About Me

OMD in <10 mins:

Officially: I studied accounting and classics (Greco-Roman history) at university. Audited investment banks at KPMG. Collected the CPA, CA accounting designation. Made models for miners, banks, gov’t, utilities, startups, etc… as a management consultant at Deloitte. Researched global equities as a value investor at Mawer Investment Management. Set a couple junior world records and won a junior world championship as a powerlifter.

OMD Venvtures was born from trying to mix my love for exploring humanity, investing, and self-improvement. I’ve written hundreds of essays, started a couple of podcasts, worked for startups, met hundreds in the tech world, interviewed for dozens of jobs from VC, COO, CPO, CoS to everything in between and I’m still exploring.

This is where I’m spending my time now.

My colleagues/bosses started calling me “Old Man Dan” because I read books on Friday nights, didn’t drink, slept early, spoke directly, avoided social media, and stuck to routines. I liked the reference so built my life around the idea.

Lived in Seoul, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto. I like to travel. Two days of pictures in a city isn’t travelling.

My best lifts - Squat: 450lbs, Bench: 275lbs, Deadlift: 525lbs, @ BW: 144lbs

Personality ENTJ/ENFJ, Type 8w7. It says I’m extremely disagreeable, love intimate conversation, think most conventions should be challenged, and try to live boring days so I can have exciting years.

I’m just trying to master the self, help others do the same, and possibly contribute to building organizations that incentivize such utopian views.


If this doesn’t turn you off, then feel free to read on.


OMD Journey: My Reflection (>10mins)

2012 - 2018 (All The Jobs):

When I was in university, the three career options for business grads were accounting, consulting, or finance. Unintentionally, I ended up working in all three.

I started as an accountant at KPMG. It beat being a bookkeeper for a not-for-profit and working sales (glorified cold caller) for a media startup one summer. The job really brought out everything from ambition, intensity, and my inner bastard.

Sneaking in. Grades were important but I’m quite sure I got hired because I was a breakdancer who was getting a personal training license. One of the seniors told me the partner asked to hire the “guy who deadlifts 400lbs”. I don’t think he ever knew my name. I think I also got the interview because I was a powerlifter. I snuck into an exclusive networking event by arriving early with a fake name tag and practically met the entire hiring team because people wanted to learn about my powerlifting obsession.

100 hour weeks aren’t fun? Audit taught me how to work ~100 hour weeks (my career-best was 120 billable hours). I ended up specializing in investment banks because I saw it as the fastest way to make partner since broker-dealer audits required ~2x the work of normal audits. By my third busy season, I was the 20-year-old co-op student managing a team of full-times, auditing revenue (it’s the most important segment), and doing work a manager 5 years my senior would do. While reaching a breaking point in my mentality and realizing taking pride in working hundreds of hours and sleeping 2-3 hours a day for 1/3 the pay of investment bankers was stupid, I asked myself….for the first time….what I wanted to do with my life. I just knew it wasn’t audit so I quit. I was lucky because a mentor told me I should leave if I want to accelerate my growth further.

Powerlifting = Trading. Naively, I decided to be an equity trader. I audited investment banks so I vaguely knew what they did. It felt like an independent sport of psychology, oddly familiar with my one true love at the time: powerlifting. I didn’t know prop trading no longer existed and most trading jobs were reserved for quants (which I wasn’t).

Quant introduced me to Buffett. I had, fortunately, taken a quantitative finance class as an elective. It confirmed I was not quantitative but the professor recommended I look up long-term investing and a guy called Warren Buffett. It was only in the last term of my last year in the country’s best accounting program that I learned about the world’s best investor.

It’s the old adage but the ideas of value investing just ‘clicked’. Ben Graham’s cigar butts were easy to understand but I found Phil Fisher more attractive. As I read everything I could, management consulting came up as an opportunity. I saw it as a way to learn about as many business models as I could en route to pursuing a career in investing.

