Sometimes you need to leave important parts of your life behind in order to make room for your dream to change and grow. Taking the time to plan and execute properly is extremely important at these critical life junctures. If you take the time to truly understand your dream (what, why, how), then habitually implement a disciplined progression towards it, you will find that you are able to manifest magnificent change in not only your own life, but all of those around you, which at the end of your story is what will make it all worth while.

I’ve spent the last 6 months preparing myself to take the next step in my journey. I’ve thought day in and day out about the intellectual freedom that would come along with the blank canvas that is 2017. I can’t even begin to explain the depth of passion that feels like it is preparing to pour out, onto this canvas, but I can assure you I will enjoy every second of it.

Tonight I intend to raise a glass to all the dreamers, the crazies, the unconventional and the entrepreneurs but I will also toast to the fearful, the conservative, the down and out and especially the procrastinators; 2017 is a blank canvas, an opportunity for you to make aspirations reality. It’s begging you to get off your ass, get to work and paint that canvas.

In 2017 I’m going to paint a new canvas and I cannot wait to share it with you all.

I’m very very proud of everything that Retsly has stood for and promoted within the real estate industry. Retsly is in a very strong place, gaining traction quickly and I believe 2017 will be an amazing year for the business. I’m excited for all of the software that will be built on it and I hope that it will enable others to find their path into real estate tech.

While this was a very difficult decision for me, I feel it is the right decision, at exactly the right time, for the right reasons. You see, in ~6 weeks I’ll be welcoming my first child, a son named Aiden, into the world. I feel an obligation to him like nothing I’ve ever felt and so I must make room and prepare for this awesome responsibility.

Retsly has been an amazing journey but it completely consumed every part of me, with very little left over. I don’t really mean to imply this negatively, rather I see it as simply a symptom of the foundership journey. I greatly appreciate the path I took to get here, but its clear to me that I must take a different path forward.

Every hurdle I jumped on the way to this point has prepared me for this moment and I am proud to be in it. Thank you to all of the people who joined me on this journey and supported my vision over the last 4 years. I hope that you are able to understand this decision to change course and that we’ll raise a glass again soon.

Little did I know that 2 months after that post was published, we would be acquired by arguably the most successful company in North American real estate. We were 10 months old.

Being acquired has been a huge learning experience for me. I want to be absolutely clear that I am extremely grateful for the opportunity that we have been given by our acquiring leadership team. I’m onboard 110% and I have managed to adjust, but I don’t want to pretend like it wasn’t hard for me get there. It was really hard.

Reading that post made me think about my mindset pre-acquisition, during the acquisition and post-acquisition so I decided to write about something I am calling Post Acquisition Stress Disorder.

General James Stockdale once said…

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

I should probably put this in context in case you aren’t familiar with his story. General Stockdale was a fighter pilot for the US in the Vietnam war. On September 9, 1965, he ejected from his Douglas A-4E Skyhawk over North Vietnam. He parachuted into a small village where he was beaten and taken prisoner. He was a prisoner of war for the next 7 years.

I think it is important to critically analyze all outcomes, not just failures but also the wins. In any situation, you can gain a lot by inverting your perspective. Obviously being acquired is nothing like being in a POW camp for 7 years, but what can be assimilated to Stockdale’s quote is the mindset that a POW must be able to adopt in order to succeed at any cost to make it out alive.

This never give up attitude is absolutely critical in start up founders. This quote completely encompasses how I felt about my pre-acquisition mindset. Stay alive, keep moving. I think every founder should adopt this mind set. That said however, this type of ruthless focus can make for a really stressful adjustment period when all the sudden the doors open and you are released from ramen purgatory.

I want to be crystal clear, being acquired was the best thing that happened to Retsly. It came at the perfect time and I know in the end it will be the pivotal decision that not only led to Retsly having a huge impact for online real estate, but also allowed me to solidify my future as an entrepreneur.

That said, being acquired wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

For the ~2 months during the acquisition phase everything was great. It was such a high to be on the cusp of achieving something you worked so hard for. We had a few small celebrations and everyone was really excited. Looking back this was probably the most exciting and fun time of all. We should have celebrated it more and took more pictures. I will always remember cracking champagne on the roof of our rail town office. I’m glad I will always have that photo of the founding team.

