I started my company 16 years, 3 months, and 5 days ago. Today, it went public. But let's rewind for a second... 5,939 days ago, I was a barista at a small cafe called @2percentJazz2, in Victoria, Canada. I made $6.50 an hour. Two guys, Chris and Jeff, started coming into the cafe. They'd sit there all day drinking espresso and typing away on their laptops, using the wifi. After weeks of this, I asked them what they did for a living. Didn't they have jobs? They told me they were "web designers" and this — sitting on their laptops — was their job. As I dug in, they told me how it worked: They asked local businesses if they needed a website, then charged them a couple thousand bucks to make one. They could whip a website together in a few days, and each make $1,000. Simple. This blew my mind. And at that moment, I realized something: I wanted to be the guy drinking the espresso, not the one serving it. Chris and Jeff were clearly smart, but I knew some basic HTML and figured I could do the same. I decided to try it out. When I got off my shift, I took the bus over to a book store downtown and bought a book called 'Bulletproof Web Design' by Dan Cederholm (@simplebits) to hone my skills. Then, I googled "freelance web design jobs" and found a tech job board called Authentic Jobs made by this guy in Utah, @cameronmoll. There were hundreds of posts, mostly from startups in San Francisco, looking for freelance web designers. I decided to try to win one of these contracts, but I had a critical insight: Nobody wants to hire an 18-year-old barista to build their website. So, I decided I'd create a fake design agency. Using tricks from Dan Cederholm's book, I whipped together a slick looking site and called my "agency" MetaLab (after the tag in HTML). The website was very vague as to what exactly MetaLab did, who worked there, or where we were located. It also featured a cringe-inducing tagline "We Help People Make Cool Stuff." Like an email spammer, I started sending emails to every single web design job post I could find. I was met with crickets, until I got an email from a guy named Kavin Stewart (@kavinstewart). He worked at a startup called Offermatica in San Francisco and told me he needed an interface designed for a web app. I barely understood what a web app was, but I assured him I could do it. He proposed a $2,000 USD budget and my eyes went wide. This was more than I earned in a month, and the project was just a few days of work. I walked into the cafe the next day and quit my job. I told myself that if I could just make enough money to wake up whenever I wanted and comfortably make rent, I'd be good. The rest is history. But I slightly overshot. I still own MetaLab, but along the way me and my business partner @_Sparling_ started dozens of companies, then began buying wonderful businesses, including one (Dribbble) — amazingly — from Dan Cederholm, the designer whose book I bought when I first started. Today, Tiny went public, and as of this moment has a market capitalization of just under $800 million. I can't even begin to explain how mind boggling this is to me. This has not been a feat of entrepreneurial genius. My key skill has been choosing incredible people to work with, both internally and externally, and I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who has worked at Tiny and our various companies over the years. And a special thanks to @simplebits, @cameronmoll, and @kavinstewart for helping with my first step😉 Watch for us on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker TINY (how cool is that ticker?). finance.yahoo.com/quote/TINY…

A good refresher on why you should hold treasury bills instead of cash. In a bank. Like SVB for example: