Nadia Tatlow is changing sides of the table

In December 2018, Nadia Tatlow was getting ready for a company holiday party when Shift reached a million in annual recurring revenue. The photograph she later shared was taken in her dining room. There are grander settings for a business milestone, but few more appropriate for a company that began as something people were doing around their other work. Before the party, there was a number worth remembering.

Six years later, she used that photograph to mark her departure. Shift had become profitable, been acquired, and gone through a transition under its new ownership. Tatlow had stayed through the handover. The company that had started inside Victoria’s Redbrick had been bought back by Redbrick. Her career had completed a rather productive round trip.

Today, Tatlow is a managing partner at Women’s Equity Lab Victoria, helping other founders from the investor’s side. Her interest in that seat predates her exit. She has been asking a pointed question about the technology industry: when a business succeeds, who gets to own enough of it for that success to change their life?

The city that required an explanation

When Tatlow considered leaving Toronto for Victoria, her friends worried about the move. From Toronto, Vancouver Island apparently looked short on opportunity. The concern is familiar to anyone who has explained a smaller-city career choice to somebody who considers a long commute proof of ambition.

Tatlow’s experience supplied a different answer. At Redbrick, she began doing marketing alongside her existing responsibilities, then moved into marketing management. That work created room to test startup ideas. Victoria’s attraction, in her telling, lay partly in the conviction of people willing to invent their own jobs. A smaller ecosystem could make initiative necessary, and give it somewhere to go.

She had already had practice starting over. Her childhood included international moves and moves across the country; competitive sports helped her find her footing. At Queen’s University, she studied political science and captained varsity cross-country and track teams. She later studied public relations at Humber College. Her route into software leadership ran through communications and marketing, with a runner’s experience of working toward a distant finish.

Eight inboxes, one promising nuisance

Shift took shape inside Redbrick in 2016 around a problem its builders knew personally: too many accounts, calendars and documents scattered across a browser. Tatlow had eight Gmail accounts tied to different ideas. Each promised a new venture; collectively, they offered an excellent demonstration of administrative disorder.

Other projects were being tested at roughly the same time. Shift’s response gave the team something to pursue. The first public launch was hardly dignified: a release at 11:55 p.m., a midnight deadline, and a difficult early morning. But people responded. Customers also wanted more than email. The product’s scope expanded toward the apps and extensions that made up their working day.

That origin helps explain Tatlow’s attention to product-market fit. Her advice to entrepreneurs includes learning how to recognize it and how to weigh customer requests against the size of the available market. A complaint can reveal a business. It can also reveal one person’s very particular preference. Telling those apart is part of the job.

A million dollars, with two different jobs

On December 4, 2019, Shift announced C$1 million in seed financing and Tatlow’s appointment as CEO. She had been its general manager and a member of the founding team. The financing divided evenly: C$500,000 from an investor group led by Panache Ventures, with advisers participating, and C$500,000 in debt financing from Redbrick.

The distinction matters. The headline number combined outside investment with a loan from the organization that had supported the project. The announcement also reported more than 30,000 paying customers. There was a working business behind the new title, with people already paying for a less aggravating desktop.

By May 2020, Shift was approaching a Series A and reporting about $3 million in annual recurring revenue. Tatlow chose to pause the fundraising conversations. Discussions had reached due diligence, though there were no term sheets. Investors were concentrating on existing portfolio companies, while Shift was seeing demand and developing its enterprise offering.

Her calculation was specific: keep building, understand the market better, and return to fundraising with more to offer. Raising money takes attention as well as ownership. Postponing it left more attention for the product. It is a useful complication in a startup story, where a funding announcement is often treated as the event everyone has been working toward.

The productivity CEO who made room for longer meetings

Tatlow’s writing about work contains a proposal guaranteed to cause a small disturbance in a productivity seminar: sometimes the meeting should be longer. In 2021, she argued that people need enough time to understand a project’s purpose and form a contribution. Quick thinkers should not acquire permanent ownership of the discussion simply by being quick.

She described Shift’s Build Docs, strategy documents that recorded objectives, stakeholders and intended audiences. An agenda circulated ahead of time gave participants a chance to prepare. The extra room was supposed to produce decisions people understood, with fewer follow-up interruptions. There was a structure around the conversation, rather than a fond hope that another thirty minutes would improve it.

This is an interesting position for somebody selling software that promises less friction. Saving minutes is easy to advertise. Deciding where to spend them requires judgment. Her argument puts a price on the unfinished meeting: confusion can keep charging interest long after everybody closes the call.

Her approach to hybrid work was similarly concrete. In a 2021 interview, she described remote work from Monday through Wednesday and office days on Thursday and Friday. Coordinating those days mattered: a trip into an empty office offers very little of the collaboration used to justify the trip.

She also described putting reminders in her calendar to recognize people outside formal one-to-ones. The gesture could be coffee, flowers or a funny meme, depending on the person. Recognition worked better when it demonstrated that the manager had actually paid attention. And when a project needed explaining, the person who led it should speak, rather than surrendering the floor to their boss.

Thank you, before the result arrives

Tatlow carried the same interest into her writing about gratitude. She suggested thanking someone at the start of an assignment, expressing confidence in what they would do. The timing was the point. Appreciation could help establish an expectation and a relationship before there was a finished result to applaud.

She had also asked her own team about working arrangements, rather than relying solely on surveys about other companies. In her published account, 85 percent enjoyed working from home most of the time, while 75 percent wanted a mixture of home and office work. Those were findings about her team, useful for making decisions about her team.

There is a pleasing modesty in that scale of investigation. A CEO need not commission a theory of civilization to ask colleagues which parts of their week work well. The answer may be ordinary, and ordinary can be operationally valuable.

Who gets a vote, and who gets a stake?

By 2023, Tatlow was speaking publicly about the distribution of power within technology companies. Counting women in an organization gave only part of the picture. Their location within it mattered: which departments, which decisions, and how much authority over the business itself?

In a Redbrick conversation alongside fellow portfolio CEOs Jeanette Dorazio and Barbara Berry, she drew attention to the gap between representation and control of core business decisions. The point carries a practical challenge for any company displaying a diverse team photograph. Follow the decisions after the photograph is taken.

“We need more female investors.”

Nadia Tatlow, 2023

Her argument about equity went further. More women needed meaningful ownership early enough to participate in the wealth a successful company might create. Women’s Equity Lab had invested in Shift; later, she joined as an investor herself. The relationship allowed her to experience the same organization from both directions, first as a recipient of capital and then as a participant in allocating it.

The lab pools members’ capital and involves them in sourcing companies, evaluating opportunities and voting on investments. Learning happens through participation. For Tatlow, now one of its Victoria managing partners, the work connects the operating experience of a founder with a collective process for supporting other businesses.

The next company need not be her own

Her public life also includes smaller acts of institution-building. At the University of Victoria, she is among the local technology leaders named in the creation of the VicFounders Award, a C$1,500 award intended to improve access to education. It places her alongside other founders in a shared contribution to the city that once required an explanation.

Her present offer to entrepreneurs is practical: help with marketing, operations, growth strategy and fundraising. Outside that work, she describes a life in Victoria involving family, restaurants, travel, hiking and running. Ambition has acquired other appointments in the diary.

The dining-room photograph remains a useful place to end. It catches a milestone before the evening moves on, with years of building still ahead. Now Tatlow can bring those years into somebody else’s early decisions. A founder on one side of the table may be looking for money. Across from them sits someone who remembers what it took to get to the party.