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Reza has co-founded six companies that have collectively sold for over $3.5 billion, but…
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Reza Satchu shared thisThis week, over 180 Harvard Business School students will walk into my course, The Founder Mindset. I know something about these students that most of them will not admit yet. All of them desperately want to build something of their own. They may be among the most talented people in the world, and that is exactly what makes them hesitate. Talent gets offered options. Another credential, another safe job, and another year of open doors. Optionality is a curse because it feels like progress. Every year a student tells me there is no harm in waiting a few years before starting. I have spent 25 years teaching founders, and the ones who waited for the perfect moment are still waiting. This semester has one purpose. Create urgency amidst uncertainty. Over the next few months, these students will sit across from founders who committed with imperfect information, overcame tremendous adversity and built companies worth billions. They will pitch. They will get judged. And they will realize that the founders in front of them started exactly where they are now, with the same doubts and lack of information. Somewhere in this new class are founders who will build companies none of us have imagined yet. My job is to help them start now.
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Reza Satchu shared thisYou are much more capable than you think Paige McFarland. I am glad you finally made the leap but i have far higher expectations of you going forward. Step in to uncertainty and don't recoil from it.Reza Satchu shared this“I’ve been too scared to speak to you this entire term.” That’s what I told Professor Reza Satchu at our NEXT Canada graduation dinner. Throughout NEXT36, I had opportunities to speak up in Reza’s classes, but I held back. I would overthink what to say, how I would come across, or whether I had something valuable to contribute. I realized that caring too much about how I was perceived was creating fear, and that fear was creating inaction. At the graduation dinner, I decided I wasn’t going to let that fear hold me back any longer. I went over to Reza and told him exactly what I had been thinking. I acted despite the fear, and in hindsight, realized how irrational it had been. It was a small decision, but it brought one of Reza’s lessons on the founder mindset to life for me: Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the ability to make a rational decision and act despite it. That matters enormously as a founder because uncertainty and rejection are unavoidable. Building a company means hearing “no,” getting things wrong, and constantly making decisions without knowing how they will turn out. The challenge is to keep moving with conviction, build judgment through those decisions, and create momentum even when the outcome isn’t yet certain. What I valued most about Reza’s teaching was that NEXT wasn’t only about building companies. It was about developing the founder mindset needed to build them: commitment, confidence, judgment, and a relentless pursuit of opportunity despite uncertainty. Building ROOT Health requires every one of those qualities. Thank you Reza, for challenging me to think seriously about the founder I am becoming. I’m grateful to have these lessons ingrained in how I think and act as I build ROOT Health.
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Reza Satchu shared thisNo small plans Daniel Moss.Reza Satchu shared thisI just wrapped up the NEXT Canada Founders program, and I wanted to take a minute to say thank you. The last few months have been some of the most defining of my time building Padder, pushing me to grow as an operator, a leader, and a founder. Reza Satchu pushed me to think differently about founder judgment. The ability to make decisions with imperfect information, take ownership of the outcome, and get better with every rep. If you've attended one of his lectures, you know his direct approach is a constant reminder that judgment isn’t something you learn in theory; it’s something you build by making hard decisions and being honest about the results. Ajay Agrawal challenged me to think much further ahead about what we’re actually building. He took the time to write a letter to our shareholders from 2030, imagining a future where Padder hadn’t just built for the future of housing, but helped shape it. That exercise gave me a new lens for thinking about the bets we make today and the company they could ultimately create. And Etai Mizrahi and the SPEED program sharpened how I operate day to day, from how I structure my time and prioritize what matters to how I show up for my team. Judgment, long-term vision, and operating discipline. I’m leaving NEXT a better founder because of all three. I’m also incredibly honoured to have been selected by my peers as Top Entrepreneur in the Founders cohort, and by Reza as an up-and-coming high-impact entrepreneur. Those recognitions mean a lot, particularly coming from a group of founders and mentors I respect. I’ve never felt more motivated to build than I do right now. Cheers, NEXT Canada, keep helping Canadians conquer the world.
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Reza Satchu shared thisMy students are all afraid of one outcome. Founding something and failing. I asked Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and president of Cloudflare, what happens to the people who do. Her answer may surprise you. She wants them on her team. "When you're in the arena making decisions, you expand in ways that you didn't think was possible, and you just never go back to the same shape." Every decision you make as a founder stretches you. Who to hire. Who to let go. Whether to take the money. Some you get wrong. Some you will not know were wrong for 5 years. Michelle calls that scar tissue, and she says the rate at which you learn from it is a superpower. None of that happens on the sidelines. The person who never commits keeps their original shape. Neat, defensible, and smaller than they could have been. Cloudflare turned 15 the same year Microsoft turned 50, and it struck Michelle for the first time that Cloudflare could get there too: "I think we're building something generational that will outlive the founders, and that is maybe the truest definition of success as an entrepreneur I could think of." That is the same person who, 15 years ago, was worried about her visa and ending up back in her parents' basement in Saskatchewan. How do you get from one to the other? You start acting with confidence in excess of your capabilities. Then your capabilities expand as you make more consequential decisions. Listen to my full conversation with Michelle Zatlyn, linked in the first comment.
