The Founder Behind Two $100M+ Canadian Startups

Hey, Justin here, and welcome to Just Go Grind, a newsletter sharing the lessons, tactics, and stories of world-class founders! Today’s deep dive is available for premium subscribers.

I’m thinking about building something and I’d love your feedback in the poll below.

Hiring sucks.

We all know how this goes: you post a job, sift through a bunch of underwhelming applications, take a chance on someone, and then—surprise—they’re not as good as they claimed.

Or, you hire an agency, and their A-team sells you, but the C-team does the work.

Intros fixes that.

They personally match you with top-tier growth and marketing talent they’ve already hired themselves. No resumes, no bad fits, no runaround.

If you know what you need, they’ll send the right person your way. If you don’t, they’ll help you figure it out. Either way, it’s free (because their experts would rather be working than pitching).

Make hiring less painful. Get your free Intro.

Today we have a guest post from Liam Gill, a startup founder, investor, advisor and lawyer from Toronto, Canada.

Liam also writers four newsletters:

• Founders' Daily Briefing - Mindset tips and market insights for startup founders

• ​Persuade & Raise - Fundraising tips to become a VC-backed founder

• Law4Startups - Legal insights and news for entrepreneurs

• Emerge - Daily summary of the top business stories

The subject of today’s deep dive, Andrew Chau, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Neo Financial, a fintech company worth hundreds of millions of dollars aiming to disrupt the major institutions that dominate the banking sector in Canada.

Prior to co-founding Neo, he was the Co-Founder of SkipThe Dishes, a food delivery service in Canada that, after four years, was sold to Just Eat for $110M. Today, it directly competes with Uber Eats, DoorDash, and other players in the Canadian food delivery market. 

Today’s deep dive is available in full for premium subscribers.

Let’s dive in.

Andrew Chau’s journey from small-time entrepreneur to co-founder of SkipTheDishes (sold for $110M) and Neo Financial ($1B+ valuation) demonstrate how founders, no matter their circumstances, can find success if they focus on creating solutions to problems they have experienced firsthand. 

Andrew started his life in a remote city in Saskatchewan, Canada as the son of immigrants. He stayed in Saskatchewan for university before starting SkipTheDishes in 2012 and Neo Financial in 2019.

As a founder working outside of a traditional startup city and without the resources available to founders in those ecosystems, his unique path to success was only possible due to the unique lessons he learned along the way. These include:

• Identifying underserved markets. When you don’t have the resources to compete directly with larger incumbents, you can follow Andrew’s lead by focusing on underserved markets where there is less competition. This allows startups to gain a foothold in an industry before trying to expand or grow their business. 

• Being resourceful. Turn your biggest challenges into advantages. Just as Amazon turned its biggest cost (computing) into one of its biggest revenue generators (AWS), Andrew consistently looked for ways to turn his constraints into advantages.

• Having a mission-driven team. When all odds are against you, having a strong “why?” behind you and your team can help motivate and encourage your company to reach levels of success that are unattainable without a commitment to a cause greater than financial success. 

Andrew was the son of two Vietnamese immigrants who moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. It is a cold city in the middle of the Canadian prairies known for its agricultural and oil industries. To this day, the city is known more for its raw resources and blue-collar workers than as an entrepreneurial hub or tech powerhouse. 

Andrew’s parents owned a small Chinese restaurant. From a young age, he worked in the kitchen, watching his parents tirelessly working while he peeled carrots and potatoes and helped with other small tasks. He saw firsthand that entrepreneurship is not glamorous. You need to put in long hours, be driven to succeed and work constantly to meet customers’ needs. 

Like many immigrant families, Andrew’s parents pushed him toward the stability of a career in medicine or engineering. Despite this, Andrew was drawn to business.

He chose to study commerce at the University of Saskatchewan, where he would take his first business classes learning the theoretical side of business. After graduating, he would go on to work with Boston Consulting Group, where we would get to put that theory in practice for the first time.

In 2012, he partnered with fellow University of Saskatechewan alumni Jeff Adamson, Josh Simair, Dan Simair, and Chris Simair to found his first company, SkipTheDishes, a food delivery company launched the same year as DoorDash.

The idea for SkipTheDishes came from his experience working in his family restaurant.

He saw firsthand how the delivery market was failing small, local restaurants and felt he could create a solution to benefit customers and restaurants in his local community.

The lessons learned in his family’s restaurant - resilience, hard work, adaptability - along with the problems he experienced there firsthand, would become the foundation for his entrepreneurial career.

Become a paying subscriber to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.

Already a paying subscriber? Sign In.

A subscription gets you:

• • Premium subscriber-only editions
• • Access to 65+ founder deep dives and the entire history of posts
• • Event discounts & early access