Bio

I got the entrepreneurial bug early, running my own lottery in middle school, and progressing to large scale tech businesses after my MBA in the 90’s. The bug damn near killed me, as one idea after another failed, culminating in personal bankruptcy at age 31. Eventually I figured out that I was bipolar, got on the right medication, and life’s been great ever since. The very next company I started was Audiobooks.com, which I sold to RB Media (and they got sold to KKR), resulting in the proverbial and much pursued “exit” a short 13 years later, in 2016. Since then I’ve tried a variety of things, including being a Venture Capitalist - creating the 500 Startups Canada fund. It didn’t take, turns out I like the entrepreneurial side of entrepreneurship, less so the pure investing side. Then I opened a cool speak-easy cocktail bar called Coffee Oysters Champagne in downtown Toronto with a friend. Followed that up with a nice restaurant called Marked in Toronto, just in time for COVID-19. Both places are incredibly popular and highly rated and losing great gobs of cash. I also wrote a book about my life, Zero to Tesla, available on Amazon. What has really grabbed my attention in this phase of my life is philanthropy. I created Nikean Foundation in 2019 to fund mental health research, focusing on novel psychedelic therapies. Starting with psilocybin for eating disorders at Imperial University in London, the foundation is now also funding treatment of PTSD, opiate addiction, depression, end-of-life anxiety and more indications appearing regularly, with a variety of molecules including psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MEO-DMT. This is the greatest fundamental advance in treating mental health in the past fifty years, just in time for the greatest mental health crisis in living memory. Link to me on LinkedIn if you already know me - I don’t like meeting people over the internet.