Diraj Goel

GetFresh Ventures

GetFresh Ventures is a venture partner and catalyst, working closely with our founders of high potential startups to pursue hypergrowth by helping them define and execute their purpose and vision through their go-to-market strategy. 

Our Growth By Design methodology includes defining opportunity from a market’s captivated need to their mission critical problem, establishing market positioning and dominance with a no-brainer solution, pursuing prospects on the most opportune channels, building scalable operational frameworks on the path of least resistance, attracting talent capital, driving customer acquisition, and ultimately long term enterprise value in customer retention and expansion.

We exist on the premise that purpose driven companies can and should be highly profitable enterprises. Having a defined purpose that gravitates the humans associated - investors, customers, employees, partners, and advocates - is a major driver for sustainable growth and innovation.

And most especially getting to a meaningful exit for its founders, teams and investors, and in that order.

Founder + Managing Partner

Canadian Association of Management Consultants (CMC-Canada) 

The Certified Management Consultant (CMC) designation is the profession's only international certification mark, recognized in over 50 countries. It represents a commitment to the highest standards of consulting and adherence to the ethical canons of the profession. 

CMC-Canada fosters excellence and integrity in the management consulting profession. CMC-Canada administers, and its provincial Institutes confer, the Certified Management Consultant (CMC) designation in Canada. 

The Association and its 2000+ members advocate for the CMC designation and are dedicated to advancing the profession and delivering the benefits of these efforts to the client community. CMC-Canada is a founding member of the International Council of Management Consulting Institutes (ICMCI), now CMC-Global.

Certified Management Consultant

TravelAI -- An UpNext Company

With over $2.5B in total bookings, TravelAI is the world’s leading intent based travel booking platform for travellers looking for unique experiences.

TravelAI leverages a multitude of data sources, gathered from a decade of experience. This allows us to employ our proprietary dataset that inform our acquisition logic, market segments, and conversion performance.

We have digital intelligence from over trillion data points based on over 8 million room nights booked. Our Data Science team constantly process massive amounts of data streaming in real-time to align traveller intent to travel inventory for thousands of properties worldwide.

Board Director

WareHoos

Warehoos is the only space for contractors navigating their relationships with construction materials resellers across the spectrum of large and small suppliers.

Solving last mile for local building supply yards while providing ease, predictability and site management capabilities for building contractors to scale their businesses.

Investor and GTM Partner

CompanyOn

Alejandro and his team founded CompanyOn to address a crucial gap for entrepreneurial nurses in managing and scaling their private practices. The healthcare industry has long lacked a solution tailored for nurses transitioning from hospital settings to independent practice, particularly in areas like patient management, billing, and compliance.

CompanyOn provides a seamless platform, enabling nurses to focus on patient care while efficiently managing their business operations. This solution is critical in an industry where healthcare professionals often face daunting administrative burdens, especially as they grow their practices.

CompanyOn has grown rapidly, with a focus on user experience and scalability, and it continues to empower hundreds of nurses. GFV has worked closely with Alejandro to develop strategic go-to-market tactics, expand partnerships, and drive user acquisition through targeted engagement strategies and regional partnerships.

Our partnership with CompanyOn underscores a shared vision of enabling healthcare entrepreneurs to scale while maintaining a patient-first mindset, with measurable success in user growth and market penetration.

Investor

Careteam Technologies Inc.

Careteam Technologies is a health technology company, based in Vancouver, BC set on a mission to re-imagine health care coordination in Canada, the US, the UK and beyond. 

The team has deep experience with all aspects of health, eHealth and business and came together with the mission to solve a big problem – care fragmentation. 

Everyone in health care and on the patient support networks is working really hard, yet their results are dissipated due to the lack of coordination.

We connect individuals, family, friends, and health care providers – together as a coordinated care team, all on the same page, all knowing what is planned, and working together to make it happen. This is the missing link to transform health care into a patient-centered proactive system. This is why Careteam was built.

Strategic Growth Advisor

MentorCloud

MentorCloud stands out by focusing on enhancing human engagement through robust mentorship, even in today's digitally driven, remote work environments. 

MentorCloud closely aligns with GFV's commitment in nurturing the human element within business growth, leveraging GFV's Human Engine approach, emphasizing personal and professional growth through trusted human relationships, real-time feedback, and continuous guidance. 

