Wearing two hats: Augur VC and Simply Silicon

No, I don't. Yeah, they're supportive but confused. I think in Canada, the high status thing in Canada to do is to go and secure a really high paying salary job that's locked in. Something where you're making good money for the rest of your life and you lock into it you get a cottage. You spend your time at your cottage. You buy a house, you spend your time at your house. And the path of being an entrepreneur

Hmm.

in Canadian culture is not necessarily treated as a high status thing because it's, know, it's there's a bit of tall poppy syndrome here, right? Yeah, there's risk associated with it. It's like, well, are you sure that's a good idea? You don't want to get out over your skis. Of course, if you look at the history of business and capitalism in the world, getting out over your skis is like 100 % of the value creation is, you know, from people who do that. So I think that my parents were ⁓

Just kidding. Mm-hmm.

you know, probably gave him lot of gray hairs.

Yeah I think like just like any other outlier would do the same for all the day, just try to make sense out of it. This is really brilliant. But then today you're wearing two hats. Like one is a founder and the other is an investor. Which one am I talking to right now?

Both. It's a good question. So yeah, as you point out, like I operate a capital platform. That's the first thing I did when I left law practice was I started Augur VC, which is a capital platform, venture capital, precedency stage investment against a thesis that we called energy AI at the time. Now it's called AI infrastructure. We're pretty early on that. That allowed me and it really gave me a platform to incubate. the company that I now run, Simply Silicon, which is a refined and more pointed operating company version of that thesis that's focused on deploying air-gapped inference networks for major cities around North America.

But they must be one because they are both full-time jobs. Simply Silicon is a whole startup, like Tropper, right, a company. And also the fund, it's not that you have a supportive role. You're one of the leading... people in the fund. And then both of them I wrote like full time too. Like which one is really weighing heavier than the other one? Or where do you feel like, my God, okay, if I need to make a choice, I need to put my resources and intellectual creativity more in this direction. Because also things are long run too, right? Like it's transitional, not every time. It doesn't mean like you're gonna do forever, just like that.