Scott Paterson: Capital, Conviction & Building at Scale

Today, I'm in Good Company with Scott Patterson, a distinguished Canadian investor, entrepreneur, and board chair whose career has helped shape Canada's capital markets, technology sector, and media landscape. From building Yorkton Securities into the most prolific Canadian technology investment bank, which raised over $3 billion for Canadian companies, to serving for over two decades on the board of Lionsgate Entertainment, Scott has operated at the highest levels of business and governance. He also built and led companies including Jump TV and Simbility Solutions, a FinTech venture that was successfully acquired. Today, he continues to build the frontier of technology through platforms like Future Vault, a pioneering intelligent document processing digital vault solution, and Future, a direct-to-consumer agent app focused on helping individuals reclaim time and monetize their personal information. Scott, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to In Good Company. My pleasure, Jay. I've been looking forward to sending down with you. Also mentioned Scott's a great mentor of mine, great friend, and him and his family are just amazing people who do so much good in Canada's community. We certainly try to appreciate that. But I'm excited to hear about your experience and some of your advice and some of your, you know, talking about stories that you might have had, and you began your career in financial services in the mid-1980s, and you rose really quickly through the ranks. So tell me about what drove your early ambition and what did those kind of first-years teach you in that environment? You know, it's so funny. I don't feel like I'm as old as I am, and I don't feel like I've been in business as long as I've been in. But 30's not old. I know, I love it. But you know, mine is a sort of a simple story that won't resonate with everybody, and it certainly doesn't resonate with my kids, which will make sense when I say it. But I had the good fortune of growing up in St. Catharines Ontario with a single mom. My dad was a fantastic guy, but my mom was 18 when I was conceived, and the marriage didn't last for very long. And I stayed very close to my dad throughout his life, but he was remarried and moved out west. And we never owned a home. When I grew up, we don't want to say crappy apartments, but let's just say they weren't the fanciest places that anybody would ever want to necessarily live. My mom did a great job. Her parents were heavily involved in my life. But why do I tell you that? It made me really hungry. Like I from a young age was I'm just going to work hard and I got really lucky. My grandmother, Rest in Peace, when I was 14, she gave me as a birthday gift five shares of something called Abitibi paper. And I think there were $14 a share. So I got about $70 of value. And I remember my buddy, Ronnie Richardson on the street in St. Catharines. He got a bike for his birthday. And I looked out the window and Ronnie's going down the street on this bike thinking, maybe I'd like a bike. And I expressed this to my grandmother and she said, you know, if you can figure out, you got to work hard and you got to do research, you got to think about it. But if you can figure out whether Abitibi paper is going to be worth more in the future or less, this share certificate of five shares of Abitibi paper, if you get it right, we'll allow you to buy many bikes. And that shaped my life. So I was very, very interested in the stock market from an early age. And that's what really has driven my whole career. Well, what a, what a thematic kind of evolution. You know, you've been incredibly successful in the stock market. And it's cool to see how that, you know, that young Scott and that the little things that teach you when you're younger really drive your life and your career. I mean, well, the second theme. So I was in love with the stock market. I think it was very blessed because it is this amazing mechanism that's that's allowed really the evolution of capitalism and allowing not only individuals to invest and share in the growth of businesses and think Google think Apple in today's context, but also allowed entrepreneurs to get the capital to build businesses. And the old days think more factories if you're Henry Ford. And he took the company public and in today's modern era, you know, the SpaceX is in the open AIs that are raising capital. And the stock market is that fundamental engine behind it. Some of them are still private, but the core of it is that it can be owned by the masses and institutions like a pension fund, for example, on behalf of the masses. But it just was, it's an incredible, incredible thing that makes the world go by. But I wanted to mention when you said sort of the framework of my life, my grandmother and my mother and my grandfather, but my grandmother was hard work. If you work hard, generally speaking, it is going to pay off for you. And that was something that fortunately was instilled in me as a young age. Well, talking about, you know, your career and your experience, I want to talk about Yorkton securities, you know, one of Canada's leading technology investment firms. And you really led that business. And I want to know what kind of the pivotal decisions you made at your time there led to its success. You know, it was an incredible era. And I just was able to spend some time with with Frank Truistra, who many people would know an incredibly successful billionaire van Coover, London based mining guru, but much more than a mining guy. I say to Frank, he's a renaissance man. And he is all the boil. All the boil. Yes, plantation and Bitcoin mining. You name it. And Frank was a mentor for me at Yorkton. He recruited me along with the guy named Bob Cross, who's a spectacular guy himself. And I was in London recently with actually my wife and a couple of kids. We went over to spend a little bit of time with Frank and his family. And he had built a mining brokerage firm, very, very prolific, very, very capable, found world class deposits. But what I was was a technology investment banker. The first ever DLA ever did where I was able to show up and say, Hey, I've got a company and I want to raise money for it. I was working with a company called Midland Wallen, which was a really, really cool brokerage firm back in the 90s, a merger between two companies called Wallen Stodgel and Midland Dirty. And the first company I showed up with in September 1991, this is before Yorkton, was Kevin Illyries company, a soft key software. And Kevin was partners with a guy named Michael Perrick. And his view was that software, which then was really only available and you'd go to a computer land. With the people your age, you're probably going, what the hell's he talking about? But you literally would go to a store, they would help you install software. And his view was software would become ubiquitous. You could buy it at Walmart, etc. And of course, it moved from buying a floppy disk to, you