Our work with MentorCloud has attracted significant interest from global enterprises, including Marriott International and Airbnb, keen on investing in their teams not just as talent but as growing, learning individuals. 

We are thrilled to work alongside Ravishankar Gundlapalli, PhD, and the MentorCloud team, driving forward our shared mission to support and expand human potential within the corporate sphere.

Strategic GTM Partner

Dyne

The Restaurant AI-Assistant that scales your revenue and marketing. Dyne helps you focus on cooking incredible food while we handle the rest. With services like automated marketing, competitor coupon marketplaces, customer review analysis, POS, reservations, and menu pricing strategy, we are the all-in-one tool for all things Dine-In.

Join the over 12 thousand users on Dyne, where our platform gives you instant access to new customers to (enough to fill your empty tables - even during off-peak hours), while retaining and recovering more of your existing customers.

Investor and Strategic GTM Partner

MyFO

Simran and Alice struck a nerve when they embarked on building MyFO - family offices the world over have been struggling with managing their portfolios in a consolidated and strategic manner - a single pane of glass on how their assets were deployed to managing capital allocation.

MyFO stands out in the market because it offers a never-before-seen solution. The platform consolidates all your assets, key people in your life and all the essential documents governing your existence in an easy-to-use subscription platform, with features to match the complexity of each layer of AUM.

In today's world of continual disruption in incumbent markets, it's surprising to hear that the very same high net worth portfolios that are fueling the worlds of investment - from institutional to venture funds - are themselves ripe for disruption. 

Relegated to various platforms from their banks to internal adhoc tools and processes, family offices have been waiting for a solution to bring all their assets together. This in-turn allows wealth advisors and family office managers to have a longitudinal view of their investments, potentially unlocking capital from inefficient vehicles to maximizing return.

Our GFV team is working with the MyFO team on bringing their solution to market on the path of least resistance through our investor network and the family offices we work with, which further enables our collective vision to create abundance for both entrepreneurs and the investors who support them.

Hembal

Hembal makes the first and only FDA registered plant-based infant formula not from soy, is a clean, hypoallergenic formula suitable for infants ages 0-12 who have unusual dietary needs such as an allergies to dairy, soy, animal proteins, multiple allergies or elemental diets. 

Hembal Infant Formula Powder is contained in an easy-to-scoop wide mouth container containing 621 grams of our proprietary ingredients. Hembal infant formula provides the adequate nutrition for your baby’s daily nutritional needs. Our formula provides 20 Calories/fl oz. Being iron-fortified and hypoallergenic, our amino acid formula is also suitable for infants with severe cow’s milk allergies. Hembal infant formula may also be suitable for infants who need elemental diets to treat protein maldigestion, malabsorption, short bowel syndrome, and even eosinophilic esophagitis. Hembal formula is suitable for both oral and tube feeding as well.

While it has been shown that infants who do not ingest cow’s milk benefit from a reduction in Colic, Hembal Infant Formula does not contain any of the major ingredients that can cause colic in the first place. Babies who have a cow’s milk or animal protein allergy have a higher chance of developing a severe reaction such as skin conditions and respiratory issues. Hembal Infant Formula can help lower the chances of allergies getting out of hand while also providing everything your little one needs to feed one.

Strategic GTM Advisor

Founder and Managing Partner, GetFresh Ventures | $200M+ Pre-Seed & Seed raised by our portfolio with their traction supported defensible Go-To-Market strategy.

I’ve spent my career scaling high-growth tech companies, transforming startups from pre-revenue infancy into successes and exits.

Outside work, I'm a proud father of two, and husband, who loves blasting 90s rap while tinkering.

My journey began at WebCT in 99 during the dotcom bust, in 5 yrs growing from a university startup to a $180M exit/merger to Blackboard, driving rapid growth on limited capital.

Sophos in ‘05, post-acq of ActiveState, I led the integration of the young startup with a stoic UK based cybersec pubco integrating cultures globally, honing skills in org design, and large-scale integration.

At IPS Networks, an early stage cybersec agency, I built and led the SecOps MSP - eventually sold to Deloitte.

Vision Critical in ‘08, I scaled the company from $5M to $120M, blending open-source and enterprise tech, migrating to multi-tenant cloud apps across global datacenters, and integrated our entire customer journey across product, Salesforce, and NetSuite, to boost acquisition, and reduce churn.

Hootsuite in ‘16, I transformed the company into an international enterprise with over $120M in revenue, integrating AdEspresso and overseeing tech, ops, and analytics. 

