Work is a relationship, not a transaction.
Platforms that treat workers as interchangeable parts lose workers. We treat shift work like what it actually is: repeated work between people who learn to trust each other.
About ShiftSee
ShiftSee was started on Denman Island, BC, by two people who have spent their lives around shift work — running restaurants, managing crews, watching schools and businesses and dance studios struggle with the same broken problem over and over.
Origin
Every small business owner has the same scar tissue. Someone calls out. You scramble. You beg. You eat the cost. You move on. It happens every week.
Tony Aly has spent 25 years building software on the internet, mostly for big companies (MyLife, Realtor.com, ZipRecruiter). But it was the small businesses in his life — his family's schools, his mother's educational institutions, friends running restaurants in British Columbia, the dance studios his family has spent years inside — that kept showing him the same broken pattern. Staffing tools for small operators in 2026 are basically a group text.
Pat Rousseau has run kitchens and hospitality operations for most of his career. He and Tony are co-founders of Takeout Near You, a restaurant on Vancouver Island, and they spent a year running that business with every off-the-shelf scheduling and staffing tool they could find. Nothing fit. Everything assumed either a big enterprise or an anonymous marketplace.
ShiftSee is what fits.
Where "ShiftSee" comes from
The name reflects what the platform does: it makes the invisible parts of shift work visible. The sub who would have covered the shift if anyone had known to ask. The business around the corner that needs a weekend server. The shifter with a perfect track record who's looking for weekend work. All of it, visible to the people who need it.
Where we're going
We're starting where we live: Vancouver Island. Specifically, the Comox Valley — our home base and the place we know best. By the end of year one, we expect ShiftSee to be the default shift platform across Vancouver Island.
Year two takes us to BC Metro — Vancouver, Surrey, Richmond, the Lower Mainland. Programmatic SEO scales us horizontally across dozens of industries and hundreds of neighborhoods. By month 18, we expect to be the fastest-growing shift platform in British Columbia.
Year three is the LA launch. Tony has deep connections in Los Angeles from his earlier career. California hospitality is 40× the size of BC and underserved by incumbents in the same way small BC businesses are. We'll replicate the density-first playbook that worked on Vancouver Island.
Beyond that, the vision is global — every shift-based business in every city, connected to a verified, reputation-portable workforce. Including the working-tourist scenarios we think are genuinely new: your Vancouver Island pizza chef picking up a weekend shift in Lisbon, your dance instructor teaching a substitute class in New York while on tour.
Values
Platforms that treat workers as interchangeable parts lose workers. We treat shift work like what it actually is: repeated work between people who learn to trust each other.
Temp agencies take 30–40% off the top and the worker never sees the gross rate. We charge 10% on both sides, in public, and the rate shown is the rate paid.
The single café owner. The dance studio with two staff. The cleaning company with a dozen workers. These are the people software has been ignoring. They're who we build for.
Both founders operate real shift businesses. Every feature decision is tested against "does this actually work on a busy Saturday night?"
We don't pretend to be bigger than we are. We don't manufacture social proof. We don't promise what we can't deliver. The product moves fast because it's vibe-coded daily; the company moves carefully because trust, once broken, is hard to rebuild.
The team
Co-founder & CEO
Canadian entrepreneur, 25+ years building and scaling internet businesses. UVA '97, early dev work in ColdFusion, SEO at AltaVista/Inktomi era, leadership roles at MyLife, Realtor.com/Move Inc., and ZipRecruiter. Creator of Root-Indexed Browse Architecture. Lives on Denman Island with his wife Rebecca and two daughters.
Co-founder & Head of Operations
Lifelong hospitality operator. Runs Filberg House in Comox and co-founded Takeout Near You with Tony. Handles every new business onboarding personally. Understands the unsexy realities of shift work better than anyone we know.
Where we work
Tony works out of Denman Island, a small island in the Strait of Georgia accessible by ferry from Vancouver Island. Pat works out of Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, a 20-minute ferry ride and a 10-minute drive away.
ShiftSee is proudly Canadian-founded, building for British Columbia first, and expanding from there. We have a small development team based in Kolkata that handles QA and engineering support.