# S01E02 · Transcript — Ali Zaydan Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 2, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Ali Zaydan, Co-Founder and CEO of [Drivisa](https://drivisa.com). Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/ali-zaydan-drivisa). This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Ali's. ## The trip and the growth **Gokul** Hey Ali. How have you been? How was your trip? **Ali** Exhausting, man. Exhausting. You still have to manage operations, manage a few things that were happening, manage family, manage a lot of things in parallel. It's been a minute, but the trip was very successful. Our operations in the GTA are just growing exponentially — four hundred percent every month. We launched in late April with a handful of students. In April we did four students. In May we did about twenty. Last month we did about sixty. So we realized we need way more driving instructors, we need to hire people. Good problems to have, honestly. It just caught us off guard. **Gokul** It's a good problem. Welcome to The Useful Podcast. I call it the useful podcast because it's useful for you, useful for me, and useful for the listener. I have it recording the whole time and I'll chop it up later. I've been good — doing a lot of interesting pivots, figuring out what the market looks like, and honestly just talking to a lot of founders. That helps too, seeing what they see. **Ali** Yeah, I saw the page. I didn't know you were doing this. I'm glad you are. ## Before Nestlé **Gokul** My first question: before Nestlé, before Canada, before all of it, when you were really young, what did you think you were going to do? **Ali** I didn't care what I wanted to do. I just wanted an office job where I wear a suit, because that was so impressive to me. I'd have my own desk and I'd be able to buy my parents a house. That's it. I didn't care about anything else. **Gokul** Is that what led you to Nestlé, to sales, to that route? **Ali** No, not at all. Actually I wanted to study politics, political science, and history — that's something I enjoyed. I'm Lebanese, and we'd had a few bad experiences. My parents were very straightforward: do you want to do something wrong in this life? I said no. They said, okay, then you will not be successful in politics. So I didn't have that option. My dad said, buddy, you've got bills to pay very soon. So I switched to business, then I wanted marketing, then I had to switch to finance because we couldn't afford a private university. I went to a public university and they only offered finance in English. Everything else was in French, and I wanted to make the pivot to learning in English, because all of my education had been in French. I got my first job through my finance degree. Then I noticed the market doesn't hire who's better — the market hires the more prestigious name. So the name is important. I applied for a scholarship and got my MBA from the Lebanese American University. It's a big name in Lebanon. Even before I graduated I had six or seven job offers. I switched to the Dubai market, worked with P&G, and a little after a year I was headhunted by Nestlé. Funny enough, yesterday when I was visiting I passed by a friend whose wife was the HR person who found me and called me. ## Dubai to Kingston **Gokul** Life sounds like it was really good in Dubai. What would make you want to go from Dubai to Canada, to Kingston, to Queen's — and go back to being a student again? **Ali** Canada, Kingston, Queen's — each one is a different thing. I kept thinking my degree and what I was doing weren't up to the calibre I wanted. So I thought a prestigious international university with a big name would help. I wanted to come to Canada to try myself in a different market, because I thought it would toughen me up. Funny — no, the Dubai market is way more competitive. In the UAE you have thousands of startups popping up every month, hundreds of millions of dollars being burned on free delivery, free hundred-dollar vouchers, free rides. So I wanted to come to North America, a place with big businesses competing. I speak French, which helps here, and I speak English. It was between U of T, McGill, Queen's, and Ivey. Even before I got far with the others, I got a scholarship from Queen's. They were very interested in what I was doing. I felt very comfortable, so I chose Queen's and Smith. **Gokul** How was the culture shift from Dubai to Kingston? **Ali** The culture shock — this doesn't even happen in Lebanon. When I first tried to find a place, I needed a credit report and a credit score. I said it's fine, I'll pay the full first year. They said no. I said I'll pay the first two years of rent ahead of time. They said nope, it doesn't work this way. In the UAE and Lebanon, when you put money on the table, they know you're serious. Here they said the SOP doesn't say that, so it's not going to happen. That's exactly why I left Nestlé — not to stick to SOPs. First day, I put all my laundry in the washing machine and it's not working. I call, they connect me to the guy I'm renting from, he connects me to someone else, and they tell me they'll come in two weeks. I said, it has water and it smells. They said, this is the first appointment we have. Patience isn't something you're used to if you live in most of Asia. Why should