My next chapter, building on these lessons of scaling during downturns and re-engineering growth, I developed the HyperGrowth accelerator for BC Tech, evolving into the Growth by Design methodology for lean rapid growth.

Seeing a gap between accelerators and VC, I founded GetFresh Ventures (GFV) to bring Growth by Design to founders, providing strategic execution to increase growth velocity and overcome challenges in building high-value businesses.

In 5 years, we've worked with over 35 companies, taken 6 from cradle to exit, and aim to build a portfolio of 100s of successful exits.

At GFV, we create clarity in achieving founder and investor exit expectations:

GTM Roadmaps - We develop execution paths that attract capital and instill confidence in your high velocity growth.

Market Traction and Growth - We execute on market expansion that demonstrates demand and profitable unit economics.

Understanding Investors - We attract capital partners for your business model and growth opportunity.

Experienced Operators - We are holistic growth partners who’ve built $100M ventures, raised over $500M, and exited with over $1B in enterprise value.

Our aim is to challenge you to evolve to the right side of your growth story – strategy, capital, execution, results, profitability, and cash flow, leading to a meaningful generational wealth exit. 

Have a venture waiting to explode? DM me.

GetFresh Ventures is a venture partner and catalyst, working closely with our founders of high potential startups to pursue hypergrowth by helping them define and execute their purpose and vision through their go-to-market strategy. 

Our Growth By Design methodology includes defining opportunity from a market’s captivated need to their mission critical problem, establishing market positioning and dominance with a no-brainer solution, pursuing prospects on the most opportune channels, building scalable operational frameworks on the path of least resistance, attracting talent capital, driving customer acquisition, and ultimately long term enterprise value in customer retention and expansion.

We exist on the premise that purpose driven companies can and should be highly profitable enterprises. Having a defined purpose that gravitates the humans associated - investors, customers, employees, partners, and advocates - is a major driver for sustainable growth and innovation.

And most especially getting to a meaningful exit for its founders, teams and investors. 

3 a.m. in the trenches.

That photo’s from 2012.
I was VP of Biz Ops and Tech, leading an overnight move of 350 people and two full data centers.

No cloud. No safety net.
We shut everything down Friday and had to be live again Monday morning — hundreds of servers, switches, and cables relocated and rebuilt.
Every team relied on it: sales, support, product, finance, HR. Even our execs were offline. Email didn’t exist that weekend.

We coordinated vendors, infrastructure, facilities, and every internal team across time zones.
Three days straight. No rest. Just execution.

Back then, 70- to 80-hour weeks were normal.
And I loved it.

Not the exhaustion — the mission. The camaraderie. The momentum that comes from solving real problems with people who care as much as you do.
We weren’t chasing titles. We were building something that mattered, with nothing wasted and everything on the line.

That’s where I learned how growth actually works.
It’s not one big breakthrough. It’s a thousand small alignments.
And when those break — growth stalls.

Over the years, I’ve helped scale companies from zero to more than 2,000 people across 20 countries, serving software to customers in 65.
Different markets. Same pattern.

Founders rarely fail because they don’t know what to do.
They struggle because they can’t see all the angles while they’re in it.
They’re moving fast, solving fires, and don’t always have the space to question their own assumptions.

That’s why I started the GTM Pod (Open Office Hours).

It’s not theory. It’s founders stepping out of their own chaos long enough to see what’s really in the way.

We ask the questions that get to the root of things:
What problem are we solving right now?
What proof do we have?
What would make this easy?
What do we stop doing?
What are the next three moves?

Sometimes it’s pipeline.
Sometimes it’s pricing, story, or capacity.
Always, it’s clarity you can act on tomorrow.

About 100 founders have joined so far.
Different industries. Different stages.
Same result: perspective, momentum, and a plan that compounds.

📅 Wednesday, October 8 • 2:15–3:45 PM PT • Zoom
💸 Free. 90 minutes. High signal.
🔗 Link in comments.

If you’ve been building hard, moving fast, and still wondering why growth feels heavier than it should — this room is for you.

Founder, GetFresh Ventures | GTM Engineer | Investor | Partnering with Founders Scaling with AI

AWS shit the bed.

Just finished speaking at the AI Summit Vancouver on a topic I deal with everyday, elevating humans in companies, big and small, on leveraging AI to drive growth. 

