Rebecca Rose Payne 0:00

Hi everyone and welcome back. Today we have an amazing guest. Greg Wolfend is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist who has has founded and scaled multiple successful technology companies and is now leading the charge to accelerate healthcare innovation across Canada through Give Back Health Innovation Foundation. Thank you so much for being here, Greg.

Greg Wolfond 0:23

Thanks for having me.

Rebecca Rose Payne 0:25

So I guess just getting started, you've managed to build multiple successful companies over several decades. What drove you to do this? Like what made you decide on this career choice and do it so many times?

Greg Wolfond 0:38

I don't know. I think all entrepreneurs are crazy. You have to be uh believing in what you're trying to do and kind of run into that wall and bounce off the wall and run into the wall again and keep going and lucky enough to have some okay ideas and then put a team around it. Because all these companies that you see that do well, it's all it's always a team. It's always a group of people with different skills that get that vision over the line.

Rebecca Rose Payne 1:02

And so how do you initially form your teams?

Greg Wolfond 1:05

It's tricky, right? You have to have an idea of what you want to do. You have to make sure there's enough room around it that you can build it and have a moat, as people talk about around it. What will it be? And then you have to figure out what skills you need in the teams. Building software companies or building, you know, chip companies. We built a payment terminal on a chip that's not a chip inside all those square terminals. Different skills. Sometimes you need chip designers, sometimes you need software engineers, but then you need operations people and sales people and kind of net management of the group of folks that you have, project managers. You really need to be careful in picking the right folks who are gonna work hard and believe in the vision of what you're trying to do and keep going. So, and we were lucky enough to do well the first time, and then a lot of those folks wanted to come back the next time because it's to make sure your team does well. So financially they did well and they helped execute the vision well as well. So that matters. In healthcare, it's gonna be different. In healthcare, it's gonna be how do you put a team around these amazing scientists who have made all these great discoveries? Because generally they know how to do the stuff in the lab or they know how to do it with the mouse, but how do you get it through FDA approval? How do you get things done? Different kinds of teams in that world versus what I was used to before.

Rebecca Rose Payne 2:12

Okay, so stepping a little bit back to like your first couple companies, um, where did you get the idea to do something like, you know, the chip and the square machines? Like, did you know how to do that? Did you start software?

Greg Wolfond 2:26

No, I think the first company we built was software, and we started consulting and did one project and hired more people to do another project, and then more people do another project, and then started saying, Oh, what's reusable we can build here to resell like banking software or lending software? And we learned how to do that. In the case of the chip terminal, we had a company that was doing digital identity, it's called Secure Key. We know who you are, and our notion there was you should be able to, in your shopping online, tap a card on any computer or machine. It would validate the card is valid, and you could make a purchase and it would fill out the checkout cart and all the rest. So we had Intel invest in us and Visa and MasterCard and Discover, who loved kind of what we were doing. We proved it, we proved that it worked and got these companies to invest. And then Intel didn't put a chip in any machines. So we had to figure out, uh-oh, we had this USB that we could plug in, but people aren't going to get USBs to go shopping and plug them into the computers. So we decided instead to go with digital identity using banks, you could log in at your bank and then get to government or other places using your bank. And now we had this chip business or this USB business, and the leader of that said, hey, I can make this a payment terminal on a chip. So we um thought that was a really good idea, and we funded buying that out and building that business and going from there. So it's often one step begets the next. That was a very too long an answer, but one step often begets the thing. You just find these things as you go, right? If you've just got a great team and you're working on stuff, very often, especially now there's a pivot, you're going one way, you have to turn a little bit this way and find what is the area we can actually make this work. And that was one of those. We turned one way and the second path we needed some help. So we helped that too.

Rebecca Rose Payne 4:02

So do you think that in terms of coming up with the ideas for like the next company, do you people come to you with ideas because they've seen you execute successfully on the previous idea?