know, today's unbelievably interoperable, interconnected world, which is amazing. But what that did was it made me feel that everything was technology. And what we're experiencing now sort of in my view, frankly, for the last 35 years, which was everything, this microphone, the podcast, automobiles, you name the industry pretty hard to think that there's not technology totaling all in that. And back in the early 90s, Canada was pledgingly, if that's a word, but building momentum around companies, Waterloo, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, certainly Toronto. And my view was that Canada was ready for its first dedicated technology investment bank. Now in in San Francisco and the older folks that might listen to this, they would remember names like Hamburg and Quest, Montgomery, Robertson, Stevens, these were venerable technology investments, and things, boutiques that could beat Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on any given day because they were so focused on technology. I went down, I met all the CEOs of all these companies and decided that we would emulate that in Canada. I felt that commercially you saw research and motion involving, you know, for example, out of Waterloo and open text as an example, both companies that we were involved in, Yorkton. And I joined Yorkton, Frank Schuster and Bob Cross said, come on in, that was Tony Pullen and David Allen and some other guys there saying, you know, what about the future being associated with technology? And the view was, Canada's ready. Let's be that investment bank that supports entrepreneurs. And you mentioned the number. We're really, really proud to this day. But you asked what it was. It was about the focus so that the investors thought, if I want to get the best advice on what technology companies to invite, let's go to Yorkton securities. If I'm a, if I'm an entrepreneur and Ottawa, Waterloo, Toronto Vancouver wherever I want to be or wherever I am, let me go to Yorkton and they're going to help me raise money if I've got a good product and a good vision. And Good Company is brought to you in partnership with KITS I care, a beloved Canadian brand out of Vancouver BC. I am currently obsessed with the lefty glasses from KITS. They offer prescriptions, they direct bill your insurance, they ship faster than any I wear company I've ever witnessed. And they offer your contact lenses, sunglasses, eyeglasses, whatever you need. Thank you KITS. Check them out. So I mean, you talk about replicating, you know, a platform in the US in Canada and bring, you've done a lot of firsts. You've been a big innovator in the Canadian entrepreneurial space. How do you feel like it has been to be one of those pioneering Canadians in the technology industry? Well, I appreciate the monochrome. I'm not sure I'd slap that on my back but I'll take it. and there's a lot of incredible Canadian technology entrepreneurs. And I used to give, had the good fortune, particularly in the Ork and Error of giving a lot of speeches. And one of the things I would say was, I don't think there's a better place than Toronto in particular, but certainly Canada to build a technology company. You're beside the biggest market in the whole world. New York's an hour away, Los Angeles five hours away. The laws are similar. There's treaties, the taxation, the language. There's just so much that makes it easy to do business from this perspective. And many Canadian entrepreneurs, and obviously we have some incredible success stories, you know, Shopify and on and on that have just been world leaders. And it's great to see it happen. And the maturity, you know, most people would acknowledge the, there's less capability in the investment banking world to support Canadian technology entrepreneurs. Some of that's been made up by the venture capital community, which is matured a lot, but there's still a gap there, certainly relative to the United States. Do you think it's still true today that Canada is a great place to do business? Well, I love Canada. I'm very proud. Canadian, I was just over Milan cheering for a team Canada. And, you know, it's got to member of the Canadian Olympic Committee. It's currently the board of the Canadian Olympic Foundation. I'm very proud to be associated with that. My wife and I went over, we've got a couple of medals, the skating, by the way, that skating. I thought it would be the least interesting of the events we'd see. I could not believe the speed skating. Yeah, the speed. Oh my god. When you see it in person, and when they catch another skate, they're flying into the wall. Well, I was, you know, I went to the Olympics right after Scott and Scott set me up with some great people over there with the foundation, but I was there as well with one of my great mentors as well, who knows who Don Lindsay. And he was, we were at a big lunch before going to my friends and I were going to the semi-finals, the men's semi-finals for the hockey. And he and his wife were going to the speed skating. And he's a huge hockey fan. He was like, from what I've seen, I cannot, because it's like what, eight minutes or something of just Yeah, it's fast. drama. Well, you don't see on TV too, those, they're often, you know, depending on where you are in the cycle, but other races building up to it. But yeah, she's so fast. Who's really, really cool. That's super cool. Yeah, yeah. I forget what your earlier question was. So I apologize. I took a great place to do business. Yeah. Canada. You know, look, we, I love the country. I think that, you know, it's going to sound sort of cliche, but I don't think there's a lot of global examples where if you layer on too much bureaucracy, if your taxes are above 50%, it's hard to innovate. And the biggest challenge and we are experiencing in a real time is a brain drain. Yeah. And, and that becomes self-fulfilling. And I appreciate we need to pay for public services. I'm all in favor of public services. The great news is that the technology generically is going to reduce the cost of public services in a massive way, in my opinion. And frankly, technology is the great leveling the playing field with respect to youth. And whether you grow up in a at-risk neighborhood or you grow up highly affluent, if you are exposed to technology and, and have the tools and technology, which aren't that expensive, and you know, you're involved with the same charity I'm involved in, which is that whole theme is that to level the playing field, then you're in great shape. But look, I think Canada needs to really focus on some of these fundamental pillars of, what do we look like 10 years from now? And I don't think there's any question in my view. There's some of these structural tax related issues, but then there's industries. And I don't mean giving away money necessarily because, you know, you can get a EV plant and then as EV is hotter as is. But certainly, whether that's driving in the education system and it does certainly mean probably tax credits around R&D spend and technology things