Faire’s Chief Architect fell in love with Canada. Now he’s selling his new home to the rest of the world.
Did you know there’s another Canadian-made alternative to Amazon?
Founded in 2017, Faire works to help retailers with physical stores find great products to sell—the types of things you won’t find on Amazon.
“Building Faire, for me, was an opportunity to bring more of this DNA from Silicon Valley to Canada.”
It’s not just the anti-Amazon agenda that connects Shopify and Faire. Shopify invested in Faire in 2023, making the company its preferred wholesale marketplace for Shopify merchants. Both companies also rode a pandemic high that dipped, then stabilized, just in time for a trade war to hit their customer base.
They also have the Canadian connection. In fact, Faire’s office in Toronto and its headquarters in Kitchener-Waterloo used to be Shopify offices.
Headquarters? Isn’t Faire headquartered in San Francisco?
Don’t say that in front of co-founder and chief architect Marcelo Cortes, a Brazilian immigrant who fell in love with Canada and has spent the last 15 years demanding that global tech companies build in his new backyard.
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On this episode of The BetaKit Podcast, Cortes talks about finding a home in Waterloo, how it connected him with Silicon Valley through work at Google and Square, and how he and his co-founders took the lessons of building at globally distributed tech giants and applied them to Faire.
We also talk about how Faire is using AI and its work to help customers navigate tariffs—important stuff.
But the heart of this conversation is the story of a Canadian immigrant trying to merge the Valley’s DNA with what we have here to create something better and new.
So, how exactly did Marcelo Cortes fall in love with Canada?
Let’s dig in.
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The BetaKit Podcast is edited by Darian MacDonald. Feature image is courtesy Faire.