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Ron Spreeuwenberg of Hi Mama presents Starting up on a Shoestring
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Leading with a Purpose | Ron Spreeuwenberg, Co-founder and CEO of HiMama
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TechTO Summer Social Series: Fireside Chat with Ron Spreeuwenberg
Watch on YouTube ↗Founder Journey ft. Ron Spreeuwenberg
Watch on YouTube ↗First seen on a TechTO stage in 2016. Every TechTO talk is searchable — ask the archive about Ron ↗
In their words
First, confirm you are solving a real problem. Validate that your market timing is right, and conserve cash through discovery and validation. Don't waste eight million dollars advertising something that nobody wants.
Over time as a founder CEO you start to become less of a founder and more of a CEO, and your job becomes board meetings and meetings with the senior leadership team. Those are all good learning experiences, but it's very different — I like rolling up my sleeves and solving problems, and I was starting to get away from that.
If I had to give one piece of advice, it's don't get distracted by all the noise. In the first five years of my company I was just heads down, talking to customers, selling, working with my team. I didn't care about what was in the media, who was raising what money, talking to venture capital.
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Quick answers
Who is Ron Spreeuwenberg?
The co-founder of HiMama, the Toronto childcare app now called Lillio, and CEO of Societ since January 2025. He studied chemical engineering at the University of Waterloo, worked at Deloitte, and did an MBA at Harvard Business School before starting HiMama.
How did HiMama start?
From one conversation. On the Founder Journey stage in January 2026 he described meeting a parent in 2013 who got a handwritten daily report from his son's daycare, couldn't read half of it, and threw it in the bin feeling guilty. Spreeuwenberg then opened the Yellow Pages and cold-called ten daycares to test whether the problem was real.
Why did Ron Spreeuwenberg leave HiMama?
He told TechTO he sold a good chunk of his equity when the company raised its Bain Capital-led Series B and more later, at roughly 10,000 childcare organizations and a couple hundred employees. After ten years the job had shifted from building to board meetings, and he took about a year off before joining Societ.