Bending all the rules. Consulting at Deloitte was about building on my personal mistakes from accounting. Consulting advertises a breadth of interesting projects but 90% end up coerced into specializing in year-long projects for a specific industry. In a business of revolving doors (everyone is thinking about exit opportunities even before joining), short-term incentives dominated culture. I did everything that was considered “career suicide”. I told a lead partner I planned to do everything I can to leave and work for a hedge fund but would do good work for him until then if he could help me. I said no to projects that would mean doing the same thing I had done before. I filled up Fridays with as many coffee dates (max. 9) with partners to get on the 10% of the most strategic and modeling intensive projects. They were the shortest in duration so I could maximize the number of different businesses I could experience. They also billed 3x the average rate given the intensity. But those projects were infrequent so my utilization was 65% (compared to the 100% target used to indicate performance). I eventually had the fastest promotion, built a brand around building models, worked on half a dozen industries, and got an accounting designation.

Consulting was a great way to learn about various industries from renewable energy, mining, banking, insurance, gov’t, CPG, etc… It was also a great way to see how most companies are mediocre and the remarkable ones probably won’t use consultants.

Getting into a fund. Without a “finance” background but a desire to get a job in value investing, I cold-emailed ~60 value-oriented fundamental funds in Canada. I met ~30 and they kindly showed me I didn’t need to do i-banking or equity research to make it into the buy-side. Since “no day is the same” in consulting, I ended up waking up at 4:30am every day to work on my investment pitches to get interviews. Over 1.5 years I interviewed with 4 funds and got an offer to join Mawer Investments in Calgary.

Day of an investor. At Mawer, I worked with the emerging market, international and global small cap funds. Basically all companies outside N.A. My days were talking with management in Europe and nights with Asia. Most of my days were reading annual reports and thinking. Learning on my days in consulting, I kept track of feedback (to identify strengths) and log activities to identify flow states. Combined with daily journals, what was supposed to be a dream job didn’t seem like it anymore.

Questioning dreams. Though I liked investing, I learned how different it was being an institutional (~60b aum) vs. an individual. I also didn’t love reading annual reports all day. Seeing colleagues who were immensely passionate in this manner of investing made me reevaluate who I was and how I wanted to invest. It made me think about the game I wanted to play. The intersection between my past roles rested in a curiosity to learn about people. As an investor, I focused heavily on management and culture as a thesis. As a consultant, I had spent most days coaching colleagues and learning about organization incentives.

New adventures. Having already worked in accounting, consulting, and finance, I was at a loss of what I should do. Each transition was an improvement but I wanted to explore more. I wanted to learn more about myself and see how I could possibly create a career around human performance and culture whilst leveraging my strengths in building systems, questioning conventions, and connecting with people.

2018 - 2021 (Personal MBA?):

I think the intrinsic motivations for an MBA are to 1) meet ambitious/interesting people, 2) get interviews for jobs in different fields, and 3) start projects to figure the self out. I intended to get some operations job in a startup within 6 months of leaving my investing job at Mawer. I never thought it would become a 3-year journey akin to building a personal MBA.

Interesting People
Instead of meeting more ex-consulting/finance assholes like myself, I got to meet hundreds of builders and creators from truly weird and unique backgrounds.

My podcasts (Accounted For, OMD Daily) let me meet all kinds of people like a UK lobbyist turned investor in Malaysia to BD at Shopify or fuel cell engineer turned entrepreneur to movie producer at Wattpad. I’ve met entrepreneurs who were lawyers in NYC, building CPG companies, paying employee salaries with maxed out credit cards, went through YC, and luxury traveling for a living. I’ve met people starting impact funds, launching incubators, and coaching an entire company.

In moments of confusion and desperation, I received kind advice from people I never thought would email me back like Kevin Kelly, Dan Ariely, Amy Buechler, and Derek Sivers.

The dozens of VCs, operators, engineers, entrepreneurs, and creators I’ve met on my journey have unequivocally shown me there are many ways to a person’s journey. Some might start successful companies at 22 while others do it in their 50s. Most are able to do things that leave me in awe and make me believe superficial desires like fame and money are silly. They all taught me to ignore labels and focus on exploring and creating.

Interviews
A job is a great way to learn. Interviews are also a great way to learn about what the role actually does, a company’s culture, and more about yourself. Sometimes, exploratory conversations turned into interviews and some were a focused attempt at getting a job in a specific field. Over the years I think I submitted 400+ applications (200+ in Q4 2019 alone). I’ve also had dozens of interviews as a result.

VC seemed a natural path for people-focused investing. I interviewed for half a dozen seed-stage VCs. Being passionate about people instead of technology, my favourite VC being Indie.vc and liking boring companies didn’t seem to fit their bill.