Greg Wolfond 4:15

Aaron Powell Yeah, we're lucky we're lucky now because I'm not starting new ones. Each one of these, they take time, right? So the 12 years, 14 years, they take a long time. It always takes longer to get done what you want to get done, and then often it could be bigger than you ever imagined. And now, in this world where we have the Give Back Foundation, people are coming to us that they have these great medical innovations and they're finding very hard to get funding. How do I, you know, I've got this drug that really works for depression, and I know that it works in the dish and it works in these mice, but it takes me five million dollars to go prove that this works. We can put it in people. Can you help us? And so we have like we work with Mark Kremble and Kremble Institute, who really understands brain, the KBI done at Western and help them. And they can do the diligence that makes sense. And if we get the idea that it makes sense, we can raise donations. And with those donations, we can actually make investments in companies like theirs, which isn't named yet. It's called Brainco or Working Man. But we believe in this team. The scientists who have done it are amazing, they're the best in the world. And they just need people around them. They need a CEO who's gonna help them get it through and get an FDA approved. They need operations people, they need clinical trials people. And if you build that team around them, our belief is you can do anything. So we're gonna help fund that if we give back.

Rebecca Rose Payne 5:28

Okay. So I mean, it almost sounds like part of your success, you're crediting to your ability to build a cohesive team around you of people.

Greg Wolfond 5:39

I think the biggest one is that is realizing it's a little different, people say with AI today. With AI, I can have a smaller team and the AI can do a lot. I'm not sure of that yet. Most of the companies we've run, you need all kinds of different skills to make it work. You need salespeople, you need operations people, you need, in this case, clinical trials people, and people who understand the FDA for approval, regulatory people. You're gonna need teams of people and they have to work well together and they have to be aligned on the objective and they have to be incented that if you're successful, they're gonna be really successful.

Rebecca Rose Payne 6:10

Do you think that's where um some teams tend to fail? Like their people don't incentivize their or companies tend to fail where they just don't want to incentivize their employees strongly enough?

Greg Wolfond 6:22

Yeah, I think some don't. I think it's really important to do that because you're only going to be successful with the team that you have, like to realize that that's gonna what's gonna make you get there or not get there. So you really have to motivate that team. It's I don't know about the success of companies, because I have lots of friends who run companies, and we've been pretty lucky with ours. They all seem to be this combination of smarts, like getting a smart team of people, working really hard to get it done, and then getting some breaks. Like you need some lucky breaks. I I don't know how to quantify that, but everyone who we talked to who's done this before. This has to happen, that has to happen, just to get you over that line. Like you need a little bit of luck as well.

Rebecca Rose Payne 6:59

So you've spent years, you know, your first couple companies were technology, and then you have more recently made a switch to healthcare. What changed?

Greg Wolfond 7:10

Aaron Powell Partly that uh have done the tech stuff before is done well and trying to give back well, hence the give back name. There's so much stuff in Canada. Like, we're such an amazing country and at such an elbows-up kind of moment that we spend billions of dollars on research. I think it's seven and a half billion dollars in medical research, and we commercialize so very little. And just the realization in talking to these folks who do it, that it's just really hard. Once you're done, you've gotten your grants, you've proven that it this cure you have works in a mouse in a dish or in a mouse. And to get it to the next phase where you de-risk it so investors will come in, there's no funding. So what we tried to do is figure out, hey, if we can create a foundation, a charity you can give money to, and they could invest in these startups, you could help de-risk that. And then the money's coming from charitable pocket from people, it's not their rent money or food money. It's coming out. I want to make a difference in whether it's ovarian cancer or whether it's prostate cancer, whether it's arthritis, or whether it's dementia. There's so many people who really want to make a difference. So if we could take those donations and fund them to the teams and then help the team build up the critical mass they need, at least they have a shot of getting it over the line. Healthcare and drugs in particular, really hard. A lot of them just don't make it. And we don't have a culture in Canada of knowing, hey, it's okay to try it. If it doesn't work, you'll do the next one and the next one will work. But we have to have that culture. We have to make some bets and work really hard at it and learn a ton. And then if one doesn't go, you'll get the next one to go.