The first months post-acquisition were much different. It was really hard for me. All the sudden, it wasn’t my business anymore. I used to feel like I had the final say on just about everything, now things were changing and happening without me even realizing it. During this period, our business shifted from being all about the product to being all about administrative tasks like paying out shareholders and integrating with new processes. My mind constantly raced about what our future would hold. Are they going to live up to their promises? Am I? Why aren’t things getting done as fast as they used to? Who do I contact to solve issue X? Are we going to be able to integrate into their culture?

My co-founder says I have unrealistic expectations, he’s right. I also constantly anticipate things that are out of my control when I should just be living in the moment. I found myself putting so much pressure on myself during this period that every little issue began to snowball and before I knew it, for the first time in 10 years, I started having really intense panic attacks randomly throughout the day. All of this stress almost put me off the rails. I felt completely isolated and started to feel like I could not cope with my stress. After almost a year of complete ownership over my destiny, it was so very scary to think about the lack of control I had that I genuinely felt like I might be better off just moving on to the next thing.

Luckily I got some great advice from people I respect, and also had a really supportive co-founder who could shoulder most of the administrative burden during this time. If it wasn’t for that and my wife’s support I would have ended up doing something I regretted.

In retrospect, I realize now that what I was feeling post-acquisition, could be closely related, on a much lesser scale, to how a soldier suffers from PTSD. I had just spent 10 sleepless months running into walls trying to find a way to survive. All along the way I was dodging the scatter bones of dead startups, some of which were my friends and mentors.

Am I being dramatic? In the real world, yes, yes I am. I’m also doing something I hate to do by romanticizing the bad parts of start up culture. Why do it then? To be honest, it’s really the only explanation I found that helped me rationalize what I was going through. This humble assimilation allowed me to understand and cope with what I am going through.

If you think about it, maybe that is what the General was saying in the first place…

My advice for start ups who going through an acquisition process are…

Get the culture right

This isn’t much different from what they say about building your team and it’s just as critical. You need to be 100% sure that you are aligning your goals with the people you will now report to. You need to make sure you believe in their goals, that they believe in yours and above all else you need to truly believe that they will make you better and together you will win. If you have to shop it around to get a bit of perspective on this, do so. You’ll benefit greatly if you get this right.

Be patient

Sometimes things take time. You have to be patient. My co-founder taught me this. I subscribe to WIN. Want it now, but sometimes you need to be patient and let things come in their own time. Whether it is a term sheet, a potential recruit, unkept promises, or even a shift in mindset. When you force these things you are creating more stress and friction for yourself.

Let go

It’s not your business anymore. The buck doesn’t stop with you, maybe it never did. If you got the culture right, you don’t have to worry about catching every little thing that may fall through the cracks. You decided to work with these people for a reason. Trust them that they can get the job done. Once you get the culture right, you need to let go a little and just focus on being a good leader for your team.

Take a vacation

Chances are you haven’t had one in a while and it’s probably a major reason you are so on edge about everything. If you take a vacation, it will do a lot to get your head right so that when you come back you can begin the adjustment.

Earn out before you burn out

If you keep operating like you did pre-acquisition, you are going to burn out before you earn out. Get familiar with the rest of the company, find ways to connect with people internally so when you need help you can find it. It does your leadership team no favours if you burn yourself out. Pace yourself.

Think about this… a startup looks to maximize value over a short term. A corporate company looks to maximize even more value over a longer term.

Figure out how to adjust your mindset for this. If you go into a large company with the same ruthless, no-sleep, approach that worked for your startup, you are going to have a hard time adjusting, just as I did.

Think about new ideas

Something I found what really helped me get past my issues with losing control over the business was to think about what my next idea might be. I decided fairly quickly that I wasn’t actually going to execute on anything but I did spend a lot of time ideating. Hackathons are a great way to get inspired, and when you are inspired, you will feel relief and realize that regardless of how the next few years go, you always have options.

Talk to your co-founder

I never expressed to him the full story as I’ve written here but he probably knew. Eventually I realized I needed to talk to him more about the little things that were bothering me and focus on developing our relationship, because when it comes down to it, we have to have each others backs now more then ever.