I wait? I'll pay you more — come after work, make more money. No, it's my time off. That shocked me. And it's something we reflected in our business: with Drivisa you can start booking classes tomorrow. If there are people willing to make money, and you have a need, why should you wait? Everything else culturally was very chill — easy country, few conflicts, not a lot of competition. For someone who's fiery and wants to get things done, it's very useful. ## Cooltech and the commercialization problem **Gokul** Before Drivisa, I heard one of your pitches on the Queen's website — Cooltech. How did that shift? **Ali** My main reason for the MBA was to shift into sustainability. I'm a big fan of it. My passion for business and sustainability combined. Because of the trash and everything else, we have increasing rates of cancer in Lebanon — my mom was one of those folks who got it because of this. I've seen it firsthand. The more research I did, the more I realized a lot of places could really use sustainability solutions, and it's not those countries producing the CO2 — it's being dumped on them. I talked to McClellan, Jim, every professor. Find me something. He introduced me to Cooltech. They have amazing technology — I loved it. I found myself working on something I believed in. In our second boot camp, right before the pitch, I was in the hotel looking at chimneys from a few factories in Kingston, and I thought, I'm going to solve every one of those and on top of doing something I like, I'm going to be a millionaire. That didn't work. The guys — I'll call them out, I don't care — they're top-notch scientists, the smartest people, but they don't know anything about business. Absolutely nothing. Now when I read about academia and business, I understand how important commercialization is. They're sitting on something that could change humanity, and there's no action on it. In Canada we produce thousands of patents, and who commercializes them? The US. Because people here are afraid to commercialize. Give it a shot. Try it out. ## Joining Drivisa **Gokul** Do you think your commercialization approach comes from Nestlé and P&G, and are you applying those strategies to Drivisa? **Ali** Definitely. I tend to understand business models. During COVID at Nestlé we had good supply and unbelievable demand, and I couldn't do a lot, so I really used 2020 to 2022. I studied the biggest hundred startups out there and a lot of old business models. The most impressive, still, is Amazon. I understood what Bezos did step by step. Am I going to be a Bezos? I doubt it. But I'm walking the same path. Nestlé taught me what brings volume, what gives you leverage in negotiations — profitability, cash flow, all those terms I was actually experiencing. My knowledge of business models came mainly from a podcast called *Business Wars*. I love it. **Gokul** You joined Fares and Basel — they were the technical people and you were the commercial one who became CEO. How did that come together? **Ali** Drivisa launched its better version a few months before I got to Kingston. I needed a driving license and I was refusing, again, to call and book a driving school. I looked for something online and found Drivisa. I picked a driving instructor, took a class, we became friends. He's Syrian and I'm Lebanese, so we have eighty percent the same background. He introduced me to Basel and told me about the business. I was impressed — Fares came here as a refugee, didn't even speak English, and he's a Y Combinator guru who knows every startup and its story. You don't expect that from a driving instructor. He asked if I could help with a few things. One help led to another, and I switched from Cooltech to Drivisa. They wanted me to come in. I said I'll need some stock, so we redid the entire business and restructured the cap table in 2024. Fares is the driving instructor with the vision. Basel is the engineer doing all the back-end — the app, the instructors, the payments, the operations. I do a little of what Basel does, plus the commercialization, PR, events, the full manual art. ## Positioning against a legacy industry **Gokul** You're doing a lot differently. Driving ed is a pretty boring industry, and everyone else is a small local school. How do you view your positioning, and how do you think people view you? **Ali** Eighty percent of driving schools, by number, are owner-operator — one guy who teaches, with an agenda double the size of a notebook, taking everything by phone and text. That takes a lot of time. The other twenty percent are bigger, with a few employees. Someone like Young Drivers has hundreds, maybe thousands, of employees and a hundred and sixty-something offices. They're the legacy — the Nestlés, the P&Gs. What used to annoy me at Nestlé and P&G were the little upcoming brands with one facing on the bottom shelf. Two months later they have a bigger facing, you read the market share, they're growing exponentially, you flag it, and no one in the business unit listens. A year and a half later it's way too late — they're competition now. I used the same strategy. I was in a corner attracting people with a solid price point, then used that money to increase my facings. Now I'm not on the bottom shelf — I'm at eye level, in the GTA. Driving schools think we're a fad, that we'll come and