Rebecca Rose Payne 8:36

So most startups tend to fail. Have you had any startups that you've done just not work?

Greg Wolfond 8:45

We've had ones that we've invested in that haven't made it, but we're lucky enough with the five that we did. We got them all over the line and they all did okay, which is maybe why my wife won't let me start another one. Because that's enough. They're a lot of work. There's a lot of sweat, a lot of hours, a lot of making it go. We got hard work and fairly lucky on all of them. So the ones that we did were well, we but we've invested in ones where we care and we're trying to help the entrepreneur, and sometimes they don't make it. And our message to them is look, you're gonna work really hard, you're gonna try this stuff. But it is that combination of you you've got to be smart, you've got to work hard, and you gotta get some breaks. And sometimes people just you don't. And it's not just startups that fail. Most companies fail at some point in time, right? They they've been around for a while and then they don't work anymore. So you have to be willing to take that chance. I wish we taught this in our schools more in Canada because we don't teach basic financial smarts on how to understand a financial statement or how does it work, or entrepreneurship that it's okay to take risks and it's okay if it doesn't work. You learn a ton and you try the the the next thing. Like that's what America gets more than Canada is really this ability to say, hey, let's just go with this, right? Let's be entrepreneurial, let's try it. If that one doesn't work, try the next one and keep going. Canada doesn't teach that enough. It's the biggest challenge we have in this give back foundation is that we have all these companies that are getting going. And like three of them now need CEOs, and we're having a heck of a time trying to find folks like you who'll go and say, I can be a CEO and I can run this business. There's not enough of us in Canada who are willing to put our necks out there and go do that.

Rebecca Rose Payne 10:14

Yeah. Where do you think you learned to be so entrepreneurial?

Greg Wolfond 10:18

I don't know. I think it's all experience, all the journey that we get as we go down. I started just consulting and then hired a person, hired another, and hired another. And before any of it, we had like 800 hours.

Rebecca Rose Payne 10:28

So Where were you consulting?

Greg Wolfond 10:30

Just set up my own little I was working for folks that would take contracts, and then I got another contract, and so I needed another person, and I got another contract, and needed more people. So it got bigger, and we created this company called Footprint. Footprint was the space a PC takes up on your desk, and we thought, hey, we can build all these systems that run on mainframes and mini computers on PCs, and we can build a deposit system or a lending system, anything else. We can use a smaller computer to accomplish the same goal at a fraction of the cost. So that was Footprint. And then we did the next wave after PCs was phones, by the way. So we did 724 solutions, which was mobile internet on your phone, check your bank balances, pay your bills. Before there was an iPhone. So you probably don't remember the generation going back. You know, didn't have iPhones all the time. Very hard to get stuff done on your phone, and now it's kind of commonplace, but we're there a bit early for that one too.

Rebecca Rose Payne 11:18

Yeah, so it sounds like partly you were in you know in the right industry at the right time in some ways. Yeah.

Greg Wolfond 11:27

Around and figuring out how what what are things people want to get done that are hard to get done today. Right? In the medical space, it's drugs for things like depression or things like glaucoma or things like arthritis that can get solved if we have enough people working to get through trials. And in the tech space, it's gonna be how do I make it more secure to get stuff done as a person? Like our last one was secure key. And we ended up using the bank to be able to prove you or you to the CRA or government where you're going in, because the bank spends hundreds of millions of dollars checking your identity. And most other, you know, what's your user name and password things aren't super secure because we forget our passwords and we reuse passwords. And, you know, the bank's checking, did you log in from Toronto this morning? And now you're logging in from Vancouver an hour later, you can't do that. Most password systems don't do that. So we figured out there's a way to make this more secure for consumers where you could extend that security across multiple other places a consumer wants to go. And we were lucky enough to convince all the banks, so that made sense. And that built this company called Security. And it's not it's now the Interact Service or Interact Verified Service, is what it's called now.