Having been obsessed with remote and bootstrapped businesses like Basecamp, I focused on remote people-oriented jobs. My background meant I got interviews like corporate development at Automattic or operations at Zapier. Trying to tie all this into an obsession for developing people didn’t go too well.

Then I thought about “getting a foot in” so interviewed for various operational and finance roles. Some were with private equity funds too. When asked why I was passionate about finance, I said I wasn’t but they were tools to measure human performance and how it impacted company performance. Most said they just wanted me to build models.

I decided to go directly and break into HR. I interviewed for roles like chief people officer at Bench Accounting, people development at ConvertKit, organizational research at ShiftHR and performance coach at CleverTech. Feedback was I needed 10 years of experience, an HR degree, and/or be Adam Grant. Various talent acquisition interviews said my years of interviewing and working with top performers didn’t qualify me to source talent.

Having started podcasts and kept a consistent blog, I started getting content-related interviews. Most required SEO use so I turned them down. I got an offer to help set up a podcast but I told them to follow a simple <10 step process. I eventually worked as a full-time business writer as the 6th employee of a small newsletter startup with a celebrity founder. I lasted less than a month as the culture made me miss my days in audit. A performance coach helped me end the relationship but it gave me a taste for the possibility of using my experience to explore, think, and create.

Projects
Q2 2018

  • Competed in first powerlifting meet since knee surgery in 2016. First competition working with famed RTS coaching team. Won my weight class and second place out of all men. Surgeon said I wouldn’t be able to lift heavy but had my career-best squat and deadlift.

Q3 2018

  • Started OMD Ventures as monthly blog. Soon became weekly essays.

  • Started weekly bullet-form newsletter titled: This Week I Learned. It shared 3 learnings on being healthy, wealthy, and wise for 100 issues until 2020.

Q4 2018

  • Launched weekly career podcast: Accounted For. Interviewed 80+ Canadian entrepreneurs for hour-long conversations. 10k+ downloads

Q1 2019

  • Deep-dive into SEOs to see if I can 1) amass traffic to the blog, 2) live off of ad revenue. I decided to take the long-term donation approach like Tim Urban and Maria Popova.

Q2 2019

  • Explored getting a Ph.D. in Org. Psychology but Dan Ariely recommended I don’t. Instead of an uncertainty 5-6 years in a bureaucratic setting, he said try to consult startups directly per my research.

  • Pitched a dozen series-A funded startups. Short engagements with two seed-stage startups. Most COOs/Founders wanted 3-day weekend workshops that would guarantee 30% increase in engineer performance. My view of long-term multi-year engagements was naive per audience set.

Q3 2019

  • Explored launching an investment fund with possible single-digit millions funding. Continued on my interest for bootstrapped and remote companies, leading to the Indie Hacker movement. Being owned went against the point of bootstrapping and most would only sell for liquidity (i.e. SPAC model). Explored RTOs in TSX.V but funders wanted to look at more traditional businesses.

Q1 2020

  • Explored starting podcasting agency to build podcasts for incubators so I could continue to explore human performance through what entrepreneurs did. Idea came from giving being invited to give a seminar to Canadian investment funds (PMAC) on building podcasts. Agency talk started with an incubator that led to interviews to help operate a couple incubators. COVID hit and incubators stopped operations.

Q2 2020

  • Stopped Accounted For and started OMD Daily. A weekday daily podcast focused on the topic of investing in people. Experimented with monologues and interviews. Stopped after ~60 episodes and a few thousand downloads in Q3 2020.

Q3 2020

  • Focused on writing as my medium after stint as a business writer. Turned weekly newsletter into a daily newsletter, inspired by Seth Godin’s blog. Stopped in Q1 2020 after ~90 issues. A desire for quality over quantity and learning more about how I think and my writing process.

Q4 2020

  • Started writing a novel. Process was 1,000 words daily until Q1 of 2020 where I changed to 500 words daily after a battle with resistance.

Q1 2021

  • Newsletter evolved to weekly. Moved from Mailchimp to Substack with long-term goal of building it into a business like Ben Evans and Ben Thompson. A continued doubling down on writing as my medium.

  • A rare clarity of focus and intention to spend next 10 years building a career exploring, thinking, and creating. Writing being the medium of choice.