Rob Pintwala

Building for the long term. Founder @firstsessionmh.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

My wife’s first experience with therapy was a disaster.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@KashPrime @EricDLombardi Promising

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@DegenApeDev https://t.co/8B4IAgfR1r

Much more coming soon

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

Doomscrolling is neurodegenerative

[Mark Hyman, M.D. @drmarkhyman]

Laughter is anti-inflammatory. Crying is regulating. Hugging is immunoprotective. Singing is vagal toning. Dancing is neurogenic.

Joy is a biological necessity.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

After 10 minutes, they asked me about my Telus services. The proceeded to try upsell me.

Massive bait and switch.

“Stand With Owners” is in fact a massive lead gen scheme slowing down Canadian entrepreneurs.

Shame on me? Sure.

But shame on Telus.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

Canadian oligopoly storytime:

Telus (big telecom) has a business competition called Stand With Owners. Top prize is $125,000. Last year I applied.

A few weeks later I got a call from someone at Telus regarding my application.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

They said my application looked interesting, and they were doing diligence to report back to the judges.

They proceeded to ask me to tell my entrepreneurial story.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

On the other side of AI psychosis human connection will be all that is left.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

Building is easy. Launching on the other hand...

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@atmoio Layer

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

Toronto, I already miss you. Thank you TTW for setting the tone and creating the vibes our country needs.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@tokifyi @skanwar Amen

[Satish Kanwar @skanwar]

@sciohn_fhanne One doesn't work without the other.

Vibes set momentum, momentum creates companies, companies build economies.

Being cynical is a choice. Doing something about it is a choice. I'd rather we go hard for the city, succeed or fail, than point fingers.

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@willpate Feel for you. Would actually be worse in SF

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

Back home in Toronto 📍Who’s around?

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@tokifyi @BetaKit 👏👏 let’s goo!

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@tokifyi @LisaLi_T @chatbase @yasser_elsaid_ @postbridge_ @jackfriks @usecollabstr @dulay604 @obsdmd @kepano @indexsy @yacineMTB https://t.co/ot9OtR7FRK est. 2019, no capital raised

[Lisa Tanh @LisaLi_T]

Congratulations @ianwcrosby on raising $10M USD in seed funding for Synthetic to build “the Shopify for software companies,” starting with fully autonomous accounting!

Last week, Ian and I chatted about his serial entrepreneurial and investing journey leading to today. We went as far back as when he was 19 studying finance and economics at UBC, when he got his first job as a bookkeeper because it was his only shot at working for a video game company. It was there that he learned programming because he wanted to spend more time testing games than bookkeeping.

After graduating, he worked as a consultant at Bain & Company but left after two years because he felt it didn't match the pace that he wanted to operate at and that entrepreneurship might be the only path. What he took with him was a knack for uncovering what would make a business more successful and recognizing teams with a high bar of competence.

He would go on to build Bench even though tech legend Joel Spolsky, who co-founded Stack Overflow and Trello, kept telling him it was doomed when the startup got into the Techstars accelerator. Bench would become the largest bookkeeping service in the world for small businesses, evolve into banking, cards, payroll, and taxes, and raise over $100 million.

After over a decade at Bench, Ian accepted Shopify’s offer to run its banking division after stepping down from the board. At the time, Bench had just raised a Series C, turned down a “highly lucrative” acquisition offer, and had “budding partnerships” with Shopify and other major companies. Yet some board members wanted to take the company in a different direction with a new CEO, which, as Ian anticipated, would prove to be the wrong call. The company would later shut down without notice and only resume operations after an acquisition saved it.

By then, Ian had left Shopify to build Teal: APIs and tools that let companies build accounting offerings. Working at Shopify gave him more exposure to a problem no one had solved yet: how companies could integrate accounting into their products—like banking and lending—and draw insights from them. Less than a year and a half after launching, Teal was acquired by Mercury.

Ian then joined Mercury as its head of accounting products. It was after that position wrapped up that he ended up in Europe, where he thought of the idea for Synthetic after experimenting with ElevenLabs and finding himself prototyping instead of sightseeing.

In this piece and podcast ep, Ian and I talk about how Synthetic will work as a fully autonomous accounting platform and why his next priority is turning it into “the Shopify for software companies"—where it would handle their websites, incorporation, bank accounts, payments, accounting, and everything else in between. We also talk about how “winning in AI now means winning the reliability race,” Synthetic's approach to quality control, and his advice for other early stage startups.

https://t.co/b5slffOwbN

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@LisaLi_T Google should just build a podcast product on top of Meet. Terrible options out there

[Rob Pintwala @RPintwala]

@robjama Chinatown after hours

[daniel debow @ddebow]

advice that changed the culture @Shopify

it can for Canada as well