In my memory it’s always the same picture:
He is young – twenty four – sitting at the black computer table by the wall of his living room. I’m looking at him side-on. He’s silhouetted by the huge window with a gorgeous view of the neighbourhood church. Green trees outside. The sun is shining brightly.
It’s summer. Probably “The Hot Summer”, when our friends G and C came over to hang and see what he was working on. This was at the one-bedroom apartment where he lived on his own for the first time. There was a small fan struggling to hold back the 35 degree heat. It was 20cm in diameter so it was ineffective – it was phenomenally hot and still a good time. He was showing all of us something on the computer screen.
When he built that desktop he used a mini-motherboard, aiming at a small form factor. But at the last step, when it came time to buy the case, only a comically-large one was available. He took it. This compromise grated on him but it was a pragmatic way to finish the build and move on to what he really wanted.
Felix and I really wanted to be millionaires by 30.
We were going to get there by starting a website empire. Many e-commerce businesses at the time had an “affiliate program”. The idea was that you joined and drove visitors to their website – by hook or by crook – and any money those visitors spent with the merchant generated an 8% commission for you. The typical affiliate would select just a few products to promote on their personal blog.
Our business’ premise was more niche: as part of these affiliate programs, some merchants also shared their entire product selection as a “datafeed”. This would allow you to pull all their products and promote them en-masse. Back in 2010, programming skills were rare enough that you could successfully use this datafeed to generate your own e-commerce site, and have it outrank the original merchant on Google. Visitors would come to your “clone” site first, and when they clicked the “buy” button they’d be taken to the original merchant’s site. You’d collect your 8% for anything they bought there.
If you think this business was lucrative then you are mistaken.
A successful cloned site would only make $100 per year. But that could still be profitable if your costs for the site were less then that. Typically just the $10 for domain registration. If you could make 100 websites, 200 websites, 500 websites at scale – then we’re talking real money. This is where I came in.
I had done a proof-of-concept for the idea. Then built a platform that allowed a single person to create the kind of vast network of sites necessary. The only hitch was that – despite the datafeeds giving us all product titles, photos and descriptions – building each site still took manual work.
We’d start by finding an e-commerce merchant with a datafeed AND a site so badly coded that our own clone could outrank them on Google. We’d smooth out all the quirks in the datafeed (each datafeed had its own technical problems. That’s why few affiliates worked with datafeeds.) We’d then classify this list of products into categories – just like what you’d expect from a site’s navigation bar. Our days were spent in this loop of research, building, and in hustling for links to sites by writing articles for syndication.
I took the year off to pursue this idea. I lived off savings from a job I got straight out of school, one at a digital ad network. The first challenge was psychology. Each site took a day to build – how could we keep motivated to build a hundred of them?
The answer was a large Bristol Board with 100 circles drawn on. Each circle would become a website. As we completed one, Felix and I would place a funny sticker in the middle and write the site’s domain underneath.
Slowly, we built out decorcurtains.com, scrapbookstarter.com, beddingforcribs.com and discountboatshoes.com.
As we manually categorized products, Felix became an expert in different types of adhesive tape available on the market (did you know “gaffer’s tape” is the ultimate multi-purpose tape? Way better than duct tape?). I discovered the world of womenswear (if you’re a tall girl, try a “sun dress”. If you like layering, try a “bolero”).
It was a beautiful summer in Toronto. Young and loving the downtown energy, I was going on dates and meeting a whole lot of disinterested women.
And then my love life caught a lucky break. Her name was A. She was clever and beautiful – short, pale, black haired. A was a cool girl – a DJ at CIUT, a university radio station for which I had a soft spot.
You see, CIUT solved a 6-year mystery for me. I was a 10 year-old growing up in the middle east, and one night I was secretly listening to the radio past my bedtime. An unforgettable tune came on. Like a transmission from a futuristic Egyptian civilization. Unfortunately, there was no way to discover the name for this type of music. Frustratingly, over the next years as an immigrant in Canada, I’d hear it often in TV commercials. So close and yet out of reach. Later on, now as a highschooler listening to CIUT in the small hours, they finally put a name to the style: Drum n’ Bass. This opened a door to the music that I loved and to finding my true self. But that’s another story.
