‘Misfit’ comes home to Brandon

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This article was published 06/04/2019 (2512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For Andreas Souvaliotis, this weekend will be a homecoming.

The founder and CEO of Carrot Rewards, an app that rewards people for healthy habits, was back in the Wheat City to speak at Brandon University for a book launch on Friday.

He’s a graduate of the post-secondary institution, having attended after immigrating from Greece 37 years ago.

“It all began here, my real sort of transformation, my Canadianization, my falling in love with inclusion and diversity and all this country stands for, it kind of all began in this place,” Souvaliotis said.

Souvaliotis calls himself a “misfit,” which is also the title of his newly released memoirs. He is gay, on the autism spectrum and an immigrant to Canada, differences he said gave him an advantage in business and in life.

“Even here, this place enjoyed different, everybody here enjoyed that difference in whichever way I was and embraced me and I really felt very hugged. … This feels like coming home.”

In his memoir, Souvaliotis details his time going to university in Brandon. He said in an interview it was an incredibly formative time for him coming here at 18 and thousands of kilometres away from home. His parents wanted him to pursue music, but he wanted to study computer science. Brandon University was seen as a compromise because of its strong music conservatory.

“I was so hungry to be accepted and to belong somewhere, and that’s the beauty of what this little town did to me; it totally embraced me, people noticed me, people liked me, people remember me to this day.”

In the 1980s, the Greek community was very small, forcing Souvaliotis to expand his horizons and integrate with the rest of the city, which he described as being very white and anglo at the time. Despite this, he ran the Greek language school and had a weekly Greek language program on the local television station.

“Had I showed in Toronto, I would probably have ended up immersed myself in the Greek community, I would have been half-adjusted immigrant. When you show up in Brandon that was so anglo, so middle-Canada in that sense, I immersed myself in it very quickly and learned so much about the country that embraced me.”

Being different made him stick out in the city and in his career, but it also made him successful. He said one of his “hard edges” — being autistic — gave him a brain wired for numbers and to see things that could influence people, such as climate change.

He also has “soft edges,” such as being gay, which made him stand out in the business world.

“Even though being gay wouldn’t have been a difference in terms of my career success, it was definitely a differentiator in terms of how I felt. … I empowered a lot of the younger people and a lot of the more junior people in the company to come out behind me and that gave me an incredible amount of fulfillment.”

Souvaliotis said one of the most important things he’s learned to do in life is to embrace change and be different. His advice is to harness it instead of wasting it and letting it go to waste.

“When you figure out what is different about you, just don’t be afraid to talk about it, to think about it, to compare notes with your friends about it and along the way these opportunities might show up.”

With Carrot Rewards, he said, being different allowed him to see the potential in the idea. Canadians are addicted to accumulating reward points, Souvaliotis said, and Carrot helps them do that. It’s cheaper to nudge people in the right direction to living healthier lives than to treat the problems associated with an unhealthy lifestyle.

In the future, all companies will have to do something to make the world a better place to stay afloat. He said consumer and investor trends are favouring businesses that have a positive impact at the same time as making money.

“Millennials no longer want to go work in a company that doesn’t generate impact,” he said. “There’s an enormous shift happening.”

“There’s even a big shift happening around investors, because they’re seeing these dark clouds gathering: ‘I’m not going to invest my money in a tobacco company or a carbon company, because I know that those things will eventually fall apart; I’m going to invest my money in a good company.’”

While he’s since left Brandon to pursue business success in other parts of the country, Souvaliotis said he will always remember the years he spent in Brandon and the lesson he learned by being different in the community.

“This feels like my roots, this is my Canadian roots right here. It has been a very long journey from living in little Brandon, Manitoba, to kind of living and working in downtown Toronto, but somethings just never get erased, so it’s just super special being here.”

» dmay@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @DrewMay_