RU = social selling, surveys, influencer marketing research, sales intelligence, insights

*** Inspiration for this website *** As a kid, my grandfather was pretty well-to-do, and he always had Fortune 500 lists, Robb Report magazines laying around on the coffee tables at his house. We'd watch "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" (with Robin Leach) together on his big-screen TV. I've always been interested in "rich lists", businesses, startup culture, angel investors and learning about different markets. After I quit my main job in 2004, I traveled to 30-ish countries around the world, as a backpacker. I learned so many things about culture, safety, money, language nuances and observing how they do business around the world. Since returning from my trip, I was an IT consultant (programmer) and worked for many CEO/CIO/COO/General Manager-types; so in a sense I was always in at the top, and not the ground floor, like when you work for a regular company you'll get the canned version of reports, and not truely know what's going on at the top. The best companies won't spy on your every movement, but empower you to feel some freedom/autonomy in the company to make things better. Any founder that thinks they're the main reason that their company is successful is a sociopath. It takes a team to build things, and this is why I'm a fair capitalist. I have observed these things from afar my whole life, it takes a bit of luck and a ton of planning and hard work. Your employees will only work as hard for you, as you pay them or whatever "skin in the game" they have to create upside. I believe CEO's and chairpersons of companies are overvalued, some of the undervalued gems know its grassroots ideas that foster innovation and to listen to their staff. Business executives are overpaid, but still deliver great value. In a perfect world, things would be more cooperative, with all employees as shareholders. This was the "Intel-model" (read the story about Fairchild Semiconductor, it's interesting) and much of the Silicon Valley ethos when HP, Xerox were just starting to build up the area. More on this, later.

I've realized that most successful companies are just huge, and inefficient. Many large enterprises (1,000+ employees) push around spreadsheets, do things manually with their giant workforce. The world doesn't need a lot from a huge company, once its established. The legacy, established year, and brand name gets all the attention, money and market share. Scrappy young startups can fill a void, when they find a need/market fit. I've worked for a couple of them. One raised $500K and was spending a lot of money on too many talented people, it just simply ran out of runway before pivoting. Power struggles, different philosophies of how the money should be spent. Visions will vary between leaders, and some leaders have an egalitarian view, or a budgetary view. It's all a mess, a pretty divine and incredible mess if you can make it somewhere with a rockstar team. I learned important things from unique people, met some of the most interesting smart people at this company. You don't meet these people just walking down the street, its a private club. When you travel, and when you join startups it can be life-altering the kinds of information you will learn and things you will recall later in life of the times people shared knowledge with you. Everything takes time, in life. As we continue to age, our wisdom grows. We are young and foolish, and make mistakes. Only to later in life have a clear vision of what went wrong. Maybe that's the point, share knowledge to the next generation. Let these people pave the way for human progress.

I hit rough times personally, broke up with my girlfriend at the time in 2015 and needed several years to rebuild. I got this tiny little 400sqft apartment. I don't need much, in the virtual world of the Internet. I had couch surfed, stayed in a friends attic and in-general tried to survive with little to no money. I met one of my great friends to-this-day from driving food around as a delivery driver. It's a bit humbling, when I saw a person from my college classes, and one of my best friends in high school randomly on the job slinging pizzas. They were probably thinking "what happened to you? you had so much potential, and had the best marks in the class", so it was a wakeup call that I need to be programming, because its what I was chosen to do for my life. Food is a happpy business, I met some great people. You'll be broke, and destroy your vehicle with wear'n'tear, but as you sit around waiting for the "next gig" and contemplating how things work, or observing directly how your city urban planning is structured, what businesses are there, and where... you get to really learn how the world works. I'd recommend "driving" to anyone younger, and not sure about what you wanna do with yourself.

After nearly going bankrupt, I started working for this venture-backed startup that raised nearly $20 million from a major investment bank. The beauty of "having a job/career" is that you're more stable, in a middle-class broke (not even close to rich) kinda way. It afforded me the money I desired to take my son out east to Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax, Cape Breton one summer.. and to Calgary & Banff, Edmonton, Fort McMurray for camping/boating with one of my best friends for another summer. I knew my son (soon) wouldn't be "young forever" and that he's going places. He will have new friends, be ready for post-secondary education and not want to hang out with dad as much anymore. Teenagers just get busy, and you'll see a lot less of them until they get older and desire more time again. Never give up on your kids, just leave them alone for awhile. It's not perfect. They'll relate better to you in the future.

So on the job; I learned a ton about Amazon (AWS) and setting up content delivery platforms, helping a PhD student (and some other smart devs) to build a search engine in Elasticsearch, which was 1,000x faster than its dinosaur-relic predecessor. I didn't like the stock options package, or where the company was headed so I decided to walk out after being harassed (and I wasn't stupid enough to quit) sort of a "virtuous personal strike" (if you will) and was promptly fired after the holidays, what a start to my "midlife crisis" before my 40th birthday. This was another life lesson. Awakened by the fact that you are just a cog-in-the-machine at most companies, and you'll never acquire true experience or wealth but only be making the founders richer, I set a new journey for my life. My parents are dutiful and responsible, and they taught me to always stand up for myself, and my moral principles... no matter what! Honesty, loyalty and integrity are my top 3 "life values" for all situations. I wanted to build personal commerce, decentralized storage/systems/payments web infrastructure, and this is what has driven me to persist beyond past failures and create, or do whatever I can to create & share the information (that I'm so passionate about) learning, and acquired for myself. When you've seen as many things as I've seen by being a freelancer, or "hired gun" you really get to know how the world works. The best way I can share this with you, is through data and my own lists. My inspiration for the Future 500. □

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