Mike is the Co-founder and CTO of hi finance, a platform dedicated to the mission that "tuition should never be a barrier to education." A "full-stack" engineer with a background at Verkada and CloudTrucks, he is building the technical infrastructure that matches students with the grants, scholarships, and bursaries they don't have to pay back. Based in Edmonton and born out of the University of Alberta, hi finance has already helped over 2,000 students secure more than $4 million in funding, allowing them to focus on their degrees rather than their debt.
01
Build to learn. Ship fast, learn everything you can, then iterate. We don't spend weeks in design docs - we get something in users' hands and learn from real feedback. If you aren't getting things wrong 70% of the time, you aren't iterating fast enough.
02
The "speed vs quality" dichotomy is false. High quality work today means we can build faster tomorrow instead of maintaining broken things. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
03
We don't wait for others to get started. We don't let "not knowing something" stop us. We happen to the world, the world doesn't happen to us. If our integration partners are slow, we do their job for them or cut them out.
One thing to take away
AI doesn't change industries by making existing players more efficient - it changes industries by enabling entirely new business models. We figured out how to offer great financial advice for dramatically cheaper, which opened up a market (post-secondary students) that big banks ignore. Instead of trying to sell tools to incumbents, we became the competitor.
