# S01E18 · Transcript — Eric Muellejans Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 18, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Eric Muellejans, founder of [Kumovate](https://www.torontomu.ca/zone-learning/design-fabrication-zone/community/members/kumovate/) and a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University. Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/eric-muellejans-kumovate). 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 Eric's. ## Leaving NiaHealth for Relay **Gokul** How has life been? I saw you just left NiaHealth and joined Relay. What made you leave? **Eric** NiaHealth was doing great. I joined back in November 2024, and we did 9x revenue in that time, launched a whole new B2B vertical, and expanded our service space. It was a great experience, but I realized I wanted to keep refining my sales abilities in a more focused environment. There I was running B2B, B2C, customer support, account management, and direct sales — it was covering so much. I think the company needed to move into a more specialized structure, and I needed to step into something with a bit more focus. I also had shoulder surgery around then, so it felt like the right time to leave. I wanted a company that let me keep working in the early-stage space but with some structure around it, still on a rapid growth pace. Relay was the perfect fit. I get to sell directly to small business owners across the US, a segment I deeply love. I've lived those pain points myself: one bank account, trying to figure out expenses and payroll at the end of the month. It's my first two weeks here and it's been great. **Gokul** Funny enough, I actually applied to Relay last week myself, for product management on growth. **Eric** I'm on the account executive, direct sales team. ## Health tech to fintech **Gokul** I know your background is a lot of health tech. I saw you at Elevate in 2018, 2019, working on Kumovate. What made you go into fintech? **Eric** Health tech has been where I've been forever. I liked it because it's a high-impact area — you're not just making another widget for e-commerce, you're driving better outcomes for people. It's also highly regulated, and I think constraints drive creativity. After eight to ten years in health, I wanted a change, and Relay married a lot of things I love. It's a regulated space, financial technology, so I get to work within regulations, figure out unique positioning, and communicate it clearly to customers. I really enjoy that process. But most importantly, I did health tech because I like making impact on people's lives. Small businesses are individuals who've taken the hardest jump possible, and helping them understand their finances is one of the hardest things that keeps them up at night. Am I going to make payroll? Do I have enough for this expense? Am I actually profitable? Can I even pay myself? Giving entrepreneurs tools for that feels like incredible impact. It was a natural transition. We're really focused on SMB businesses — not the sexy venture-backed ones you see in Fortune, but mom-and-pop HVAC owners, the real heart and soul that drives the economy. There are twenty-four million small businesses in the US. Our dream is to help them become self-made, to actualize what they want to be as entrepreneurs. **Gokul** How do you plan to do it? **Eric** Without turning this into too much of a sales pitch: we use the Profit First model. We're the official bank of Profit First, a methodology where you pay yourself first in profit before you take out expenses. We often think profit is revenue minus cost, whatever's left over. In reality, you want to put profit first so there's something left afterward. It's really about giving visibility into your banking — multiple checking accounts, things automatically flowing into certain buckets, so you know what's allocated for payroll, taxes, and cost of goods sold, instead of everything sitting in one account. On top of that you get debit cards, credit cards, all tailored specifically for small businesses, not the big competitors' programs built for companies that are already profitable. **Gokul** I've tried Loop, Venn, Relay — most fintechs and banks in Canada and the US have a real problem serving small businesses. **Eric** Relay only operates in the US right now. Canada's even further behind, though Float is doing well there and Ramp just opened a Canadian office, so the space is heating up, and open banking is coming down the pipeline. A lot of small business owners are still using spreadsheets or one checking account with everything running through it. It's about making sure everything's labeled clearly and visible in one place before you even get to fancier finance solutions. **Gokul** How do you teach a first-time entrepreneur, a mom-and-pop shop owner, to manage their finances? **Eric** They know their business best — we're very clear that we're not financial advisors. We just give them the tools and visibility to make informed decisions. No one can tell you what to spend or not spend; what you