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?
Asian grocery store started by a Taiwanese immigrant and her husband in 1993. named it after their daughters Tina and Tiffany
Almost went bankrupt and then sold it 15 years later for $225M
Canadian btw 🇨🇦
Yes because people are more interested in demonstrating their own moral superiority than examining their shortcomings
Infidelity is very easy to be self righteous about.. even if you've cheated yourself.
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Ya sign me up
We switched 10 people from iPhone to Blue. Weeks later, none of them want their iPhone back.
Introducing Blue: a phone you just talk to. Tell it what you need, and it gets done.
It has all the context, can use every single app, and even triages your notifications.
We built it for people who always have a little too much to do. The ones buried in messages, notifications, and to-dos.
If that's you, get yours today.
Backed by Y Combinator + 70 other VCs & angels.
heyblue.com
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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
