Preface

I can’t tell you how this story will end, because it’s still being written. I can’t tell you if the end will be a happy one or a sad one, either. I can’t see into the future. Neither can my partner Ali. All each of us can do is bust our asses and hope for the best. Hope that our winning percentage is over .500. Hope that we can be .300 hitters. Hope that we do enough to make the playoffs each year. And obviously hope that we eventually win the championship.

No, this is not the story of a couple of ball players, but we sure do love sports analogies. This is a simple tale of two guys that were (and still are) young enough that they didn’t have much to lose, and are motivated enough by self-actualization to actually take control over their lives. This is the story of Synapse International and the trials and tribulations of starting – and hopefully succeeding – in the startup landscape.

Throughout this series, you’ll be hearing from both my partner and myself. Our different perspectives should give you some insight as to who we our and where our passions lie. One thing is clear, though: when it comes to our business, even with our oft-polarizing points-of-view, we are perpetually finding a way to get on the same page. As you follow us on our journey, I think that will become apparent at almost every turn.

Chapter 1

Our journey begins in two major metropolitan Canadian cities separated by over 3000 miles: Vancouver and Montreal. On the west coast you have my partner, Ali Taghikhani, and on the east you have me, Cody Sklar. Each coming from different backgrounds and upbringings, but each also with their sights set on reaching the pinnacle of Canadian post-secondary education at McGill University. I can’t speak for Ali, but speaking for myself, growing up in the anglophone community in Montreal’s west island, and knowing pretty early on that I wanted to pursue a career in business (in what respect, I still had no clue), McGill was always a pretty clear frontrunner, and in maintaining decent enough grades throughout high school and Cegep, I made my goal a reality. Ali took a slightly different path (being an out-of-province student he had to maintain some pretty impressive grades), but ultimately found his way to McGill as well. It wasn’t until our 3rd year that we actually met. There still wasn’t much to be said for our relationship. We worked together a couple of times, shared a couple of classes, but that was pretty much it.

Fast-forward to graduation. Ali and I both start working at the same recruitment firm in Montreal the summer we earned our B.Comm degrees. And I’m not talking about some big name firm that is recognized internationally for its excellence in recruiting…. if I were, Ali and I probably wouldn’t be writing about starting our own business right now. I won’t bore anyone with the details, but suffice it to say that while we never expected our first jobs to be all magical and whatnot, we never expected such a seemingly harmless place like this company to be the melting pot for a complete guide on how not to operate a successful business. We didn’t claim to know everything (or anything, really), but coming straight from one of the country’s top business schools, we thought we knew what to expect from a company that had been around for nearly a decade at the time. Yea, we misjudged the place and the people.

There’s alot of good that came out of that job, though:

1) We learned how not to keep your employees happy

2) We taught ourselves the difference between a successful recruiter and his counterpart

3) Among other things, Ali and I worked together closely and shared alot of the same visions

As snow began to fall in November, Ali and I didn’t waste any time. We quit the firm and decided to go into business for ourselves. We had nothing to lose (since we weren’t being paid very well anyways, and since the turnover rate at this company was astronomically high), so we walked. We wouldn’t compete with them, and we didn’t need to. We discovered something while working there that they never taught us – we discovered how to work with startups. And not just local businesses either, but well-funded startups from coast-to-coast. Not only that, but we managed to figure our a way to have success in working with these companies remotely.

Not a bad start to our story, eh? Now is where the fun really begins.

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