Hi, I’m Jay.
I haven’t built and sold a company. Yet.
I work in real estate finance and am writing founded. to learn from those whose hard work became successful businesses valuable enough to sell, so one day I can use those lessons to forge a path of my own.
There was one day at work about a year ago that changed everything and led to me deciding that I would accelerate the timeline:
I had just finished a research project that had taken weeks and long hours to complete. I poured my heart and soul into it. I didn’t do it for any particular reason other than to show how good I was at my job and to have something to show for all my hard work.
While the effort that went into the research project was motivating, I craved more freedom and creativity from a career that I would spend years cultivating.
That was the point I realized that nobody was going to hand me the life I wanted.
I’d have to build it myself, brick by brick.
That wasn’t the first time I’d thought about a different life path, though.
I grew up watching fitness YouTubers like Maxx Chewning, Christian Guzman and Greg Plitt. As a gym rat this was the ultimate motivational reel.
I watched Maxx go from YouTube videos and apparel to Sour Strips, a candy company that was sold (eventually this became the second case study I wrote for founded.)
My brother and I always talked about starting a business and found the numbers fascinating: How did they sell so quickly? He sold it for how much? He grew it that big in how long? What was the annual revenue? How much did he sell for?
Maxx’s content around the sale and building the business had me wired until 3am many nights. We were dreamers, and those numbers were proof that the dream could actually happen.
So I tried things to get my feet wet.
I started a YouTube channel after graduating from my master’s degree in economics in 2020 after four months of job hunting to no avail.
I named the channel ‘Your Average Jay’ and created tirelessly for four years without much traction (I had 660 subscribers or so at the end of it). It started out as education content including investing and basic economics principles and slowly turned into cinematography and personal development. I figured that videos should make a viewer feel something.
In 2024, I grew RiskorRust, a motivation and personal development page to 13,000 followers on Instagram which at its peak made $2,000 per month from a few paid clients that hired me to edit short form content for them.
It worked, but most of my time went into cutting other people’s podcasts into clips which left me feeling lost and wanting something more creative.
In May 2026, after a few months searching for what I wanted to do next, I started development on an app called Helm; a tool that connects to all body wearables and uses inputs to reverse-engineer your best days. That never launched but taught me how use AI properly (building skills, prompt engineering, the whole lot).
All of that led to founded. which I started back in August of 2026.
It feels like bits of each venture and a lifetime of dreaming and learning came together. It compiles the personal development aspect (founder mindsets, habits, and failures) with storytelling from my YouTube videos while keeping my love for the numbers.
Every Sunday at 6am, I send one case study written about a founder who took a business from idea to exit and takes about 15-25 minutes to read, perfect with your morning coffee or tea.
Every company that’s featured sold for under $120 million, because I want lessons that work for a business your size, not one with hundreds of employees and venture money behind it.
I read everything public about the founder, work out how they went from first customer to deciding terms for the sale and boil it all down into digestible lessons you can apply to your business today.
Each issue takes about 5-7 hours of research and I am actively becoming knowledgeable about what worked and what didn’t: something I hope will help me grow founded to an eventual exit.
The key for me is that the personal development part stayed close to me. It’s something I’m very passionate about. The most beautiful part is that starting a business is the biggest personal development journey of them all.
Every founder I’ve written about morphed into a completely different person throughout the journey from idea to exit. That growth is what I aim to capture in each case study.
Here’s what this looks like day to day. I research and write every morning from 7 to 9am before my 9-5 (plus Saturdays), mostly from cafés with noise cancelling headphones tuned into Endel’s ‘relax’ mode (awesome app btw, no affiliation). This is where I feel like my best self; I can disappear into my own little world.
The night before I often leave myself a loose thread, a half-finished paragraph or a question I haven’t answered yet so I can pull on it in the morning and get right to work that pushes the business forward.
I moved to Toronto on my own five years ago from western Canada which was outside of my comfort zone to say the least. It taught me how to become self-sufficient and to trust myself with life’s big decisions.
When I think about freedom, I think about an ordinary Tuesday. Deep work from 6:30 to noon on whatever matters most. A workout and lunch. A long walk to think, then right to the sauna and a meditation. Dinner and a movie with my girlfriend and our cat to round out what I’d call a perfect day.
That’s what freedom means to me: control of my time, where I live, what I earn, and most importantly nobody (but my harsh inner critic) telling me what to do.
It’s also why I always ask each founder what an exit did for them. My hit rate hasn’t been great at 25%, but I have learned a lot:
The founders of AppArmor and MVMT both replied with encouraging words and even provided additional context for their stories. Those moments made it all worth it for me. How cool is the internet?!
The hardest part? Finding a way to contact each one. Some of them have no online presence or close off all channels to the outside. It’s something I’m actively figuring out as I go.
If you run a business and trying to figure out how to reach the next level of growth and which distribution channel deserves your time, founded. is for you. If you’re where I currently am and inspired to escape the 9-5, it’s also a reminder that if you learn the lessons here, you can achieve anything you set your mind to.
See you Sunday,
Jay
PS: I’d love to know who’s reading. Leave a comment or hit reply and let’s start a dialogue!
PPS: I also love cars. It’s part of the motivation to not only find freedom but to have control over my income. The dream car, you ask? Ferrari F12. Maybe I’ll post on here once I’ve gotten that far…