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Reza Satchu shared thisMy students imagine commitment as one dramatic moment. Cut off your options, burn the boats, and jump into shark-infested waters. Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and President of Cloudflare, has been a good friend of mine for almost 20 years (yes, we met at a ball hockey game) and she got there without any of that. Cloudflare started as an independent study she took at Harvard Business School. One semester of real work on a real problem. What I call a "small-c" commitment. The summer after, she joined a venture program to keep building it. Another "small-c” commitment. She was on a one-year visa in the depths of a recession. Every month she gave the project was a month she could not spend on a safer path. She dedicated herself to Cloudflare anyway. That is the slope. Every month the problem got more interesting, and every month she chose it again. Small commitments stack. By the time anyone asked whether she was all in, the question had already been answered a hundred times. Cloudflare today has a market capitalization of $100 billion and carries roughly a fifth of the world's internet traffic. Entering the arena does not have to be one giant leap. You can walk in one commitment at a time, until there is no version of your life where you walk away. Listen to my full conversation with Michelle Zatlyn, linked in the first comment.
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Reza Satchu shared thisCommitment is the most important trait a founder has. People confuse it with grit. They are not the same thing. Grit is pushing through whatever happens to be in front of you with discipline and endurance. Always showing up. Every founder I admire has it. It is also table stakes. Why? Because grit asks nothing of your judgment. You never have to decide whether the thing you are enduring is worth enduring. Commitment, on the other hand, is a judgement call. Commitment means choosing one thing and cutting off every other option. You have to decide what is worth that. And you carry the risk of being wrong for years before anyone can tell you whether you were. Grit is safe. Commitment is risky. And risk is where the upside comes from. No one dreams of a life full of grit. People long to commit. To a person, a purpose, something they will not walk away from. If I had to choose one, I would take commitment over grit every day.
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Reza Satchu shared thisWhen my family moved to Canada, I was an Indian kid with a British accent who had never been outside Kenya. I was a year younger than everyone in my class, certain I was looking in from the outside. For years, that felt like a disadvantage. It was the opposite. Nearly 6 in 10 of America's billion-dollar startups have an immigrant founder. People who arrived with the fewest advantages built many of the country's most valuable companies. I do not think that is a coincidence. It takes resolve to leave the life you have, good or bad, for one you cannot picture. My parents showed me that at a young age. It is a hard, irreversible bet. Starting a company asks for a smaller version of the same bet, years later. By then, the training is already behind you. It began the first time your own accent was the one that sounded different. The first winter in a cold country. The first room where you were the minority. Every day handed you another reminder that you were operating somewhere unfamiliar, but slowly that stopped being frightening. By the time you consider starting a company, uncertainty is not a special event. It is the water you swim in. If you have spent your life comfortable, the most useful thing you can do is deliberately put yourself somewhere unfamiliar. It is the closest thing there is to an immigrant founder's starting condition. The outsider is not behind. The outsider has been training the whole time.