Rebecca Rose Payne 12:27

So if we go back to the beginning, can you can you tell me a little bit about what you were like as a kid and like how you grew up?

Greg Wolfond 12:34

As a kid.

unknown 12:36

Yeah.

Greg Wolfond 12:36

We grew up in a different era, right? So we we grew I grew up in the era where you kind of left in the morning and you c and you came back for dinner time. Dinner was at six, came back. How was your day? Good. Parents didn't know where kids were. I think my mother has pictures of me running away from home at five years old with my suitcase full of toys because I had bought the wrong sucker, got a lollipop that I wasn't allowed to buy at the store, but I'm thinking back to that means at five years old I was allowed to take my allowance and walk three blocks to the store to spend it and bring it back by myself. And you'd never think of that today. Like we didn't think of that with our kids. Imagine today, yeah, let your five-year-old just go to the store and get something. It's a different, different world. So free and able, I don't know. So some is just circumstantial. Everyone's in a different circumstance than where you are. And do you have some capital to get it going? Like the first business, I think we started with $2,000 in capital, and the other ones a lot more because we had the capital. So it was easier to get them going, to get them started. Yeah, it's a good question. I love comp when I went to high school, I was mucking around with my friends most of the time. So I'd go to some classes. Even university, I would go to some classes and not others, but I'd always do. I was always an A student because I could read an economics textbook the night before the exam. Too okay. But I love the outside stuff. I love being outside, skiing, biking, snowboarding, outside more than I love the school stuff. I love the venture.

Rebecca Rose Payne 14:01

Do you think that there's something about kind of the environment that you were raised that made you more willing to take certain risks than other people or work harder than other people?

Greg Wolfond 14:14

I think lots of people work hard. I I I love the environment we're in. Like my parents were always very supportive. My mother's always you're loved and capable. You can do anything you set your mind to, just go for it. Take a shot. Doesn't matter if you fail, just do it. And that that was great, right? Because we know we could try things and sometimes they work and sometimes they wouldn't work. I could pick up all kinds of odd jobs through high school to figure out how do you do this? How do you sell vacuum cleaners?

Rebecca Rose Payne 14:37

How do you do whatever you're learning skills, learning how to do you were entrepreneurial even in high school, it sounds like.

Greg Wolfond 14:45

I think so. I think so. My parents were kind of like, well, if you want this and you want spending money to do that, go earn it. Like go do it. You wanna you want to get that stereo, okay? Go figure it out. Like this it's on you. There's lots of ways to do it. Go figure it out.

Rebecca Rose Payne 15:00

Do you think that if your parents had been different, like kind of had a different attitude, like, oh no, you're never gonna get that, or here's the money, go buy it, that you might have turned out differently?

Greg Wolfond 15:12

All that makes a difference. All of us born in North America are kind of born a little bit with a golden spoon compared to being born in other places in the world. Like it's there's different levels of that for sure. But you're born over here, you've got so much opportunity and things you could build and do. So lucky with that we were able to do that kind of stuff. But you compare North America to other parts of the world, it's like a whole immobile.

Rebecca Rose Payne 15:32

Yeah.

Greg Wolfond 15:32

But Buffett always says though, lucky to be born on this side because you could never do what he did being born in other parts of the world.

Rebecca Rose Payne 15:38

That's true. So you've had multiple companies that have been successful. Has your definition of success changed over time?

Greg Wolfond 15:49

Different people have different views of success. Our kids are more balanced than we were. Like when I was working, had set goals of what we wanted to do with the business. And it's not as just riding away. You have to work harder because you've got to make payroll and you've got to do this and you've got to do that. I think people today are much more life balanced or much better at life balance, you know, husband and wife sharing the goals and balancing my free time versus my work time. I don't think I was as good at that. Growing up, like if I had to do stuff and it was 18 hours a day that I do the 18 hours, I'd be home for dinner, but I'd keep working into the evening and get done what we have to get done. I think the life balance stuff is probably better, but sometimes during those those two things are in conflict. The life balance and the drag on one of these businesses can sometimes be in conflict.

