Why SkipTheDishes co-founder Jeff Adamson is stacking his newest startup with ex-Olympians

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Finland was Jeff Adamson’s last shot at wrestling glory. Win there and the five-time national champion, and 2011 Pan Am Games bronze medalist, would punch his ticket to compete for Canada at the 2012 London Olympics. Lose, and the journey was over.

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“I lost to a guy from Poland,” he said. “It was the biggest inflection point in my life.”

The other wrestler wasn’t the better athlete. He wasn’t in better shape. He wasn’t an opponent Adamson should have lost to, but he did, and he came away from the mat with a penetratingly clear understanding as to why.

“I didn’t take enough risks,” he said. “Had I put myself out there, I would have won.”

It was a staggering, life-course altering realization, and Adamson understood, as an amateur athlete staring at the end of his career, that the good sales job with a good salary working for a good company he already had wasn’t going to cut it.

“I knew I needed to take risks,” he said. “And had I not had that experience in Finland, I for sure would not have co-founded Skip.”

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That would be SkipTheDishes Restaurant Services Inc., the Winnipeg-headquartered online food delivery service, with the Saskatchewan roots that Adamson co-founded with four other partners, and which Just Eat Ltd. paid $200 million to acquire in 2016.

What the British online delivery behemoth bought was partly built by a guy who used to roll around on a mat in a wrestling singlet, a guy who didn’t have a clue what a startup was until he actually helped start a very successful one.

Olympians and elite athletes, in general, tend to get typecast as smiling, wholesome motivational speakers, spokespeople and brand ambassadors, and not company builders. But Adamson is building again, and the people he’s hiring to build another winner are people just like himself.

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“There are not a lot of companies that value the character that is built into the athlete’s life experience,” he said. “But we value that — I don’t want to say higher than an MBA — but we put a huge price on it.”

Adamson stuck around SkipTheDishes for a few years after the sale before shoving off to Calgary, where he reunited with fellow Skip alumnus Andrew Chau, as well as Calgary tech veteran, Kris Read. The trio decided to launch Neo Financial, a financial technology outfit that has raised more than $100 million in seed capital, has its own Mastercard and high-interest savings account, and is “just getting started,” Adamson said.

The goal? Disrupt the stodgy Big Five-dominated Canadian banking scene by being a completely different kind of financial institution. Getting the job done requires good people, and the type of individuals Adamson knows best, often without ever having met them, are former elite athletes. People with an intimate understanding of what it means to sweat, suffer and get out of bed when every bone in their body is screaming against it. And then do it again the next day, and the next.

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Perseverance. Grit. Character. Having a sense of purpose, being part of a team, overcoming adversity, chasing the big prize, getting knocked down and picking yourself back up again is all part of the language of elite sport, and something Adamson has embedded into his new company’s recruiting strategy.

Erica Wiebe, a 2016 Olympic wrestling gold medalist, who happens to be mid-MBA at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., is among the recent hires. She joins a company already featuring a former Olympic skeleton racer, a former professional volleyball player, a former national team ski racer, a former national team speedskater and a former CFL all-star and three-time Olympian in bobsleigh, Jesse Lumsden.

Lumsden met Adamson in the fall of 2019 at Peppino, an Italian sandwich joint in Calgary’s Kensington district. Perseverance may be part of an athlete’s makeup, but it is also essential to the DNA in a startup, most of which don’t emerge to become a SkipTheDishes, but fail and die in obscurity. To survive, you have to fight. Athletes get that. They also get that you need to eat.

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On that note, Adamson and Lumsden split three sandwiches — Peppino Joe’s Specials — as they talked about sport, personal growth and building something new.

“I’d always wanted to be a part of building something,” Lumsden said.

He was pushing 40 and done with pushing bobsleds. Prior to meeting Adamson, he had been learning the ropes of the oil and gas industry at a boutique private-equity firm, but the sector was in retreat in 2019 and he was looking for a change.

Fortunately, one of the first calls Adamson made when he initially came to Calgary was to Cara Button at the Canadian Sport Institute. He was interested in meeting athletes in the “after-life” phase of their career. Button had a list of names. Lumsden’s was near the top.

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“My mentor had a saying, ‘You go from the podium to the Porta Potty,’” Adamson said. “A lot of athletes feel as though they are lost at sea, because what does success look like in a career when you are just starting out, and you are working in a team of people that don’t care as much as your previous team did?”

Lumsden cared about bobsleds and would devour hours of Youtube videos, digesting what other competitors did, all in a constant search to get better in a sport where being a few hundredths of a second faster than the next guy is often the difference between winning a medal and finishing in fifth place, which Lumsden did in both the two- and four-man events at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

He is not bitter about falling just short. On the contrary, he “let it fly,” and he still feels as though he is competing now; he just doesn’t need to be hunkered down in a bobsled to achieve the same rush.

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“I don’t feel like that competitive spirit in me had to get hung up with the helmet and cleats,” Lumsden said. “In a startup, I get to channel that competitiveness in a positive way.”

Today, he oversees a sales team of 20 people while the rebel Calgary fintech that hired him has grown from a core group to 500 employees, and counting. The task ahead is daunting, which is part of the fun.

“The big banks are not going to lie down and let us take market share,” Adamson said. “They are going to make our lives hell.”

Hell being a relative term. The ex-wrestler grew up in a hamlet south of Saskatoon. He had a poster on the wall of his childhood bedroom. It read: “Once you have wrestled, everything else in life is easy.”

At 36, having built and sold one startup, and now back to building again, he can’t say he disagrees with the poster’s message.

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“Nothing I have ever done is as difficult as wrestling,” he said, almost sheepishly.

But there are parallels between getting pummelled on a mat and getting pummelled by the market.

The looks the SkipTheDishes co-founders, including Chris and Josh Simair, who are both former university track stars, got when they initially went looking for investors are best described as: “Are you guys nuts?”

Maybe. But they kept at it. Wrestlers, track stars … they don’t quit.

“Having to go through hell as an athlete and continually having to find that motivation to keep going and the challenges you have doing a startup are very similar,” Adamson said.

Take heart, all you job seekers who didn’t compete in elite athletics, but are looking to get into finance. Neo Financial is also seeking artists, musicians, software geniuses, accounting whizzes, anyone who demonstrates that vein of “having gone all out on something,” Adamson said.

“Sports just happens to be the only thing I was OK at. In the early days of a company, you kind of lean on what’s familiar.”

And you take risks.

Financial Post

• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites