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The wealth advisor industry is changing from five directions at once.
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Bloks Rises Like a Phoenix from Nook's Ashes
Bloks Rises Like a Phoenix from Nook's Ashes
Nook is no more. Bloks rises like a phoenix from its ashes!!! Today, we announced that we changed our name from Nook to…
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My Promise to the Foko Retail Team
My Promise to the Foko Retail Team
Thanks to the hard work of the Foko Retail team, we are fortunate to be in high growth mode and hiring on all fronts…
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Why Companies Should Care
Why Companies Should Care
Yesterday - Sopar - Bala Vikasa - The non-for-profit started by my parents over 40 years ago inaugurated a new Center…
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My Version of Steve Job's Commencement Speech
My Version of Steve Job's Commencement Speech
Steve jobs in one of the great orators. When I was preparing for the demo conference in 2007, I broke down his iPod…
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The Least Talked About, Most Important Factor in Startup Success
The Least Talked About, Most Important Factor in Startup Success
Nike sells shoes. Yet, unlike so many other shoe companies, they’ve been able to re-invent themselves several times…
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Marc Gingras shared thisDerrick Kinney was 26, looked 13, and had no network to sell into. So he started giving away $75 a month. A gift card for a teacher and a gift card for a student at his old high school, every month. Four months in, a woman called and asked him to be her financial advisor. Not because he was the smartest or the best connected in town, but because, in her words, he cared about what she cared about. That $75 a month is where his million-dollar accounts started. Another clip from Episode 4 of The New Wealth Advisor with Derrick Kinney
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Marc Gingras shared thisI would be lying if I said I never think about the exit. Every founder does. We're just told we're supposed to be in it for the journey. The journey is real. I've loved most of it. But I've sold three companies, and the exit was never the reward waiting at the end of the journey. It was a pile of decisions I had made years earlier, all showing up on the same day. An advisor building a book is no different. Nobody spends thirty years serving clients without wondering what it's all worth when they're done. Here's what I learned somewhere between the first exit and the third. Buyers don't pay for what you own. They pay for what keeps running after you walk out the door. In software we have a name for the distance between those two numbers. Key-man risk. When the revenue lives in one person's relationships, one person's head, one person's memory of a meeting, the buyer discounts it. Sometimes they walk. Which brings me to the advisor. I sat down with Nick Paleos for episode 5 of The New Wealth Advisor, which goes out in a few weeks. He buys books of business for a living, so I asked him what actually moves the number. He never said AUM. He gave me three questions instead. Does the client deal with you, or with your firm? Would two similar clients get the same experience on two different weeks? Have the children of your top thirty relationships ever been in the room? Three ways of asking one thing. How much of this business transfers? Nick said the holy grail would be handing a book to AI and getting a score out of 100 against everything he looks for. He's right, and it's closer than most people think. What's holding it back is that the evidence was never written down. It lived in one advisor's head. That's the part nobody tells you at 42. The record you build this year is the part of your practice somebody else can actually buy. The exit isn't a decision you make at 62. It's what you were doing at 42, whether you meant to or not.
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Marc Gingras shared thisDerrick Kinney built a top 1% advisory practice in Texas. For years, he was losing people with one sentence. Somebody would ask what he did, he'd say "I'm a financial advisor," and he'd watch their eyes glaze over and their feet start moving backwards. Then he swapped that sentence for a different one. Same job, same credentials, and people started leaning in and asking him to keep going. First of four clips from Episode 4 of The New Wealth Advisor with Derrick Kinney - link to the full episode in the comments. Derrick Kinney - The New Wealth Advisor - Episode 4
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Marc Gingras shared thisAt BlackBerry, I ran the productivity apps. Email, calendar, contacts, tasks. The first thing we decided to build was none of them. Our research kept surfacing the same picture. Nobody was living in one inbox. Two or three email accounts, a handful of messaging apps, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn — each one a separate place you had to remember to check. What stayed with me is that people never described it as a volume problem. They described the switching. The going back and forth, all day, to make sure nothing had slipped. Because that was the real cost. Messages got missed. A conversation would start in one app and finish in another, and everything connecting the two disappeared. So we built the Hub. One place where all of it arrived, no matter where it came from. It was not a feature sitting on top of the apps. It was a layer underneath them, and everything else got built on top of it. BlackBerry stopped making phones in 2016. The Hub is still on Google Play today, a decade later. People hadn't stayed for the device. They stayed for the one place. BCG's 2026 Global Wealth Report makes the same argument in language this industry is ready to hear. Firms with unified data and modern architecture can scale AI rapidly, while firms with fragmented systems and siloed data will struggle to get past pilots — regardless of how clearly they see the opportunity. That gap isn't budget or ambition. It's order of operations. You can add AI to fifteen disconnected systems. You cannot add coherence to them afterward. Unified data isn't something you ship in version four. It's what everything else stands on, or it never happens. Everything worth knowing about a single client is sitting in a dozen different systems right now. None of them were built to give it up.
