(1) Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Israel Peck. I’m a home-schooled ranch boy from Montana. I’m a Notre Dame grad, and former strategy consultant. Right now, my co-founders and I are building a team and a software tool focused on the sole mission of accelerating culture change in big businesses.
(2) In two sentences or less, describe how you participate in the startup ecosystem.
I am the CTO of an early-stage, bootstrapped, tech startup based in Calgary, Alberta. I spend most of my time writing (and re-writing) code.
(3) What are you currently reading right now and would recommend to others?
“The Systems View of the World” by Ervin Laszlo. Laszlo is basically the father of system theory, and the book is essentially a model for how to think about the World. I think this idea of system change is valuable, if you want to affect a large change in the World. It helps to understand that many many systems already exist around us, and your startup is a new system that must integrate with others, in order to succeed. I’m reading it for the second time.
I just finished “Super Cooperators” by Harvard professor, Dr. Martin Nowak. Very insightful book about the role of cooperation in evolutionary dynamics, with special emphasis on game theory, psychology, and human behavior. That book has a lot of surprises.
(4) What makes you stay in the startup ecosystem?
I don’t have any other choice. People say that you should only go into entrepreneurship if you absolutely can’t stop yourself, and that applies to me.
(5) What drives your passion for the startup ecosystem?
I’m not passionate about the startup ecosystem per se. I find the ecosystem fraught with undesirable factors and weird dead-ends. You really need to find the right network, or you can waste a lot of time doing non-valuable things. What I am passionate about is ideation, the ability to grow and harvest ideas. The startup ecosystem is the best place to do that, aside from probably a few elite universities or institutions.
(6) Where do you see the startup ecosystem in 5 years?
In five years, I suspect it will be similar to what it is today. I don’t think 5 years is really enough time to see dramatic change, but we will probably see a lot of the same variables moving in the same direction: (1) capital flow will continue to accelerate into the ecosystem, (2) new and exciting technologies will continue to pop up, (3) unicorns and decacorns will be more and more common, and (4) — my personal hope — we will see some new miracles, in the form of truly massive break-thru’s that transform human life and disrupt what we think is possible.
(7) How has failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
Failure has taught me that it doesn’t last. I’ve suffered many quite devastating failures, the type that in-the-moment felt like “this is the end”. But they never are the end. Failure is just a stepping stone to whatever is next. I like to say that “in entrepreneurship, you have to fail, until failure stops mattering”. How has it set me up for success? Well, I think I’m set up pretty well, because I don’t fear failure anymore.
(8) What is one of the best worthwhile investments you’ve ever made (could be financial, time, energy, etc.)?
Learning to code. When I was 33 years old, I had a masters in finance and I was earning a very nice salary as a strategy consultant, but I was bored. I quit, went to a 6-month coding bootcamp, and it transformed my life. Now I live for the next code push 🙂
(9) What do you do to refocus yourself when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused?
I use lots of patterns to manage myself. Most of them involve doing something nice for myself, to take care of my emotional and physical needs. I tend to get most overwhelmed when lots of problems are coming at me at once, and I don’t know which to prioritize. The easiest solution to this is to go for a walk down the street to my favorite coffee shop, stop and look at some trees on the walk home. By the time I’m home, I usually know exactly what to do next.
(10) What’s one piece of advice you would give someone trying to break into the startup ecosystem?
This may seem cynical, but I would say to start out very suspicious of everyone, and then over time, become very friendly & gregarious. I have found that if you do it the other way around, you will waste a ton of time, because a lot of people in the ecosystem talk a big game.
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