Where things are at now
I've recently started a new job as an Engineering Manager, and if things go well, I should be able to rebuild and start gearing up for some new adventures. That being said, I'm now having to deal with one of the biggest things that I struggle with, which is time management. I honestly think that people downplay this and go all out in the hustle grindset, but the reality is that managing time is critically important since everyone will want your time. We literally sell our time to employers all the time, and when you look at what I actually did over the past year, the thing I did was use my time for me.
What does this mean for Baseweight?
Baseweight is functionally paused. I'm not going to dissolve the corporation yet, but I'm going to see how often I work on it in the weekends, and if I'm still putting some work into it, I'll probably keep it going. I'm needing a better way to keep track of this, because the whole Open Source hacker tendency is to check your GitHub commits and see if you're working, but realistically I've been doing my accounting and taxes on the weekends of the past month and that's not exactly something that shows up on GitHub, nor does consulting calls or spending time assembling data sets and doing annotation.
Any adventures yet?
Honestly, none so far his summer. I haven't even gone on a dayhike in 2025, and I've ridden my bike a handful of times, including one commute to work. Honestly, I feel like I need to train up and lose weight before I head back out and my trapezius still hurts on occasion, and I still have bone spurs. Also, I haven't even done a car camping trip this year because when you're savings are running out, you generally cut things like outdoor adventure. I'll probably do a couple of weekend trips when I can fit them in, but since I've just started this job, I don't really have the time to take off to do some epic adventure yet.
I do plan on taking the family to Iceland during the eclipse in 2026, but that's going to be a massive financial stretch and right now I'm making sure that everything I do book right now is refundable.
Did I give up too soon?
Here's the reality. I'm fucking old. Baseweight was a controlled experiment, and while there's some things that I kind of regret (namely lawyer fees), overall I'm happy I didn't end up taking on any financing that would have made me personally liable for debt. Most failed Canadian startups end up having the founders be in debt $350K due to the fact that the bank is all to willing to loan people money that digs them in a deep hole. There's also the fact that some Canadian angel investors seem don't seem to actually want to fund anything and want founders to beg, which is why Founders fuck off to the Bay Area and get a nice SAFE.
Here's the reality:
- I'm over 40
- I have a mortgage and family to deal with, including a developmentally disabled child
- I have an interesting past
Going to the United States for trips where the parameters are well defined is tricky enough, but going to the Bay Area in the age of Trump to raise capital or to "just check things out" is definitely not something that I'll be able to do until things calm the fuck down a bit, if they ever do. If you're boring enough to be able to do this, then yeah, I'd still recommend moving to the Bay Area to make your money. I do think that this is something that could be overcome by bootstrapping Baseweight instead of going to seek capital right off the bat, but I need some way to bootstrap and get customers, and sadly I have to have a job to do that, so it's a side gig at best.
Startups are a game for the young because failure means living with your parents. Failure doesn't mean losing your house, or having to move to buttfuck nowhere and living in a shack in poverty. That said, every founder talks about how you have to stay healthy and you really can't do that if you're hustling non-stop. It's easy to romanticize and get sucked into the founder mythos of eating ramen, not sleeping, etc, etc, but the fact is that startups are fucking hard, and Vancouver does not have a healthy startup ecosystem. The successful startups are built by people my age who were already wealthy, and if I didn't have the stacks of cash that I made from RSUs and Adobe severance, I wouldn't even have tried.
So, now what?
I see how many hours I throw into Baseweight and see if it can survive me being employed and make forward progress, if not, I fold the thing, recover my losses the best I can and move on. I know that people view taking a job as a bad thing like you failed, but sometimes you have to pay the bills and it's expensive to be full time on a startup that doesn't have the product figured out. The thing is that I wasn't able to incorporate while I was at Adobe (which was one of the reasons I hated working there at the end), and I needed to incorporate to publish apps and gain valuable data on whether things were even possible, because you don't know unless you actually try.