Two nights. One lesson neither room planned to teach.

Commerce Toronto and Sales Toronto ran back to back this week. Different industries, different constraints. But the same thing kept surfacing in both rooms.

The founders who build companies that last aren’t the ones with the best playbooks. They’re the ones who know when to throw them out.

🛒 Commerce Toronto

Tuesday night at Rotman School of Management, four founders broke down what it actually costs to build in consumer tech.

Margins that don't make sense on paper, channels that took years to earn, deals that looked right and weren't.

The system isn't broken, it just doesn't care about your mission.

Three things stayed with the room.

Retail rewards what moves, not what's best. Better ingredients mean harder margins. The founders who survived it didn't find a workaround. They built businesses that could outlast it.

Sequence matters more than speed. Farmers markets before grocery chains. DTC before national retail. Years of direct feedback before scaling manufacturing. The founders who got it right didn't skip steps. They used each one to learn what capital can't teach you: what consumers actually buy versus what they say they want.

And the quiet one: the boring problems are the next commerce wins. The gaps nobody wants to touch, trade-in infrastructure, reverse logistics, the stuff sitting in a consumer's garage losing value, are exactly where the market is open.

Thanks to Leila Keshavjee, Julia Kirouac, Josh Guttman, and Ian Slipacoff for the real version of their stories. To Jamil Bhuya and Yash Dave for hosting the evening. And to Rotman School of Management for the space.

📊 Sales Toronto

Where Commerce wrestled with the shelf, Sales Toronto wrestled with the org chart.

Wednesday night at Northeastern University, four revenue leaders answered the same question from four different corners of the org chart: when GTM breaks down, what breaks first?

The answer was consistent across all of them. It's never a people problem. It's a systems problem. The moment sales and marketing are chasing different numbers, you're losing deals you don't even know you're losing.

Two things stayed with the room.

Misalignment is expensive and invisible. Most founders know their revenue functions aren't fully in sync. Few know how to measure what that gap is actually costing them. By the time it shows up in the numbers, it's been bleeding for months.

One source of truth isn't a nice-to-have. Build your plan bottom-up and top-down. Align on one number before you optimize anything. The GTM orgs that survive rapid growth are the ones where sales, marketing, and CS can answer the same question the same way on the same day.

Thanks to Justin Hudon, Miru Gunarajah, Candy Lee, Jason Myers and Bobby Green for a sharp night. To Vasco for presenting and shaping this special edition. And to Northeastern University Toronto Campus for opening their doors with us for the first time.

The talks are dropping on our YouTube channel soon.

Devon Galloway built Vidyard from a Waterloo basement through YC S11 into a company trusted by LinkedIn, Citibank, and Honeywell with over $90M raised. He now runs Garage Capital, a seed fund with 134 companies backed, 10 unicorns, and Groq among its exits. He was our speaker at Together YC back in February.

What the room walked away with that night:

• The moment your core product breaks and nobody notices is actually the most important signal you'll ever get.

• Cap table mistakes made in year one follow you for a decade.

• Seed stage is 100% conviction, zero proof - and that's fine, as long as you know it.

• The hire with the impressive resume who came from a much bigger company will almost always let you down.

Devon got there by showing up. So did every founder in both rooms this week. Together Toronto is where that keeps happening.

Rob Imbeault built Assent from an Ottawa basement to a $1.4B valuation. On May 4 at MaRS, he sits down with Alex Norman to tell the version that doesn't make it into press releases.

JJ Tang grew Rootly 400% year over year after YC S21. Mark Hlady sold TriplePlay to Roblox in 2022. Jocelyne Murphy co-founded Wygo and has become one of the clearest voices for the next generation of Canadian builders.

Doors at 6. Together Toronto is open to everyone.

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