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Marc Gingras shared thisReally excited to be partnering with @advocis - and looking forward to interacting with all members.Marc Gingras shared thisAdvocis Coffee Talks Presents: Never again: 6 things AI now does for advisors from Marc Gingras, Co-Founder and CEO of Bloks. Join us for this session on Thursday, September 17 at 11:00 a.m. ET, as Marc explores six powerful ways that advisors are using AI after one meeting ends and before the next begins. He will also share what advisors should demand from any AI tool that handles sensitive client data. A special thank you as well to Bloks for sponsoring this episode of Coffee Talks. Exclusive to Advocis Members only, secure your spot today: https://bit.ly/4A04oEC
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Marc Gingras shared this2014. A thousand companies signed up for my product in three weeks, and almost none of them could buy it. Last month I watched an advisor make the same mistake pitching their own head office. Foko had just launched. A TechCrunch piece went out and the signups came in from everywhere — retailers, manufacturers, some of the biggest companies in the world. HR teams loved it. They became our champion inside every account. It took me too long to understand what that actually meant. When those champions went upstairs to get budget, they made the case they believed in: this will change our culture, our teams will finally talk to each other. The CFO listened politely and asked what it did to the top or bottom line. Nobody had an answer. Not HR, and not us — we had never given them one. The product was right. The champion was right. The argument was wrong. Which brings me to the advisor. They wanted to bring an AI tool into their practice and needed the firm to approve it. Their pitch was the one every advisor makes: this gives me five hours a week back, and I'll put those hours into clients. It's true. It's also the culture argument in a different suit. Nobody at head office is measured on how an advisor spends a Tuesday afternoon. They're measured on what happens when a regulator asks what was said in a client meeting two years ago, and whether anyone can produce it. But I'd tell that advisor to be careful, because the moment you make that argument you invite the only question that matters. Prove it. Show me where it's stored, who can see it, how long you keep it, what happens when someone edits the record six months later. Most tools that can make the claim can't survive the follow-up. The advisors who get a yes aren't the ones who found better words. They're the ones holding something that answers the second question. So before that meeting — you know what you want your firm to buy. Do you know what it's going to be asked to prove?
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Marc Gingras shared thisDerrick Kinney built a top 1% advisory practice in Texas, then sold it at the top because he got bored. Somewhere in between, he laid flat on the floor in the middle of a team meeting and told his staff he'd just had a medical emergency and couldn't see clients for the next six months. What his team came back with two weeks later changed how he ran the entire business. That story, the $75 a month that started bringing him million-dollar accounts, and the 24-year-old advisor who landed a $10 million rollover by changing one sentence Check out episode 4 of - The New Wealth Advisor - with Derrick Kinney is out now. Link to the full episode in the comments. Derrick Kinney
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Marc Gingras shared thisNineteen years ago today, Natalie married a man who was building his first company. They say staying married as an entrepreneur is hard. It is. Not dramatic-hard. Quietly hard. The hard part is different for everyone. For me it was never the hours, or the weight of running a company. Mine is that I can be in the room and not in the room. At dinner. Driving the family somewhere. Present enough to answer, gone enough that she can tell. Natalie looks up and says: you're thinking about work right now, aren't you. She has never once been wrong. I've never mastered containing it. I'm not even sure I want to - it's the same appetite that makes me start things in the first place. What I do know is that she has made real sacrifices for my dreams. My hope is that I have given her the freedom to chase hers. My father has often quoted Saint-Exupéry: aimer, ce n'est point se regarder l'un l'autre, mais regarder ensemble dans la même direction. Looking in the same direction doesn't mean wanting the same things. It means she can see what I'm looking at, even when I can't explain it well. And that I try to do the same for her. And there are days when even I don't know what I'm looking at. Knowing someone will hold you when things are uncertain, when you have no idea what the next move is - that's the quiet strength you push forward on. Nothing is certain. Nothing should be taken for granted. So today I'm grateful for nineteen years, and hopeful for every chapter we haven't written yet.