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Reza Satchu shared thisLast Thursday marked NEXT Canada's Venture Day, the culmination of our 16th year of programming. It was an inspiring event. 16 years ago, when I took my class out of the University of Toronto to create NEXT Canada, I remember looking at data provided to me by my partner Ajay Agrawal that illustrated the prosperity gap between Canada and the U.S., and knowing we had to do something about it. That issue is even more relevant today as it was then. And yet, I remain increasingly hopeful about our future. NEXT Canada has launched over 400 ventures that have created in excess of 10,000 jobs, helping bridge the prosperity gap. Last week, founders from Next 36, NextAI, and Next Founders took the stage to pitch in front of an audience of business leaders, investors, alumni, and supporters. Each year I say this, and each year it remains true: the caliber of these NEXT Canada founders keeps getting better. We have the next generation of Canadians working on demanding and globally relevant problems - from healthcare products that will save lives, to multi-million dollar run-rate domestic platforms seeking to scale internationally, to AI-native software applications seeking to transform industries. NEXT Canada's mission has always been to develop Canada's most ambitious founders and build a more prosperous, innovative economy. Days like last Thursday are proof that this mission is working. In fact, I had a group of my Harvard Business School students in the audience. Several of them told me afterward that the pitches were as good, if not better, than what they see at Harvard. I agree with them. Thank you to Jennifer Reynolds, MBA, ICD.D, our CEO, and the entire NEXT Canada team who made this possible. Tim Price for his ongoing support. Josh Domingues for his leadership and to John Kelleher for moderating the morning and delivering an excellent reminder on the importance of both potential and performance. And finally thank you to our panelists - John Ruffolo of Maverix Private Equity, Michelle McBane of Standup Ventures, and Ali Asaria of Transformer Lab - for sharing their feedback with our founders. Congratulations to every founder who went through the program this year. The future of Canadian entrepreneurship is bright. NEXT Canada, Andrew Kosc, Morgan Hewett, John Kelleher
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Reza Satchu shared thisAlways look for people who challenge you Ben PetlachReza Satchu shared thisI joined NEXT Canada because I wanted to be around ambitious, like-minded people. At least, that was the answer I gave Reza Satchu. He called it a first-order answer that anyone could give. Translation: think harder. What I was really looking for was an environment where every idea could be pressure-tested by experienced founders, peers building alongside me, and a community willing to open doors so we could learn faster. Nine months later, that is exactly what NEXT gave me - and then some. Looking back, the rate of learning this summer was unlike anything I've experienced. Reza's lessons on closing and inevitability, Etai Mizrahi's SPEED sessions, and Ajay Agrawal's mind-opening classes constantly pushed us to move faster, think more clearly, and test our assumptions against reality. Philipp Mayorov and I spent the program applying those lessons to Enlyte. Last week, I got to pitch what we've been building onstage at Venture day, where Enlyte was one of six NEXT 36 ventures selected to present. More importantly, NEXT surrounded me with intelligent, high-agency people who made ambitious action feel normal. Huge thank you to the current cohort, alumni, mentors, and staff for your advice, introductions, hard questions, and great memories. Special shoutout to Fletcher McLaughlin, the best Venture Manager I could have asked for. Reza was right: "like-minded people" was incomplete. I didn't need people who thought like me. I needed people who would challenge how I thought, raise the standard I held myself to, and help me move faster. I found them. We're still incredibly far from where we want to be. But this is just the beginning.
Reza Satchu replied to a comment
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Michelle Zatlyn We will do it again on November 18th!
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Thanks so much Michelle Zatlyn. You exemplify the Founder Mindset and are a true inspiration to so many.
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Reza Satchu liked thisReza Satchu liked this"Never expected my apartment kitchen startup to land here, but I'm honoured to be named Female Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2026" - Vishar Yaghoubian, Cofounder of Toothpod 😊🏆 Started Toothpod at 18 with zero experience and everything to prove. Today we have patents, clinical trials underway, $1M+ Toothpods produced, and a product that's actually making a difference. This recognition is proof that if you care enough and work hard enough, anything is possible. Celebrating Sunday, September 13th at the Amazon Rooftop in Vancouver with Canada's top founders, investors, and leaders. Come celebrate the next generation: yeyawards.com Massive thanks to my team, my supporters, the LOI crew, TD and The Forum and everyone who took a chance on a kid with a crazy idea. Really just getting started. P.S. Happy to connect with other founders in Vancouver around Sept 13 #YEYAwards #Startups #Entrepreneurship
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Reza Satchu liked thisReza Satchu liked thisI walked into NEXT AI in Toronto with strong conviction about Vayu. And a lot of unanswered questions. Could physiological computing become something people use every day? Could stronger engagement become a real business? Could research and revenue grow together? Over the course of the program, the signals became stronger. Engagement improved. In-app purchases increased. Our research became a public preprint. (https://lnkd.in/gEP6PcPN) And Vayu continued growing across iOS and Android. But the biggest change was not a metric. It was how I learned to think about the company. Reza Satchu classes challenged how I think about ambition, leadership and the responsibility of building something meaningful. Ajay Agrawal sessions sharpened how I think about AI, strategy and where technology can create real value. I am deeply grateful to Geoff Wadham, who consistently made time for us throughout the program. Thanks to our Scientist in residence Aditya Jain for all the manful feedback and sessions from Graham Taylor related