go. I know what they say to students, because five to seven percent of our students every month come from other schools after bad experiences. They tell them we're not certified, that we're immigrants who don't know much. This isn't just Kingston — in Ottawa we have immigrants shitting on us for being immigrants from the same countries, saying we can't operate here. But it's all talk. We have all the papers. We were audited by the MTO for three days through an audit company — they finished in three hours because everything is available twenty-four seven. Customers see a decent website, verified payments, verified social accounts, and we made it easy: you can start with us for forty-nine bucks. In Kingston and Ottawa nobody takes a risk on us anymore — we're known. That's why the growth there is steady without dumping marketing money. ## Cracking a city **Gokul** You personally visited seventy-four high schools in two days in Ottawa. How did you actually crack a city? **Ali** On average five to seven minutes per school. We'd start at eight and finish around three. And I didn't do this once — we do it every two or three months. We've done more than four hundred school visits in the last year. You optimize the road, what comes after what. Sometimes there are two high schools right next to each other. The first time you need a few minutes; then they know you — "you're the driving school guys, where's my chocolate?" We go in with chocolate, introduce the business. Some shush us away, some send us to the board, some listen — and some are our partners now. We launched five high school partnerships and scholarships between Kingston and Ottawa. Last week was graduation week — we went to five graduations and awarded five students our scholarship. I love high schools. Kids are fun. ## The business model **Gokul** You're talking to insurance providers and car dealerships to reach new drivers. Are you looking at a customer acquisition model, or something else? **Ali** I'm looking for a business model that handles anything regarding your automotive journey, from the beginning until you're done. As long as you have a car, I want to be there. We want to help you buy a vehicle at a discount, get insurance at a discount. We want to revolutionize the whole process the same way we did with drivers. This won't happen tomorrow or next year — it might take five, ten, fifteen years — but we're planning to build an empire in the automotive industry with no brick and mortar, everything easy, sustainable, and accessible at a decent price, without passing the cost of rent and employees who never pick up the phone onto the customer. No one has this vision in the automotive industry right now. Everyone's sitting on top of their kingdom, and things are good — until we step into their territory. And they'll realize way too late. I've seen it. I've lost market share by realizing things too late. ## On copycats **Gokul** A platform in the Philippines literally copied your logo. What does that tell you? **Ali** They copied our logo and our concept. It's a sign of success. Honestly, I respect them more than I respect some competition here, because they're trying to do something. God bless — if they can do a better job than us, they deserve to put us out of business. If they can raise more money and service more customers, amen. It's survival of the fittest. I'd love some decent competition, because in a market you learn from competition. Other driving schools copy our concepts, not the business model, but the implementation is so poor. They worked hard their whole lives to build their brand, but just like they built it, someone will come and build over them. Any product has a life cycle. If you don't innovate, it dies. Same for us — if we don't stay on our toes and keep expanding, we die too. And when they copy us, they only see the surface. We actually send a student to enroll at each of these schools and report back all the insights, so we know exactly how outdated their process is. What keeps Walmart from being Amazon? Walmart doesn't think like Amazon. It's in the DNA. What kept Nestlé from being Mars? Different culture. ## The trade-offs no one talks about **Gokul** What's the biggest part of running the business no one talks about — or the biggest trade-off you had to make? **Ali** I don't think I've made many trade-offs. I don't take my salary, to be fair. In the beginning it's absolutely ugly — stress, no sleep. Not because there's a lot of work, but because you don't know what will work. I used to sit and wait for my Stripe notification. Did someone download the app? Did someone buy something? I still check my sales every single day — students, location, the split, their age, how they heard about us. I track all of it. We know what works now, which is why we dropped our customer acquisition cost by more than ninety percent in under a year and a half. **Gokul** What helps most with customer acquisition? **Ali** Them knowing we exist. That's it. I give an offer so affordable, so quick, that trying us doesn't cost a lot of money. We call customers who left their cards — personally, not through a call center in the Philippines. They want a human. "Where have you been? It won't cost more than forty-nine bucks. If you don't like it, I'll refund you." We lowered the barrier to entry. Everywhere