A and I kept going on dates. I’d take her to see Delorean. She’d treat me to a Black Angels concert where we hopped outside to share a joint with her coworkers. The Black Angels made sinister music and my heart beat fast (“oh, that weed was definitely laced with something”, A said).
Despite living in a hip market district, A ate all her meals out. “It’s more affordable to do that than to cook your own food!”, was her logic. Felix and I laughed about it. He was shopping at that same market district once a week and knew it was way cheaper to cook at home. He’d rumble with his wire cart 20 minutes there, do a round at his favourite shops, clump that cart down the stairs of the cavernous basement supermarkets in Chinatown. He developed some mean stir-fry recipes.
At night, Felix and I would go out drinking at one of the indie bars in his area. He was one of the early gentrifiers in the West Queen West neighbourhood, so we had a glut of hip hole-in-the-wall places to choose from. It was a time of good rock, good electro, and Cut Copy, Ladyhawke and Radio Dept. were the background music to our days. Walking home from the bar on humid nights – the smell of lilacs lingering in the air far longer than it does in daylight. I will always remember those songs when I think of Felix. The same way you associate a trip abroad with the albums you were obsessed with at the time.
I couldn’t stop looking at A, I was infatuated. But the chemistry was just not there between us: when I asked if I could kiss her for the first time, she was taken aback. “Don’t ask me. Just do it.”
Dear reader, I strongly believe in showing courtesy and giving a woman space. This makes me profoundly unsexy. Over the years I’ve come to understand that, if a woman is ok with this, then that’s a strong indicator of compatibility. A and I stopped dating. I suspected she’d be disappointed in the other men she’d find out there.
Creating the websites every day was boring work. I would maintain our morale by celebrating made-up milestones. From “hey we finished our first website!”, to celebrating the fifth website (“we’re one twentieth of the way there!” to the 30th website being “almost a third of the way there!”. And – of course – the celebration of the 33rd website which marked the actual one-third mark.
As summer turned into fall I was failing at online dating. You see, my problem was that I was 24.
Younger women were looking for a much older man than them. With money and a cool lifestyle.. Say, a 27 year old.
Women my age were looking for a moderately older guy. Someone who’s 27.
Women older than me were definitely looking for someone their own age. A 27 year-old.
There was only one thing for me to do if I ever wanted to find a partner. I had to become 27.
So I lied.
And after a few awkward dates with more mature women – “What do you do for a living?”, umm… I’m a Boy Genius? – I finagled a date with M.
M and I met on the street where my old digital ad network job was. I shook her hand, and quickly followed with: “let’s get out of here, all my old coworkers hang around here and I don’t want to run into any of them.” We went for ‘po boy sandwiches and paid for our own meals. We then went for a walk that ended by lake Ontario. It was nice. M was pretty and quiet. I’ve always thought that the quietest person in a room is often the smartest. And I’ve been on enough bad dates at that point to know that “a nice date” is actually a way-above-average date.
That’s why I asked her out again. And at that second date (lubricated by beer) the conversation flowed. We both loved Star Trek: TNG and had a similar taste in electronic music. She was a Fashion Design student and I imagined her making garish avant-garde nonsense. Like big balloon outfits that engulf a person’s body.
Date number 3 was at Stones’ Place, dancing to some good music and chatting on the couches at this just-slightly-gungy bar. That’s the date when M put together my sisters’ age, the gap between us, and the fact that I was 27 – and smelled a liar liar pants on fire.
I don’t know what went through M’s head when I told her that I was busy “being an entrepreneur” taking two years off work.
It was September. We hit 50 websites. “That’s halfway there baybee”!
Out with M and her friends at an “Asian Fusion” restaurant1, I got a text from A. She’d reconsidered and wanted to see me again. I thought about the alternative timeline here. A choice between someone who’s quiet and slow-burning versus seeing through an unfinished story with someone I was infatuated with. Maybe it wasn’t even a trade-off at all. M and I weren’t exclusive. I loved pursuing multiple options.