When I did this, things got a lot better. Not talking about little issues creates resentment to the point where you cannot be an effective team and that is how the snowball is made. Avoid the snowball at all costs.

Building a start up is hard. Selling your startup is also hard. Neither are as hard as being a POW in North Vietnam for 7 years, but if you find yourself building mental prisons, always remember what James Stockdale said.

I had added it as an alternative email to gmail and I figured that would do the trick, but no. All I got was an abyss of failed ux telling me that I was logged in with the wrong domain anytime I tried to accept a calendar event.

Anyone with >1 google account has seen this, no biggie. I then started looking inside calendar and plus settings for a place to add it as I did in gmail. Neither of these allowed me to add the email as an alias within the individual service.

Finally I backtracked to the slajax.com google apps admin and realized that the google apps admin was smart enough to add an alias for mail(a)kc.io to my user profile within google apps. I tested it and I could accept invites to that email, so I figured I was getting closer.

People like me are probably some of the worst people to test your software because we are always trying to get into the head of the programmer who wrote it to figure out how to make it do stuff it can’t do. I figured whomever wrote this must have just assumed that because I had mail(a)slajax.com they could alias the same first name on the new domain and that would be all I needed.

In reality I always use one generic email in google apps that has everything catch all’d to it, but I really wanted to use a different name on the new domain for vanity sake. Anyway, we’re on the right path… I think?

I click “add an alias” so I can add kc(a)kc.io - It opens up the ability to add anything *(a)slajax.com but no ability to add something on the aliased domain.

W…T…F…

Now I’m getting mad. Who wrote this thing anyway?

I decided to get a bit creative. What if I change my email address to kc(a)slajax.com?

WHOOOOOA. It worked. Google apps added kc(a)kc.io to my list of account aliases and now I can accept invites that are sent to that gmail alias.

W…T…F…

This is a perfect example of what happens when you build a UX that tries to be too smart. The more you assume what the user wants, the greater the risk of getting further away from what the actually want.

If you asked me how to start a successful business in 5 words I would answer…

build something that has value

That is about as simple as it gets in my mind. The important word there is “value”, which in some circles is synonymous with “capital”. Most people associate value and capital to money which is reinforced in the startup ecosystem by all of the romanticing and tech crunchers who equate getting a big cheque from a prestigious VC as the catalyst for your success.

If you were to ask a successful founder what the catalyst was, I’m willing to bet they would definitely feel great appreciation for such a milestone as a funding event, but I would hope that they would refer to an earlier spark of sustained creativity as the real reason they made it to that funding event in the first place.

Many people think of capital as money, but if we agree that capital is synonymous with value, then we should also agree that value can be built.

Therefore it is my opinion that the most important capital an early stage company has is what they can build. Very often early stage companies do not have money, but they do have creativity, a computer and an ability to solve hard problems which is value that can then be traded for money.

Whether it be a customer, an acquisition or a equity investment, when someone gives you money it is because you built value and they want to own a piece of that value. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the different models that exist to support founders and the one thing that seems relatively obvious to me is that they all exist primarily to secure a piece of value as early as possible in exchange for their support or money. As a symptom of this, I believe that very few are getting it right.

In most cases these supporters push founders to pitch for huge amounts of money before any value has been built. This isn’t by mistake. Many of them will do whatever they can to secure an option in your value as early as possible, just in case you succeed.

You see, it’s a numbers game to them. They win in one of two ways. They either secure a small option across many ventures that have a low chance of generating value, or they secure a large option in the ones that have a relatively high chance.

Knowing that, it would be obvious that these so called supporters are going to look to engage you before you’ve built enough capital to generate counter leverage. This is how they can lock down the maximum share of your value, before you realize it.

If you focus on anything other then increasing your Hack Capital in the early stages of your business you are doing yourself a disservice because the only value you have is what you create.

Suggestions for how to generate the maximum value?

Here are a few things I’ve learned.

Don’t raise money until you make money.

This isn’t the same as bootstrapping your business. Bootstrapping is like blowing on coals to get a bonfire. The supporters I mention above seem to me like they are the same as pouring gas on a stack of wood and hoping for fire. The best approach I’ve seen is to stack a huge pile of wood, get some flames, then add gas.