want to know is whether you have the capacity to make a decision, whether revenue sitting in your account is already spoken for. So it's about defining the buckets your funds need to go into. Taxes are the other big one. I sucked at taxes when I was a founder — I'd set money aside for taxes and then steal from that account to pay myself, telling myself the tax bill was months away. That money probably isn't coming back, and if you make more, you owe more on it. Tax allocation eats a first-time entrepreneur alive. Being smart about it saves a lot of headache with the government. ## Curiosity over having all the answers **Gokul** If someone met you today with no resume, no LinkedIn, how would you describe yourself? **Eric** I'd say I'm a curious person. I've always valued asking questions — I don't think the person who has all the answers exists, but the person who asks all the right questions is far more powerful. Understanding what questions to ask, how to dig at the essence of something, is critical. And once you apply that curiosity, you need a bias toward action. I like to move fast, break things, and not sit and wait. It'll be messy, but you learn a lot in a day or two versus two weeks trying to make something perfect. ## From cold calls at ISIC to Ryerson **Gokul** We met through ISIC. What do you think ISIC did for you? What did it do for me? **Eric** I remember when you first came in, doing cold calls, terrified. But your growth over that year was real — you took stuff on, tried it, when a lot of people are hesitant. A lot of student organizations are so event-based: plan an event, do something, and you learn event skills. ISIC gave you the ability to actually go and cold call, manage a team, do budgeting, handle HR — skills you normally wouldn't get until an internship, and most internships don't even give you that. Better to learn in second year that you hate cold calling, or that accounting sucks, than after a four-year degree and multiple internships. **Gokul** Real-world experience, even if you're not good at it, is valuable. If you cold call and you're bad at it, it's volunteer — no one's going to fire you. But if you're great at it, so many opportunities open up. **Eric** If you had to redo your degree, what would you change? **Gokul** My bachelor's GPA was horrible — I did the bare minimum, looked at the course outline, and figured out exactly what I could skip. My master's GPA doubled. What I actually needed from my bachelor's was to learn how to control myself, sit down, and work on myself — it was the first time I was let loose as a kid. **Eric** I was the same way — bare minimum, because I never respected employers with a GPA cutoff. I don't think regurgitating information in a university setting is the best indicator of quality; a lot of people have extenuating circumstances, a second job, someone to look after, and they don't learn well in that environment but can still crush a sales call or be a great product manager. What I should have done is learn my own way of studying, and better time management and prioritization, rather than optimize the GPA itself. ## From Ottawa to Ryerson **Gokul** What made you go from Ottawa to Ryerson? **Eric** I'll be a bit harsh on Telfer School of Business. Three reasons I left. One, I was disappointed with the level of support the university gave students — every idea or event I wanted to run was pulling teeth. Two, the academic side of the MIS program felt outdated; this was around 2017, and there was no discussion of AI or digital services. Three, I had a startup idea for a medical device, Kumovate, and TMU, formerly Ryerson, had an incubator program where you could work on your business, get office space, funding, mentorship, and course credit. When I transferred, what I was taking in fourth year at Telfer was equivalent to first-year courses at TMU — the business technology management program there was far outpacing Telfer. I got my own office, did pitch competitions, prototyped my product, and got it into market. The staff were so supportive that when I told them I had to fly to China for a trade show, they just said "no problem, we'll figure out how to move your exam." I couldn't fathom that happening at Ottawa. The support from TMU and the Ted Rogers School of Management was world class. I actually applied to one of TMU's zones — not the well-known Digital Media Zone, but the Design Fabrication Zone — before I'd even transferred. I'd missed the transfer cutoff, so I did continuing education courses through Chang School as an external student while working on the business, then became a full student the following year and finished my last two years there. ## Manufacturing and studying in China **Gokul** How did the China connection happen? **Eric** For Kumovate, I had to manufacture in China, and I was terrified — I had preconceived notions about IP theft and getting ripped off. So I decided to go to China for a month and visit manufacturers in person, get a lay of the land, show them a real human. To do that, I learned Mandarin first, doing