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Marc Gingras shared thisEvery single person who signed up for Tungle got an email from me with my personal cell number in it. We grew to 500,000 users. Over five years, the phone rang maybe ten times. I braced for it to be a disaster. A founder handing his number to half a million strangers is the kind of thing people warn you about. What actually happened was quieter, and better. Almost nobody called. But a lot of them replied. Instant, unfiltered feedback, sitting in my inbox — what was broken, what was confusing, what they wished the thing did. Some I answered myself. The rest I forwarded to whoever on the team needed to read it. The ten calls I did take, I was happy to take. You learn more in one of those than in a quarter of dashboards. Here's what I took from it: people don't abuse an open door. They just tell you the truth when they know there is one. So I still do it. I answer support tickets at Bloks. I sit on intro calls. Customers are surprised by that, which tells you how rare it's become. Because the thing nobody warns you about is that growth quietly puts distance between you and the person paying you. First a support team. Then account managers. Then a dashboard. Then a quarterly deck with a number on it that used to be a conversation. Every layer is reasonable. Every layer rounds the truth off a little. Advisors understand this better than most people in software. Nobody who has built a real practice delegates the client relationship. You hand off the paperwork. You keep the conversation. That's where you find out what's actually going on. So over the next few months I'm getting on planes. Vancouver. Calgary. Sasktatoon. Toronto. Montreal. Halifax. Rooms full of advisors, across the country. Not to present at them. To leave the door open and see who walks through.
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Marc Gingras liked thisMarc Gingras liked thisAt 3am, Phil Libin had already decided Evernote would die in the morning. There were 20-something people on the team. Around 3 weeks of cash left. And a $10M investment that was supposed to solve the problem. Then Lehman Brothers collapsed. The investor called Libin and told him their fund had just lost around 60% of its value. The $10M was gone. And suddenly Evernote had a very real problem: they were running out of money. The financial crisis was obviously terrible timing. But it wasn’t the whole story. Evernote had been locked into months of due diligence and exclusivity with that investor, so other fundraising conversations had gone cold. Their legal structure was also messy after combining two companies, which made them harder to fund in the first place. And they had allowed the runway to get painfully thin. You can have a product people love and still run out of money. Libin spent the next week calling basically everyone he knew. Nothing. Eventually he decided they had to close while there was still enough cash left to actually shut the company down properly. Then, before going to bed that night, he checked one last email. It was from a guy in Sweden. He wasn’t a VC. He was an Evernote user. He told Phil how much he loved the product... then casually asked: “Do you guys need any investment?” A week or so later, $500,000 landed in Evernote’s account. Crazy. But the $500K wasn’t some magical turnaround. It bought them time. And they did something useful with that time. They cleaned up the structure that had made investors nervous and kept pushing the product instead of desperately trying to squeeze money out of every user. Their freemium model looked terrible at first. Of the 31,000 users who joined in June 2008, only around 0.5% paid in the first month. About $700 in revenue. Pretty ugly number if you look at it in isolation. But the users who stayed became more valuable over time. That same early cohort eventually produced around $11,000 a month. By January 2011, Evernote was generating roughly $525,000 a month. The company didn’t survive because somebody sent a lucky email. The email gave them runway. What saved them after that was proving that people actually stayed, used the product and eventually paid. There’s a big difference. Sometimes a company doesn’t need a miracle. It just needs enough cash to get to the point where the numbers finally start telling the story.
