Ryan Spong
Ryan Spong is an entrepreneur with a history of starting, growing, and selling innovative businesses. In 2010, he invested in Tacofino Cantina, becoming a partner and restauranteur to help grow the business from a single food truck to four trucks and nine brick and mortar locations. In 2013 he joined Vancouver-based food-tech company Foodee as co-founder and CEO. Under his leadership, the company has grown 1125%. Currently, it powers meal ordering to offices of 4,000 corporate partners including Amazon, Facebook, Deloitte and Microsoft, across 12 major North American cities.
In a phone interview, Ryan reflected on his journey from student to CEO, giving advice to Arts students thinking of following in his entrepreneurial footsteps.
Why did you choose to study English at UBC, and what did you enjoy the most about it?
In high school I was really into science, and when I went to UBC, I went into the Bachelor of Sciences program.
In second year, I took organic chemistry—which is a really tough class—and went into the final with an A and came out with a C+ for the course. It really made me question how much I was enjoying and thriving in the program. At the same time, I was taking an English literature class for whatever Arts credits I needed, and had this really great instructor. I had never done well in English, and this teacher showed me that I had a bit of a talent for writing, and writing analytically, even creatively. I had such a good time in that class, and such a horrible time in organic chemistry, that it spurred me to take a year to try more literature classes, more writing, more Arts classes in general. Before I knew it, I’d switched to Arts and was a major in English literature.
At the time, I remember thinking “oh, this is not a great career decision down the road,” but now, as a leader in business, I come back to the written word in my ability to communicate crisply, to parse complex ideas and then develop action plans. I come back to English language, and English literature all day every day.
What I realize in retrospect is you can always specialize in things, go back to school for masters or graduate work when you think more of what you want to do. The BA, at least in my case, was a process of trying to figure out what I was interested in, what I was good at, and getting exposed to as many things as I could. An English literature degree gives you exposure to the most that you could possibly get exposed to in an undergraduate degree. You get tons of history, you get theology, you get art, you get culture through the ages—it all gets written down as time goes on. It gives you massive exposure to things, and you can pick and choose what you want to focus on later in life.
At what point did you find your taste for finance and how did you get into that career with an Arts degree?
I had lots of jobs while I was doing my undergrad to pay for my undergrad. One of the jobs was on a transfer year at the University of Toronto in my then-girlfriend’s mother’s financial planning office. I was doing data entry and helping her with her clients’ data. What I noticed was people would come into her office totally stressed out about their finances, their day, their work, whatever it was. She would sit down and meet with them, talk them through the plan, and they would leave in a totally different mood. Happy, relieved, excited about their future. What I loved about it was that finance—and in fact the stock market and investment banking and all that—it uses two sides of your brain. You get a lot of interacting with people, but it has very quantitative results and impacts. So when I went back to UBC for my last year of school back in Vancouver, I started to take finance courses on the side, and I got my license to trade.
My first job out of my undergrad was actually in the mail room of a stock brokerage in Vancouver. I was licking stamps and envelopes and addressing mail. It was a very busy time in the stock market, two months after I started I was trading accounts and it just went on from there.
Did you face any challenges in launching your career?
I think that the challenge that I’ve had in my career is really figuring out the blend of what nourishes my interest, what feeds the soul, and what feeds the bank account. Finding that cross section is something that’s continually evolved. In an odd way it’s that tension that’s led me to starting and building Tacofino, and it’s also why I’m a co-founder and CEO at a tech company that really focuses on making the lives of both restauranteurs and office managers better.
A lot of students when they graduate get into the mindset of “I’m just going to find a job that pays the bills”. Do you think there’s value in following your passions?
If you follow your passions the money will come, but that’s a privileged way of looking at it. The fact is that you need to find a place to live, you need to eat, you need to pay your student loan down. There’s the real world that’s applying pressure.
I think as a younger person, and rightfully so, because you’ve got student debt and the world is a big scary place, I tended to focus on what fed my bank account first. My advice is that you need to really focus on something that you love and you’re passionate about. You can’t follow those things blindly, you have to have an eye to making a career out of those things, but your guiding light should be what you really enjoy doing.
So if you have an inkling, but you come out and you don’t land that job right away, that perfect job, that’s okay as long as you’re heading in the right direction. You don’t have to consider doing something that gives you a paycheck as selling out. In my case I thought I wanted to be in finance, and I took a job as a temp getting paid $9 an hour. I said, “I want to take any job I can in some kind of finance company,” and then took it from there. Going through a series of small steps in the right direction, that’s the only way you get places.
What advice would you give students or alumni that are entrepreneurially minded and looking to start their own businesses?
My advice is not to become an entrepreneur straight out of university. My advice is, if you have an idea or if you know what it is that you’d like to start for a business, that you go and you get experience on somebody else’s dime for a while. Is that idea working in a startup? Fine, go see how startups are run, but it could be in consulting, in finance. You get to see what a big, mature organization looks like, what professionalism is, you get to learn from a senior manager how to take and develop people in a small team or in a bigger organization. What best practices are. All these things are going to make you a better entrepreneur. Because you really don’t want to come out and pay full price for all these lessons with your own startup. You want to borrow these lessons for free.
The second thing is, what keeps you coming back to entrepreneurship for an entire career is that any time you achieve something, anytime you’ve solved all the problems, I think real entrepreneurs either get bored and complacent, or want to move on to the next challenge. If you’re not in the headspace of “I like tacking challenging problems” then this isn’t the business for you.