Rebecca Rose Payne 16:34

So you'd say you now define success more as having more of a work-life balance than you once did?

Greg Wolfond 16:42

Aaron Powell I see that it's as important to have that now. I mean, it's easier for me now because I've kind of done it, but I I I see the benefit of having the life balance. I wonder a little bit because the ones, the entrepreneurs that I've seen who really go through, you start to push on that a little bit, right? It's hard to just do like end it the day and be home for dinner and do all those things and run the business, especially some of these businesses like ours that were in Australia and New Zealand and Thailand and all these places and different time zones. It becomes uh pretty all-encompassing. So if you have these circles of we've got this work circle and the family circle and the self-circle, you're supposed to balance those out. When I went through it, the work circle often jumped into the other circle. The self-circle goes first, and then it starts to convince the family a little bit too. And you try and push it back, but these businesses are hard. I think it's harder now. Like I honestly think for younger folks who are starting businesses now, there's so much competition coming from everywhere. And AI that's able to build stuff that used to take forever. They can build things that took you forever, and now someone can rebuild it in a fraction of the time. It's gonna be a more interesting world in what's coming. I wish I was doing it again, because I think the tools are amazing, what you're gonna be able to do. But I think competition is gonna come from everywhere, and it's gonna be somewhat harder to really build that edge and keep that edge.

Rebecca Rose Payne 18:02

So you think there's more competition now than there was when you were starting your business?

Greg Wolfond 18:06

Yeah, if I go through the five different companies we did through the whole history, the starting at the first business, you could you could have a product or service, you could charge a good, you know, fair rate for it, you could make a good margin and run your business. And if I watch over the decades going forward from that, it always became harder, the margins always got tighter, you had to sell more to make it work. And it got there's always more competition than there was. So I think that's a rising ramp that there's more and more people jumping into that space. And it makes it harder to run a business and keep keep margin to be able to pay people and grow the business.

Rebecca Rose Payne 18:38

Yeah. I guess there's more people in the world, period.

Greg Wolfond 18:41

So I guess there's more people in the world and it's more connected, so you can do more with computers and stuff. So maybe you need less staff, but people deal with people. You still need a staff to get stuff done, right? You still need all of that.

Rebecca Rose Payne 18:54

That's true. That you've executed.

Greg Wolfond 18:57

The hardest of these. The health stuff that we're doing now is the hardest because it's it's just so expensive to build. Like you come from an idea that works really well, you know, a drug that does depression or a drug that does glaucoma, and it looks good in the lab, but it needs millions just to get into approval. And then needs, you know, so many million for phase one, and then phase two trials are 20 to 40 million dollars, and phase three trials are $100 million. So these are gonna be really different and huge dollars. And then if you can get them through, the wins are ginormous, like it's multibillions of dollars or zero. It's gonna be up or down in the way that whole industry works. So those are the harder ones to get around. So we're doing it with philanthropic capital. People are saying, hey, let's go make a difference and they're less risk adverse. In Canada, generally, a lot of the businesses now are finding it tougher to get capital, right? Anyone who's starting a business in Canada now, it's harder to get capital here for some reason, risk capital than it is in the US. But of our businesses, which was the hardest to get around? I think the chip business, we're gonna go build a payment terminal on a chip, was hey, can we do this? Can we actually build something that has the security and the NFC, the tapping thing and everything else on a chip and get it done and execute it? We were like, well, maybe, but lots of competition from the big folks, and we actually were able to show that, hey, there is a working business here. We could actually design a chip, get it produced in Taiwan, get it back, prove that it works, and make that business go. I think that chip is now in 25 or 30 million terminals. So it feels good when you get it done. Team did really well, but there's moments I I don't think there's any business that I've had where there wasn't a moment of oh shit kind of thing. Like you're riding this roller coaster, hey, we're gonna conquer the world. Oh no, we're gonna die. Okay, we're gonna conquer the world. Okay, we're not. Every business has these ebbs and flows, and there wasn't one of them that we weren't in peril at some point in time.

