Disruptors

There is a shift happening in retail. Angela Ahrendts, former SVP of Retail at Apple and CEO at Burberry joined us on RBC Disruptors to discuss the trends she's seen from her time at two iconic global brands and to share her vision for the future of retail. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Technology is disrupting the brain. Dr. Murali Doraiswamy, a physician and brain scientist at Duke University highlighted that 8%-10% of people in North America show signs of a serious addiction to the Internet and gaming - on this special episode we turned our minds inward - Murali shares his perspective and research on how technology is changing the brain and mind. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWi...

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are moving at a staggering pace but big hurdles remain to dreams like self-driving cars and personalized medicine. What are the risks, opportunities, and timelines? John Stackhouse is joined by the Head of Borealis AI and Chief Scientist Officer at RBC, Foteini Agrafioti, and key experts including Layla el Asri (Microsoft Research), Jean-Francois Gagne...

When Ritual CEO Ray Reddy was a product manager at Google, he learned a trick from Larry Page: the toothbrush test. If you can use a product twice a day, it will become habit-changing. A ritual. Reddy took this premise and applied it to the last frontier of digitization: the local market. At its core, Ritual is about connecting the physical and digital worlds by monetizing the local, in-person exp...

Global shipping ushered in the modern economy — but in 2019, it still has a 19th-century problem: too much paperwork. With growth in global trade contracting, there is tremendous pressure to find efficiencies. At our latest RBC Disruptors, we took our show on the road to Halifax to talk about the future of shipping with Karen Oldfield, who is tasked with making Halifax the most tech-savvy port on...

The most common question people ask their voice tech assistant isn't “How's the weather?" Not anymore. Today, it's “Alexa, will you marry me?" With 80,000 skills and growing, marriage is maybe the one thing Alexa can’t do. This year, the smart speaker industry will grow to be worth an estimated $7 billion, and demand could potentially surpass that of smartphones. Al Lindsay, a Canadian v...

Hauling away other people's junk, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? founder Brian Scudamore has seen it all: a mountain of escargot shells, a naked man and $400,000 in cash hidden under the floorboards. A lifelong entrepreneur, he’s also seen what it takes to succeed in business — and how failing is vital to learning how to get things right. At the last RBCDisruptors, Scudamore spoke about being willing to fail and...

John Chen didn't set out to be The Turnaround Guy. He just played to his strengths. He’s had plenty to fix at BlackBerry, the iconic Canadian tech company he took over as executive chairman and CEO in 2013. BlackBerry’s CEO & Executive Chairman says he’s driven to do what others think isn’t possible. He spoke at the last RBC Disruptors about trade tensions between the U.S. and China, the futur...

Spin Master was founded in 1994 by three friends fresh out of university. They had early hits with the Earth Buddy and Devil Sticks; but it’s when they started investing heavily in R&D that their toy company took off. Today it’s one of the top five toy companies in the world, with sales exceeding $1.5 billion last year. Ronnen Harary, their Co-Founder and Co-CEO joined us at the last RBC Disru...

Dan Schulman is President & CEO of Paypal, a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like cheques and money orders. He spoke with RBC CEO Dave McKay at the recent RBC Capital Markets Technology, Internet, Media and Telecommunications Conference in New York City to discuss how Paypal transformed t...

When it comes to business transformation, Patrick Pichette has seen it all. The former chief financial officer at both Google and Bell Canada has over 25 years of financial and operating expertise and has led world-class companies like McKinsey and Sprint Canada to break through the complexities of hyper growth, and to execute large, transformative programs. This episode is live from RBC’s Nationa...

It's hard to talk about Stewart Butterfield without getting into his unorthodox path to the heights of tech. The Canadian entrepreneur spent his early childhood without electricity, taught himself to code, and studied philosophy at Cambridge before falling into a tech career that’s now pitting him against Microsoft and Google. Butterfield’s biggest business success, Slack, is a corporate communica...