else you pay thousands. The difference is we have a business model that can manage the volume. Everyone else has been trying, but managing the volume is the problem, because their infrastructure is built completely differently. ## Trust and AI **Gokul** You're building a lot of trust human to human. Is that because everything feels fake now and people care about really knowing who they're dealing with? **Ali** Today I got a LinkedIn message, obviously AI-written, and I replied, "just because you sent this and it's clearly AI, I won't take your shot." The guy replied, "Fair, sorry for bothering." Everyone can AI everything, and there's nothing wrong with that — you just need to be sensitive when it's your customer. We get ten to twelve new customers a day. Whoever gets a call from us is usually happy, because usually you call a provider and wait. What if your provider calls you? We've been blessed with a guru CTO — everything is on our own app and dashboard, so we add a note, get a notification, and follow up. I still pay for HubSpot, I don't know why. ## Five years out **Gokul** Zooming out, what does Drivisa look like five years out? **Ali** In five years we'd be doing anywhere between fifty and eighty million dollars in revenue a year. Our projection this year is a hundred percent growth, landing around six or seven hundred thousand. We just launched in the GTA — seven times the market we were serving, and already forty percent of our business last month. We'd be in every province in Canada, already providing other services like vehicle purchase and insurance, and in at least ten US states. **Gokul** Do you find it easier with the younger generation, since most of your services are digital? **Ali** They love it. Kids hate texting, they feel stressed when a thirty-, forty-, or fifty-year-old instructor texts them to align on a time. We sponsor a volleyball team in Ottawa, and the whole team was so happy they could book without explaining their schedule. They can keep the same instructor or, if they didn't like a class, just try someone else. Our instructors mostly work almost full time with us now, but they used to work for other schools with all this talent that students couldn't see — no reviews, no vehicle photos, just a random person calling you when you're sixteen or seventeen. With Drivisa you just switch. Done. ## What scares you **Gokul** What scares you most about the next year? **Ali** If you'd asked me two months ago it would be different, but we just did fifty percent growth over our previous record. I'm full dopamine, full trust right now. Things can go wrong — keeping cash flow steady, keeping our CAC dropping, keeping three-digit growth every year. Not doing that would be a major challenge, but I don't see it now, because I read and process all that information daily. Our business model can handle volume without us interfering. One thing most investors don't know about B2C: it's hard to lose your name. Ask a random stranger what SAP or Oracle is — they don't know, and those are among the biggest in the world. Ask them what Lay's is — they know. That gives you leverage. My subcontractors now do what I ask, because my brand brings the customers. So talk to me in a week — I don't know what's scaring me right now. ## Building trust and distribution **Gokul** Say you have an industry struggling to commercialize because of a trust issue — like crypto. How would you build trust in a B2C distribution sense? **Ali** Not in Facebook ads, not in Google ads. You need to work with trusted partners. The crypto industry already lost a lot of people a lot of money. It needs to be humanized. Work with people others trust. We partner with high schools and newcomer centers — people whose clients need what we do — and we give them steep discounts and free services in the beginning. If you're going into a developed industry to gain trust, you have to bring in familiar faces. It won't happen overnight and it will cost you — maybe fifty grand for someone's name and their time — but they need a decent experience so they talk about it. **Gokul** The reason for the podcast: once we started building products, we realized the biggest problem with AI or anything now isn't building the product, it's distribution. Anyone can build a product, so every product starts looking the same. So I thought, let's build a distribution chain with a podcast — bring founders in, give distribution to their businesses, and eventually use it as a distribution platform for us. That's why it's useful: useful for me, useful for you, useful for the listener. **Ali** Is the podcast the only front you're working on for distribution, or are you trying other avenues? **Gokul** We tried cold calling — didn't work. Cold emails don't work either. So now it's going in person, knocking on doors — that's what I'm doing tomorrow. We also built a product before figuring out the best use case and niche, so we're trying to specialize into a specific industry. Talking to twenty, thirty, fifty founders over time helps you see the pattern of problems across industries, and where trust is lacking — and if I can build trust for them, how do I monetize that trust? **Ali** As long as you keep trying something different, you'll figure it out. But you have to keep trying, over and over. It's boring and it consumes a lot