The best decisions I've made in my career

This was originally posted on my personal blog here: https://victoranjos.com/leadership/the-best-decisions-ive-made-in-my-career and on my Medium account here: https://medium.com/@VictorFAnjos. I post on both of those places weekly about topics to do with tech, artificial intelligence, executive management, strategy, angel investing, coaching, etc... It's basically a lens into my brain

The best decisions I've made in my career

I have always had a bit of an edge, something super competitive in me that drove me to be better than my self of yesterday. It's an unrelenting hunger that I use to fuel my career growth, business growth and my team('s) growth. I just don't stop and live a completely UNreasonable life (i.e. a life without reasons, excuses or ways out of commitments).

This often rubs people in the wrong way, and the majority of those people, ones that I've run into at every juncture and in every walk of life, be it from educators, to parents, to fellow athletes, to bosses and even founders, it seems, overwhelmingly, that people are generally looking to lead a predestined life, and one that is average.

I, myself, hate the notion of anything average, be it for me, my family or my work. I literally can't stand it and would rather fail miserably (as there is something to be learned there) than do just enough to get by. Average feels sedentary, lackluster and useless to me (almost like an existence not worth living) and it begets exactly the type of results that you would expect - average ones.

I'm certain that along the way, I've made a ton of poor choices, but in the way I frame them, they were all well intentioned learning experiences (looking back at them) and have led me to where I am today. With that in mind, let's examine how I've reached this shoulder in my career and figure out (together) what I might do next.

Choosing UofT instead of Waterloo

One of my earliest formative decisions was which school to go to when I was leaving high school. At that juncture, coming away from a top International Baccalaureate high school with a high nineties (90s) average was good enough to secure acceptance from any one of my #university choices, however the two that I wanted most were University of #Toronto and University of Waterloo. At this point in time, I was still extremely fascinated with space exploration and its applications and really wanted to get into UofT's #Engineering Science program to be able to get into their Aerospace Engineering sub-faculty.

Alas, that was not meant to be and instead I was offered early acceptance and partial scholarships to both schools in their Engineering departments (both in Electrical - which I preferred at the time to computers - since I was a nut about actually building things over coding them).

A funny thing happened during my decision-making process though, my girlfriend at the time was at UofT and irrational teenage puppy-love won over my decision making (a very average thing to do actually) and I ended up at UofT.

The fit for me was impeccable and I loved my time there. Having been an urbanite for most of my earlier life (other than high school), I felt at home in a bustling city, I loathed commuting and found it to be a huge waste of time and could not comprehend how people were willing to endure a wasting of 3+ hours per day to work (or study) somewhere - why not just go to the source and actually live where you work? The juxtaposition of Toronto to Waterloo was such that it truly made my decision very easy to rationalize after the fact, however the catalyst was a girl (as it is so many times for teenage boys).

Taking a semester off during university

After finishing my first two years of Engineering on Dean's List at UofT, I was really bored (yet very challenged by the material) with what I was learning. It seemed that I would be pre-destined as part of UofT's co-op program (the Professional Experience Year or PEY) to work at some manufacturer of high(er) tech things such as Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney or Lockhead Martin.

None of those excited me.

This was a challenge for me as I had been so very much head down for the past 5 years about being an Aerospace (and then Electrical) Engineer that I had not paused to reflect on the type of work I might do with the degree. Having now spoken to some upper year students and faculty members, I saw that my degree would have me end up doing work that would not satisfy me - there was something that had to give - then in a moment of near panic, I just decided to not show up for the start of year 3 and look to work in a field that would be tangential to what I was doing for the year.

Leaving Engineering

At this point, in the hay days of the early web and pre-y2k, I looked for a steady job at something that I could do right now. I had proven to be very good at SQL and there many business analyst positions available at Nortel Networks (through PwC) in their mergers and acquisitions department. I applied through a placement agency, got the interview, aced it and somehow got in at the tender age of 19, getting paid a king's ransom as a consultant.

Even with this nice cash cow at my door, I still had a pact with myself that I would not let this detract from getting a degree and I would definitely go back to school at year's end. I guess this was lucky as some of the earliest code that I wrote at Nortel was an application for acquiring (and divesting) them of employees, in the thought that they would be acquiring more companies and at a much more rapid pace, to try to keep up with giants such as Cisco and Lucent.

In the end, it was this software that ended up getting rid of all the staff (nearly 80% of total headcount) when Nortel floundered and had to do a massive restructure.