I didn’t text back.
Felix and I were submitting our generated sites to online directories. Adding features to the platform so they’d rank higher in Google. We implemented a custom analytics system (we wouldn’t use Google Analytics – can’t let the Big Bear know these sites are all related). The money was trickling in – 73 cents commission paid by hobbypartz.com, $4.95 from fabric.com, $2.2 from undergroundhiphop.com.
In December, we hit the 100 website milestone. Sixteen years later, I don’t remember how we celebrated but we must’ve done so. That year we made $1,300 on expenses of $1,800.
The consolation was that it was money we made out of nothing. And we were building an asset. And it was going to be a future passive income stream.
In 2011, Felix and I stayed “in business” but did not grow our network of sites. I remember tweaking things and experimenting with variations of the designs. All to try and encourage more clicks on the “buy now” button. I could see that we had several new competitors running the same play. Their techniques for ranking were more risky and more effective than ours: creating vast numbers of sites by using “temporary domain” services instead of paying for each domain name.
I was conservative and insisted that we don’t stoop to this level. I also insisted that we avoid putting paid ads on our sites, thinking that we should keep our visitors 100% focused on clicking the “buy” button. I took on Freelance work for extra cash. This side income allowed me to stretch my savings for much longer than I expected.
I had a lot of extra time on my hands and decided to get into coffee as just something to do. I’d frequently go to the hip 3rd-wave cafes that were opening up in Felix’s neighbourhood. Taking a book to read, I’d insist on always ordering an Americano. My logic being that it’s such a simple drink that there was “nowhere to hide” if a barista wasn’t hitting the high notes.
One favourite was a combination menswear and cafe run by 3 friends, each working there part-time. It had kickass Americanos for $2. I called it “Coffee / Clothes”, but M would point out that this wasn’t its actual name. It was just one of the phrases stuck on their window and more catchy than the cafe’s true name: Lost & Found.
My relationship with M was developing slowly. We listened to Miniature Tigers and Com Truise. She introduced me to GRUM. We were seeing each other once a week despite being always free on an entrepreneur’s and student’s schedule. I needed a lot of space away from people.
In April, M invited me to watch the fashion show that served as her program’s graduation. That was the first time I’ve seen any of her designs. The models with her collection were last to go down the runway – a place of honour closing out the show. Her clothes were geometrical, futuristic but flattering. I really liked them!2
That year, I made $5,300 from the websites and freelancing.
Felix and I were restless to make more money. And that meant adding more websites. So early in 2012 I set out to recruit an intern to increase our capacity. I ended up at a “Students For Startups” event hosted by a nearby university. This was a kind of speed-dating event where students in the Entrepreneurship program would talk with founders, and both parties could choose each other for an internship.
There were 8 entrepreneurs and 16 students at the event. And a twist:
Each entrepreneur could only choose one student. Each student could only select one entrepreneur. If you didn’t match then there was no internship.
It was high-stakes, and I had to spot talented students while schmoozing them with a story of why they should do repetitive labour for us on websites that hardly brought in any cash.
There was one student who stood head and shoulders above all the rest. She was clearly ambitious and capable. She already had her own business, making jewellery and selling it online. With her understanding of e-business and my ability to teach her all the digital marketing and tech tricks, the benefits of working together were undeniable.
There was just one complication: I found her very attractive. Both physically and her entrepreneurial streak. Remember, I was going to be a millionaire by 30. We were on the same wavelength. It was going to be the Dream Team. I just knew it in my weaselly little bones.
Dear reader, today I may be wise and a paragon of good behaviour, but at 25 I knew that I couldn’t just keep it professional. So I had to think about the slow-burning relationship I was in, and the exciting possibilities of an alternative path – listen, I wasn’t even doing anything, it was pure optionality, you heard of optionality yeah?
I decided to keep out of trouble.
My choice was the second-strongest student in the room, D. He was a brash guy who talked the talk and had a focus on entrepreneurship that very few in business school have.3 And D chose me as well!