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Marc Gingras liked thisMarc Gingras liked thisEmbracing the Discomfort 15 months of consistent effort, commitment, and showing up. Reaching my goals and embracing a whole new energy. Looking back, I’m proud of the work put in and excited for what's next. Becoming the man the role model for my children meant everything. #Transformation #Progress #Consistency
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Marc Gingras liked thisMarc Gingras liked thisToday I'm officially announcing on LinkedIn: I'm Co-Founder and CEO of Dexacam. Dexacam is an AI app that shows you a realistic version of your future body, then tracks your real progress against it. Take a photo, see what's possible, and get the accountability to actually close the gap. Not another habit tracker. A way to see who you're becoming before you get there. I'm Customer Zero. I built this after my last exit, when I gained 60 lbs and needed exactly this to get back. A year later, alongside my co-founder Tariq Zaid, it's real. Grateful to early investors and believers who got in before this was anything: Mark MacLeod, Solon Angel, Aydin Mirzaee, Viveta Lobo MD, Lloyed Lobo, and DOM CORYELL to name a few... We land in the App Store next month. Between now and then, I'm meeting investors, operators, and anyone who wants to get ahead of it. Locked in.
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Marc Gingras liked thisMargaux HEMARD worked on this!Marc Gingras liked this‘Prima Facie’ – World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend ADR at Goldcrest Post London Director: Susanna White Producers: david jowsey | Kevin Loader | Greer Simpkin Post Supervisor: Henry Karjalainen Post Coordinator: Isabella Ekstein Dialogue Editor: Liam Egan Supervising Dialogue Editor: Beth Bezzina Re-Recording Mixer: Robert Sullivan ADR Mixer: Mark Appleby ADR Assistant: Romi Martinez Villar ADR Producer: Lilian Crock Bunya Productions | Edith’s Daughter | EMBANKMENT FILMS LIMITED
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FrontFundr
🤔 Think your startup needs to be VC-backed to raise capital? Think again. Here are three Canadian companies that show exactly the kind of startups we're looking for in the 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞: 🔵 𝐣𝐨𝐧𝐢 raised $200k through FF towards their $379k round from 155 investors, without spending a single dollar on paid ads. They had a mission-driven brand, a community that cared deeply about period equity, and a story worth backing. 📱𝐆𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 hadn't even launched their product yet. But they had 34,000 organic signups from Canadians ready to back a values-driven alternative to Big Tech social media. They went on to raise $1.5M from 2,500 Canadians, one of the fastest equity crowdfunding campaigns in Canadian history. 💳 𝐭𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐚𝐩 raised $1.8M through FrontFundr from 345 investors across two raises complimenting their seed and series A funding rounds. Founder, Chris Greenfield, said the greatest gain wasn't the capital. It was the community of investors who became partners, connectors, and advocates for the business. Three very different companies. Three very different industries. One thing in common: 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦. That's exactly who the #BackTheNextCanadianStartupChallenge is looking for. To be eligible, companies must: ✅ Be new to FrontFundr ✅ Be a Canadian entity ✅ Raise a minimum of $250,000 ✅ Launch within 6 months of introduction ✅ Have a community behind them One winning company will receive a 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐭 ~$𝟏𝟑,𝟎𝟎𝟎, including campaign preparation, due diligence, and a free listing on FrontFundr. *Trade fees and optional closing services still apply. Who do you know that fits this mold? Nominate them today. 👉 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐲 𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐞: https://lnkd.in/gRPDf-Qk #BackTheNextCanadianStartup #canadianstartups #equitycrowdfunding #founders #startupCanada #privatemarkets Peter-Paul Van Hoeken Will Tang Trieste Reading Daniel B. Noah Gustinelli Sharry Li
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Daily AI Wire News
𝗖𝗼𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝗴𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝗣𝗢 🛰️ [BUSINESS] Cohere, a Canadian AI startup, exceeded its revenue target, reaching $240 million in ARR, fueling speculation about a potential IPO in 2026. Why it matters: Cohere's impressive growth highlights the increasing enterprise adoption of AI solutions. A potential IPO would position Cohere alongside other major AI players and further validate the market's confidence in generative AI technologies. 🤔 How will Cohere differentiate itself in the increasingly competitive AI landscape, especially in the lead up to a potential IPO? #Cohere #AI #IPO #GenerativeAI #EnterpriseAI 📡 Follow DailyAIWire for autonomous AI news 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dwtXznDa