Back to school

The time was perfect for me to head back to school. During the restructure, my software was used against me and I was divested just as thousands of other Nortel employees had been.

Since I had planned to go back to school, this year off helped me pay off most of my student loans, buy a house (yes, house prices in the GTA were reasonable at one point) and pay for my 3rd and 4th year tuition without required any more loans. It was, in the end, a very smart thing to do.

In the midst of all the Nortel trouble, I had been in constant chats with UofT about changing departments (from Engineering to Computer Science & Math with a minor in Physics). Within one year, I would also be taking a PEY year (or 16 months actually) and that would guarantee that I would end up debt-free when leaving school, with over 2 years of relevant experience under my belt.

Professional Experience Year

With the amount (one year may not seem like much, but in a time before wide tech adoption and at a time where nerds weren't sexy) of experience I had and my extremely high grades (always in the top 5% of my programs), I had the ability to pick just about any placement. I interviewed well and had my final two choices ready - I would either go do some serious engineering at ATI Technologies (now AMD) or consulting work at IBM.

Seeing as I was an Engineer at heart, I opted for ATI and became a part of their hardware engineering team - taking care of their data-centres, network and infrastructure. It was a really great job and it paid well (not nearly as well as I had been paid at Nortel, however it was awesome for a PEY). Throughout the year, I still went to UofT for two night courses - I made sure to not lose the steam and momentum I had and I focused heavily on taking the most coding courses I could (I wanted to soak in every language possible).

At the end of my year with them, they tendered a full-time offer to me, at a decent but unsatisfying salary (I was after all, not a graduate yet). I accepted and decided that I would finish my degree over the next two years part-time (night courses).

Selling my car

Things were well under way, I was making money moves, I had sold that house in the suburbs and bought a very spacious condo in Toronto (to help cut down on my commute which at that time was a horrid hour each way) with a friend. In order to afford this condo (well, the down payment) I had to raise some capital quick and if I was going to be living in the city, I could afford to let go of my car and just keep my motorcycle.

Having had my formative years in the suburbs of the GTA, I had a bit of a difficult time letting go of my car, as it was one of the things (as I thought it) that made me independent. So much of my supposed identity was tied to that car that I believed I would literally lose a part of me if I were to sell it, but ya, none of that was true - I sold it and never looked back.

A small blip

During my tenure at ATI, I grew tired of my low salary and started to look elsewhere. At that time, I was supremely employable and looked to apply to just about everything and also to passively put my resume out there (through both recruiters and job boards). I ended up getting several interviews and one of them sounded quite interesting - #Google.

I interviewed with Google before much was known about them (at least the general public) and aced their interview. They were, at this point, opening up offices in the North-East (in NYC) and wanted me to make a move there. The salary was much better than what I was making at ATI and the work sounded really cool.

Not accepting an offer at Google in 1999

So here I was, looking at offers from not only Google, but also from HP, SUN Microsystems, Oracle and IBM. The only one of these offers that wasn't local was Google, and the pay would be in US dollars, but I would be living in New York.

With a slight increase in salary (I believe Google was offering me about 20% more than anyone else and it was 50% more than I was currently making at ATI) I hopped on a plane to New York and started to look at neighbourhoods where I might live near their offices and how much it would cost me to be there. In the end, I found that working at Google at that time, would net me a much lesser quality of life than being at any of the other large companies mentioned above, so I opted to instead negotiate with the others using the Google offer as leverage.

Working for SUN

The negotiation, as all my job offers have proven, was very fruitful. I was able to get SUN to bump its offer up by more than 25%, however no stock or signing bonus (which is something I became more accustomed to later on in my career).

As a member of the SUN hardware consultancy teams, I was placed at Enterprises such as Telus, HSBC and Rogers, creating some of the largest data centres in the world with the newest servers, network gear, storage and virtualization. This was an era before the world went crazy over cloud services, and at this point, SUN (and its clients) were already on the path to virtualizing every server to be able to partition it into ever smaller and more specialized zones (SUN allowed you to partition its compute, memory and storage into zones under Solaris).

At this point, working a lot was how I defined my existence and I knew this wasn't sustainable. I needed to find another outlet where I could help people in some manner, a way to further increase the value I brought to the world.

Coaching volleyball

My friend, a school teacher, had been coaching a club #volleyball team for a few years and asked if I might be interested in doing the same (this did not come out of nowhere, as I played and won a ton of volleyball at a very high level at that time and continue to do so today). The club team was in the suburbs (Mississauga), but was in a slightly more diverse part of the city than traditional volleyball teams and as such, I inherited kids whose parents were not used to club sports or volleyball in general.

