From early adopter to early employee

Origin stories. Part 1

Before joining SharpestMinds, I was toiling away in grad school and joining a startup was nowhere near my radar. The world of venture capital and angel investment; startup incubators and accelerators; minimum viable products (MVPs) and indie hacking—it was all invisible to me.

This changed quite rapidly in 2016 when I dropped out of my PhD program. I had no plan at the time. No idea what I would do with my life. I just knew it wasn’t experimental biophysics. Cue existential crisis.

On one of my last days as a PhD student, Edouard Harris came to the lunch room and started pitching his startup. He had recently completed his PhD in the same department. Back then the company was called Yazabi. It wasn’t a mentorship platform, but the mission was similar.

“We’ll teach you data science and get you a job,” said Ed. “Yes, please,” I replied—having only a vague notion of what “data science” actually entailed.

So I joined Yazabi as an early adopter. At the time, it was a Slack community that Ed and his brother Jeremie managed (MVP baby!). They would send us resources for learning Python and data science concepts. We would ask them questions and send them projects for feedback. Meanwhile, the founders were hustling behind the scenes trying to get jobs for me and all the other physicist-turned-data-scientists that signed up for Yazabi.

The first interview they landed me was for a startup in the ideation phase. They were looking for a CEO. “There’s no way I’m qualified for that,” I told them, flabbergasted. But Ed gave me a pep talk and loaned me The Lean Startup.

That book completely changed my outlook—on business, startups, and life. A startup is just an experiment! You don’t need an MBA to start a company! You don’t need a perfect plan and all the answers, you can figure it out as you go. Maybe, just maybe, I could do this.

Well… not quite. The interview was a flop.

My inexperience became obvious to both myself and the interviewer very quickly. But the whole charade had a positive effect on me. I started to see the world through founder’s eyes—seeing startup opportunities and potential MVPs everywhere.

I began to recognize the Lean Startup tactics being deployed at Yazabi and I tried very hard to be a helpful early adopter. One of my early Python projects—a script that would generate Spotify playlists from an artist’s last set list—became part of Yazabi’s curriculum. I was very flattered. I started fantasizing about joining the team.

A couple of months later, Yazabi landed me another opportunity. A robotics startup needed someone to create a ROS package in C++ to interface with MongoDB. I had no experience with any of those things. That made me very anxious and I was ready to decline their offer. But somehow I said yes anyway and took the job.

What followed were some very stressful months during which I had to learn everything as I was building. My imposter syndrome was at an all-time high. My work/life balance at an all-time low. But I learned a ton about software development and about myself—I like to program and I’m pretty good at it.

It was a short contract. Just over two months. Thanks to some open-source software that I was able to reverse engineer, I was able to deliver a working product. There was a chance it would turn into a full-time position. And I would have leaped at the opportunity.

However, soon after that contract ended, I got message from Ed: “Tell me if this is crazy, but would you want to come work for us?” I answered as casually as I could: “Sure, I’m interested.” But, internally, I was beyond stoked.

A month or so later, I met Ed at a co-working space for my first day. That co-working space, ironically, was in the Physics building at the University of Toronto. A building I thought I’d never see again after I dropped out 6 months earlier.