Everyone should hack

I think the best situation for a young start up is when the entire founding team can contribute to the value being built. Not that business development and sales people don’t offer value, but I truthfully feel they are the gas that you pour on the fire. First the fire wood is collected, the ground work is laid and the spark is started. An engineer can fan the flame to ensure it will scale, and then you add gas. In the early days, having anyone who can’t write code, design or act as a subject matter expert is going to be a huge waste of resources and likely a distraction.

Find advisors, not investors

Having good advisors to help you build something that is future proof is not only a great way to solidify your product but it is also a great gateway to investors, when you need them. Find entrepreneurial people who have experience in your space and may invest in the future. Don’t take money from people early on who can’t provide value beyond money. Early on, the money isn’t what is important, creating value is, apply this rule to the people who advise you as well.

Never leverage strategics too early

This is the kiss of death for value creation. The second you take money or partner with a large strategic you are in their pocket and your entire purpose will start to shift towards their priorities whether you like it or not. They will not be concerned with how you generate the maximum capital overall, they will be motivated by their own priorities and in many cases that means securing the option to buy you so that their competitors cannot engage you. Avoid avoid avoid avoid. Building value means keeping your options open.

Remember, the first 6-12 months of your company are the hardest, the most important, and usually the most fun. Focus on your Hack Capital, build as much value as you can, solve hard problems and you will win.

I’ve been considering retiring slajax.com in favour of something that reflected my actual name a little more accurately and I am really pleased with this domain because it is so short and reflects my initials!

I’ll definitely still be retaining slajax as my primary username for most sites and networks, and I’ll keep forwarding of all urls and email while I slowly move things over to my new home online!

Tech Crunch, Inman, Zillow PR, Retsly

Yay!

So where am I at a full year later? Well, I started a new company called Retsly and things are moving along really really well. We’ve been at it since August and big things are happening which is great.

Anyway, lets keep this one short so I have more to say next time.

I am bipolar II. I say it that way because I don’t see bipolar disorder as something you have. To me it is something you are. For people who aren’t familiar with this form of “mental illness” here is a quick excerpt from Wikipedia:

Bipolar disorder or bipolar affective disorder (historically known as manic-depressive disorder) is a psychiatric diagnosis for a mood disorder in which people experience disruptive mood swings. These encompass a frenzied state known as mania (or hypomania) usually alternated with symptoms of depression. Bipolar disorder is defined by the presence of one or more episodes of abnormally elevated energy levels, cognition, and mood with or without one or more depressive episodes.

The people who know me they might think That makes sense. The honest truth is that if you really know me, then you’ve probably seen the negative results either first hand or indirectly. Especially if you knew me 10 years ago. I can’t lie, there have been times things have gotten really bad for me over the years but the truth is that there have been been excessively positive times as well.

I’m expressing this openly on the internet because I think, particularly in the hacker culture, there is very little said about “mental illness”. I can understand why. In an industry where you are judged for your ability to solve intellectually complex problems, being open about a “mental illness” doesn’t inspire confidence most of the time.

I probably won’t change that but I can at least be honest about my life and hope that someone struggling to understand what is going on with their own situation might learn something about themselves from my personal experiences.

The first time I remember feeling it I was 8. I was playing with kids in the school yard, feeling on top of the world. So very excited, screaming, yelling, chasing and then all the sudden it happened. Some kid said something to me about being selfish and my self worth instantly shattered. I spent the rest of the school year sitting on the side lines by myself hoping someone would come, accept who I am and tell me it was ok and life would go on. That never happened.

Time passed and as I turned into a teenager things got a lot more intense. Probably due to the hormones that were thrown into the mix. By this time it was apparent that something was “wrong”. My parents tried taking me to counselling and they determined I had an anxiety disorder. I was prescribed Paxil. This was my first experience with medication.

I started drumming and became interested in computers so for a little while I was able to maintain. Eventually I started “experimenting” with alcohol and pot like most high schoolers do but I started taking it to the extreme. Everything was like that. I couldn’t do anything without trying to do it harder, better and inherently with more risk then those around me.