Rebecca Rose Payne 20:49

And how do you manage it when you're in that peril?

Greg Wolfond 20:53

You just have to keep going. You just have to do your best to go through, and some will make it, and some won't. Said luck comes in, so we got lucky, and some of the outcomes of some of these met the right person. Like you wake up every day, so who do I have to talk to today that's gonna make my journey better, make the business succeed? And you have to just get off your bum and go talk to those people, take your to-do list and figure out what the top three things are and get those done. And who do I have to talk to that's gonna help with this mission? You've got to talk to those folks. You can't be frightened. You just find out how do I get to this person that's gonna help make it better. And that's just the work you have to put in.

Rebecca Rose Payne 21:24

Is there a conversation that you've had that's changed the trajectory of your career?

Greg Wolfond 21:30

Oh, lots, right? Uh, lots of mentors, lots of great folks along the way that just say, hey, just that kind of stuff with a f find the people who are gonna help you get done what you got to get done, and find a way to get to them and talk to them and see what what I have to do. That was one of the bigger ones that really helped go because sometimes you just sit there and you can't figure it out. But if you sit down in the morning with your to do list of here's the three things I have to get done today, and here's the people I have to talk to to move this business forward, and you do that every day, you'll find great things happen.

Rebecca Rose Payne 21:59

Yeah. That makes sense.

Greg Wolfond 22:01

It does. Yeah. A lot of people don't. They're busy with the thing they're on or they're on number five on the priority list. You gotta really focus.

Rebecca Rose Payne 22:10

So I guess when you or when people look back on your career decades from now, what do you hope they would say matters most?

Greg Wolfond 22:21

I don't know. Depends on who who and what and and where. J generally what I hope they say is that I was really good at coalescing the team and driving the team to be their best and deliver on the vision. And that's generally what I try to do. I try to get that team in place and then really push them and drive them to work together and here's what we have to get to and get to that goal. And that's what you have to do to start one of these businesses and make it go. And that means you're going to be good some days. It means you're not going to be as nice some other days. I mean, you have to push and say, here's what we have to get to. Like you have to keep very real on are we doing well or are we not doing well? And make sure the team knows that and drive to here's what we have to get to. And they can do it. Like if you have a good team, it's amazing what they can get done. And look like many of these companies that we've done, it's in some cases a few years since, in some cases, 10 years since, and in some cases 30 years since. And they still get together as a group and say, hey, let's have a reunion. Let's talk about this, let's talk about that, and things that we did because they feel a camaraderie of getting it done.

Rebecca Rose Payne 23:21

Wow. That is do you think that's unique to your businesses or I don't know if it's unique.

Greg Wolfond 23:27

I think it's unique to people. People like to work with other people. They like to feel a camaraderie and a shared vision of what we're trying to do and get it done. And I think it's amazing what you can do in this short life that we get. You can make a lot of change in this world.

Rebecca Rose Payne 23:40

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, and then one last question, which is a little out of order. You mentioned philanthropic capital. So is that money that people are like that's charity money, or how does that work?