one semester of Chinese at TMU over the summer. Then I went to China and fell in love with the place — the culture, the hospitality, and the sheer scale of the business opportunities. I think it's one of the few countries where there's such an asymmetric understanding relative to its rising power. Chinese people, scholars, and business leaders understand a huge amount about North America — they're well educated on it, we publish a lot of public information, many of them study here and speak the language. But North Americans operating with China face the opposite: we don't study at their universities, we don't speak the language, we don't have access to the same information. That asymmetry makes it incredibly hard to build real cooperation. So my view became that building China competencies is a long-term skill set worth investing in. I did my master's program in China on the Schwarzman Scholarship, continued going back, and later joined and helped found the Canada China Forum to help young Canadians build China competencies — a way to keep being a bridge between Canada and China, because if the understanding stays asymmetric, geopolitical tensions and trade negotiations get more fraught with misunderstanding. **Gokul** Do you think this problem stems from that information asymmetry? **Eric** I think so, and with information asymmetry also comes fear. Bridging it helps, even though these are still two radically different systems and cultures — understanding doesn't guarantee getting along, but it's the first step. I think of other rising powers: when Japan was rising in the eighties and nineties, the US had a real understanding of Japan that doesn't exist with China today. That understanding helped develop cross-collaboration. I worry that without it, we'll keep seeing fracturing and deep mistrust between the two countries. ## The Schwarzman Scholarship, and a pandemic in Beijing **Gokul** The Schwarzman Scholarship is one of the most prestigious programs in the world. What was your experience? **Eric** The whole point is exactly that China-competency goal — bringing top young emerging leaders from North America and Europe to a world-class institution, Tsinghua University, and pairing them with rising Chinese leaders, fully funded. I applied expecting to get rejected the first round and try again the next year, but I got in. One thing I'm especially grateful for: I was there during the pandemic, 2021 to 2022, so I saw firsthand how China responded to COVID. Getting into the country meant a full month of hotel quarantine in a windowless room with spotty Wi-Fi. Once out, you did daily COVID tests but could move around — and at that point China had more mobility within cities than North America did. Then cases started rising again, and when China locks down, it locks down completely. I was interning at ByteDance, which owns TikTok, in a twenty-floor building. One person tested positive, and within a week everyone who'd been in the building had to go straight into two weeks of hotel quarantine — not your own home, a hotel or a school gymnasium with a cot and a bucket. Contact tracing and lockdown at that scale is something you're unlikely to see again, hopefully. **Gokul** How fast they proceduralized all of that is amazing. **Eric** In Canada, you'd get a week's notice before a lockdown. In China, it was 24 hours: this area has a case, entry into the city is changing, tomorrow we lock down. Because it's a fully top-down government, decisions get made and enforced quickly. In a democratic system with municipal, federal, and provincial governments not fully aligned, it takes much longer to share information, build consensus, and act. ## Democracy, autocracy, and the speed of change **Gokul** Did living under that system change how you think the world operates? **Eric** There's always the question of whether autocracy wins over democracy. I'm still a firm believer in democracy — it's the worst system in the world except for all the others — but you do see arguments for autocratic governments in crisis response and large-scale population management. **Gokul** Why do you think they can stay in power so long? **Eric** If you control the messaging from the top down and it's consistent, there's little room for dissent, and you can implement change decisively — we know what's best at the hundred-million-person level, even if we bulldoze through a hundred thousand farmers' fields to build a rail system without getting caught in land disputes or environmental review. Within five years you're moving hundreds of millions of people, and that builds trust even though you angered a hundred thousand people along the way. Compare that to Toronto's Eglinton line, which just finished after years of delay, or the Ontario line, where no one trusts the timeline. When governments can't show change, people lose trust in them. **Gokul** My problem with democratic systems is the incentive structure — a person in power is mostly incentivized to stay in power, not to do anything. **Eric** Exactly. Think about how much of a term is