Mike Murchison

Mike Murchison is co-founder and CEO of Ada, a customer-service AI company built to resolve support conversations. He started Ada in 2016 with David Hariri. The name honors Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the 1840s, he told Canadian Family Offices in 2023.

Selling Lawn Care Door to Door in Toronto, Ontario

Murchison was born in Toronto, Ontario. His first business was a neighbourhood lawn-mowing service, and going door to door taught him "how to speak to people and convince them that they could depend on me." He said it was probably then that he began to understand the power of excellent customer service. His grandfather gave him geometric wooden cube puzzles every Christmas, and he still solves them.

He enrolled in international relations at Trinity College at the University of Toronto, choosing it "simply because it was the hardest school to get into," then switched to cognitive science and human-computer interaction. He was, he said, obsessed with making internet search a more human experience.

A Support Backlog at Volley

After university he and Hariri built Volley, an online community where members posted requests for help and got advice from people with relevant experience. "Volley was growing very quickly and we encountered a customer service problem," he said on Accel's podcast. "We couldn't keep up with our customer service demand." They looked for software to fix it and found none, and when they asked other business owners how they handled it, the answer was "We aren't," he told Canadian Family Offices.

So the two went to work as customer service representatives at fast-growing internet companies. They found that 30 per cent or more of questions were simple and repetitive, that agents disliked their tools, and that every company wanted more live chat but could not afford the staff. They then ran the first version of Ada at one of those companies without telling anyone. "No one noticed the difference between the software's responses and from us responding manually," he said.

Turning Support Leaders into Quarterbacks

In a 2023 interview with Adrian Swinscoe he argued that brands should talk to their customers more as they grow, not less. As support teams move from answering tickets to directing and coaching AI, he said, their leaders gain the data other departments need and become "the quarterbacks of the engagement strategy of the future." He told Swinscoe he once thought product people knew the customer best and now believes customer service teams do.

Personal Life

Murchison is married to Anna and runs an angel fund, Union Capital, which he co-founded with Andrew Sider and Andrew Dubowec and which has backed 40 Canadian startups. A distance runner, he was training for the Squamish Ultra Marathon in 2023. "In order to run faster you first have to run slowly," he told Canadian Family Offices.