Now in a working session with Arvin, sipping lychee soda, while he breaks down the realtime day since the AWS outage hit the wire. 

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, the vibe coding phenomenon, found out about the AWS outage at 2am. 

His Eight Sleep smart mattress was warm. The bed couldn't cool properly because the internet was down.

Peak 2025. 

I wish my mattress warned me about outages back in the 2010s, instead of the incessant Blackberry.  

Here's what's really happening: Of 111 AWS services, 78 are still degraded. 

This is the first time it's gotten worse after initial recovery. It's affecting US-East, and AWS' redundancy IS the redundancy—which is exactly why more things keep breaking.​

The damage is massive:

Roblox, Fortnite, Coinbase, Robinhood, Venmo, Zoom, Duolingo, The Walt Disney Company, Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios, Ring, Amazon, OpenAI, Perplexity, United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, AT&T, Snap Inc.

Even "decentralized" crypto platforms—down because of AWS.​

This was always the concern.

Back when I was building and scaling apps pre-cloud SaaS, we measured ourselves in uptime. 

Five nines. 99.999%. 

That was the standard. 

Then cloud came along and we collectively agreed, "Let someone else handle infrastructure."

We knew the risks. 

Platform concentration. Vendor lock-in. Single points of failure.

But we did it anyway because the math was mathing.

This dependency problem at AWS is not technical, its structural.

AWS built redundancy within AWS, not independence from AWS. 

When you measure in nines, every minute counts. 

The cloud promised to abstract away these concerns. 

It seems, the problems of yesterday still exist today. 

You can't abstract away physics, geography, or concentration risk.​

As we engineer companies at GetFresh Ventures, moments like these remind me that operational excellence isn't a nice-to-have. 

It's existential.​

Thank you Tessa, our Chief of Holding-it-all-together, for putting today together.  

So what do you do when the internet's down?

Guess you could watch the White House get demolished or Trump's most recent tweet. Yes, it's still a tweet to me.

Ironically, my talk today was about the humans in the system. 

With the penchant for AI solving, everything, this is a good reminder that it's still a system that will likely go down. 

What remains are human relationships. 

In the meantime, Arvin and I are now vibe coding platform redundancy, migrating our DB from Lovable Cloud.

Good luck everyone, hope the spike in customer tickets drops to a reasonable level by end of day.

See you on the other side of the outage.

The future of B2B sales isn’t about replacing humans with AI. 
It’s about freeing humans to do what only humans can do.

I’m excited to share that I’ll be speaking at the AI Summit Vancouver on October 20th, 2025.

Session: B2B Sales in a Post-AI World: Where Humans Still Win

Over the past few years, I’ve seen firsthand how AI has transformed the sales stack—automating CRM, analytics, and outreach—yet leaving the most important part untouched: the human connection.

CRM management isn’t sales—it’s governance and enablement.

Analytics and demand generation aren’t sales—they’re pipeline creation.

Sales, at its core, is about understanding the customer’s reality and ensuring they succeed.

That alignment of purpose—across the customer, the company, the investor, and the market—is where durable value is created.

High margin. Low churn. Real growth.

What we’ll cover in this session:
- How AI is reshaping sales while preserving the critical human layer of trust and intent
- Practical frameworks we use at GetFresh Ventures to structure go-to-market and sales motions that AI can accelerate but never replace
- How to strip away administrative overhead and create more space for deep customer work
- How to diagnose and solve the right problems for a fair price, building credibility and pull
- How to design a sales process that compounds value across every stakeholder
- The outcome: sales teams that close faster, churn less, and grow sustainably—because they’re solving for humans, not just numbers.

This session blends our Growth by Design methodology with applied AI strategies founders can implement immediately.

🎟️ Link to tickets in the comments.

Looking forward to connecting with others shaping the next era of human-centric, AI-accelerated growth.

See you there.

I have to open X every morning.

It’s my primary source of news, keeping up with market movements and how those macros and micros impact our portfolio.

It’s also my primary source of anxiety.

Tariffs, wars, strife, teetering democracies, diminishing liberties, and generally awful news.

I’d be lying if I said the news doesn’t affect my mood.

My ADHD brain loves ruminating and engineering scenarios, so it’s natural to immediately consider the ramifications of what I read.

It takes work to stay in the moment, especially with my kids.

When I’m with my 6 and 8 year-olds, I have to stay grounded in hope, to step out of the noise and into their worlds of magic and wonder. 