Millions of people have turned to wearables to track their steps, monitor their heart rate and sleeping patterns, and more. For many of us, the fitness tracker is a constant companion. Should tracking our mental health be any different? This was the theme of the latest RBC Disruptors in advance of Mental Illness Awareness Week. This episode's guests are former Olympian and mental health advocate S...

With traditional career paths in flux, some millennials are choosing entrepreneurship and staking their future on themselves. At a special RBCDisruptors session for RBC's summer interns, three young entrepreneurs explained why they took the plunge—and why others should follow in their footsteps. This episode's guests are Emma Harris, 25, whose company Healthy Pets focused on telemedicine for pets;...

Netflix is maybe the biggest disruptor of them all. Ten years ago, the company made most of its money sending DVDs by mail. Now, it’s bigger than Disney—the most valuable media company on earth. Jessica Neal is head of talent at Netflix, and it’s her job to maintain the company’s culture of innovation. This episode is live from the C2 conference in Montreal. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz compan...

It's the secret that drives Silicon Valley’s best: the growth mindset. It’s about failing fast, learning fast, and growing fast. PagerDuty's Jennifer Tejadahas built a growth mindset into her company. She tells us about filling out the CARD: the candour, ambition, resilience and diversity that are common to every great growth company. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com f...

Canada’s tech sector needs more swagger. That’s according to Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein, who says part of his company’s runaway success has been the ability to sell itself—to customers and to potential employees. After hiring 200 people from 50 countries over the past two years, Shopify is looking to add thousands more in its Ottawa HQ and around the world. To meet those needs they’ve partnere...

Dax Dasilva says that when building a successful startup, culture is more important than code. He's the founder and CEO of Montreal-based Lightspeed, which has 50,000 customers around the world using its e-commerce platform and nearly $300 million in funding. Yet it wasn't clever coding that powered that success, he says, but an open mind and an inclusive corporate ethos that draws on his backgrou...

If you’re looking for the future of digital government, you’ll find it in the unlikeliest place: the tiny European nation of Estonia. The country offers nearly all of its government services online, and Estonians are behind Internet innovations such Skype and Kazaa. Siim Sikkut is the man charged with making sure Estonia stays on the cutting edge, and we sat down with him at C2 in Montreal to talk...

Some say cryptocurrency is the future of money. Others think it’s a house of cards that’s going to come crashing down any minute. We hosted a lively discussion about the future of cryptocurrency at our RBCDisruptors event on April 26, 2018. We heard from an entrepreneur who is bullish on the benefits of cryptocurrencies, a venture capitalist who thinks the hype has grown out of control, and a bloc...

Robot doctors are still years away, not least because of their cold hands and stilted bedside manner. Yet the transformational power of technology is nowhere more obvious than in healthcare, where data is reshaping diagnostics, implantable sensors are saving lives, and digital video has opened up new opportunities for virtual care. Our guests, Shirlee Sharkey, CEO of in-home care provider Saint El...

As part of our look at the skills revolution in Canada, we headed down to the Niagara Peninsula to see how one of Canada’s largest wine companies is training the next generation. Andrew Peller Estates has a partnership with Brock University, bringing in co-op students and building their skills through on-the-job training. RBCDisruptors producer Peter Henderson sat down with John E. Peller, whose g...

Canada is facing a quiet crisis, In the coming decade, half of all jobs will be disrupted by technology and automation. That's the conclusion from our new report, Humans Wanted, a year-long study of the future of the Canadian workforce. As part of that study, we visited the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph to hear from its director, Evan Fraser, and two student entrepreneurs, Leah...

Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon control huge swathes of our online lives. That's why we need to seriously consider breaking them up, according to NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway. In his new book, The Four, Galloway makes the case that these original disruptors have come to form an oligopoly—one that is stifling innovation. He says we need a radical new approach to regulating the big four...

There’s a serious skilled trades shortage in Canada. Carpenters, plumbers and electricians are retiring faster than they can be replaced. Here’s an easy answer for the problem: encourage more women to get involved. They make up nearly half the workforce in Canada, but less than five per cent in the trades. RBC CEO David McKay spoke with the founder and CEO of construction company Freshco, Mandy Re...