of time and money — personally too, because you're not getting paid. Throughout last year, every few months we'd drop our CAC by twenty percent, then try something different with that saved budget. Only a few channels stay — the ones that bring trusting customers and good reviews. Even if an avenue didn't work a year ago, it might work today. Just don't pour unlimited money in, don't do it twenty-four seven. This podcast might go viral six months after you record it because of one clip. As long as you're doing something, you're good. **Gokul** And thank god I'm batch-recording these a couple times a month. ## Advice to your younger self **Gokul** For the first time you landed in Kingston, what would you tell that version of yourself, knowing everything you know today? **Ali** Do it. I wasn't sure. I kept most of my corporate connections running because I was still looking for jobs while trying things with the startups — I never knew. A lot of things I was afraid of financially did actually happen, but I decided to keep going. Sometimes when the only option is to make it work, it works, because you had to. What am I going to do after being a national key account manager at Nestlé and now restarting from scratch? It was worth convincing myself it has to work. I hope this part isn't recorded — I came with a lot of savings. I could afford to take the risk, which a lot of people can't. I didn't have kids, and I still don't. My only responsibility was my parents in Lebanon, and for the last year and a half my brother has taken that burden — I helped him through med school and now he's becoming a big shot. Having amazing people around you helps. My co-founders challenge me a lot, but if I want to do something they say let's do it. My wife is one of the most pleasant people on earth — that really helps. I'm not in Drivisa for the money. If I wanted money I'd have stayed at Nestlé — I was making more than a hundred and ten grand US a year, no taxes, plus bonus, flying for free because my wife worked for Etihad, my parents three hours away, living in the Marina on the beach. Life was beautiful. But I wanted to challenge myself in a different place, on different things. **Gokul** So you went to a bigger but less competitive market? **Ali** Way bigger — it's a two-point-something trillion dollar market, at least four times the size of the UAE. For a hustler who puts their big-boy pants on and works without waiting on investors' money, it's amazing. In the UAE, this concept probably wouldn't survive two or three months. People there are thirsty for innovation. We have customers in the UAE — Canadians whose kids come here for school — who call us and ask, "why are you this cheap?" The moment I say we're a startup, it clicks: decent website, no typos, no 1998 Word-document site, it's an app, there's a discount. In the UAE the discounts are ridiculous — you can order food at fifty percent off for six months because an app decided to grab ten percent market share and isn't afraid to burn fifty million dollars. That's not Canada. I'm adopting that approach and it's working wonderfully. Look at Amazon, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb. Listen to *Business Wars* — every single story. ## What he wants to be known for **Gokul** When you decide to retire, what do you really want to be known for? **Ali** First, I don't know if I can ever retire. When I started the MBA I tried to take a two-month break after almost a decade of corporate life. I couldn't manage it. But when I die, I want my story to be an example. I keep looking at myself at five, six, seven years old. I was born in Tripoli, one of the poorest cities on the Mediterranean. I want to prove that yes, you can be from there and still get into the big league. That's the impact I want to keep making — the example I keep proving to myself before anyone else. I live very low maintenance: as long as I eat my chicken with garlic and vegetables, have my wife around, business is good, my family's good, and I can go dancing a few times a week, I'm happy. That doesn't cost more than twenty-three or twenty-five hundred bucks a month. I don't care about a new car or a big house. I don't give a flying fuck about those. Impact — definitely impact. I want people to talk about our stories — a bunch of newcomers and immigrants, one who didn't even speak English, who despite everything built the biggest driving platform in Canada. Fifteen, twenty years from now, I want to be the biggest platform for everything regarding driving — everything automotive. We might get acquired before that, the team might break apart, I might die, God knows. But if things stay as is, definitely. I'm not here to play around. I'm here to build an empire. **Gokul** That makes sense. Loved having you. Once I edit the videos I'll share it and we'll post it everywhere. **Ali** Merci, Gokul. Thanks for your time. And please — if you have an iPhone, *Business Wars* is on Apple Podcasts, free. Uber versus Lyft, Hershey's versus Mars, Blue Origin versus SpaceX — I never knew Musk's biggest product, Tesla, was something he purchased. The guy tried it all. Very beneficial for me, so I advise it. All right, have a good one. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/ali-zaydan-drivisa) · [Drivisa](https://drivisa.com) · [[podcast|All episodes]]