Two Life Changing Exits in 14 Months | Peter Hwang

Resources and Links

• Tre'dish: tredish.ca
• The Unstuck Entrepreneur (Substack): unstuckentrepreneur.substack.com
• Alyst Ventures: alystventures.ca
• Peter on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/peter-hwang-venture

Key Timestamps

(01:25) Growing up watching his parents' Baskin-Robbins
(04:47) Why he knew he had to work for himself
(06:29) What actually drove his early ambition
(07:42) Starting Extreme Pita and his first exit at 24
(10:43) Why he keeps building in completely different industries
(12:53) Enwise: the near-IPO that collapsed in 2008
(15:03) The email that changed everything
(16:22) Who showed up when things fell apart
(18:28) What Cindy said when he told her
(20:32) What kept him going through two years of rebuilding
(23:37) How Enwise led directly to Globalfaces
(24:09) Running two companies simultaneously for seven years
(32:01) What separates founders who make it from those who get stuck
(37:07) Two exits in 14 months and the arrival fallacy
(39:53) From 100 emails a day to three
(41:52) How he found his way back to purpose
(45:07) How passion and purpose shifted across three chapters
(46:18) What his dad actually wanted
(47:40) How building businesses built him as a person
(53:47) What he hopes his kids take from watching him

Episode Summary

Peter grew up watching his parents run a Baskin-Robbins franchise every single day for nearly 30 years. Open at 11am, closed at 10pm, seven days a week, including holidays. They were first-generation Korean immigrants who had arrived in Canada with university degrees that didn't transfer, and so they built what they could. They created security for the family. But the business owned their time and their lives. Peter saw that as a kid and made a quiet decision: if he ever built something, it would not own him.

That decision shaped everything that followed.

His first company started at 23, moonlighting from his job at CIBC Finance, sleeping on a futon in the back of a pita shop on weekends. He had his first exit at 24 for $50,000, which felt like a king's ransom. His second company, Easylease, became one of the larger equipment leasing brokerage networks in Canada. Steady, profitable, comfortable. But Peter kept financing entrepreneurs building things with real scale ambition, and the gap between what he was doing and what he wanted to build became too wide. He sold and started again.

His third company, Enwise, nearly went public in 2008 before the financial crisis pulled the financing a month before closing. He was left with $3 million in debt, a double-mortgaged house, friends and family in the business, and a wife six months pregnant with their third child. The co-founders and colleagues jumped ship. The friend who had invested $15,000 peppered him with questions about what he could have done differently. His best friend, a plumber who had invested $50,000 he didn't have, told him he saw how hard he was working and trusted him. His wife Cindy, after a few hours of very emotional conversation, said they came up with nothing and if they had to start over they would be okay. Peter says he probably would not have started his fourth, fifth, and sixth company without that.

He spent two years restructuring Enwise, cutting everything, building commission-only door-to-door sales teams with zero marketing budget. He eventually wound it down. It is the one company in his career that did not survive. But one of the agencies he worked with during that restructuring came back to him a year later with an idea: instead of selling HVAC equipment, they thought they could acquire donors for charities face-to-face. Peter wasn't sure. He explored it anyway.

That became Globalfaces Direct. What started as digitizing the paper forms fundraisers used in the field evolved into a full donor data analytics platform. 30 offices, 1,200 brand ambassadors, clients including UNICEF, the Red Cross, and World Vision. Around the same time, Peter co-founded Newstrike Brands with his brother-in-law, a cannabis company that signed the Toronto Maple Leafs as brand ambassadors, went public, raised $170 million, and was eventually acquired for $263 million. For nearly seven years he ran both companies simultaneously, traveling constantly, never stopping long enough to celebrate any of it.

Globalfaces sold to private equity in 2018. Newstrike was acquired in 2019. Two exits in 14 months, one 8-figure and one 9-figure. He was 45. His email was cut off the day the Newstrike deal closed. He went from 100 emails a day to three, all promotional. And then the emptiness arrived.

Peter describes what followed as the arrival fallacy made real. He had spent his entire career trying to prove himself, to the white doctors and lawyers kids he grew up next to in Mississauga, to the people who doubted him after Enwise, to his parents who had sacrificed everything. The exits were supposed to be the moment of relief and validation. Instead they felt lonely and depressing. The urgency was gone. The identity he had built around solving problems and building things had nowhere to go. He describes it as not feeling the way he thought it was going to feel, at all.

What eventually pulled him back was not a revelation but a question: what actually gives him purpose? What makes him want to wake up? The answer was the same thing it had always been. Figuring things out. Solving real problems. Building something meaningful. He just needed to do it for different reasons this time.

His sixth company is Tre'dish, a grocery platform built to remove the layered middlemen from Canada's food supply chain and make nutritious food more affordable for families. He has put over $2 million of his own money into it. He describes it as the hardest company he has ever built and the one most aligned with what matters to him now. His oldest daughter works with him in the business.

We close on the question of what he hopes his kids will take from watching him. His answer circles back to where the conversation started: his parents, the sacrifice they made, the work ethic they passed down. He does not want his kids to take any of it for granted. The freedom they have exists because someone before them gave everything to create it.

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