How Tulip CEO Ali Asaria Retooled His Business Twice and Landed $100M Investment + MORE Feb 8th

The journey from idea to IPO is a difficult one. In this five-part series, we look at how founders scaled their startups and reached new milestones. 

When Ali Asaria founded Tulip, he was missing one, seemingly critical, thing: a product.

The serial entrepreneur had worked at BlackBerry and founded early e-commerce success story Well.ca. After selling that company, Asaria was looking for his next challenge. He knew he wanted to stay in retail—he had a wealth of experience, the intellectual property from Well.ca and a team of mobile commerce experts on hand—but he had no specific idea of what product to build. So, he did something that would become a hallmark of Tulip’s approach to business: he asked potential customers what they needed.

“We went to the biggest retailers and asked them about their toughest problems. They’d say, ‘Look how badly my stores are running; the software behind them is so old-school,’” Asaria recalls. “We looked at their problems and knew we could solve them really quickly, if they gave us a chance…

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Many retirees have the bulk of their retirement savings in registered retirement savings plans (RRSPs) or similar tax-deferred registered accounts. RRSPs need to be used to buy an annuity or more commonly converted to a registered retirement income fund (RRIF) by Dec. 31 of the year someone turns 71. Required RRIF withdrawals begin the next year, with each withdrawal based on a percentage of the account value. 

Locked-in RRSPs, defined contributions (DC) pensions, and deferred profit sharing plans (DPSPs) all have the same rule requiring conversion at age 71. 

The two big questions for a retiree prior to age 71 are: When should I start withdrawals? And how much should I take out each year?

If we take a simplistic approach to the RRSP drawdown, a sustainable withdrawal rate may be 2% to 5% of the account value. That is, between 2% and 5% of the starting account value may be withdrawn each year with subsequent withdrawals increased each year with inflation for life. There are many asterisks depending on age, life expectancy, investment risk tolerance, investment fees and other factors…