of that nature. Well, I want to talk about Jump TV. So, you know, one of the defining chapters in your career was building Jump TV. And it was another great era for you. And you took the company public in a $71 million IPO. That right. Just amazing. And I want to know, you know, serving as chairman and CEO of that business and, and, you know, kind of tell us the story of Jump TV and what it taught you and how it informed some of your current ventures. Well, I appreciate you asking. I'll do the short version, but it's sort of a cool version. I was fortunate enough to be involved with the Lionsgate Entertainment. The aforementioned Frank Choustra got me involved when he founded the company in 1997. I was on the board for 21 years, stepped down for some gender diversity a few years ago. And I moved to the Lionsgate Cairnabord, which has been great lecture. A board meeting yesterday. And John Felthamer, the CEO and Michael Burns and Jimmy Barge and some of these executives, I consider great friends. And these guys are spectacular individuals in all respects. But I mentioned the Lionsgate is a setup to jump TV because I was able to watch from a Los Angeles vantage point, technology unfold, streaming unfold. Where's the world going? And I got approached by a guy and decided to partner and ended up buying him out and took over full time as chairman and CEO of Jump TV in 2005. Keep in mind that this is an invented until 2007, the iPhone. And what we did was sort of innovative. We went around the world, I raised some money privately and we went around the world and we signed up TV channels, TV Chili from Chili, a ZTV from India. And we said to them, "Hey, there's this new thing called the internet." And we'd like to have your worldwide streaming rights. And we're going to sell subscriptions to people in New York and London and Toronto that are from India. And they can watch literally ZTV live on there at the time, laptops, computers because the iPhone didn't exist at the time. Now the cool part was the precedent already existed, but differently, the Dish Network, which is satellite TV in the United States, they had about 400 channels that you could access if you're a Chilean, if you're Indian, in those, in if you're in New York City, but they had their US satellite retransmission rights. So satellite TV retransmission rights. And so we showed up to TV Chili, it was a great guy, actually the sister who lived in Toronto, super pioneering guy. And he said, "This is pretty cool." Dish wasn't very happy at first because there was no internet when they signed their contracts. But I went down to Manhattan and Dougal McDonald, the then more recently just retired as chairman of Morgan Stanley Canada, but made a very warm introduction for me to some executives at Morgan Stanley in New York. And it was it was the coolest meeting of my life. A one hour meeting turned into four hours because they kept coming in going, "Sorry, you what?" And I'd pull out the annual report for Dish and say, "See all these channel 400 channels? We have 335 of these channels. They're worldwide internet retransmission. And if you look in the annual report, it's not explicit, but it looks like this probably generates 100 million plus of free cash flow to Dish Network." And they said, "What do you want to do?" And I said, "We want to go public." And they said, "Well, you don't have any revenue." I said, "I know, but it's all I know." And I was really fortunate. There was, you know, fidelity was very supportive and Wellington out of Boston and Kiki Delaney and Toronto. And a number of other institutions said that they wanted to back us. And Morgan Stanley took us public. And it was just really, what ended up happening, Jay, was really quite amazing because at first it was a B2C site. So the idea was your Chilean, you came into the site and you found yourself. But then we realized sports, not surprisingly. Sports was a big driver, you know, cricket, obviously, for some parts of the world. Soccer, football for other parts of the world. And so we morphed into a B2B to see white label platform. And instead we went to the TV Chili's and said, "Hey, how about you put the ability for somebody who's Chilean around the world to click a button on your website?" And they could stream it. And that was much more successful. And then we partnered with Charles Wong, who had owned the New York Islanders and he built a company called Computer Associates. And with that partnership, we ended up winning the mandate for NHL Game Center Live. And that was an end and from signal acquisition in the New York Operation Center to transcoding and coding, user experience, everything. And then we were fortunate enough to get the mandate for the NBA league pass outside of the United States. And the NFL Game Pass and Charles Company was called New Lion, ours was called Jump TV. And we also had, and we merged them. We had 170 NCAA schools. So if you went to the bottom of University of Miami and your kid was swimming or something and you wanted to watch because you didn't live in Miami, it said powered by Jump TV. How cool. Which was pretty cool. Yeah, we were really early. And there were times when it wouldn't work. It would buffer. The technology wasn't quite there. But it was a really cool piece in the New York Times after the Olympics that said, the era of the internet and the way in which it changes the way the world can watch content has finally lived up to its dream. Now it's, yeah, this is 20 years later of what I thought would happen really, really quickly. But different camera angles, you could watch one skater, you know, interactivity, interactivity, everything that was the original promise has come to fruition. So really cool to watch. Well, I've always felt knowing about Jump TV and knowing the story from me. It was like a true preamble to the streaming dominance era. that we're in now, and it's a testament to your fourth thought of knowing that that would be the user. A lot of the things you do and the technology ventures circle around the user and the consumer. Another person I had on the podcast join a Griffiths, the CEO of Nix, and she said that the biggest lesson she gives people is you have to solve a problem that a lot of people have. A lot of people would have wanted, they live in Canada or they live in the US. They want to see those channels from India, Africa, wherever it was, and it's really cool to see that that has actualized into such an incredible. It's fun. I grew it very much to solve the problem, but there's another element to it as well. I would argue which is certainly in technology, which is sometimes the world doesn't know what it wants yet. That's where I actually personally get most excited. At the time we in 2005 with Jump TV, text represented 98% of internet interaction was text. It was only 2% video. Now of course it's probably the complete opposite. The new line Jump TV ended up becoming acquired by Endeavor, which was on the New York Stock Exchange to the time. Endeavor is our Emmanuel's company and that's UFC and WME and IMG. My thesis was that every single media company at the end of the day would need streaming at its core. That's how fundamentally shifting streaming. It wasn't just, oh, satellite TV, cable TV, now internet TV. No, no way bigger than that. It would fundamentally change the media world. Obviously, we've seen that in real life. Yeah, well, what happened, I was just talking to another guest about how the stream, even just in the last few years streaming has been revolutionized to include games, hockey, award shows, podcasts. I feel like there was a long era of streaming where it was kind of the same. Then now networks tell us bundles, all of these into their own streaming platform. It's interesting how that industry has changed. 