I started giving up on things that didn’t satisfy my mania and things went off the rails. Looking back I have no idea why but I had gotten it into my head that I needed to prove myself. I felt I needed to prove that I wasn’t dependent on anyone, that at 16 I could move out, live on my own, make my own money and support myself. High school was a write off for many reasons but this was the main reason. I moved to the city lived in a homeless shelter for a while. I came off Paxil because effectively I was a street kid and couldn’t afford it. I don’t wish that on anyone. I can only describe “The Paxil Flu” as what it must feel like to come off of heroin. It was miserable but eventually it passed and I swore off meds. I eventually got a job at a pita joint and rented my first apartment. I had accomplished my goal, now what? I spent a few more months raging out and barely scraping by and then it happened again. The pit of depression. Everything came crashing down just like before.

My best friends mother was diagnosed with cancer and shortly there after died. I don’t know why it affected me the way it did. Albeit she was like a second mother to me and they were both like family, but I don’t think it was that specifically. I think somewhere deep down I realized how selfish I’d been. I saw how it crushed my mother and suddenly I could hear that kid from the school yard again.

I realized how I’d treated my family, how hard they tried to get through to me, and how stubborn I was. I moved back home and spent the next couple years fighting the cycle of my moods. When I was younger the cycles weren’t so rapid but as I started to become of age, the cycles intensified and the extremes became more familiar. Going to school was a joke. I would skip weeks at a time simply because I couldn’t drag myself out of bed. If I did go to school nothing would be accomplished because my energy levels would be too high to focus on anything that didn’t match my stimulus requirements.

More and more I started to turn to computers as an intellectual challenge that would help me fill the stimulus gap that existed from attending a public school system. I was in a band and eventually became interested in one subject. Entrepreneurship. I would skip every other class of the day and just go see Mr Worthylake for this one class. As sort of a class project I started a concert production “company” (used loosely). Things progressed and before I knew it I was booking bands that I would have only ever heard of on TV and I would “guarantee” them hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars to come to my small town to play music for people. This is when things started going really well for me. I was proud for the first time in my young adult life. I was making money and I felt important among my peers. Looking back I realize that I was always bound to be an entrepreneur. I loved the risk involved. Will people show up? Or will I have to fork over the thousands of dollars in expenses from my own pocket? I had probably a 99% success rate and I now realize that it was one of the most satisfying periods of my young life.

After focusing on just that for a few years I decided I needed a change. The risk didn’t quench my thirst any more so I decided to move to Banff Alberta where a lot of my friends were living. I spent a year there working crappy jobs making just enough to snowboard. It was fun for a bit but it turned out to be the same old crap but in a new place. I eventually was fired from my $6.35/hr job for missing work so I decided to move on. I had no idea where I was going, so I spent a month or so in town at the internet cafe using what little money I had left to help my friends build a website for their band. Then it hit me like a truck. I like computers, I like entrepreneurship. I’ll do that.

I moved to Toronto and took some night courses on programming. I didn’t learn anything because the courses were meant for older people with no experience who were aiming at a career change but they at least validated that I was somewhat decent at what I do on computers. I spent the next 6 years or so working for a variety of places as a developer during the day to mitigate the risk, while trying to build “the next big thing” in the evenings. Things were relatively stable. I found myself able to lock into programming tasks that required intense cognition and mental clarity for long periods of time. I solved some pretty awesome problems and the cycles were becoming more and more obvious.

Then one day out of no where my teenage sister sent me a link and said a few words that would changed my life forever…

“Kyle, I think you are bipolar”

I read the article and instantly a light went on. Holy crap. I am bipolar. I started spending as much time as I could learning about bipolar.

I started trying to hack my mood disorder. I looked for triggers. Things that would invoke my mania as well as shut me down, in both cases without reaching the extremes, something I now think of as a safezone. I found that the spark of a new entrepreneurial idea was without fail the best way to invoke mania which would then allow me to focus completely on really complex problems with relatively little distraction. There were times I would sit down at 5pm to work on an idea and before I knew it, the sun would be coming up and I would have almost no memory of the last 12 hours. It felt like a super power, but it was one I would have to train. I spent many of those years coming up with sparks, executing them and working on pulling myself out of the mania without crashing. None of these things were actually good ideas, but that didn’t matter. I was like the karate kid and bipolar was like Mr Miyagee. I was training for the future. This was a feature, not a bug and I planned to use it to my advantage.