Afterwards, the administration sent me an email: D wasn’t supposed to be in that room. He wasn’t enrolled in the co-op entrepreneurship course at all. They didn’t even know if he even wanted to enter the course. Wow – D had moxie.
D ended up interning for us. I showed him how to organize the datafeeds of thousands of products into categories. And then he went to work. I would send him new work assignments by email. We would meet every two weeks to review his progress.
Surprisingly, D was terrible at his job.
He was slow to populate the sites with products. What’s more, during our meetings he’d constantly pester me with probing questions about my business decisions. Why did I build things this particular way? Why not put advertisements on the websites? How come it takes so long to create each site? Are you reselling these domains as a supplemental income stream?
I had very good reasons for every decision. And here was this student playing Big Business Consultant when he can’t even do his assigned work on time. Sheesh.
D was my first encounter with a rare type of person. I’ve only met two others like him in my life. These people are:
- Terrible at day-to-day execution and require lots of support from others.
- Big visionaries, they explore cutting-edge ideas that push others out of their comfort zone.
- Big gossips – constantly informing you of what others in the organization are working on.
- Politicians who try to influence things at a level they haven’t reached yet.
These people’s qualities match only one role you’d see in a corporation. People in that role do no hands-on work and have to rely on experts for that. Their job is to over-communicate a certain message. They are paid to think ahead and push others to change in uncomfortable directions. That role: CEO.
People like D are born CEOs.
The tragedy is that, despite their innate skills for the top, they still need to climb many rungs of drudgery to earn their place there. Most of them will become casualties of the journey. Unless they are spotted and supported.
D’s co-op period ended. I was dismissive of his advice but Felix was open to it. Felix already had an inkling that my approach was too conservative. Eventually, I ended up implementing all of D’s recommendations. He lit a fire under me. D taught us that the key to our business was volume – standing up new websites as fast as possible. So why were we focusing so much on quality, which was holding us back?!
I recoded the platform so that it would auto-categorize products into “good enough” buckets, and I stopped spending so much time picking the perfect domain name for each site. We created the next 100 websites in a fraction of the time it took us to create the first hundred. We put ads on the sites. Instead of distracting visitors, they doubled revenue.
The business was succeeding. But I was losing interest. I got a contract job an hour and a half away. I’d invited M to move in with me. We were listening to Twin Shadow and Childish Gambino. We even managed to see the first tour of a mysterious Toronto musician before he got globally famous. I had to move my clothes out of the bedroom and into a hallway closet to make space. I’d change frenetically in that hallway before going to work. It was hard to share my home with M. The truth is, I was jealous of Felix. He still had his freedom and I could see the cage coming down on me.
Was life so difficult because of M or would it be equally challenging to live with any other person?
I did a lot of soul searching. I decided that I’d have the same problems living with anyone after I’d tasted life on my own. After all, we’re talking about the guy who needed so much space he’d only see his new girlfriend one day a week.
Living with M, I realized that some things will never change. That they are a permanent part of the deal in having M in my life. At the pace of molasses, this attractive, creative, crazy funny woman kept revealing herself to me. I don’t think that I’ll ever fully know her. And I don’t want to: I still don’t know her birth name. Only the one she chose for herself.
I got a permanent job. And then another. M and I got married. There was less time to do what I wanted and more time spent coordinating, tiptoeing, compromising. But, even with my day job, I could still squeeze in time in the evenings to learn a new programming language. Two months before M was due with our first child,I decided I’d had enough of my consulting job, and went freelance. I’m sure she loved that.
When our son was born I was hustling for customers, looking for another job, and waking up to feed him at 4:30am every day. I hated the demands of fatherhood. I felt like I’d died and left a ghost to walk the earth. Echoing that Bristol Board with the hundred circles, I’d tell myself: “I am seeing the sunrise with my son. This is good. A good experience together”. I cried on the kitchen floor when no one was around.