Through the 3+ years that I coached the Pakmen 13U teams, we came in 2nd place at Provincials twice and I taught a ton of boys about becoming a man.

Going to startups

It was at this point in my career, a full 8 years in, that I now moved onto startups (although I had already dabbled with starting my own venture twice). As my time at SUN (and Telus) was coming to an abrupt end (Enterprise re-org - which is code for they don't know how to hire), friends of mine were embedded in early stage startups that I joined.

At first I was amazed by how much actually got done at startups compared to large companies, but as time wore on, I soon came to notice that even here there were 90% of people who were mostly just getting by and 10% (or less) that drove everything forward.

This has remained a constant at every company (startup) that I've been a part of since, no matter what their product or service is, there is always a bunch of de-moralized people (often due to extremely poor management or founder team) and a tiny few (less than 10%) who actually drive the business forward. Luckily for me and as everyone that I've worked with will attest to, I'm in that latter group.

Apache committer

Since I am (and will always be) part of that small percentage of people who actually drive business forward, I decided that I needed to do more for myself because management generally wouldn't. This is the time at which I started "building a brand" by committing to several #Apache projects (Cassandra, Storm and Spark) while also teaching everyone in Toronto (and abroad) how to do things with #Big Data (at scale with no downtime).

Meetups, conferences and speaking

By building up my street cred, I got noticed by several developer conferences and started being asked to speak at many worldwide events. I also began down the route of hosting several meetups and creating conferences that Toronto desperately needed.

I was once again, ahead of the game (for Toronto) and really helped push the agenda at the places I worked at, as well as teach all other (apparent) competitors how to do the things that I was doing and what to focus on in the coming years.

From the hard work of creating, maintaining and running these meetups (most at a monthly cadence with only me as a presenter), I gave huge amounts of clout to my former employers and had they been smart about it, would have capitalized on these extra-curriculars of mine as companies like Rangle.io have.

Starting my own companies

Whilst the bug had hit to start my own thing, I was now starting to get good at it after failing a few times. I went down the path of trying to create things that were never heard of it, however I made mistakes such as:

• partnering with friends I got along with (because it'd be cool to work with them)
• partnering with people that I did not know (because they were referred by people I trusted)
• outsourcing way too much of the product development
• not being aggressive in sales

All of these led to faltering before anything really got off the ground on ideas such as:

• an OCR and #machine learning based app for contractor accounting (at the time of Blackberry, not iPhones or Androids)
• a location based ad company that was direct to the consumer
• a direct to consumer deals company that was based on group buying (much earlier than Groupon or any other entrants existed)

But alas, it's not who has the idea first, it's who executed on it best (and sold the story behind it).

#Data for Good

Then in the fall of 2013, I met the person who would become my co-founder at Data For Good. She approached me during a talk that I was giving at the conference that I had created for Big Data (called Big Data Week) and she and I saw eye to eye on the need for us to do some good - something altruistic - in lieu of working for companies whose sole purpose was to try to sell you things.

Since that fateful evening, we have managed to grow Data For Good into a fully integrated national #not for profit that has 7 chapters stretching from Vancouver to Montreal (with the very likely possibility of Halifax coming online in the next few months). We now have over 5000 volunteers across the country and have worked with some of #Canada's (and the world's) most recognizable not for profits.

AI

And finally, the current frontier that I'm leading - #Artificial Intelligence. Two years ago, while part of a company that was having some financial hardship, I decided to make a move and position myself in the machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence space by taking on the role of #CTO at DeepLearni.ng. The company has done well under my guidance and the junior founders have grown and are displaying some characteristics that could lead to success. We are well backed and financially stable and are producing some of the best Enterprise results in the world.

Conclusion

In the grand(est) scheme of things, none of these decisions will ever really matter to the world, but leaving them as a bit of a relic so that my friends, family and peers can read about it is important.

While being a stand for all those around me and helping to guide them to be the best version of themselves I can, I have come to notice that much too often, people are afraid of responsibility and accountability, whether it is a friend, employee or some level of company management. It's a shame because without true accountability and measures, there is no point in setting any goals for yourself - a practice that we should all undertake (and something I do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis - to make sure that all my personal goals align with my life mission and that I am on track to be the superstar that I expect out of myself).

The world needs to have more singular focus, to be the best it can be. Good enough is NOT good enough and people need to stop having and making excuses for being average.