Eventually I moved to Vancouver. I met my amazing wife, bought a house and worked some more full time jobs. Real white picket fence type shit. Things briefly went off the rails about a year before we were married but this time I had trained myself to recognize the patterns and adapt. It was a really pivotal time for me. I did not want to lose the woman I would eventually marry so I went to seek help for the first time in 12 years. My wife eventually told me this was the moment she knew she’d marry me because I was strong enough to put my pride aside in an attempt to save our relationship. The doctor turned out to be a world known specialist in this field. Within 5 minutes or so he was 100% sure that I am bipolar. He prescribed me some Lithium and I went on my way.

I spent 8 months or so on Lithium. I’ll be honest. I felt awesome in a lot of ways once it kicked in. The cycles went away entirely. Things were good but something was still wrong. I started gaining weight and I realized something was missing. The skill that I had been training was no longer affective. When I lost the cycles I also lost my mania. I lost the ability to go long times with relatively strong cognitive focus and my work suffered. I tried everything to get it back but it just wasn’t there. So I made a decision. I came off medication and started training it again.

I began working out a few times a week, eating better and watching my sleeping habits on top of the mental training. The last year is by far the best I’ve felt. Shortly after a good idea actually came to me and I pounced on the opportunity to test my training and prove myself once again. This time I would be proving myself in a way that actually mattered. I would be starting a real business and while there would be risk involved I would mitigate that risk in a way that made rationale sense. I started a company called AppLabz and now a year down the road we are bootstrapped and fully profitable. I also find that I have been able to strengthen my resolve and manage my cycles in a way that I never could before. I’ve never been legitimately happier in my life, but something is STILL missing.

I realize now as I write this and reflect on my life that there is something I have never been able to accept about myself. I love risk. I like to put my balls on the table and take chances. I think I’ve forgotten this because so many people I love are very risk adverse. I can understand why they would look at me and think, he should probably avoid risk because he’s bipolar. The truth is, I love it and I need it to feel alive.

I like to take risks and if I ever hope to truly be at one with the best feature I have been given in this life, I have to embrace that. I lost it somewhere along the lines when I decided to grow up. Now I look back at my passion as a teenager running a promotion company and I realize that was when I felt the most alive. The last 8 years or so I’ve been working these full time jobs for other people, trying to come up with something during my “time off” that would be viable. Well it’s time to stop lying to myself about who I really am.

Today I told my boss I’m leaving my full time job to pursue AppLabz. I am going to stop lying to myself. I am bipolar. I am a hacker. I am an entrepreneur and I love risk.

This realization does not mean that I have beaten my “illness” but the entire point is that I don’t need to beat it. I like to think that I’ve been able to use the hacker way to understand it and eventually engineer it so I can succeed at my life in a way that I am proud of. I often wonder if more people in the hacker community haven’t also experienced a similar battle within themselves. I’m not sure the industry standard lends itself to people being open about this type of thing however I do think that it is very likely that some of the things that make up a great hack-trepreneur can also lend themselves to personality defects or mental “illnesses”.

If you have a “mental illness” it is important to remember that it is only a negative thing if you allow it to be. No matter what people think it is up to you to find what works for you. I found that once I began thinking of bipolar as a feature rather then a bug it all became a lot more clear. I also realized in writing this that I still have a lot to learn about myself, but one thing I know for sure is that I’m not sick. At least I don’t think so. I guess it depends on who you ask.

In the past I’ve received 30 emails in a week from recruiters. These days it’s more like 5-10. In the last 5 years I would estimate I’ve been sent at very least 100 opportunities a year. That’s 500 opportunities I have had the chance to consider. One of these was even a recruiter trying to hire me for the job I quit the day before. Of the rest of the 499 potential opportunities, 1 has lead to a job. It was my first job. In any other industry, providing a service that is 1/500 would speak volumes to the effectiveness of the service. While that may or may not be true I still believe opportunity breeds opportunity so I entertain every email that I get from recruiters.

