Joe goes to Austin and other news
I'm already more than two months into my job, and I already had to make a business trip to the United States for my employer, this time to Austin, Texas. I've been to Texas before for the Big Android BBQ in Hurst, and while I had a good time overall, I hated how stranded I was, regardless of having a car. I believe that this was mostly due to the Dallas - Fort Worth Metroplex being a traffic disaster and it being impossible to get anywhere due to traffic congestion, esepcially when you're stuck in suburbia becuase the conference organizers picked the venue due to cost and not proximity to anything.
One thing that people have to keep in mind is that it's easier as a person with a job to cross the border into the United States as it is as a "founder", because having a job and a contract and a paycheque in Canada means that you have ties to Canada and suspicion that you're going to come into the US and steal jobs goes away. This is the thing that I get asked about the most when I cross, even when it's to Burning Man. I've never been asked about drugs, or politics, or anything else, simply the whole "OK, are you going to work here?".
So, I had to fly from Vancouver to Calgary, than from Calgary to Austin via WestJet on a codeshare with Delta. While my flight arrived in Calgary on time, it seemed that everyone was arriving in customs and it looked very likely that I was going to miss my flight due to border delays. I then downloaded Mobile Passport Control app on my phone, went to the MPC line, which in Calgary is identical to the NEXUS line and skipped all of that noise. It was a straight forward, quick encounter at the border and I found myself waiting at the gate while most people were flailing.
As for Austin itself, it was oppressively hot and humid. The 35 degree celsius heat and the humidity was like a wall of heat the moment I got off the plane onto the guideway to the airport. I spent most of my time either at work or at the hotel, but I did manage to get out, eat BBQ, do some shopping and some light exploring, but like most work trips, it's cleat that I would have to go to Austin on a personal trip to truly see what it had to offer. Austin definitely had the whole "Keep it weird" vibe of Portland with the bike infrastructure in place, but the complete lack of public transit and the fact that I didn't fly with my bike meant that I was stuck relying on Ubers, which really made me feel isolated.
So, just like the first Trump term, where I was "I'm never going to the United States again" until work summoned me back down in February 2017. In fact, during Trump's first term, I did the following:
- Watched the Solar Eclipse in Oregon
- Visited Big Island in Hawaii
- Went to Google I/O 2018
- Started my AI work with Adobe Sensei, where I'd fly to the Bay Area and get an L1B
So.....yeah, the big difference really is the fact that during the first term of Trump, I had Adobe backing me up, and this time I didn't have a job until recently. That, combined with the new stories about Canadians being abducted and thrown into ICE detention centres definitely scared me as an independent startup founder from going to the United States. Should I have sucked it up and made trips to the Bay Area? Well, my lawyer at the time seemed to think that this was a really bad idea and that I should avoid it, that said, that's literally where all the investment still is, and we can't magically elbows up and bootstrap a startup from nothing.
OK, so you're going to head back to the US again?
Yeah, I'll probably head back to the US again. Self-imposed exile doesn't make sense since Mark Carney and his government are in full apeasesment, and the fear of what could happen at the border may have killed Baseweight just as much as the current economic environment. I'm not a fan of Trump or his politics, and I am aware of how quickly things can shift, but I also don't believe that the 49th parallel is some magic line that will insulate us from these changes.
So, what about Baseweight?
It's been two months and other than filing my T2 for Baseweight where I declared a loss, I haven't done a ton of work on it. It's clear at this point that Baseweight is a consultancy and not a startup that can be backed by VC. I'm probably going to keep it active until the end of the year and see how much time I spend working on it, but unless something changes soon, I'll probably close shop and try and recover what I can out of it.
I'm going to release some applications under Baseweight, but it'll likely to build the brand as a mobile and AI software consulting firm. I'll probably do the third relaunch of Baseweight as a brand this year and blog about the change in direction and keep this mostly as a personal blog.
Anyway, onward and upward!