100%. I want to know, I mean, you have scaled and you've raised billions of dollars and scaled numerous businesses. You're like the king of the scale and the race. I've got a lot of scars on my back too. Let's stick with the winners, okay? Let's stick with the back. Let's stick with the wins and we'll ignore the scars for now. I mean, you can also talk about the wins and the losses in this question, but what do you think really makes a meaningful difference in a successful scale? Well, I wish I could find what I'm going to say to you because there's two things that have shaped my view on this stuff. The first one is that there was a survey I read about the survey a few years ago and they'd gone to 100 technology leaders and they said, you know, rank, what mattered? Was it product? Was it sales? Was it, you know, innovativeness? What were the things? And you know, you could obviously come up with sort of a dozen things that you might attribute. And the cool part about it was the overwhelming single factor that determines success or failure was that failure was no option. It's a terrible curse, though. It's a curse because a lot of people will give up and probably should give up. If the market's telling you, this isn't working, but mine isn't keep doing the same thing. It's pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. But by the curse to it is, I'm putting my own money up when we're starting a new venture and I'm asking my friends and associates and business people and people I've never met before to put in money. And I feel such an obligation to them. I'm not saying I'm failed. I have failed. But I will do one thing you get from me, man. I will do everything in my power. There'll be dark rings under my eyes and I'll bust my butt. And so I would say that's a really key attribute. The Roman bless furnace. And you know, theater Roosevelt in 1909 in Paris wrote his man in the arena speech. And I have that up in my office in various places, which basically says, you know, you need to be, you got to be in the arena. And a lot of people I get it, it's it's scary to go in the arena because guess what? You fail in the arena and it's the hurts. But really your whole life and you, you neither know, he says, and this is a paraphrase at the end, but his his prose basically says, and those timid souls that know neither the joy of victory or the sort of defeat. I love that. I mean, Darren, that was all CEO of tell us is always I'm paraphrasing as well. But what's always in the back of my mind is that there are no such thing as circumstances. You have to find your circumstances. And if you can't find them, make them. I think that's a great. Darren's a sharp guy and a wise guy. So to testament to the successful mindset. But in this regard, I want to talk about future vaults and future. I mean, two incredible businesses you're building. And it's it was nice to talk about jump TV because there was a lot of forethought in that business for the future. And I think, you know, in the name we're talking future vault future, you're pioneering what, you know, you describe as an intelligent document processing digital vault construct. So tell just to break it down, tell me why a secure structure digital document control is so important for businesses and people today. And that sounds so dull doesn't it intelligent break it down. But let's draw the analog first. So thanks for the setup on the jump TV. So in the same way that I went to Wall Street, I jumped even in public in England as well. So it was in the city and and Bay Street and Wall Street. We're able to attract investors for jump TV. And that thesis was that there be no such thing as a media company in the future without streaming at its core. Here's what I'm going to say about the digital vault. The first words intelligent document processing mean AI. We know such thing as a digital vault that's not embedded in AI capabilities. There'll be no such thing as a financial services company in the world without the digital vault construct at its core. So I'm just doing the same thing all over again, just in a different business. And those are my two areas of love and hopefully some core competency financial services and media. But we've been waiting. So I started future vault. It's private Fintech and future of UTR that we just spun out to be a public company. And there's sister companies. So there's some overlapping technology started future vault in a number of years ago when I really built something for myself. And I was watching Dropbox and then OneDrive and then Google Cloud and Apple storage capabilities, etc. And my epiphany in the business world was it's not going to be opt-in. It's going to be delivered to you. Now what's the it? The it is two things. So if I'm a customer of a bank or a brokerage firm, I have a portal. And it's not that the portal changes so much or the website, but that access to your documents and data. When I click that on, if they're a customer partner of ours, they end up in future vaults. White labels, you don't know we exist. But we're this digital vault. And that means two things. It means tremendous digital security, which really matters more than ever before, particularly as quantum computing picks up steam. Then it's going to matter even more so. But it's also the functionality. You can ask a digital vault anything. You could you could literally put your kids report cards in and say, what did my son Jack get and his last report card in math? And what was the comment from the teacher? It lacks this instant. Jack's worth no. I was going to make a joke. Jack's very smart. He was a very son named Jack and Jack taught me about future vaults in future. Yeah, I know he's where he's an AI crypto kid graduating from University of Miami and he's set for a great future. As are all my kids. I have eight kids. So very, very blessed. But future vaults B to B to C. So we sell to businesses this notion of a digital vault construct. Here's the simplicity of it. Although it's way more complex than this. If if any of us go to any financial institution Toronto, New York, London, Taipei doesn't really matter. But let's stick with Toronto. We want a car loan T4 T5 103 proof of income, etc. We get the car loan. And the very next day we say we'd like to