Between Two Brunettes

Most financial institutions in Canada built trust the same way: slowly, through branch relationships, decades of presence, and the assumption that people had nowhere else to go. Wealthsimple decided to build it differently, betting on brand and on product experience at a moment when fintech was still trying to prove it could be trusted with people's money. Paul Teshima is Wealthsimple's Chief Comm...

Almost every country in the world is spending more on healthcare, with costs climbing faster than the economies paying for them, and almost all of them get the same thing back: a system built to treat people once they are already sick. Mike Goss of NiaHealth is hoping to change that. He is a Co-Founder and the company's COO, and before Nia he spent his career on both the public and private sides o...

Canada has a habit of celebrating founders on the way up and chasing them on the way down. Michele Romanow has been both, and she doesn't pretend otherwise. She started her first company at 21 by driving to New Brunswick in a Toyota Camry with $150,000 in business plan competition winnings, catching fish and cold calling restaurants from a flip phone. That company became a caviar business during t...

Canadian businesses have spent decades overpaying for banking that barely works. High fees on basic transactions, in-branch visits to send a wire, FX rates that quietly drain margin, and a system that wasn’t designed with small businesses in mind. Ahmed Shafik watched all of this up close as one of the first employees to launch Revolut in Canada. When the expansion stalled, he and co-founder Saud...

Most consumer health companies chase scale with big raises and bigger burn. Samantha Diamond took a different path. She co-founded Bird&Be after transitioning out of a decade-long career running her own communications agency. When she made the move, she rebuilt a founding team from scratch, raised a few million dollars in two weeks, and set out to build a reproductive care company that doctors wou...

Tonya Papanikolov spent years searching for a functional mushroom product she could actually trust. When she couldn't find one that met her standards, she thought to build it herself. So in 2018, she did. Rainbo is now one of Canada's most recognized functional mushroom brands, a B Corp, seven-figure company stocked at Erewhon, Whole Foods, and Summerhill Market, built on organic growth and strong...

What if the most important health decision you could make right now costs less than Netflix and takes 30 minutes? That's the bet Dr. Drew Taylor has been building toward since he co-founded Acorn Biolabs in 2017. Acorn lets people bank their own stem cells, harvested non-invasively from hair follicles, before age degrades them. Acorn now operates across more than 200 partner clinics in North Ameri...

John Ruffolo has spent decades helping shape Canada’s technology and venture capital ecosystem. From building Deloitte’s technology practice to launching OMERS Ventures and now founding Maverix Private Equity, John has been at the center of many of the country’s most important moments in innovation, investment and economic policy. Over his career, he has helped build and back some of Canada’s most...

Dr. Dana Sinclair is one of Canada's leading performance psychologists and author recognized for her work with elite athletes, high-level professionals, and executives. She is the author of the Globe and Mail bestseller Dialed In: Do Your Best When It Matters Most - giving practical lessons on how to deliver when the stakes are high. In this conversation, we unpack what actually separates top perf...

Dan Eberhard didn’t set out to build a fintech company, he set out to fix a system that wasn’t working for people like the family he grew up in. Raised by a single mother in British Columbia, Dan saw early how traditional financial institutions often fail the very people who rely on them most. After a mix of wins and hard lessons in prior ventures, he went on to found KOHO, one of Canada’s most su...

Alex Oosterveen was in the middle of building a company when his life changed overnight. A former investment banker turned founder, Alex was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the very start of building Caribou - a moment that forced him to confront his health and the choices that led to this moment. In this conversation, we unpack what it really takes to scale a company while navigating uncerta...

In this first episode of Between Two Brunettes, we sit down together to introduce ourselves, our relationship, and why we decided to start this podcast. This episode sets the foundation for the conversations that follow.  We hope you enjoy the show! ___ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@betweentwobrunettes Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/betweentwobrunettes Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@bet...