Survival, Relevance, Legacy

Saturday morning, the United States and Israel bombed Iran.

By Sunday, every airport in the Middle East was closed.

By Monday, the US told Americans to leave 15 countries. Through airports that hadn't had a flight in three days.

I watched all of this from my apartment in Toronto. Coffee in hand. Heat on. Cold outside. Completely safe.

Meanwhile, people on Tik Tok are complaining they are completely stuck at Dubai airport, can't get out. No flights plan available in the near future.

Someone I met at a forum last year, stuck in Bahrain with his wife and two kids, trying to book a flight that doesn't exist.

These are people with money. Real money. And they couldn't leave.

I sat there for a long time thinking about that.

Five years ago, I would've been thinking about how to raise a Series B.

I immigrated to Canada at 18. Average family. No trust fund. No connections. No safety net.

I started businesses because the alternative was working for someone else's dream, and I couldn't stomach it.

Somewhere in my early twenties I discovered YC. Got invited to pitch nights. Met people from VC syndicates who made you feel like you were one deal away from everything.

I got hooked.

For three years, I genuinely believed the path was: raise money, scale fast, exit big.

I thought a $60M Series B meant I'd made it.

Get to Series D and the billions show up on paper. That was the game. That was winning.

I'm not embarrassed by it. That's what the world told me success looked like. And for a small circle — Anthropic, OpenAI, the people who already had the network before they had the idea — it still works.

But the circle tightened. And I wasn't in it.

More importantly, I stopped wanting to be.

Here's what changed.

I hired someone two years ago for work that would've taken a team of ten in 2022. One person. With AI tools. Did the whole thing in two weeks.

I watched someone I know shut down a 12-person content studio because three people with ChatGPT were outproducing his entire staff.

I watched another friend raise $4M for a SaaS product that an open-source tool replicated two months later. For free.

Money used to buy you the best talent in the world. That was the whole point of raising it. Talent was the bottleneck. Capital unlocked talent. Talent built the thing.

That equation is breaking.

What $100,000 bought in 2022 versus what it buys today in terms of output — it's not even close. And the gap gets wider every quarter.

By 2030, intelligence will be as cheap as electricity.

By 2035, the idea that you needed millions of dollars to build something meaningful will sound as quaint as the idea that you needed a factory.

The Renaissance had patrons who bought the best artists.

The Industrial Revolution had magnates who bought the best engineers.

The Information Age had VCs who bought the best programmers.

Every era's power currency eventually got commoditized by whatever came next.

I watched it happen. I adjusted.

Not because I'm smarter than anyone else. Because I was paying attention and I didn't have the luxury of ignoring it.

So if money isn't the point anymore — what is?

I sat with this for a long time.

Not as a thought experiment. As a real question with real stakes.

I'm 27. The decisions I make now about what to optimize for will compound for decades.

Three things kept coming back. Not from a book. Not from a podcast. From watching what actually mattered when things got real.

Survival. Relevance. Legacy.

Notice what's missing.

Survival

Most people don't think in terms of survival.

Yeah, life is hard. Inflation. Costs going up. Job market's tough.

But actual survival — will I make it through what's coming — that's not something most people sit with.

I sit with it all the time.

This weekend made it real for millions of people at once.

People in Dubai who built entire lives there — careers, apartments, kids in international schools, golden visas — woke up Saturday to explosions.

By Monday they were boarding military evacuation planes. Celebrating when they landed in Frankfurt like they'd survived something. Because they had.

Their survival wasn't threatened by a bad quarter or a layoff.

It was threatened by geography.

By the assumption that where they lived would stay safe because it had always been safe.

I have a friend who moved to Dubai in 2023. Sold everything in Toronto. Put it all into the move. "Tax-free income, world-class lifestyle, safest city on earth."

On Monday he was in a hotel lobby refreshing flight apps that showed nothing.

That's what dependency looks like when it breaks. It doesn't break slowly. It breaks all at once. On a Saturday morning while kids are going to school.

My version of survival is boring on a normal day.

Multiple income streams instead of one.

Citizenship instead of a visa.

Liquid cash instead of illiquid equity.

A 20-hour work week so I have capacity to move when the world moves fast.

A home in a country that's stable, neutral, and far from the blast radius.

I didn't build this because I predicted a war in Iran.

I built it because the world is entering a period where the people who survive are the ones who built flexibility before they needed it.

And the people who didn't are the ones boarding military planes out of Dubai.

Relevance

A lot of people are rich.

They have the jets. The mansions. The political access. They can buy almost anything.

But ask yourself — when's the last time you cared what they said?

I watch it happen. Someone makes their money, hits their number, and slowly disappears.

They're comfortable. They're set. And year by year, fewer people listen.

Fewer people care. They fade into their beach houses like retirees fading into a sunset.

It's not tragic in the way poverty is tragic. But it's empty. And I think most of them feel it even if they'd never admit it.

Relevance isn't about fame. It's not about follower counts or being known. It's about mattering.

Having a voice. Saying something that makes people stop and think. Being part of the conversation that shapes what happens next.

In a world where 70% of people might be displaced from their current economic role — where AI rewrites the entire relationship between humans and work — having ideas that help people navigate the transition isn't vanity.

It might be the most valuable thing there is.

This weekend, I posted a tweet about Dubai airports. Simple observation. No amount of money can get you a flight out right now.

It got 125,000 likes. Not because I'm special. Because I said something true at the moment people needed to hear it.

That's what relevance feels like. Not manufactured. Not optimized. Just — true. At the right time. In a way that lands.

My essays. My content. The "Own or Be Owned" thesis. None of it is marketing. It's what I actually believe.

And when reality validates it — when the world catches up to something you've been saying for months — that's not a win. That's proof that relevance comes from honesty, not strategy.

The world has no shortage of rich people.

It has a severe shortage of people who see clearly and say what they see.

That gap is where I want to live.

Legacy

This one feels almost silly to write at 27.

But I care about what I leave behind. I just do.

I look at the world and I see too many systems built on dependency. Too many people sleepwalking into displacement.

Too many voices that stay quiet because speaking up is inconvenient or unprofitable.

I don't want to be one of those voices.

When I'm gone — whether that's in 50 years or tomorrow — I want to have left behind something real.

Not a company valuation. Not a portfolio. Values. Principles. Ideas that helped people see the world more clearly and make better decisions about their lives.

I don't know exactly what that looks like yet. A 27-year-old sitting in Toronto during a war probably can't see the full shape of his own legacy. That's fine. It'll get clearer.

But the direction is clear.

Every essay I write. Every conversation I have with a founder who's trying to figure out where to be and what to build. Every time I say something publicly that I believe privately. Every time I choose honesty over convenience.

That's the legacy being built. One decision at a time. Whether anyone notices or not.

The Three Pillars

The old formula was: raise money, build a company, get rich.

The new formula doesn't fit on a pitch deck.

Stay alive through the transition. Remain useful while the world reshapes itself. Leave something behind that was worth the effort.

Survival tells me what to protect.

Relevance tells me what to build.

Legacy tells me why any of it matters beyond my own lifetime.

I came to Canada at 18 with nothing.

Spent three years thinking the answer was venture capital. Spent two more thinking it was revenue and margins.

Today I'm sitting in Toronto. The Middle East is on fire. AI is rewriting every industry I've ever touched. The old playbook is burning alongside everything else.

And for the first time, I'm not anxious about it.

Because the things I care about — surviving the transition, staying relevant through it, and leaving something meaningful behind — those aren't things the world can take from me.

They're not things AI can automate.

They're not things money can buy.

They're mine.

The world changed this weekend. My values didn't.

They just got clearer.