Diversify Yo' Diversity: How we added different perspectives to Flashfood in 2019, a 1 part series (only this article)...

We didn’t win any of the tech awards in Canada this year. But I want to share what we did do. This is the biggest accomplishment I’ve had as a founder and CEO of a really quick-growing tech company so far...

If you haven’t read the internet in the last 18 months, particularly in the Toronto tech scene or any of the news coming out of SF, there’s been a constant theme of white male privileged founders that take advantage of their perch as executives in startups to do some bad shit. You’ll find this anywhere in life from people who have power, typically those who’ve never had it before.  

This all kind of parlays into the biggest thing that I’ve learned and accomplished as a CEO looking back over the last twelve months. But it actually starts a little before that.

Flashfood was so close to going broke so many times and we took so many risks in the first few years of our company’s life. I’d be happy to share war stories at some point, but I’ll leave that for another post. As our company progressed and diversity has been more forthcoming in the tech industry internationally over the last few years, I remember looking around our company and seeing this:

We had a team of 7 full time working out of this pretty dope loft in Liberty Village in Toronto. (it wasn’t until after we moved out that people told me our ‘office’ felt like a ‘dungeon’)

(We had a really big family-style dining room table that sat on this floor with a bunch of seats for people to co-work from. Also, that fireplace on the left was our only source of heat in this office. I’m also pretty sure the heating situation isn’t ‘to code’, don’t ask me the address though because I ain’t no snitch! Although we never got our security deposit back from our landlord, so authorities, get at me ??)

Different people will see different things in our team photo above, but what struck me in mid-2017 as I kept reading more and more about diversity in tech was shocking. I had a self-realization:

“Holy f* Josh, you have a team of 7, including only one woman and a tiny office with only 1 washroom. How the hell are you:

1. Going to even up the gender numbers so you have a broad range of perspectives surrounding important decision making in the future.
2. Recruit any worthwhile, diverse candidates if all you have is one woman on your team. What women would walk into this place and say ‘oh ya I can be comfortable working here?’

In fairness, we had such little money in the bank and were such a scrappy team that we weren’t able to recruit new teammates at that time, but if I wanted to add more diversity over time I’d have to start laying down the foundation.

So I turned to my trusty friends LinkedIn and Google, and started to search for things like ‘Top women in tech in Toronto’ and ‘Women leading tech in Canada’. I reached out to as many of these women as I could and offered to take them for coffee.  

I was fortunate enough to get responses from several of the most regarded women in the industry including the most badass dev Leigha, who happens to be tatted up, loves comic books and oh ya was a top 30 under 30 software dev in Canada (she’s since moved on from FF in a really amicable way and is still very much my homie. Leigha helped elevate us get to a much better place as a company while she was with us and I’ll always appreciate it?? ??).

Laying the foundation building a network with these really cool women helped Flashfood level up over the last 12 months as we more than tripled our team. We were really fortunate to land partners like Loblaws as our flagship grocer partner and received funding from world-class investors and new amazing partners at General Catalyst - and off we went for a huge 2019!

We started last year with a new office that included like 6 different individual washrooms. I was so curious about the number of washrooms available that the landlord said ‘why do you keep asking about washrooms? There’s a bunch here!’, me: 'oh right right, ya that’s weird I agree… I'll stop'.

And through this past year we added and we added and we added (we also subtracted some people. A caveat here, if you’re not a good teammate then you won’t last long. It’s a really unfortunate part of building a team but one that I hold really dear to me. I played hockey at a high level my entire life and being on teams that had bad teammates was the WORST.)  

But as we were adding, we were really deliberate on hiring the best candidates and opening our hiring pool up to any community or background that we could think of. This lead to introductions and applications from people from all walks of life. We were also really careful about making sure that people coming in, while having impressive backgrounds and important credentials, were not shitty people. I don’t know how much more simple I could have made this to my team as we were hiring - luckily it stuck. We made sure that people we brought in were able to laugh, joke, be humble, be great teammates and treat others with respect.  

What this lead to was we 4x’d our team size and we nearly leveled up the numbers between those who prefer the pronouns he/him and she/her. We’re at nearly a 50% gender mix. Again, that number is cool but these were the BEST people in their respective categories and have all elevated our team. 

There’s not really a takeaway to this story other than we’re going to be growing a lot in 2020 too. If you’re in the tech world, looking at making a switch and working with a great solving one of the biggest problems we’ll face in our lifetime, climate change and food affordability - hit us up!

The Flashfood team doesn’t care where you come from, what you look like, what you believe in or how you associate your pronouns. We care about people and we care about our teammates. We care about diversity and having different perspectives shared freely without judgment. It’s really difficult to continue to foster this as we add people but we’ll keep trying our best!

I hope others who are building their companies may find this as a blueprint or at the very least focus on who has a shot joining your team as you grow. I couldn’t be happier with who we have on the ship and what we’re building.

Here’s to 2020, here’s to continuing to build our category, here’s to reducing food waste at mass and here’s to giving a f*ck about the environment through our collective work at Flashfood.

Giddy up! 

In the comments - how does your company focus on diversity and what things do your teams do to maintain diverse perspectives and inclusivity?