Inventor of Earned Wage Access. Café sidequest. Spent 100+ days at sea. Lent $250k on Craigslist at 16. Tweet fintech, Canada tech, and half-baked thoughts
Calgary, Alberta
Joined November 2014
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Last week, I wrote 2 checks to Canadian founders 🇨🇦
This week, I'd like to write 2 more.
Who's raising?
Wifi ads are a really good example of how incentives drive behaviour and people everywhere just go through the corporate motions.
Some marketer is justifying their job by surfacing metrics that lie
No one actually watches them, but they play, so watch time is high.
Some leader is saying cool without thinking
Marketer sees they can keep doing mediocre work without thinking because their leader doesn't hold a sense of intuition or critical thinking.
Eventually the market believes what they are doing is actually correct because they've lied to themselves for so long
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I once spent 43 days on a fishing boat.
In total, I've spent well over 100 days at sea.
Fishing/harvesting mostly sea urchin, geoduck and sea cucumber. Big in China.
a license holder controls the quota.
The holder employs the fishermen.
The fisherman unloads to a boat that transports it to land
A truck transports it to a factory
A factory processes it and puts it on a plane to Hong Kong
A distributor in Hong Kong sends it to restaurants
A bunch of middlemen, pen and paper, and absolutely ripe for disruption.
I get jacked when I see so-called niche products like this.
we have a winner for the most absurd AI startup ever
this Peter Thiel backed company uses AI robots to stab fish in the brain so they taste better and last up to 3x longer
it's called Shinkei and it modernizes a centuries-old Japanese technique
dozens of Michelin-star restaurants are already lining up to buy the fish
here's how it works:
> the problem is when a fish gets caught, it usually just suffocates on the boat
> that stress floods the meat with hormones and lactic acid, which hurts the flavor and texture
> the old Japanese fix for this was spiking the fish through the brain right after the catch, which stops all that
> but doing it by hand is impractical for most American fishing crews
> so Shinkei built a fridge-sized robot that sits right on the boat's deck
> the crew feeds in a fish and AI identifies the exact species, so it knows exactly where the brain and gills are
> the robot then drives the spike through the brain and cuts near the gills in about 7 seconds
> the fish goes into an ice slurry so the blood drains out
> so the fish doesn't sit there stressing out, and that tasty flavor and texture is preserved
example number 5,392,417 of how AI can be applied to literally anything
ALT A gloved fisherman on a boat feeds a live salmon head-first into the steel intake of a white Shinkei Systems robot, with the ocean behind.
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Last week 🇨🇦
- 0 capital gains tax on up to $15M (QSBS-style)
- 3yr rollover to reinvest exits
- Instant write-off on software/hardware/IP
- SR&ED limit doubled to $6M
I get excited to know how much of a superhuman I've become with AI, but then I get anxious to know the efficiency arbitrage is only going to last for 18 months.
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My wife and I had a son 5 months ago.
We were both uncertain if we wanted him.
Why? We really enjoyed our life and the fear of a new variable disrupting that was very scary.
And the first 2 months into it, we were still uncertain. It felt more like a nuisance than a benefit.
We also lived a life of extremes. Each with 120+ nights per year in a hotel, hiking every weekend, racing cars and a ton of solo time. The relative change was real.
There's a mourning of your old life.
But then the postpartum hormonal extravaganza ends, you settle into the change and adapt to the new.
You realize how incredibly special a child is.
It's difficult to explain until you have one, but I liken it to the gut punch feeling and chemistry you experience with a first love. There's a draw to that person that is more important to you than anything else. And the weirdest part is no one else feels this same yearning.
If you don't have a kid, this might also help you understand how looking at your kid is way different than looking at someone else's... because I really don't care for anyone else's.
But mine? When I'm away for more than 4 hours I catch myself smiling at a photo of him and anxiously anticipating when I get to see him again
You solidify the family unit. And imagine a future together that's much greater than "happy".
Then there's a wonderful realization you can still thread in the parts of your old life that mattered.
Prioritization becomes clear.
My wife and I learned how to work even better together for each other, ourselves and the family.
Could we have been fine without kids? Probably. We're pretty adaptable as humans.
But does the good outweigh the bad and is that worth taking a chance on the regret index? Absolutely. 100x.
It's difficult to explain, but I suppose anything encoded into us over millions of years is.
Seth Rogen says he and his wife are now more grateful than ever that they decided not to have children he’s not afraid to explain why.
He admits they used to question whether they’d made the right decision, but now their conversations have shifted to, “Honestly, thank God we don’t have children.”
His reasoning? They’re in the prime of their lives, understand themselves better than ever, and have the freedom to pursue their careers, enjoy life, and build the kind of relationship they’ve always wanted.
But Seth took it a step further, saying he sees people with children struggling to find the same time for work and personal enjoyment that he and his wife have.
“I seem to get a lot more active enjoyment out of not having kids than anyone I know seems to get out of having kids.”
That statement will probably divide people. Some see raising children as life’s greatest joy, while others believe a fulfilling life doesn’t have to include parenthood.
Do you think Seth has a point, or is there a kind of happiness you can only understand after having children?