spent running for reelection. You get one year to learn the job, maybe two years of real impact, and by year four you're not making policy that could upset key voters and you're on the campaign trail instead of dealing with constituents. Your effective governing time gets cut by roughly a quarter, which makes it tricky too. ## The two jobs at zero to one **Gokul** You've gone from founding businesses in China to being the founding account executive for a lot of startups. How did that happen? **Eric** I'm comfortable with ambiguity and love taking an early-stage problem and doing the hard work of an early win. With a three-person early team, you really need two roles: someone who can build something, and someone who can sell it. Since I'm not a coder, and this was before vibe coding, there was only one job for me: go knock on doors and get people excited about what we're building. Outside those two roles, there isn't a great fit for you at the earliest stage — maybe once you're at seed or Series A, but in the zero-to-one state, it's really just those two. The comfort people have to keep working at the early stage is rare. Most people are "wantrepreneurs" who talk about doing their own thing and never do — eighty, ninety percent of people never actually build. The couple who try once often get bitten hard, mortgage their house, lose their benefits, and never do it again. The people who keep going back build a rare skill set: working in highly ambiguous, low-resourced environments and still driving outcomes. Over time that's rewarded because it's hard to find people who can operate that way. **Gokul** Do you see yourself building your own thing again? **Eric** I don't know yet. Right now I want to stay close to early-stage businesses — Relay is a Series B likely headed toward Series C, which most people would call too early, but for me it feels like a massive corporation compared to what I'm used to. I have an office, a desk, an onboarding plan — that's not normal for me. I want to spend the next few years deeply understanding small businesses in the US: HVAC owners, small agencies, consultants — what problems they have day to day, how you build the relationship as they grow. I could see myself building something again in five or ten years, but I know where I don't want to play more clearly than where I do. **Gokul** Where do you not want to play? **Eric** Don't open a restaurant — terrible margins, brutal failure rate. And health tech is very cool but also very brutal, with very long sales cycles. ## Health tech's regulatory maze **Gokul** When we built our own product for clinics, we ran into an EMR issue — anything touching health in Canada can mean a couple million dollars and five years just to get through regulations. How do you get around that as someone who's sold early-stage health tech? **Eric** That's a hard one — if I had a great answer I could charge a lot for it. It's very case dependent, but by default you have to have privacy compliance nailed: PIPEDA compliance, data safety, sometimes SOC 2, data housed and accessed only within Canada. That's non-negotiable. From there, you need a pilot, and the problem in healthcare is that pilots are expensive, slow, and hard to replicate across organizations because of procurement and differing case bases. You need a very efficient pilot that shows clear ROI in a short window. A lot of clinic tooling takes three months to implement, two months to train on, eight months to evaluate, and you might not see measurable health outcomes for three or four years — which makes it very hard to justify to a procurement team mid-pilot. You also really need clinical expertise on your team, ideally a chief medical officer, to show you understand clinical workflows. From an investor's perspective: the AI scribe market for healthcare is not where I'd park money. It's a race to the bottom — there are a bunch of standalone competitors, and then Epic, the biggest EMR player, just adds it into their platform and seventy percent of your market disappears overnight. People like scribes because they're easy to stand up as a bring-your-own-device tool, but that doesn't make them a durable business. **Gokul** The ROI often isn't even there to return venture-scale returns. **Eric** Hinge Health is a good counterexample — a virtual physiotherapy platform that automated and digitized the injury-recovery experience: recommended exercises, biomechanics tracking, far more efficient delivery at lower cost, and they IPO'd. For a long time no one wanted to invest in healthcare because of long development timelines and legacy players, but Hinge Health revitalized interest, especially in preventative health, where NiaHealth was playing. Function Health in the US raised at a two-billion-dollar valuation last year; Superpower and Mido are also in that space, and Full Script is doing well in Canada. The models that work well: play on a consumer base first, generate revenue and early validation, then pivot into an employer-benefits offering with larger ticket sizes and distribution, while