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Grishin Robotics
Onix is betting that the most valuable AI datasets may belong to experts, not platforms. The Montréal company has raised a $5 million USD pre-seed led by Alpha Edison, with participation from Garage Capital, Ride Home Fund, Jeremy Zimmer and Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer. Onix turns licensed expert knowledge into private AI systems called Personal Intelligence. Its first library focuses on health and wellness, where users can query digital versions of specialists while the experts retain control over how their knowledge is used. The product is designed to run privately across devices instead of sending every interaction to a general-purpose model. The founding pair brings an unusual mix. David S. Bennahum previously built media and technology companies, while Nicholas Nadeau, Ph.D., P.Eng. helped scale humanoid robotics company 1X as CTO. The new capital will support platform development, expert onboarding and public availability. Quick facts👇 ● founders: David S. Bennahum; Nicholas Nadeau, Ph.D., P.Eng. ● HQ: Montréal, QC ● Investors: Alpha Edison; Garage Capital; Ride Home Fund; Jeremy Zimmer; Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer This round reflects a broader shift in AI: durable value may come from knowledge that creators license and govern, not information platforms can scrape.
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CleverAvian
Big news for CleverAvian! We are proud to share that CleverAvian has officially joined the ventureLAB Innovation Community — one of Canada’s most diverse and innovative technology hubs. ventureLAB is a leading force in Canada’s innovation ecosystem, bringing together world-class mentors, industry leaders, and investors to help founders build globally competitive companies. By joining this vibrant community, CleverAvian now gains access to powerful resources, networks, and expertise that will accelerate our mission: Transforming poultry farming with AI-powered precision, advanced health monitoring, and sustainable productivity solutions. This milestone is not only about CleverAvian’s growth — it’s about delivering the future of Agriculture 4.0 to poultry producers around the world. We are excited for the journey ahead, and proud to walk it alongside ventureLAB. #CleverAvian #ventureLAB #AgTech #AI #Innovation #PoultryTech #Agriculture4_0 https://www.venturelab.ca/ https://lnkd.in/dFdysp2G https://cleveravian.com/
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Inovia Capital
🚀 Big news for Québec tech. Telegraph Ventures has secured $35M to back enterprise AI startups, with financing from the Québec government through Investissement Québec, Teralys Capital, Inovia Capital, and more than 40 entrepreneurs and family offices. Led by Étienne Mérineau, Luis Gutierrez Roy and Varun Dalal, Telegraph is stepping in to provide the early-stage capital to founders building transformative AI companies. As Marianne Dubois, our Discovery Fund Manager, put it: “Discovery has sought out funds we felt could catalyze Québec’s pre-seed market. We believe that the combination of Luis’s experience with Etienne’s on-the-ground operator network…will do just that.” 👉 Read more in BetaKit: https://lnkd.in/e3sRdE42 #AI #QuébecTech #CompanyBuilders
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UpNext Global
Just dropped the next UpNext PopUp with Joshua Barimon Firima , Founder of KrosAI (DraperU S24), recorded at SAAS NORTH Conference in Ottawa. KrosAI is building an AI platform that removes language, accent, and dialect barriers — making technology accessible to the next billion users. Their mission is simple and powerful: enable anyone, anywhere, to communicate and access information using their own voice, in their own language, without friction. Follow @upnext.worldwide to see who’s UpNext tomorrow. #UpNext #ElevateFestival #AI #VoiceTech #Inclusion #EmergingMarkets #Innovation #Startups #SpeechAI #PopUp
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FoundersPress
GrowWise Partners is Reshaping How Canadian Companies Access SR&ED Funding “Traditionally, founders and technical teams spend an entire year building and experimenting, and then months later are asked to reconstruct what happened,” said Co-Founder & Managing Partner Lauren Valliere. “We built GrowWise around a different idea: what if SR&ED took 10 minutes a month instead of 30+ hours at year-end?” “SR&ED traditionally becomes a major project once a year. We’re trying to make it something that happens quietly in the background,” Valliere said. https://lnkd.in/gdV7skP7
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