apply for mortgage. They say we need the same thing. Yeah. I'm just telling you that's the way it is. Now they're working in the background. There's the thousand engineers. They'll figure out a common, you know, a common identifier for a customer. But we're showing up saying why not put it into a digital vault. So you have client centricity. Everything's there for that individual, including their holding company. Maybe you're lending the holding company money or their manufacturing company, including all their kids, including their charitable foundation. If they're very affluent, you know, a C-corp, if they're active in the United States, holding everything you can imagine. So the thesis is, it's all about workflow automation and taking advantage of AI. So future vault with the way we describe it is AI is the engine and we're the car. We have over 4,000 permissioning matrices, which means, you know, if you and I are our advisors at a, we're financial advisors at a financial institution and we've got a team that works with us. Well, some of us may not be, have access to all of our clients' information because they work on different things that get paid for different things or third party estate planner may not be allowed to come into certain things. There's privacy laws, there's business rules, et cetera. So what we say is that AI's the engine, we're the car because when you put the AI in our foundation, in our platform, now it sees all the permissions and it can do incredible things. So we interact with all of the large language models. And in fact, our special sauce is in two things. It's in the permissioning. And think about that. You can't really have that outside the chassis. You couldn't be the CTO of a money manager and say, hey, and thropic, go and put the monthly statements in the year and tax and do all this stuff and put it in one spot. You could do that, but it doesn't know the permissioning. Yeah. So it needs the chassis, the car for the engine to work and there's rules and regulations. The more regulated the business, the better off we are. So we've been waiting. We've been waiting. We got our first patent in AI in 2021 before the introduction of chat GPT. Having said that, we stopped doing our own coding. Now our coding is, is this prompt? I'm on my way to see you and I'm an advisor and I say to the future of all your vault, I'm going to see Jay McCauley. What should I talk to him about? Well, that is a reasoning prompt. And right now our engine says go to code. We think they're the strongest large language model at this moment. That could change a month from now. But reasoning. But if I said, I'm on my way to see you, who are the beneficiaries of the McCauley family trust remind me. I say to the vault to my agent and it tells me your sister and you know, parents, whatever it may be. That's summary information. And we think Lama, which is part of meta, is the strongest. So we're spending enormous amount of time and energy on saying to our counterparts, let we'll do that work for you. You don't have to go all in and standardize on one large language model. We're going to incorporate all of them. The best ones this morning. I heard the Alabama. Alabama one is pretty darn strong in certain areas. And that's where we have this special sauce permissioning and our interoperability with large language models to get workflow seamless automation information. That's future. If I can future for a house. That's really cool as well. Well, that's been my vision from day one. Yeah. So future vaults B to B. You don't know we exist. We're white label. Future is direct to consumers. So we've been in close beta. We're soon launching the soft launch of the future. FUTR agent app. I think it's one of the coolest things that'll be out there. Certainly the coolest thing I've ever been involved in conceptualizing. And I'm not alone in this. Alex McDougall our CEO is spectacular. Daniel Kenny, the CEO of future vaults B. And he introduced me to two Alex and we have a great, great team behind that. And what is future? You get this app, but it's also web based if you want. And you're encouraged to upload everything in your life. Your bank statements, your car insurance, medical, medical, your kids' report, our bronze bidon, I'm ecstatic. 20,000 documents they told me in my vault on. How's that possible? But if I invest in a deal, I have the subscription agreement, the method of payment. I want to save the presentation to turn sheet, all that kind of stuff. Why is that matter? Well, now I can go and say, hey, I got a crack in my windshield. Do I have any insurance on the crack in my windshield? My agent says to me literally talking ads, very fun, playful. You can have it a cap dog. Very user friendly, very user friendly designed for Gen Z-ish gaming mentality issue. Because these people, these people, these kids of which I have and these young people, particularly coming out of school and starting their lives, they're total lives on this. And my thesis is that everyone, all 8 billion people will have a digital life personal like management vault. Mobile phones aren't with all 8 billion people because 2 billion people can't afford them. But if you're a refugee somewhere in the world, you're going to have a digital vault in the cloud and your eyes are your fingerprint and it'll be your passport, maybe your entitled to unicef, maybe your entitled to something. So I think we're talking about one of the biggest businesses in the history of the world. What we're doing that's unique is there's the agent, there's the future vault underlying technology back to my windshield thing. Hey, agent, whatever you want to call your agent, I got a crack in my windshield. Do I have any insurance? Hang on a sec Scott, the agent says, oh, I found an insurance policy with your insurance broker. In my case, a really cool company called ProLink that's very interested in working with us. It's dated February 15, 2025. But I see four cars. Is it your escalate? No, your BMW X5? Yes. Yes, you do. You have $2,000 a year, subject to $200 deductible. Do you want me to contact your insurance company? This now, you could say, can I drag and drop my insurance policy over to chat GPT and get the same answer? And the answer is yes. That's my point. But we're saying put it in a container. Don't put it out in the world. Why? Why don't put it in their training model? Don't be subject to hallucination. Have it all in one place. And guess what? Here's the kicker gang. Wait for it. I pitched this to a guy the other day and he said, wow, how much is that going to cost me per month? And I said to this kid, it's not going to cost you anything. He said, you're going to do this for free. And I said, no, we're going to pay you. We're going to pay you to open a future agent app in future tokens. We established the Future Foundation or arms link parties that we're associated with established the Future Foundation in July, 2022. We didn't jump on the Trump band wagon. You know, crypto's hot. This was from day one. How do