People are often surprised to discover that I’m not a software developer, having founded a tech company. Indeed, I grew up in a commercial fishing family. Starting at age 13 and into my twenties, I spent a decade fishing with my dad from Ucluelet, a small fishing village on Vancouver Island in the Canadian Pacific. Our family owned a 38-foot wooden salmon troller called F/V Tribute. My grandfather was also a fisherman and my great grandfather too. I like to quip that when someone says “chips,” I think fish ‘n chips, not computer chips.
While seemingly worlds apart, the high-stakes, unpredictable nature of commercial fishing offers profound lessons for anyone navigating the volatile waters of a technology startup. Here are five lessons that I learned from commercial fishing with my dad that have helped me succeed as a tech CEO.
1. Mastering the Pivot, Not the Plan
My dad and I would awake hours before sunrise, so early that, as a teen, I’d feel nauseous. Dad would notice the wind rustling the cedar treetops in our backyard. Down at the dock, he’d turn on the marine forecast and check the tide table. Steaming out of the harbour, just past the lighthouse, he’d then assess the true sea state. He was constantly ingesting data and adapting. If the sea was too “lumpy,” as dad liked to say, we’d abruptly drop our fishing lines on Lighthouse Bank, a short retreat to Ucluelet, whose indigenous name means “safe harbour.”
Similarly, a startup founder cannot control market shifts, new competitors, or economic downturns. That’s a bitter lesson I learned in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic crippled the economy, a “perfect storm” that sank many companies, tech startups included.
Success for fishermen or tech startups depends not on a rigid plan but on the ability to read the data, recognize changing conditions, and pivoting—or “tacking” as salmon fishermen say—quickly and decisively without losing momentum.
2. Relentlessly Hunting for Fish and Product-Market Fit
Commercial fishermen are the original A/B testers. You can have the most advanced boat and the best crew, but if you’re casting lines in empty water, you’ll go bankrupt. Dad used a combination of depth sounder, charts, LORAN-C (before GPS), gossip and intuition to find productive fishing grounds. He also used a technique in the 1970s and 80s now known in digital marketing as A/B testing.
When casting our first lines early in the morning, we’d often use “hoochie” lures, resembling squid, on the port lines, but use “spoon” lures, resembling herring, on the starboard lines. Dad was testing which lure—A or B—hooked the most salmon first and then quickly switch all lines to the winner.
For a startup, this is the hunt for product-market fit. The primary job of a startup founder is to obsessively search for the market (fishing ground) and customer segment (target fish species) that will get virally hooked on your marketing (bait and lures). Continuous testing, feedback and agility is as important for a fisherman as a startup.
3. Ruthlessly Managing Risk and Resources
Commercial fishing is a dangerous job. Sinking, capsizing, falling overboard, gear entanglement—there are many ways to be killed or maimed aboard a fishing vessel. Every fishing trip is a calculated risk with finite resources. Fuel, food, ice, and time at sea are all limited. A captain must constantly weigh the potential catch against the cost of staying out longer.
Tech startups run on a similar logic, where the limited resource is cash runway. Founders must be ruthless in prioritizing which software features to build, which markets to enter, and where to deploy their team’s limited time to maximize their return before the fuel (read cash) runs out.
Years of commercial fishing have help me master risk management and especially conditioned me to watch for existential threats. A bad decision can be a learning experience, for sure, unless it leads to drowning on a doomed vessel.
4. All Hands On Deck!
On a fishing vessel, the crew operates in close quarters under intense pressure. Everyone has a critical role. A single weak link or breakdown in communication can be disastrous. Trust and shared responsibility are non-negotiable. This is a perfect model for an early-stage startup team. Founders need to hire adaptable, resilient individuals who can wear multiple hats, communicate clearly under stress, and are unified by a single mission—bringing the catch home.
I’ll never forget the F/V Marwood. On August 14, 1994, the hulking stern trawler docked at the government wharf in Ucluelet around dinner time. Later that evening the crew went to the village bar, returning after midnight to bunk down. Unbeknownst to them, spare trawl doors that were overhanging the side of the vessel caught the underside of the wharf. As the tide rose, the vessel started to list. A valve was open on deck and the vessel slowly—then quickly—began taking on water. The chief engineer drowned, trapped below deck attempting, apparently, to save the ship. At the time, Marwood was one of B.C.’s largest fishing vessels. It was 115 feet of solid steel and sank in our supposedly “safe harbour.” It still horrifies me 30 years later.
Catastrophic failure is rarely caused by one big mistake. It was an unfortunate confluence of small mistakes, minor vessel design flaws and an unusual circumstance that sank the Marwood (Read the Marine Investigative Report). As a tech startup scales, standardized procedures, safety checklists and team training and discipline grow increasingly more important to guard against the type of cascading failures that sank the Marwood.
5. Perseverance
Commercial fishing involves long periods of intense, repetitive work with no guarantee of a payoff. Some days the hooks come up full, some days empty. Day in and day out, rain or shine, dad and I rose before dawn for the two-month salmon season. Every day was a constant struggle for our family’s limited income. Only storms or fishing closures kept us off the ocean.
The tech startup journey is similar. It’s a marathon of small wins, frustrating setbacks, and countless experiments that fail. But success belongs to the founders who have the grit to get up early and treat every “empty hook” not as a failure, but as a data point for the next attempt.
Fishing with dad—a hard-drinking, stoic man—was relentlessly exhausting, emotionally and physically. Unlike most school kids, I never enjoyed a summer vacation since it was “salmon season.” But the experience indelibly etched a work ethic in me. Years later, my Chinese mother-in-law Charlotte gave me the Chinese name Yìlì (毅力), meaning “perseverance.” Apparently, you can take the boy out of fishing but can’t take fishing out of the boy.
Far from a bygone industry, commercial fishing has proved to be humanity’s most resilient industry reaching back thousands of years to our origins as hunter-gathers. While our company’s engineers code new cutting-edge AI solutions, it’s not lost on me that it’s the soft skills I learned as a youth fishing with dad that have helped keep our company afloat and prospering in these turbulent times.
