Heather Reisman, founder and CEO of Indigo Books, revealed something in a podcast last year that conclusively shatters the myth that has been built around her. The interview took place in Montreal as part of the Startup Fest event and was a live recording of the Big Shot podcast by Shopify President Harley Finkelstein and David's Tea founder David Segal. As an aside, the talk was interrupted by a protestor who claimed that Heather "funded the genocide in Palestine":
Excerpt from the Big Shot podcast.
You can see Heather was quite willing to engage, but the other people in the room discouraged it. The heckler is one Yves Engler, who is a veteran activist. You probably assumed he was Arabic, didn't you? Heather countered by saying “The truth is, we fund education for people with no parents.” That would be a simplistic explanation. I put more details about this controversy in appendix below, if you care.
The podcast covered a lot of Heather's origin story. Her business career began when she was a single mother needing to support her two children. She started working at her brother's IT company, learning to code using the Basic programming language. She says she got so much into it, she was dreaming of code. But one day, she got shifted to a receptionist role, so she quit on the spot. She then co-founded an organizational change strategy consulting firm called Paradigm. Then she joined soft-drink bottler Cott when it grew sales from $100m to $900m in three years in the early 90s. Despite this success, there were tensions with the CEO who hired her, Gerry Pencer. For example, because he would tell dirty jokes in meetings and she would go “ballistic”. I see, so she doesn't believe in the Geneva Convention on Locker Room Talk either? She said their values didn’t align, she wasn’t passionate about selling pop, so she walked into Pencer’s office and resigned. That struck me as odd. No one knows women better than me and the only thing they love more than guzzling sugary drinks is men who tell dirty jokes.