Aldo de Jong is leveraging innovation to drive change
Credit to Author: Ramya Ramanathan| Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2023 17:53:56 +0000
Aldo de Jong is on a mission to make the world a better place through innovation and entrepreneurship. With experience in multinational organizations like Meta (formerly the Facebook company) and GE, he has spent most of his career creating and working with leading startups.
Born in the Netherlands, de Jong lived in Spain for over a decade and, in 2016, moved to Canada with his family to establish a North American presence for a company he had co-founded in Barcelona. He soon decided to make Canada home. A father of two kids, in his free time he can be found walking his dog or playing the clarinet with the RCM Latin Jazz band at events across Toronto.
What brought you to Toronto?
I’ve been an entrepreneur seeking to make an impact by making the world better since high school in the Netherlands, where I grew up. Toronto is the best place to be for that. It is the fastest-growing tech hub in North America, and it has great talent coming out of the universities and to the city. I moved here with my family six years ago to continue building the product innovation and strategy firm Claro Partners, a company I co-founded in Barcelona. Since 80 per cent of our work was for American clients, Toronto was the best choice for establishing a hub for serving clients across the US, for many reasons including the political and social climate, the cost of living and ease of immigration for ourselves and future colleagues.
The single most important aspect of Toronto, that is dear to my heart and core to my approach to building companies, is what I call inclusive diversity. Leaders should work for diversity itself to be inclusive, where cultural and other differences between people are sought to be understood and celebrated. This not only makes anyone feel more welcome, but it also fosters a work environment that is more enriching, creative and productive!
What were a couple of challenges?
Making new friends was a key challenge. As a newcomer, it is very important to build a strong circle of friends. The welcoming attitude of Canadians to pay it forward, watching the cherry blossoms, bringing us to do pumpkin and apple picking with them, and inviting us for brunch helped a lot. The Internations.org community [a website connecting expats] has been great as well. This is where I made most of my new best friends and it’s also how I met my new love and partner for life!
Another challenge was finding good and reasonably priced services, like banks and telecoms, since there’s little competition leading to sub-par services compared to what I was used to in Europe. In real estate I was lucky to contribute to changing this, serving as the CEO of Justo.ca for a couple of years to deliver the best-rated service in the industry for half of the price.
How did your kids manage the transition?
The transition was quite easy for my children, who were eight and four years old when we moved here from Spain as they quickly made friends at their school. After only seven weeks of living in Canada, my daughter, when asked by my mother whether she felt Canadian, Dutch or Spanish, said “Canadian, obviously, grandma!”. The funny thing is that a couple of months later I started feeling the same. Even though I lived in Spain for close to 15 years, I always was the “guiri” there, which is a term they use for foreigners, a bit like “gringo”.
What are you working on?
I am one of the co-founders and the CEO of Paddio. ca, a climate-fintech company. We finance and facilitate climate retrofits for homes, to help homeowners to reduce their energy bills and their carbon emissions by replacing the fossil fuel heating system with an electrical heat pump and improving the insulation, for example. With many different providers and government rebates, it’s complex to manage and finance, which is what we do, free of charge to the homeowner!
What keeps you going when things are tough?
What motivates me most is to see people grow. That’s why I focus my leadership on empowering people working with me to grow faster than they imagine possible. This leads to great results from a high level of motivation and engagement as well as an organization that grows in capabilities.
What is your advice for newcomers?
Get out there doing whatever activity you like doing to meet people and make friends. Do this at least once per week.
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