to machine learning. The best mentors do not simply give you answers. They help you ask better questions. Thank you to Stephania Stefanakou, Fletcher McLaughlin, Mischa Hamara and Alexandra McGregor for holding the entire experience together with care, patience and genuine commitment to every founder. And thank you to my fellow founders in the cohort. Learning about the problems each of you chose to solve was one of the most meaningful parts of the program. Behind every startup was a deeply personal reason for building it. The work across this cohort was ambitious, thoughtful and genuinely useful. We also met people through NEXT AI whom we may never have crossed paths with otherwise. Some challenged our thinking. Some opened doors. Many became people I hope we continue building alongside for years to come. We came for the program. We are leaving with a community. We are not leaving with everything figured out. We are leaving with a stronger product, better questions and much more conviction about what comes next. That may be the best thing an accelerator can give you. Deepali Raiththa Prana Labs Inc. Rizwan Kheraj Michael Bidu Alexei Doudkine Metacreation Lab for Creative Artificial Intelligence Philippe Pasquier Bernhard Riecke Fletcher McLaughlin #NEXTAI #NEXTCanada #DigitalHealth #EntrepreneurshipVayu: Screen-Free Haptic Breathwork with HRV-Adaptive Control—Pilot Outcomes and System DesignVayu: Screen-Free Haptic Breathwork with HRV-Adaptive Control—Pilot Outcomes and System Design
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Reza Satchu liked thisCommitment is the most important trait a founder has. People confuse it with grit. They are not the same thing. Grit is pushing through whatever happens to be in front of you with discipline and endurance. Always showing up. Every founder I admire has it. It is also table stakes. Why? Because grit asks nothing of your judgment. You never have to decide whether the thing you are enduring is worth enduring. Commitment, on the other hand, is a judgement call. Commitment means choosing one thing and cutting off every other option. You have to decide what is worth that. And you carry the risk of being wrong for years before anyone can tell you whether you were. Grit is safe. Commitment is risky. And risk is where the upside comes from. No one dreams of a life full of grit. People long to commit. To a person, a purpose, something they will not walk away from. If I had to choose one, I would take commitment over grit every day.
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Reza Satchu liked thisReza Satchu liked this“I’ve been too scared to speak to you this entire term.” That’s what I told Professor Reza Satchu at our NEXT Canada graduation dinner. Throughout NEXT36, I had opportunities to speak up in Reza’s classes, but I held back. I would overthink what to say, how I would come across, or whether I had something valuable to contribute. I realized that caring too much about how I was perceived was creating fear, and that fear was creating inaction. At the graduation dinner, I decided I wasn’t going to let that fear hold me back any longer. I went over to Reza and told him exactly what I had been thinking. I acted despite the fear, and in hindsight, realized how irrational it had been. It was a small decision, but it brought one of Reza’s lessons on the founder mindset to life for me: Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the ability to make a rational decision and act despite it. That matters enormously as a founder because uncertainty and rejection are unavoidable. Building a company means hearing “no,” getting things wrong, and constantly making decisions without knowing how they will turn out. The challenge is to keep moving with conviction, build judgment through those decisions, and create momentum even when the outcome isn’t yet certain. What I valued most about Reza’s teaching was that NEXT wasn’t only about building companies. It was about developing the founder mindset needed to build them: commitment, confidence, judgment, and a relentless pursuit of opportunity despite uncertainty. Building ROOT Health requires every one of those qualities. Thank you Reza, for challenging me to think seriously about the founder I am becoming. I’m grateful to have these lessons ingrained in how I think and act as I build ROOT Health.
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Reza Satchu liked thisReza Satchu liked thisI just wrapped up the NEXT Canada Founders program, and I wanted to take a minute to say thank you. The last few months have been some of the most defining of my time building Padder, pushing me to grow as an operator, a leader, and a founder. Reza Satchu pushed me to think differently about founder judgment. The ability to make decisions with imperfect information, take ownership of the outcome, and get better with every rep. If you've attended one of his lectures, you know his direct approach is a constant reminder that judgment isn’t something you learn in theory; it’s something you build by making hard decisions and being honest about the results. Ajay Agrawal challenged me to think much further ahead about what we’re actually building. He took the time to write a letter to our shareholders from 2030, imagining a future where Padder hadn’t just built for the future of housing, but helped shape it. That exercise gave me a new lens for thinking about the bets we make today and the company they could ultimately create. And Etai Mizrahi and the SPEED program sharpened how I operate day to day, from how I structure my time and prioritize what matters to how I show up for my team. Judgment, long-term vision, and operating discipline. I’m leaving NEXT a better founder because of all three. I’m also incredibly honoured to have been selected by my peers as Top Entrepreneur in the Founders cohort, and by Reza as an up-and-coming high-impact entrepreneur. Those recognitions mean a lot, particularly coming from a group of founders and mentors I respect. I’ve never felt more motivated to build than I do right now. Cheers, NEXT Canada, keep helping Canadians conquer the world.
Experience & Education
Honors & Awards
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Canada's Top 40 Under 40
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King Charles III Coronation Medal
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McGill University Distinguished Leader Award
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McGill University Management Achievement Award
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