Even though it’s proved not be effective in my career I still entertain all opportunities. I have come up with a list entitled How to recruit me so that recruiters will know what the best way to approach me is if they truly want to hire me. In the interest of increasing the effectiveness and decreasing the amount of time I spend wasting time with bad third party recruiters I offer this advice and hope you will implement it

If you want to recruit me:

1) Contact me via email first. Do not call my personal phone number during business hours until I explicitly express interest in speaking about the job more.

2) When you contact me via email, provide me full transparency on the opportunity. This builds trust and I only work with people I trust. Include the company name, and whatever job description you have. If I do not know who the company is, I am not likely to pursue your lead as for all I know, it’s the company I am currently working for. If you are a recruitment firm, I will never go to the company directly but I must know who they are before going forward.

3) If you try to pressure me to meet in person or talk on the phone before I validate that I am interested in your opportunity I will not be interested in your opportunity.

4) If we have spoken before or I have spoken to people in your recruitment firm you will get a lot of points for knowing that, referencing it and not duplicating effort.

5) Please make sure you read my Linked In and Resume.

Thank you for reading this. I wish you the best of luck with recruiting me.

Looks like I was featured as “High-quality talent”. At first I thought my profile got blasted out to everyone so I began preparing for an onslaught of ruthless startup recruitment inquiries. But then I realized that Wynne Leung is also from BC. My assumption at that point was that they were using a regional context and they probably did this within all their regions. I posted a few tweets about it…

Did @angellist just feature me in their last email about AL Talent? If so I'm honored. It was the beard wasn't it? screencast.com/t/2pT5P2J7eg— Kyle Campbell (@slajax) August 17, 2012

And our conversation eventually got a response back from the CEO of Angel List confirming:

@slajax @allan_chang @wynwyn you were featured, and it is region targeted.— Naval Ravikant (@naval) August 17, 2012

Pretty cool stuff if you ask me!

Seems like awesome syntax highlighting is taking over all aspects of my life these days!

These articles will talk about all the different stress factors that you will face. Everything from long days to working all night to scale your product because you got slash dotted. It’s almost a rite of passage or a pre-req that you are able to hack all night while dodging every distraction that comes your way and still making morning standup.

Even though these things have a certain bad boy glamour to them that entices young developers, I don’t feel like these are truly the challenges that epitomize startup culture. In truth I feel that this is a misrepresentation of the culture to those who have not yet been able to see for themselves. It’s almost as if we are setting the expectation just so when that next young intern comes in he will feel that he has to be the last one out of the office every night if he wishes to be accepted by his peers. Maybe this is because founders expect more from their troops, maybe not but in either case it’s not the full truth and certainly not the most painful part of a start up in my eyes. Most of that comes with the territory after a few jobs.

So what is? Start ups are a roller coaster. The thing no one tells you is that theme parks are really popular so there are lines. In my mind this is the most challenging part of start up life. Not because waiting in line is physically hard but it requires mental focus and patience while you endure the slow progress that inevitably determines the speed at which you get your next adrenaline fix. After all, the idea of going really fast through a series of loops and possibly puking afterwards is why we are here, I see waiting in line is the trade off.

Maybe I am just a really success oriented person but my favorite part of the start up life is when measurable progress occurs and all those long hours become worth it. You see, the long hours late nights and red bull hangovers are just part of the deal. It doesn’t matter if I work for a start up or a big company, if I want to be successful I will do whatever it takes. I can endure endless hours of late night hacking with relative ease. The truly hard thing to endure in a startup is stagnation.

Ultimately every startup has to buy the ticket before they take the ride on the success coaster. The part most people leave out is how long the lines are when you get there.

Within an hour I had shut them out and restored the box from an earlier back up. I don't use the box for much more then some remote back ups and haven't updated my actual website in 4 years since I moved to Vancouver initially. I'm glad I made the decision last year to give all my hosting clients the boot or else it would have been mega drama.

Either way I'm pretty much abandoning the entire cpanel infrastructure and decided to host this site on github using github pages. It's a pretty slick little set up and entirely hacker friendly once you get it going. Next steps are to get my backups off that server and into dropbox, get my friends website off the server and onto something else and then I'll be able to shut er down completely and just stick with AWS and heroku from here on out.

Check out this awesome band I saw with Russian Circles a few weeks ago called And so I watch you from afar