we create a rewards mechanism? But here's the key. You earn future tokens when you download the app and you learn, you earn tokens every time you upload a document. What does that mean? It means you're monetizing your personal information. Google's worth $3.8 trillion. Great value proposition. What time's the restaurant open? What's on the menu? They keep all the money guys. I'm not saying the bad guys met a $2 trillion value picture of my grandmother, my dog. It's here for everyone. Facebook Instagram. I love it. They keep all the money. Chat GPT in real time is talking about monetizing your your your your prompts for ads. Great. Guess who's going to keep all the money? Chat GPT very likely. Maybe they'll change the model. They shouldn't watch this because they might change it too early. We're saying share in the monetization. What does that mean? Counter parties can come in. Geico progressive as example. What is the information that you've provided? It's called McKinsey calls it explicit consented data to be distinct from cookie generic data. It's got buyers and want a new car insurance. They're looking at my cookie activity or here's the model make year car premium expiring. Exactly. I'm anonymized. They don't know they just a male between a certain age. Northeastern United States. I live in Toronto. But pick your lives in the Northeastern or they own a car between 1570,000 just like they would in program. I advertising but explicit consented data now means I know when to give you the offer and if my insurance is $1,500 a year their offer could be $500 cash and 3000 tokens. What you just do. That's a win win. You just monetize your personal information. What are they? What what does that tokens represent that that cash they gave up? They're giving you a toaster now or an iPad. That's customer acquisition cost. They're all ready doing that. And then we say take those tokens you took and lieu of cash and redeem them for more leads. There is a scenario in which their customer acquisition cost could be zero. So we think we've got something very, very cool. We've spent millions and millions of dollars on this. We're launching it very soon. And you know in a little bit of luck we're going to we're going to partner with a number of businesses that are consumer facing that'll have many apps within the future app. And the cool part about this discussion is I'm either going to be completely wrong. And remember that ridiculous thing Patterson was talking about go watch the Jamie Kully podcast or holy crap. Why not buy that storage and story? We just we got it listed. Orange and sorry. I love it. I think it's a really exciting time for both future vault and future because they're you and your team are conceptualizing and have conceptualize something that will be so admissible and so important and meaningful to people. And it's it's shocking that has been done yet. Well, what we're doing could not have been done three years ago because there were no large language models that could tell you about your insurance policy in one second or what was my date of my daughter's bronze medallion because I need to have submitted for her application to be a lifeguard or or you know think about the time you spend finding documents particularly the longer it is. How about you put a little renovation on your house the ACB you know what when's the roof? Where's the warranty on the road like drowning in documents at all times. One of our taglines we're drowning and done but you so large language models didn't exist. But the other thing is you couldn't put a digital wall. There's a digital wallet in our app which you couldn't do before Trump. You know basically change the the game with respect to regulation to to that world. Yeah. We're pretty darn excited about look they're going to come. And what I'm excited about is my perception will be there will be a dogfight between the major operating system. So you know Microsoft and outlook will compete with Google and will compete with Apple and there'll be guys around the sides trying to figure it out from crypto.com to others. And you know there's not a lot of interoperability. Try won't going on air Canada and using their free Wi-Fi and guess what if you're texting to somebody doesn't have an iPhone doesn't go through. Yeah. Okay. There's not pure interoperability. So we're sitting in the middle of Switzerland. Yeah. We need a little luck. All these things need a little luck on timing. But we got some incredibly hardworking smart people. Great vision and we got some really cool things. And we're coming with a credit card. I won't say which one yet, but this is pretty cool. It'll be the first time in the history of the world that you can upload documentation, could be your library card, could be your condo agreement, can be your golf membership, anything. Now, the relative value is gonna be different, right? Your mortgage is gonna be worth 2000 tokens. You know, library card only maybe we were two tokens, but we want you to have everything. The first time ever, an app has comprehensive information so that I bet it, Google's got it by the way, but you don't really see it, you can actually dig behind it. So it's at your fingertips, relative value being paid to you so you're monetizing your personal information and you're making the world easier for people that wanna present you targeted opportunities that fit with what your needs are. - It's really a win-win all across the boards, what I've understood it to be. I also think it must be cool for you with future vault and future building and leading these businesses hand in hand with the explosive growth of AI. Like, it's been very evident to me that AI has helped propel this business and venture. - Well, we've been waiting for AI, frankly. And people would look at me going, what are you talking about intelligent document processing? - Well, is it like a few? It's here finally. - I think the way to think about it, I mean, you know, we have an amazing integration at future vault with Salesforce, for example. And Salesforce is $150 billion market cup. And you say, why the heck would anybody need future vault if you've got Salesforce? And the answer is, and I don't care whether it's Salesforce or Fidelity or InvestNet or it's Adapar and all these are great companies and they're partner companies of ours. So I wanna make sure, if any of them are watching this, they appreciate how much we value in the partnership. But they didn't invest in document management and document management is table stakes to be clear. We're not a document management company, that's table stakes. But I think the reason they didn't invest is that historically documents were considered sort of a necessary operating evil. Redundancy, what jurisdiction, security, oh, and by the way, purge everything seven years plus a day. We have one customer partner that is like the most important thing to them. They don't want liability for one minute after seven years plus a day. What we've been saying is that data embedded in documentation