In those moments, the weight of the world matters little compared to what matters in theirs: a new drawing, a wild idea, a question on how something works.

I try to meet them there, to talk to them as mini adults with surprisingly articulate vocabularies, and to forget, even briefly, the chaos outside.

When I walk out of their world and back into mine, I carry their hope with me. It fuels the work. It reminds me why we build at all.

That same tension between awareness and hope, was at the heart of the panel I had the privilege of moderating yesterday at Frontier Collective: 

𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗢𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗺 — 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗛𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗴𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗽𝘀𝗲

Toni Thai Sterrett spoke about building CinePartna, an AI-powered screenwriting platform that democratizes filmmaking rather than replaces filmmakers. Her concern about the decline in Black representation in education drove her to demystify technology for underrepresented communities, giving those whose stories have been sidelined the tools to tell them. Hearing her describe how creativity expands when technology is guided by intention reminded me that optimism can be engineered, one design choice at a time.

Hanae Bezad, through Boann Social Impact and her book Being Other, brought a perspective forged in places that have already experienced collapse. She showed how inclusive systems can be rebuilt from the ground up — how hope becomes durable when it’s shared. She spoke about mindfulness, gratitude, and the grounding she finds in Buddhist prayer, how stillness allows her to build with clarity and compassion.

Dominic Wong, Managing Director at INVOKE — the studio that launched Hootsuite — reflected on his evolution from developer to CEO. He spoke about widening his lens beyond product and code, and how staying in a learning posture helps him resist cynicism and lead with the hopes of his customers, teams, and family. 

Having lived my own chapter inside Hootsuite’s hypergrowth years, that landed deeply.

Each of them gave me reassurance that there are still humans devoting their time, energy, and focus to creating exponential good instead of chasing exponential gain.

My kids give me hope. These humans give me hope.

Dan Burgar Tessa Clarance Arvin M.

Bronwyn Bridges didn’t wait for the right moment to build something meaningful, she created it.

When she founded PragmaClin Research Inc., her goal was clear: make neurological assessments for people living with Parkinson’s faster, smarter, and more accessible.

In 2024, she joined The Forum Pitch Program - a transformational initiative by Odlum Brown Limited since 2016.

A program built for Canadian women founders who are ready to scale their impact with the right support and community behind them.

Bronwyn leaned in fully. 

She took advantage of every mentorship call, every connection, and every opportunity to refine how she told her story. 

The result was more than the recognition, it was momentum.

Since completing the program, she has:
◆ Secured over $650,000 in non-dilutive funding
◆ Earned a $10,000 grant from Visa Canada’s She’s Next initiative
◆ Been selected as one of 30 women across Canada for a global business mission to Taiwan and Vietnam

Her story captures what this program is designed to do: unlock growth by surrounding founders with the expertise, visibility, and confidence to move forward with clarity.

I’ve watched this program empower women entrepreneurs across the country for years. 

This year, I’ve joined The Forum as a 𝑪𝒐𝒎𝒎𝒖𝒏𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝑷𝒂𝒏𝒆𝒍 𝒋𝒖𝒅𝒈𝒆, because I believe in what happens when mentorship, access, and vision come together.

If you’re a Canadian woman founder with early traction and a business you believe in, this is your moment to take it further.

𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗼𝘄, 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟯 𝗮𝘁 𝟰𝗽𝗺 𝗣𝗧 / 𝟳𝗽𝗺 𝗘𝗧.

Here’s what the program offers:
◆ Up to $90,000 in total value through funding, mentorship, coaching, and national exposure
◆ Paid travel to semi-final events in Toronto and Vancouver
◆ 1:1 mentorship with experienced entrepreneurs and industry leaders
◆ Performance coaching and 12 months of ongoing support through The Forum Mentor Program
◆ Visibility and PR coverage across Canada’s entrepreneurial ecosystem
◆ Access to a national network of funders, advisors, and growth partners

It begins with a single step—a one-minute video sharing your vision.

𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.

When the right community surrounds a determined founder, the result is growth that lasts.

On Monday, I had the chance to speak at the AI Summit Vancouver about how artificial intelligence is reshaping sales — not by replacing people, but by giving them back the space to do what only humans can do: listen, think, and connect.

My talk, 𝗕𝟮𝗕 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁-𝗔𝗜 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱: 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗦𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗪𝗶𝗻, centered on the rise of a new role: the 𝙂𝙏𝙈 𝘼𝙄 𝙀𝙣𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙚𝙧 — the operator who gets rid of the homework of sales, so leaders can spend more time on what actually matters: understanding the customer.

