Before becoming the CEO of food delivery company SkipTheDishes, Paul Burns became an expert in leading teams through sticky situations, managing the tricky transition when Shaw Communications purchased CanWest, then spending five years at the always-volatile X (formerly known as Twitter). With SkipTheDishes under his direction, he hopes to help the Winnipeg-based company foster innovation in the food delivery industry and beyond. Earlier this year, we named SkipTheDishes one of our Top 25 Disruptors as part of the 2024 Canadian Business Innovation Awards.

I cut grass for my neighbours as a teen. My dad would drop me off on his way to work—he ran a construction technology business and my mom was a nutritionist. I was reading an old issue of Canadian Business in the car one day and came across an article about marketing and creativity. I became fascinated with the idea that creativity could be used to solve real world problems.

I studied communications at York University because I knew if I was an effective communicator, I’d be capable of a lot of different things. I noticed how effective and influential people who are great communicators could be, and that’s what I wanted. One of my first jobs out of school was in the marketing department at Nokia, the mobile phone company. This was in the early 2000s, when the idea of gaming and music on mobile devices was very new. My job was to figure out how to create and implement a content experience on a mobile device. When an opportunity came up to join the global marketing team and take on a bunch of large strategic projects, I jumped on it. I got to travel the world and learn about how different cultures apply marketing in different ways.

In 2008 I started a job at CanWest, the media company that owned the television network Global. At that time streaming was starting to blow up, and my job was to figure out how to take broadcast content and put it on a mobile device. At first, I was terrified to take charge of hundreds of people across 25 different TV channels. I made a ton of mistakes, like trying to move too fast to respond to changing market dynamics when the organization wasn’t ready, but I learned the importance of just being human and doing a lot of listening. The business was acquired by Shaw in 2009, so I had to lead during a period of high anxiety. My strategy was to just keep calm and cool and focus on the big picture amidst a changing environment.

In 2015, I became the managing director for Huge, a New York-based product development agency that consults with brands like Google, Apple and Nike, reimagining the next ten years of their business strategies. I was the agency’s first employee in Canada, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to help build products and experiences that change the world. I became obsessed with creating thoughtful, intentional product design strategies.

I was happily running Huge when I got a phone call asking if I’d be interested in having a conversation about a job at Twitter, now known as X. I never say no to a conversation, so I went to meet the executive team. I was fascinated by the role Twitter played in global politics—every major political leader was on the platform—and how, at the time, it was an underdog with incredible influence relative to its size. I joined the company in 2018 as the managing director for Twitter Canada and was able to transform it from one of the worst performing markets for revenue to one of the top performing, globally. The company experienced a lot of turbulence during that time. I became the Chief Reminder Officer, telling people they were there to do their life’s best work, rather than the chatter about what may or may not happen with the company. However, I was laid off when X downsized their Canada office in late 2022. 

I joined SkipTheDishes as CEO in October 2023. I’ve delivered food on courier runs, talked to customers in our contact centre and packed groceries in a fulfilment centre in order to learn how all aspects of the business work. The closer you are to the customer, the better equipped you will be to anticipate their needs—and I’m obsessed with making our service better.

My goal is to make Skip a tool Canadians use every day. The technology, algorithms and delivery infrastructure this company has built are being used to power food delivery in markets across the globe, so I want to continue to do that in a really ambitious way. What I get really fired up about is the opportunity to build this business beyond food. Restaurants are currently at the core of the company, but in the future, I want our customers to be able to have anything they want delivered in 25 minutes or less. I’d like SkipTheDishes to be another great Canadian technology success story.