is worth materially more than raw data. Why? Because there's context. When's the last time there was a lawsuit over data? No, the lawsuits over what does the contract say? So you could extract structured data for 20 years and increasingly unstructured data, but you couldn't extract context into large language models. And that's the different today. - We'll talk about to the opportunity for partners to come in and win new customers. Like expand a little bit about that. - Yeah, well, and we sort of skipped over the early part of my career and won't go into it other than to say, I started as a financial advisor. I love that I cold call most people hate cold calling. I read many, many years ago something that I believe is absolutely true that 50% of the people do not make a second outreach after the first one's rejected or ignored. It goes to 75% of the people will not make a third outreach after the first two are ignored. It goes to 85% won't make the fourth and it makes sense. Who on earth, if there's somebody said, I'm not interested or they don't return your outreach email call, whatever, 95% of people do not make a fifth outreach, totally get it. 50% of all sales take place after the fifth outreach. And when I read that, it changed my life. Now, you don't want to be a pest, but what happens is the reason it works is because you're just catching the individual, oh, I had a different mandate. I wasn't ready. I was focused on something else. We, you know, I'm now a new job or now I'm ready for it. You know, you don't want to be a pest, that's for sure. And I wouldn't promote that in any business. But, you know, unless there's some structural reason that they won't benefit from your product or service, but if you're convinced that there is a structural reason they can benefit from it, you just need to hopefully get them to give you an opportunity to explain that. Then it makes sense to keep knocking on the doors. Anyway, I started as a financial advisor. I love to call call. I still do. And that just gave me this sense of how can advisors, you know, do a better job with clients. And obviously technology is a massive part of the world today. But again, this ability for an advisor to prepare for a meeting better, to have their clients have things that their fingertips. Why, why does the client just use our platform and the client's permission in their account and write into the vault? Who needs to send the stuff? Download this, that, like eliminate the friction, right? Let your clients, no one's done this yet. Let your clients use the large language model in their own vault. Let them say, when's my mortgage payment in March, 2027 or when's my last one, or do the calculation how much interest I'm paying? How much interest would I save if I made two payments per month, or did the maximum prepayment, which can happen in five seconds in our technology? - Yeah. Wow, that's incredible. I wanna switch gears and talk a little bit about, you know, your experience with the Toronto Venture Stock Exchange you're sharing that, your vice chair at the Toronto Stock Exchange as well. And talk a little bit about the responsibility of capital markets in shaping Canada's economic future. - You know, we have incredible capital markets in Canada in the following sense. And I'm not sure the big banks all would appreciate what I'm gonna say here, but man, we give entrepreneurs a chance. You think about the cannabis wave. Okay, it hasn't worked out all that well for a bunch of reasons. And there was things that I think structurally, legislatively could have been done differently. But the point is, you know, the capital markets supported it. They did not in the United States. And we actually got a lot of US issuers that came to Canada to source capital. Right now we're in a precious metals, you know, euphoria. And there's backed and by the way, critical minerals that if you went just back two, three years ago, metals were wo-wo-wo-wo-wo-wo-wo, that's bad for the environment. And of course, there are serious issues with respect to extraction. And what happens with respect to the, you know, manufacturer of the use of certain minerals and resources in the manufacturing process that you wanna deal with responsibly. But now all of a sudden, critical minerals and holy crap, we're in a race around EV, we're in a race around drones, we're in a war drones, we're in a race around AI, and you need a lot of these critical minerals. So the great news is some pressure has been taken off, regulators, governments, et cetera. Canada's got, I think we're the third largest oil resource in on the planet Earth. We're abundant in water, uranium, cobalt, nickel, uranium on and on and the cap, and the capital markets, especially the venture exchange. And there's the Neo now called the CBOE, the Chicago board of trade about the Neo and the CSE in Canada, the Canadian Stock Exchange. They provide the junior entrepreneurs an opportunity. And sometimes I don't think that the big banks appreciate how critical that is to job creation and entrepreneurial mindset. And that contributes to the brain drain. If you'll only finance a company when it's a billion dollars market cap, guess what happens? Those entrepreneurs go elsewhere. And so if you look back at the waves, there's been the EV wave, there's been the solar wave, there's been certain precious metals wave. I mentioned the cannabis wave, there's been an AI mini wave, there'll be, and there's a bit of a quantum computing minnowave. And in our country, people say, oh, American servicers, Americans are the shooters. Listen, there are a lot of shooters in Canada that will write checks. And by the way, they're much more willing to write a check for 50,000, 100,000, 25,000, $5,000 if it's liquid. Yeah, maybe not overly liquid, but at least it trades versus private. Do I ever get my money out and it's binary? It's often binary, zero or a win. Whereas, okay, I paid 20 cents. This one didn't work. It went to four cents. But the next one, and there's lots and lots and lots of them that go from 20 cents to 10 bucks. Yeah. And that's the beauty of our capital markets. And the country should be very proud of it. I agree. You and your wife, Sarah, have contributed a lot of money and time to charitable causes. We've done a lot of work together in that regard too. So what rule has Philanthropy played alongside your business life? Well, I just think, you know, very simple concept. I'm very blessed. I think we're all generally blessed to live in Canada. But obviously there's people that need help in this country. The charity that we're very proud that you are very involved in on the board. And on the committee of our big mass grade ball that my wife, Sarah, chairs, is called Com Kids. It used to be called Kids Cops and Computers. We're now, we started in 1998, started with Bill Blair, now the high commissioner in the United Kingdom. And Bill saw the vision right out of the gate. It was a very simple vision that if kids do not have home computing technology, means something