Greg Wolfond 23:53

Yeah, it's a good question. So GiveBack Health Innovation Foundation is a public foundation. And what we're saying to people is, hey, you may have friends or family or someone who, God forbid, have a cancer or some kind of condition, and they have great doctors and teams who are working on them. Can we help those teams take the cure that they have or the treatment and get it from, hey, an idea to something that actually works in lots of humans? So GiveBack was set up to say, I can give a gift of, say, a million dollars to the foundation and say, I'd really like if you could look at this area in glaucoma or this area in depression, and here's some people who are working on it. Can you look at funding them? So the foundation itself, GiveBack, can do due diligence, make sure that team's got the right technology to make it work. If it does the diligence and makes sense, then the donation comes in, give back and decide, yeah, it's good to go to this company, can buy the shares of that company and help mentor that company, say, okay, you need this person, you need this business developer person, you need that person, kind of guide them a little bit along the way. But the goal is hopefully that company is successful. And that donation of, say, a million dollars turns into $10 million, that comes back into the foundation to go to other companies that are trying to get going. So the donor can then make a recommendation. I think it should go over here, it should go over there, and give back and consider if those things make sense and fund it there. But the the idea is try to create this circle of doing good that goes from one donor who wants to make a difference to a team that's going to build it. When it's successful, it comes back into the foundation, it can be reallocated again out there. It's a different lens than where in your for-profit pocket, the one I said before, pays the rent and gets you food. When you're very risk-verse, that's risk capital and very cautious. If you're trying to make a difference and someone's working on stem cells, which is super risky, you may fund it because you've got a friend who's got a spinal injury, and you think these guys could actually make a difference if it works. So much more risky, but if you don't fund it, no one else is funding it. How does it go through? So can you get donors to give to be directed towards the stem cell project or this depression project? That yeah, they're hugely expensive, and yeah, there's risk. But if it works, what a difference it makes, right? I think depression in Ontario costs the province about $5 billion a year. And there's no great drugs. There's some great, some good drugs, but there's no great home runs yet. So how do you fund these great scientists who are spending years, they're giving their whole lives to work on this to actually get it to point where they can try it in humans and show that it works. So the philanthropic pocket, less of a risk lens and more of a, hey, let's do good lens. And if we can be successful at funding other people to come into these causes they care about and funding the scientists, we think we'll make a difference in moving the needle and getting some of those going. And then when they get to the showing it in a phase one trial or a phase two trial, and it's really good, then you can bring in more capital to make it bigger to raise the next phases. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could build those companies in Canada and keep them in Canada with capital coming from Canada once we de-risk them? It's kind of the goal.

Rebecca Rose Payne 26:56

I mean, that's a very noble goal. And it sounds like everybody's motivations is a little bit shifted throughout the process as opposed to like investing and wanting to make money and you're wanting to do as much as it has to be acknowledged right up front.

Greg Wolfond 27:12

We acknowledge it's it's more risky than uh tech investment in many places, right? It's more and this is gonna work or not work. But if we don't do it, it's not gonna happen. So do you want to fund and the donors love it because they get to see what company it's going into. They get updates every quarter of here's what they're working on, now they're trying this in the trial, or now they're trying that with mice. They feel that their dollars are going somewhere. Like Canadians do give a lot as a good philanthropic community here. We're just trying to make the opportunities kind of bubble to the surface. So if you care about arthritis, here's people who are working on that. If you care about depression or dementia or Alzheimer's, here's people who are working on those things. And how do you fund the dollars they need just to de-risk these ideas so they can get to the next phase?

Rebecca Rose Payne 27:53

Yeah, I mean, and I can absolutely see why people would want to spend their money there. Because I mean, who wouldn't?

Greg Wolfond 27:59

Everyone wants to make a difference, right? There's the different states. There's the companies you talk to that, hey, I've got to build it, get it going, and then there's the okay, I've done it, now I want to give back a little bit. And what are the areas I want to give? There's no lack of places you can give. Health sciences, we are we are like almost one number one or number two in the world on research and discovery, and we do very poorly on commercialization. I think that's a problem. I think we can fix it.

Rebecca Rose Payne 28:23

I think so too. Well, thank you so much for your time and for speaking with me. It's been very educational and fascinating.

Greg Wolfond 28:34

I appreciate your time too. You're doing amazing. So this is like we're all learning here. And uh it's great that you have this kind of print that's out there that people can say, hey, what else can I do?

Rebecca Rose Payne 28:43

Yes. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Greg Wolfond 28:45

Thank you so much.

Rebecca Rose Payne 28:46

Thank you.