Cliel Schachter had a practical question about a prospective employer: what did its product feel like to the person who needed it? So he downloaded Wonolo, completed the onboarding process and accepted a catering shift at a startup in downtown San Francisco. Before joining the company, he had tried the work it made possible.
There is an appealing economy to that decision. A job interview usually asks a candidate to describe previous experience. Schachter arrived with an experience of the company itself. A platform for finding work had become a way to find out whether he wanted to work on the platform. The exercise gave him concrete material for the interviewing process, beyond the customary exchange of adjectives.
That small episode offers a useful route into the career of Northern Labs’ Toronto-based founder and CEO. His work has crossed camera electronics, mobile analytics, employment marketplaces and venture building. The titles change. A practical question keeps returning: what can you learn by putting yourself inside the system?
A shift before the interview
Schachter joined Wonolo as Head of Engineering in 2018 and later became VP of Engineering, Product & Design. The catering experiment belongs to his account of how he decided to engage with the company. It gave him something concrete to discuss, rather than leaving the conversation at the level of a promising market.
The episode is revealing because the task was ordinary. There was a job to accept and work to finish. A person using an employment app is trying to reach a result beyond the screen. Looking at that whole sequence changes the questions a product leader can ask. Completing a form and completing a day’s work are different kinds of accomplishment.
Seen this way, his trial is also a small experiment in attention. The person delivering lunch and the person designing an app can encounter the same instructions with different concerns. The designer may ask whether the feature behaves correctly. The worker needs to know what happens next. Both questions belong in the room where priorities are decided.
A single shift cannot stand in for every worker’s experience. Its value is more modest and more useful: it gives a leader a place to begin asking informed questions. The customer’s route through a product becomes something experienced, with a beginning and an end, rather than something described on a slide.
The engineer learns another language
His earlier career included camera electronics at Research In Motion, the company behind BlackBerry. He also worked in product management at Kontagent and engineering leadership at Upsight. He studied computer engineering at the University of Waterloo and earned an MBA at the University of Ottawa, graduating from business school in 2012.
Schachter has described the MBA decision as a response to the limits he felt as an individual engineer at BlackBerry. He wanted to understand business well enough to influence decisions. After business school, he moved to the Bay Area. The connection between those choices is straightforward: learning a new vocabulary, then finding somewhere to use it.
There is a familiar difficulty here for anyone who has built something inside a large organization. Technical understanding answers questions about how a system works. Business responsibility introduces questions about whether it should be built, who will use it and how much of the organization’s effort it deserves. A working circuit offers a satisfying answer. A company requires continuing decisions.
“I like to know how things work.”
Cliel Schachter
Read alongside his career, that plain sentence has room for several meanings. A camera is a system. So is a marketplace, where the actions of one group affect the experience of another. A venture studio introduces another layer: the people, resources and decisions that help a company get started. The scale of the question grows while its practical character survives.
A camera has to work in someone’s hand
The camera work left a technical record. Patent US8582000B2 names him, under Yochanan Cliel Manoach Gilbert-Schachter, alongside Marc A. Drader for a composite flash. The invention describes light sources with different colour spectra and control of their relative intensity. In everyday terms, the problem concerns what light a camera produces when it takes a picture.
Another granted patent, US8391702B2, names him with Qian Wang for reduced pre-flash in LED camera devices. Its subject is the camera’s handling of illumination and exposure before the main photograph. A panoramic-image application, US20120268554A1, names Cliel Gilbert-Schachter with Sung Ho Hong and Joshua Lucien Daigle. It addresses guidance while forming a panoramic image.
These are collaborative inventions, and the names beside his matter. They also make the early engineering work unusually tangible. “Technology” is a broad word; deciding how a device lights a scene is a specific problem. The object has to perform under conditions outside the designer’s desk. Someone will hold it, move it and expect a usable result.
That makes an interesting companion to the catering shift. Each puts the finished experience within reach of the person responsible for understanding it. The comparison is an interpretation of his career, rather than a claim that camera design caused his later management habits. It is nevertheless a useful way to read the movement from devices to products.
Twenty people, then thousands of emojis
Northern Labs was founded in 2021. In a February 2022 update, Schachter reported that the company had grown from himself to twenty people over six months. He also announced a partnership with Forte to help build blockchain gaming infrastructure. These are early milestones, with their dates attached, rather than a description of today’s team.
Reported February 2022
His update had a welcome bit of domestic perspective. The company had launched a website to explain its work, he said, though he was still unsure his parents understood it. Anyone who has tried to explain a specialized job across a dinner table will recognize the challenge. A company can have a clear proposition and still require a second helping of explanation.
In a subsequent anniversary post, he thanked thirty-three colleagues and counted thirty-six “Beer and Learn” presentations, roughly 250,000 Slack messages and 3,261 custom emojis. Those figures belong to that retrospective. The emojis are especially pleasing as a detail: a remote organization finding thousands of tiny ways to express itself.
The learning sessions make the account more than a headcount announcement. A team needs occasions to share what it knows. Numbers about presentations and messages give a glimpse of the effort involved in working together when colleagues are apart. They do not measure the quality of every conversation; they make the conversations visible.
The merchandise store had homework
In October 2022, Schachter described Northern Labs’ token-based staff merchandise store. Employees could practice using wallets and signing transactions while ordering company items. He had also built a test app at Upsight so colleagues could use its analytics and marketing tools. Different settings, the same decision to create a practical exercise.
The store is amusing because its purpose is so recognizable. Organizations send people merchandise. People have preferences. Someone must arrange the order. Giving a technical exercise an ordinary job offers a reason to come back to it. The lesson arrives inside a task the team already has, with an outcome people can understand.
That choice also makes learning discussable. An unfamiliar technology can remain vague when every conversation begins with its promise. A transaction gives colleagues a shared event to examine. What did they need to know? Which step made sense? Where did a term require explanation? Questions become easier to locate once there is something specific to do.
The scale is worth noticing. A learning exercise can be small enough to try without requiring anyone to understand an entire industry first. That makes room for an initial attempt, a question and another attempt. In this reading of Schachter’s approach, the useful thing is the chance to learn while doing work that already has a purpose.
A company built around the next practical question
Today, Northern Labs describes itself as a venture studio focused on fintech and digital consumer engagement. Its stated mission is to make entrepreneurship in Canada more accessible and help companies scale. It combines technology expertise, capital and a network, while also working with venture-backed startups on products and platforms.
For Schachter, the move into company building brings the engineering and business sides of his career into the same frame. A venture studio must decide where effort belongs before there is a finished product to inspect. That gives firsthand experience a useful role, while leaving plenty of work for judgment, collaboration and questions that only customers can answer.
The catering shift remains a good opening scene because it is so small. No grand announcement was required. There was a product to try and a task to complete. Schachter’s career invites the reader to take that scale seriously. Before the next decision, get close enough to the work that something about it can surprise you.