I opened with Sam Altman's idea of the 𝑂𝑛𝑒 𝐻𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑈𝑛𝑖𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑛 — a company where one person, fully leveraged by AI, can do the work of hundreds.

But before we can build that kind of company, we need something more fundamental: the 𝙊𝙣𝙚 𝙃𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙀𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙥𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙚.

The One Human Enterprise is a company where every function that touches the customer — marketing, sales, product, finance, operations, and success — moves together coherently.

Not optimized in isolation, but orchestrated in flow.

AI doesn’t replace those functions — it connects them.

It becomes the layer that feeds shared context, removes redundancy, and turns activity into understanding.

That orchestration is what the GTM AI Engineer enables.

They bridge automation and intuition, ensuring that AI serves people, not the other way around.

When systems take care of the admin — CRM updates, forecasting, reporting — humans are freed to focus on the customer’s reality: what they need, what they value, and how they define success.

In that model, sales stops being about transactions and becomes about transformation.

Because customers don’t buy data — they buy meaning.

AI recognizes patterns. Humans recognize meaning.

Meaning builds trust. Trust builds belief.

And belief is what closes deals.

We may never get to the One Human Unicorn, but heck, it's a worthwhile attempt to get rid of the drudgery of corporate life. 

Meetings, reports, updates, CRMs, ERPs, and every other paper pushing activity that ends up straining our mental health. 

It was an honor to share the stage with some incredible minds, Adina Gray on transparency and trust in AI inference, Tyler Akidau on deploying agentic AI safely, Shreya Gupta 🦋 on building AI for people, not just profit, Rick Regueira on collaboration and inclusion as well as inviting me to speak on his podcast - and the many others shaping this evolving ecosystem.

If you're interested in how we're bridging the concept of AI enablement, the link to the deck is in the comments. 

Thank you Arjun Kadaleevanam and Procheta Nag for inviting our team to speak.

Tessa Clarance | Arvin M. — your fingerprints are on every system we’ve built that turns noise into clarity.

𝙌𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙛𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙧𝙤𝙤𝙢.

Any of you up till 2am trying to drive growth while running your company?

Staying on top of pipeline, admin, product, emails, AI workflows… and the needle still isn't moving?

Most of us run with low visibility on our own operating system.
We spend the day in the business and the night inside our lives.

Changing flow takes altitude. You have to step out to see the pattern.

We've all had the false start, where we paid for a gym membership we hardly used. 
That is why we lean on therapists, mentors, coaches.

What many founders have never had is clean feedback and a little room to breathe.

I don't mean strategy like your product roadmap or your target market.

But how you get things done and make sure you are moving in the right direction.

It's why I run 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀. Next one this 𝙒𝙚𝙙𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙙𝙖𝙮. (𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙠 𝙞𝙣 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙨)

I’ve spent 30+ years building, fixing, and scaling through different cycles. 
Scrappy to scaled. Bootstrapped to investor backed. Good markets and hard ones. 

The challenge is always the same - figuring out how to make progress here and now, while building for tomorrow, with limited capacity in time and/or money.

There's a better way we call, Growth by Design.

By designing how growth happens. On purpose.

Numbers first so anxiety quiets down.

Outcomes over features so the story lands.

Small repeatable motions so progress compounds.

The session itself is Socratic. It is not a script.

I ask the questions that surface the real work.

What problem are we actually solving right now.
What proof do we have.
What would make this easy.
What do we stop doing.

What are the next three moves.

Sometimes we pull numbers on screen and turn the target into deal math and lead math.

Sometimes we map the pipeline and circle the exact points where momentum dies.

Sometimes we realize the constraint is capacity, or the story, or pricing, or focus.

The point is clarity you can act on tomorrow.

What we’ve helped founders unlock in these rooms:
• Work the bottom of the funnel so close-ready deals actually close
• Cut noise and choose a single motion that earns the right to scale
• Shift from feature talk to pain-first outcomes that customers buy
• Replace founder-dependent selling with a simple weekly rhythm
• See the true constraint and remove it

Since launching these office hours, about 100 founders have jumped in across sessions. Some rooms are tight and surgical. Some get big and energetic. The result is the same. Clarity, momentum, and a short list that gets done.