Time passed and I landed a good position with managerial responsibilities. There was no more learning of programming languages and no more hobby projects. I felt resentful that my time was being swallowed up by responsibilities to others4. I constantly talked about wishing to write up a specific accomplishment at work, if only I had time. Finally, M told me that I’ve been ruminating about this writeup so much that I need to go get it done. She’ll make uninterrupted time for me to work on it. Because of her, I wrote the damn thing. This was my first long piece of writing. And a first step in a journey I can see only in retrospect.
We moved 3 times in 3 years.
When we finally felt like we had a handle on life, we welcomed our daughter into the world. Instead of a hollow ghost I was now an enraged demon.
Throughout the years I thought frequently about Felix.
I would always remember him in that room. I’m watching him side-on in front of that massive window. The room is filled with furniture his mother bought him when he moved out: the black couch, black computer chair, black TV stand, black TV. “Do this for your own children when they move out”, she said. She taught him how to cook basic meals in that first apartment of his. Loved and uncomplicated.
It is now 1am. I passed out while putting our daughter to sleep and woke up again. It’s a daily routine that usually takes an hour. It’s been 7 years now. And 7 years since I slept alone with my wife in our bed. First there was a baby between us. Then a little girl. Then a Big Girl.
It’s 1am and I’m shuffling in groggy with my hair sticking out where it flattened against the mattress. At the dining table, M is sitting with her pottery. If anyone has a more regrettable relationship with sleep than I, it is her. She’s holding a little bisque-fired vase and putting down white glaze. Then pink. I tell her that I am struck by inspiration to write. But if I get on the computer now, I’ll be fucked tomorrow.
“Go for it”, she says. “You don’t have work tomorrow and you can take a midday nap”.
Felix is still twenty four.
I am almost forty.
Not a ghost anymore. M has me loving IVE and Cukak’s remixes through sheer force of repetition.
I am not a demon. Recently, I played Altın Gün for M. But I figured she’d hate it because the singing would annoy her. And I was right! Hah!
I am just an ordinary perpetually irritated man. Going through a mid-life reinvention. With a brain like Swiss Cheese from years of sleep deprivation. My son recently told me his favourite song is The Look.
I sneak time away to write and code in the evening. Parenting is less demanding, but I haven’t grown to like it. It’s like: if you feed me a BIG tablespoon of shit every day and then switch to just a little teaspoon daily, I won’t suddenly start liking the taste of shit.
Felix and I went our separate ways. He’s working on his own projects, never slowed down by responsibility to others. Still listening to hip music. Having coffee in that downtown neighbourhood that’s so different from the sleepy, middle-aged, middle-achieving, mid-town neighbourhood where I live. Nothing ever happens in my neighbourhood. I can’t even get a croissant on a Monday because the local shopkeepers decided it’s now a day of rest.
Do you have a Felix in your life?
I think we all do. We all have a shadow version of ourselves that, as we got middle-aged and weighed down, that version just stayed young and effervescent and kept living life.
I often think about Felix’s freedom.
But my memory plays tricks on me. I never told you about it being so lonely in that apartment that I cried5. I never lashed out at anyone, hungry and angry that they broke my concentration. But that was because there was nobody there but me. Never made it as an entrepreneur. When I think of that time, it’s a Forever Summer. I don’t remember the Winters. I bet they sucked, cooped up indoors with the next boring website that needed building. Cufflinks! Horse Bridles! Vibrating Cockrings!
I think the most honest thing we can do for our Felixes is to dive further into the fantasy. To flesh out the details of their life. Make them concrete.
When I think about Felix’s partner or children, I can’t help but picture a life similar to my own. Because he also wanted children. He wanted a partner. He wouldn’t have stayed in that neighbourhood. And anyways, that place is not the same as it was sixteen years ago.
Felix probably made choices akin to my own. Made compromises. The only alternative I can imagine to compromise, accommodation, negotiation is to never allow yourself to love.
It’s 5:30am now. The sun is beginning to rise.
M had gone to sleep 3 hours ago and I am all alone.
Sometimes I sit there and think that I am lucky. So very very lucky.
I feel it in my weaselly little bones.