different today than back in 1998, 1998, I mean, a big desktop. Uh, in HP would give us 100 desktops that cost $3800 for a home desktop back then. Now you can get a laptop. HP is still a principal sponsor. And there are more very high quality for sort of $600 ish to think of what's happened there. About 85% of the kids in those at-risk districts did not have home computing power. Wow. Great. news is today that's gone down to 15%. And why? Class of law, our family make it a priority, internet access, phones, laptops, etc. But think about that 15%. That cohort is in deep trouble. Yeah. And we almost felt that COVID, you know, I wonder if we're that relevant. We don't want to be a cherry. What's the point? Unless we're really changing lives, etc. And then Toronto District School Board announced during COVID that 29,000 kids in Toronto were without access to home computing power during COVID because it was online. And so we realized, wow, this need exists. I think we're in five provinces right now and in NAN of it, which made me very proud with some indigenous kids up in NAN of it. And so my point is just if you're lucky enough that you can give time, energy or money. And by the way, there's a million extremely philanthropic, I don't say a million, you know, the truth is as a percentage of philanthropy giving candidates behind the United States. But part of that's our social system, you know, provides more. But it's really, really improving. If you went along university avenue in Toronto 20 years ago, you did not see the names of the big huge success story instead of giving tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. And you know, Canada's come a long way there and it's great to, it's great to see. It's an amazing legacy of giving. Maybe we'll close up with some rapid fire questions. What's Scott Patterson's coffee order? Ah, you know, I have a lot of vices, Jay, don't tell my wife that, but I have had one sip of coffee in my entire life. What? Yeah, yeah, I was at West God. You know, I love you, but you were like the highest caffeinated person I know. What are you? What are we drinking in the morning? Crazy. I was at Western. I was up late. I never studied till like the night before I was burnt out and I said, got to try coffee on. Oh, no, man, I do not want to try coffee. Wow. I had one sip. I cannot. I would never do it. So I've never had a couple of months. I'm jealous. What's a Canadian company you admire? Oh my gosh, so many companies that I admire. I would say sort of the one currently on the landscape would be, would be Shopify in the tech space. It's, you know, to build what they built into continue to use the the base of that core relationship they have with retailers and merchandisers and keep adding more and more functionality and playing in the big global sandboxes. Yeah, pretty damn impressive. It's like as a Canadian, I'm proud of that company. Yeah, for sure. But I'm proud of many came. Yes, same. What's like the best piece of business advice you've ever received? Maybe you said it. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't know, received. But I think it really is hard work. I, you know, I'm a lot, most, let's say not a lot. Most people I've been in a room in the room, I mean, I probably smarter than me. But if I outwork them, you know, I can level that playing field. I agree. What's a word you might use to describe this chapter of your life for this era future. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, it's funny. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs would feel, maybe feel what I'm going to say, you know, some days they wake up, you get a kick in the gut. Something's not going right. And you go, oh my god, I'm going to take this to zero. And the next day you wake up and something great, oh, we're going to be billionaires. You know, it's not about money, by the way, I mean, don't be wrong. I'd like to make my investors and myself money. But I have found any time I've ever tried to make money, I cannot make it. I just can't make it. I make money when I'm passionate about something. Yeah, the journey. Yeah. And then it, and yeah, that's that's, you know what? Let me give a little credit on that one to Charles Wong. I mentioned earlier who won the New York founders. He had said something to me once, which was really impactful. And he said, celebrate the journey because you may not get to your end goal. So I'm sitting here saying, yeah, future can be a 50 billion dollar company, future of all several billions. That's my goal. But what if we don't get there? So you want to celebrate the journey. And I would say that's a really great piece of ice that I've done a better job at that taking in. I love that. Well, I've shot called this show in good company. What is being in good company mean to you? Well, my mom from an early age would say, you know, look around you and who your friends are, who you spend time with, and are they supportive? Are they aspirational? Are they good people? Do they treat everybody with respect? You know, I live in mortal fear. I could be back with no home. So I think it'll be okay. Well, I'm betting a lot on these companies I'm describing. So I am investing retirement money in some of this stuff. But I think it's as simple as treat your neighbors like you'd like to be treated yourself. And that means the good company is people that are enjoyable to be with. That doesn't mean, and this part's important, especially get older. I'm quite a bit older than you. Friends will disappoint you. I will disappoint friends. I know I've disappointed friends. You hopefully can have a strong enough friendship that you can share. Hey, this was upsetting. This disappointed me. And good friends will fix that gap and will either apologize, acknowledge, change the way. Hopefully I'm capable of doing that. But that's what good company I think. But it also means another guy in a club I'm in the other day said, and it really resonated with me. He said, be really open to making new friendships. I've got some really lucky. I've got some friendships that go right back to my childhood. A lot of great university pals, including you mentioned, St. Bill, he solutions built a business with one of my Ridley College grade pals. It's crazy. And so those kind of friendships that are there forever. But being open to building new friendships. I love that. And it's really true. You know, it's a friend of mine. I'll mention a laugh at this, but because I think both of our wives are joking about the two of us spending time together, but Andrew Alexander and Alexander Carpenter is a big brand in Canada. And we become squash buddies and friends. And we spend all this time together. I think our wives are like, what's wrong with you guys? And it's weird to build a close, nice relationship at a slightly older age, but it's a good embrace that. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Scott, for coming on the show. It's so great to chat with you as always. Forward to the future. My pleasure. Thanks, Jake. Awesome.