keeping the stickiness of improving employee wellness. There's a clear, venture-backable path there. That's different from clinical tooling used inside a hospital, which is still very case-by-case and difficult — and it's not the same as pill mills like Felix selling GLP-1s; I mean real models of care delivery. ## Semiconductors and sticky legacy tools **Gokul** You also did an AI chip startup. How was building go-to-market different for semiconductors versus health? **Eric** There's actually a lot of similarity. With any industrial tooling — a software layer on top of a highly regulated industrial process like design or manufacturing — customers typically want it on-prem, which means deploying to physical sites. But early on you don't want that, because you can't keep updating your AI models as fast; you want cloud so you can run more efficient models. That's always a struggle for early-stage companies in that space. Manufacturing also has deeply entrenched legacy players. Everybody agrees Cadence's tooling is terrible — an old, clunky interface — but they're so deeply integrated that people don't want a point solution that doesn't interoperate with their existing setup, even if it's ten times better. Synopsys and Cadence own the entire design space for semiconductor production between the two of them. It's very hard to break in as a new player, even though semiconductor tooling looks like it was built for the web 2.0 era and crashes, gets buggy, and has real delays. Talk to any integrated circuit designer and they'll tell you Cadence sucks — but imagine if every salesperson used Salesforce and it crashed constantly; people would switch. That's not the case here because replicating all of their tooling is so hard that they still own the market. I bought a lot of Synopsys stock after working in that space — even though I don't love their product, they are not going anywhere. ## Building a team: hire fast, fire faster **Gokul** How do you go about building a team? **Eric** For an early-stage business, I'd say three principles. First: hire fast, fire faster. Don't spend weeks interviewing — get someone into the role, put them on a two-week trial, and you'll know within that window if it's a fit. I don't think six or seven rounds of interviews and case studies tell you as much as watching someone actually work. If your gut says to let someone go, nine times out of ten it's the right call, and it's rarely that they're a bad person — the stage or the role just isn't a fit for them, so it's better to let them find something that is. Second: curiosity. Especially early on, there are so many unknowns. Can someone ask thoughtful questions and take action to find the answer, whether that's finding someone who knows or running an experiment? That hypothesis-driven learning is rare but makes everything run better. Third: figure out what a candidate has to bring themselves versus what you can teach. Early-stage businesses often think they need "an adult in the room," a twenty-year veteran CTO, but that person is often used to systems, reports, and budgets that don't exist in a two-person team. You tend to do better with someone a bit more junior who doesn't have the polish, will make mistakes, but has real curiosity and scrappiness — that pays off longer than a more seasoned hire in the earliest days. ## What he wants to be remembered for **Gokul** With everything you've done — health tech, community work, board seats — what do you want to be known for when you retire? **Eric** I'm still involved with ISIC Toronto as an advisory board member and with the Canada China Forum. As for what I want to be remembered for: there's a vanity metric I care about, which is tangibly impacting forty million people — roughly the population of Canada — to have better self-determination. That's my definition of impact. Beyond that, I want to be known as someone who always showed up, left it all on the table, came in with an open mind, and followed through. It's a bit of a wishy-washy answer, but those are the things I hold myself to day to day. **Gokul** If you could wave a magic wand over the next twenty years, with no economic benefit to yourself, what would you make ten percent better? **Eric** People need to be empowered — that's the whole thing I come back to with entrepreneurship. If someone wants to start a restaurant, they should feel empowered to actually do it. That's how you change the world: everyone starts empowering themselves instead of relying on someone else to do it for them. **Eric** That's a much more coherent answer than what I gave you. **Gokul** Sometimes you just trip into something coherent. **Eric** Thanks so much for having me on, Gokul. **Gokul** Thank you for joining. This is The Useful Podcast because it's useful in a bunch of different ways — useful for you, useful for me, useful for our viewers. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/eric-muellejans-kumovate) · [Kumovate](https://www.torontomu.ca/zone-learning/design-fabrication-zone/community/members/kumovate/) · [[podcast|All episodes]]