Ryan Spong
Ryan Spong is an entrepreneur with a history of starting, growing, and selling innovative businesses. In 2010, he invested in Tacofino Cantina, becoming a partner and restauranteur to help grow the business from a single food truck to four trucks and nine brick and mortar locations. In 2013 he joined Vancouver-based food-tech company Foodee as co-founder and CEO. Under his leadership, the company has grown 1125%. Currently, it powers meal ordering to offices of 4,000 corporate partners including Amazon, Facebook, Deloitte and Microsoft, across 12 major North American cities.
In a phone interview, Ryan reflected on his journey from student to CEO, giving advice to Arts students thinking of following in his entrepreneurial footsteps.
Why did you choose to study English at UBC, and what did you enjoy the most about it?
In high school I was really into science, and when I went to UBC, I went into the Bachelor of Sciences program.
In second year, I took organic chemistry—which is a really tough class—and went into the final with an A and came out with a C+ for the course. It really made me question how much I was enjoying and thriving in the program. At the same time, I was taking an English literature class for whatever Arts credits I needed, and had this really great instructor. I had never done well in English, and this teacher showed me that I had a bit of a talent for writing, and writing analytically, even creatively. I had such a good time in that class, and such a horrible time in organic chemistry, that it spurred me to take a year to try more literature classes, more writing, more Arts classes in general. Before I knew it, I’d switched to Arts and was a major in English literature.
At the time, I remember thinking “oh, this is not a great career decision down the road,” but now, as a leader in business, I come back to the written word in my ability to communicate crisply, to parse complex ideas and then develop action plans. I come back to English language, and English literature all day every day.
What I realize in retrospect is you can always specialize in things, go back to school for masters or graduate work when you think more of what you want to do. The BA, at least in my case, was a process of trying to figure out what I was interested in, what I was good at, and getting exposed to as many things as I could. An English literature degree gives you exposure to the most that you could possibly get exposed to in an undergraduate degree. You get tons of history, you get theology, you get art, you get culture through the ages—it all gets written down as time goes on. It gives you massive exposure to things, and you can pick and choose what you want to focus on later in life.
At what point did you find your taste for finance and how did you get into that career with an Arts degree?
I had lots of jobs while I was doing my undergrad to pay for my undergrad. One of the jobs was on a transfer year at the University of Toronto in my then-girlfriend’s mother’s financial planning office. I was doing data entry and helping her with her clients’ data. What I noticed was people would come into her office totally stressed out about their finances, their day, their work, whatever it was. She would sit down and meet with them, talk them through the plan, and they would leave in a totally different mood. Happy, relieved, excited about their future. What I loved about it was that finance—and in fact the stock market and investment banking and all that—it uses two sides of your brain. You get a lot of interacting with people, but it has very quantitative results and impacts. So when I went back to UBC for my last year of school back in Vancouver, I started to take finance courses on the side, and I got my license to trade.
My first job out of my undergrad was actually in the mail room of a stock brokerage in Vancouver. I was licking stamps and envelopes and addressing mail. It was a very busy time in the stock market, two months after I started I was trading accounts and it just went on from there.
Did you face any challenges in launching your career?
I think that the challenge that I’ve had in my career is really figuring out the blend of what nourishes my interest, what feeds the soul, and what feeds the bank account. Finding that cross section is something that’s continually evolved. In an odd way it’s that tension that’s led me to starting and building Tacofino, and it’s also why I’m a co-founder and CEO at a tech company that really focuses on making the lives of both restauranteurs and office managers better.
A lot of students when they graduate get into the mindset of “I’m just going to find a job that pays the bills”. Do you think there’s value in following your passions?
If you follow your passions the money will come, but that’s a privileged way of looking at it. The fact is that you need to find a place to live, you need to eat, you need to pay your student loan down. There’s the real world that’s applying pressure.
I think as a younger person, and rightfully so, because you’ve got student debt and the world is a big scary place, I tended to focus on what fed my bank account first. My advice is that you need to really focus on something that you love and you’re passionate about. You can’t follow those things blindly, you have to have an eye to making a career out of those things, but your guiding light should be what you really enjoy doing.
So if you have an inkling, but you come out and you don’t land that job right away, that perfect job, that’s okay as long as you’re heading in the right direction. You don’t have to consider doing something that gives you a paycheck as selling out. In my case I thought I wanted to be in finance, and I took a job as a temp getting paid $9 an hour. I said, “I want to take any job I can in some kind of finance company,” and then took it from there. Going through a series of small steps in the right direction, that’s the only way you get places.
What advice would you give students or alumni that are entrepreneurially minded and looking to start their own businesses?
My advice is not to become an entrepreneur straight out of university. My advice is, if you have an idea or if you know what it is that you’d like to start for a business, that you go and you get experience on somebody else’s dime for a while. Is that idea working in a startup? Fine, go see how startups are run, but it could be in consulting, in finance. You get to see what a big, mature organization looks like, what professionalism is, you get to learn from a senior manager how to take and develop people in a small team or in a bigger organization. What best practices are. All these things are going to make you a better entrepreneur. Because you really don’t want to come out and pay full price for all these lessons with your own startup. You want to borrow these lessons for free.
The second thing is, what keeps you coming back to entrepreneurship for an entire career is that any time you achieve something, anytime you’ve solved all the problems, I think real entrepreneurs either get bored and complacent, or want to move on to the next challenge. If you’re not in the headspace of “I like tacking challenging problems” then this isn’t the business for you.
