I learned the value of an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age. I have vivid childhood memories of afternoons and sick days spent in the travel agency my mom started, napping on the little sofa while she built her business. Meanwhile my dad, an accountant, was a master at building relationships. On our weekly trips to the grocery store he would greet each vendor by name—the produce guy, the baker, the butcher—and always got the best deals on the strength of those relationships. 

We were a middle class family, but my parents made a point to teach us the importance of working hard. I busted my butt in high school, landing a spot on the honour roll. Back in the 90s, when email was just starting to become mainstream, I spent countless hours experimenting with computer code in my parents’ basement, tinkering around to see what I could create. As a side hustle, I wrote programs and built websites—from online store fronts for vitamin shops to homepages for politicians. That got me a scholarship at Carleton, where I earned a degree in computer science with a minor in economics. When I graduated in 2006, building on a piece of code I had previously written, I co-founded a company called Sitebrand, creating software that could tailor online ads based on the users’ behaviour (something a lot more commonplace now). Over five years, we grew to a staff of 60, and took the company public on the TSX in 2009 before it was acquired by Cactus Commerce in 2011. 

That early success led me to a job at Shopify, where I helped grow their Shopify Plus offering and built a global network of large digital agencies that worked with major brands to distribute their products online. We would bring agencies on board and offer their big brands Shopify Plus’ capabilities instead of their platform’s built-in e-commerce features. After several successful years at Shopify, I left the company. It wasn’t an easy choice, but I was driven by a deeper calling—to be there for my two young children, and to care for my father, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. 

During this time, I regularly needed to have items delivered to my parents’ house for my dad, but I kept running into roadblocks: Local stores wouldn’t deliver, and courier services were unreliable or took too long. Frustrated, I started to dig deeper, asking drivers and small business owners about the gaps in the local delivery landscape. I learned that many mom and pop shops simply couldn’t afford to give up sizable portions of their revenue to same-day delivery giants like Uber and Doordash, electing to opt-out of offering delivery altogether. It was then that I had an idea—a delivery app built specifically for small businesses, one that undercuts neither businesses’ bottom lines or couriers’ wages. 

I got to work immediately. In early 2019, I started spending late nights in airport parking lots—where drivers for companies like Uber and Doordash often hang out—and interviewed them about their pain points. I worked out a business plan for a delivery platform that would solve their problems, including delayed payouts and a lack of steady income. After about six months of working alongside developers, Trexity was born. 

The major difference between Trexity and other courier companies is that we don’t take a cut of the merchant’s sales—Trexity charges a flat fee to the customer based on the delivery distance. The lion’s share of that flat fee goes to our couriers. We take a 30 per cent cut of the delivery cost, compared to other companies that take 30 per cent of the invoice cost in addition to 80 per cent of the delivery cost. That makes a huge difference for drivers, who can make more money and get paid every day. By the end of that year, I had launched a successful minimum viable product in Ottawa.

Then the pandemic hit and businesses were forced to close their doors. Many pivoted quickly to delivery, and our platform offered them a way to get their products into customer’s hands in an efficient and cost-effective way. We upgraded our technology so that we appeared as a one-click shipping option for customers in the final stage of an online order. Before long, we were signing on national partners and growing rapidly.

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Our crowning moment came when I was invited to appear on Elevator Pitch, a show where startup owners pitch to potential investors. I ended up getting a $200,000 USD offer from the Miami-based serial entrepreneur Kim Perell in exchange for equity in the company. She has become a champion of our mission. Today, we’re in six Canadian cities, including Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary. We have 15,000 couriers across Canada, who work as independent contractors, and have more than 3,000 merchants signed to our platform. We service all types of retail, from groceries to alcohol and pet food, and perform around 4,000 deliveries daily. We just had our first two back-to-back $1 million quarters.

To this day I’m guided by the values my parents instilled in me—a solid work ethic and a commitment to building genuine connections. I couldn’t have built Trexity if I didn’t know how to develop relationships with merchants and drivers; I wouldn’t know how to solve their problems if I didn’t take the time to learn about them first. In building this business, I want to set a really strong example for my kids, just like my parents did for me.