Who this is for:
• Founders in the $100K to $2M stretch who want a repeatable revenue engine
• Earlier founders who want to see how operators think
• Later-stage teams who want a sharper motion

𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗲.

𝗪𝗲𝗱𝗻𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟴 • 𝟮:𝟭𝟱–𝟯:𝟰𝟱 𝗣𝗠 𝗣𝗧 • 𝗭𝗼𝗼𝗺

𝗙𝗿𝗲𝗲. 𝟵𝟬 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀. 𝗛𝗶𝗴𝗵 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹.

Busy week at GetFresh Ventures — but today’s panel is one we’ve been looking forward to.

At Frontier Collective, I’ll be moderating a conversation that sits close to what we wrestle with every day as founders and builders:

𝗥𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗢𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗺 — 𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗛𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗴𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗽𝘀𝗲
🗓 Thursday, October 23rd — 11:20 AM
📍 Museum of Vancouver, Joyce Whalley Room

I’ll be joined by three incredible builders who have chosen hope over despair in their work:
• Toni Thai Sterrett (CinePartna) — Building AI tools that democratize filmmaking instead of replacing filmmakers
• Hanae Bezad (Boann Social Impact) — Designing inclusive systems globally, in regions that have already faced collapse
• Dominic Wong (Invoke Co.) — Launched Hootsuite, now building across quantum computing and AI

The question we’re exploring:

How do you stay optimistic when building through crisis?

This isn’t about blind positivity or hustle-as-faith.

It’s about having the courage to design a future worth believing in.

We’ll talk about:
• How technology can reconnect us to purpose instead of alienating us
• Why communities on the margins often lead the way forward
• How building in community sustains optimism differently than building alone

For founders, this panel isn’t about platitudes — it’s about frameworks.

Practical ways to practice hope when the world feels unsteady.

If you’re at Frontier Summit, join us in the Joyce Whalley Room at 11:20 AM.

If you’re not, we’ll share key insights afterward — these are the conversations that shape how we build resilient, human-centered ventures.

What keeps you optimistic when building through uncertainty?

Drop a comment — I’d love to hear your take.

🎟 Last-minute tickets: https://lnkd.in/gMtQbsjM or https://lnkd.in/gtqUyq3h

Tagging Dan Burgar, Natasha Jaswal-Orságovám Megan Lihou, Tessa Clarance, and Arvin M. — thank you for making this possible.

How can we get more Canadian founders on Nasdaq?

A week doesn’t go by where I don’t hear from a Canadian founder lamenting the lack of funding in Canada, and that our government doesn’t fund innovation.

But as Harley Finkelstein said in his post in September, the problem isn’t always the money. 

It’s the process.

Canada already has billions set aside for founders through programs like IRAP and SR&ED — two of the largest non-dilutive innovation funds in the world.

Yet every year, hundreds of millions go unused because of the complexity, delays, and paperwork that sit between a builder and a cheque.

In his Build Canada memo "𝐅𝐢𝐱 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐚'𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐑&𝐃 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐦", Harley called out what so many of us have experienced firsthand:

 - The system is so complicated that it fuels a consulting layer, not innovation.
 - Foreign companies can benefit from Canadian research dollars without leaving lasting value here.
 - And the programs stop short of funding what actually builds companies — the messy middle between prototype and pilot.

That’s where real Canadian innovation either accelerates or dies — and where most of us are forced to choose between survival and scale.

At GetFresh Ventures, we see this gap every day. 

Founders with working products, early traction, and real customer demand — but limited visibility on how to tap IRAP or SR&ED to fund the next step.

So we built a guide:

𝗖𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿’𝘀 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗲𝘁 𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗥𝗔𝗣

(Link in comments)

It breaks down, in founder language:
 - How IRAP actually works — and how to make your proposal fundable.
 - What to show your ITA to get approval faster.
 - How to use the various programs to fund work from R&D to revenue.

It’s long. You can copy the whole thing into an LLM with your business details, and have it tell you what to do. 

Canada doesn’t lack talent or ideas.

We lack access.

If you’re a Canadian founder working hard everyday to build in Canada, Harley’s post and the Cheatsheet is worth reading.

One outlines what needs fixing. 
The other shows how to work the system that already exists.

Both in the comments.

Taplio

Diraj Goel's Linkedin Analytics

Diraj Perkash Goel

Performance ScoreDiraj Perkash Goel's LinkedIn Performance

What is Diraj talking about?

Diraj Perkash Goel's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?