Mike Murchison and the art of answering

Mike Murchison had a peculiar way of preparing to automate customer service. He became a customer service agent. Then he did it again, across seven companies with his co-founder, David Hariri. Before Ada had a product to sell, its founders had calls to answer, emails to clear and customers who expected something more useful than an explanation of how busy everyone was.

The apprenticeship grew out of a problem at Volley, their earlier startup. Growth should have meant more people to learn from. Instead, customers were becoming harder to answer. Murchison, who cared about the connection between a product and the people using it, watched that connection fray. A successful business was acquiring the habit of keeping its own customers at a distance.

There is a certain comic efficiency to this arrangement: spend money attracting people, then organize a department to discourage them from speaking. Murchison thought the contradiction deserved a company. Ada, founded in Toronto in 2016, became his attempt to make growing businesses easier to talk to.

Seven desks before a product

The decision to join other support teams gave Murchison and Hariri a different education from a tour of conference rooms. They worked through inquiries themselves, using the software already available. They learned what capable agents actually did, what customers needed and where the systems got in the way. Their eventual product would have to survive contact with that working day.

The length of the exercise matters. In his account of Ada's beginnings, Murchison describes answering thousands of inquiries manually. This was sustained work, with repetition built in. A founder might spot an interesting problem during a customer interview; handling the queue makes it harder to overlook the boring parts that determine whether a solution is useful.

The ambition also had a practical audience. Support employees needed to be able to use AI without becoming machine learning specialists. Ada's early emphasis on accessible software followed directly from the founders' experience beside those employees. A technically impressive system would accomplish little if the people responsible for customer service could not operate it.

That instruction became a company principle. It also gives Murchison's career a useful organizing idea. He keeps returning to situations in which doing the work changes his understanding of it. The approach requires a willingness to look temporarily less like a chief executive and more like someone learning the job.

The student who went looking for the lab

At the University of Toronto, where he earned his BSc in 2012, Murchison studied cognitive science, psychology and human-computer interaction. His interests sat near the meeting point of people and machines long before Ada turned that meeting point into a business. He has recalled sitting in on Geoffrey Hinton's courses and spending time in engineering professor Steve Mann's lab.

His advice to students has been to use that kind of access. The research, people and opportunities may be close by, but a student still has to walk through the door. The detail is revealing because it gives curiosity an address. For Murchison, learning involved showing up where someone was doing something he wanted to understand.

He has also credited entrepreneur Vicki Saunders, with whom he worked on an earlier company, for teaching him the value of learning through action and believing in people before they believe in themselves. Hariri would become the enduring collaborator in the Ada story. The company emerged from the two founders' shared experience of a problem, followed by their shared willingness to spend time inside it.

A billion-dollar valuation, with the date attached

Recognition arrived while the business was still young. Murchison and Hariri appeared in the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 enterprise technology class, announced in November 2018. The distinction put names and faces to a Toronto startup working on a familiar irritation: getting an answer from a company that already had your money.

In May 2021, Ada announced a US$130 million Series C led by Spark Capital, with participation from Tiger Global and existing investors. The round valued the company at US$1.2 billion. Ada said it had automated more than 1.5 billion customer interactions in 2020. The numbers belong to that period, but they mark how far the founders had travelled from answering inquiries themselves.

For Murchison, growth also created a problem closer to home. A company can improve its customers' conversations while making its own meetings unbearable. Leadership, like customer service, needed a method that could keep working as more people arrived.

Permission to play the rabbit hole card

Murchison has been candid about an early leadership mistake: “I felt like I always had to be right.” He described an executive meeting that went badly, then asking colleagues individually how to improve it. Their feedback helped him change the process. Eventually, meetings were scored so the person running them could learn from the result.

One particularly pleasing intervention was the rabbit hole card. Employees could signal when a discussion had wandered away from its purpose. The physical cards later became more metaphorical, but the permission remained. Few executive accessories have such an honest relationship with the problem they were designed to solve.

At a founder dinner in 2022, he described another adjustment. He had trained himself to pursue difficult problems, but someone encouraged him to consider whether the easier path might sometimes be right. “What if it wasn't hard? What if it was easy?” The question sits neatly beside his appetite for challenge. Difficulty could teach him something; it did not automatically make an approach sensible.

He also urged founders to support one another and share what they were learning. That instinct has an institutional form: Murchison serves on DMZ's advisory council. His work extends into investing, too. On his personal website, he says that alongside his partners at Union, he has invested in more than 50 Canadian founders.

A coach, a meme and a hockey player

As a child, Murchison wanted to play in the NHL. His model was Mario Lemieux, admired for making the people around him better. The adult version of that ambition appears in his account of leadership: the team's improvement is part of the leader's job. It is an appealingly practical inheritance from a childhood sporting dream.

His approach to communicating company goals is less traditional. He has suggested treating them like internet memes: simple enough to repeat, clear enough to travel through the organization without a lengthy explanation. There is some mercy in a business objective that can survive without its accompanying slide deck.

In April 2021, he began a leadership blog to examine what he was learning while Ada grew. Writing offered a way to inspect his own decisions and improve how clearly he communicated. His stated hope was also to help other people lead. The recurring concern is how personal learning becomes something colleagues can use.

“I’m personally motivated to become an exceptional leader.”

Mike Murchison · Leadership Lessons, 2021

The customer still needs the thing done

The AI boom gave Ada new technical possibilities, but Murchison's central question remained recognizable. How much of a customer's problem had actually been solved? An answer can be correct while leaving the person with a considerable amount of work.

By 2023, Ada was introducing ways for its AI to retrieve information from business systems and take action. Murchison encouraged companies to treat AI as an employee that needs feedback and coaching. Buying the software was the beginning of the management task. Teams would need to keep checking its performance and helping it improve.

In his 2026 account of Ada's development, he described the progression from giving instructions to completing tasks and investigating their causes. A refund provides an ordinary example: explaining the procedure leaves the customer to follow it; executing it changes the outcome immediately. The distinction brings the story back to the support desk, where a conversation is only useful if it gets someone somewhere.

Murch, away from the queue

His personal website introduces him by name, then adds that his friends call him Murch. It lists making things, reading and helping other people build among his interests. Those are modest descriptions for activities that have become both his work and the way he spends time around it.

One of his more memorable wishes, shared in 2019, was to take a long transatlantic journey on a cargo ship with books for company. The attraction was the chance to read away from the demands of connected devices. A cargo ship is an unusually committed answer to the problem of notifications. It also suggests how much he values being able to give something his attention.

The experiments continue closer to shore. His public GitHub includes an AI chief of staff project built on Claude Code, intended to help with communications, meeting preparation, relationships and goals. On his website, he also links to Just Enough, a game about context. The chief executive selling AI for work is still making things to explore how people use it.

September 2026 brought another public milestone: Murchison was named among Canada's Top 40 Under 40 honourees. In October, Ada's World Aviation Festival program listed him for a customer experience panel and a roundtable on disrupted journeys. The settings have changed considerably since Volley. The question remains familiar to anyone waiting for a reply: can a business get bigger and still make time for the person asking for help?