Diary of a Serial Entrepreneur

Thigh high snow puffed and squeaked under our skis as we huffed our way back up the mountain through a boreal forest of birch, fir, spruce and cedar. Aside from our shuffling and breathing, the blanket of snow absorbed all other sound, leaving our earlier tracks from the run downhill as the only evidence of humanity. Every hundred feet of elevation or so, animal tracks hinted at the vibrant community living around us — the hop of a hare, the prowl of a lynx, the pounce of a fox. But for the most part, it felt like we were at the edge of the world, far from our homes and families and the lives we had made for ourselves. And indeed, we were.

The St. Lawrence River widens where it first becomes the Gulf of St. Lawrence, still 600 miles from the open Atlantic. For a tumultuous, current-infused section, it becomes an estuary as the ocean pushes the river backward at a fierce pace only to relent thirteen hours later in the cycle of tides. These waters are frigid and flowing with ice in the winter, and yet teeming with life from krill to humpbacks, belugas, seals and porpoises. On the north shore, the Laurentians — one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet — crash down to the estuary, visually striking and yet muted remnants of their former Himalaya-dwarfing grandeur. And just at this juncture where the river, the ocean and the mountains all meet, a mighty asteroid struck the Earth about 450 million years ago. Two kilometers across, it created an impact crater twenty-five times wider that eventually filled in with sediment to become an oasis of beautifully rich farmland in the midst of mountains and untouched wilderness.

Once we reached the pond, the yellowy long light that made the snow sparkle like crystals also urged us to quicken our pace if we wanted to reach the house before dark. We trudged up the final pitches in silence, stripped down and drenched despite the subzero temperature, and came in sight of the house just as the outdoor lights illuminated it for the evening, a glowing symbol of warmth and safety as the blue blackness of a cloudless evening encroached. Exhausted, delighted, we put away our gear and prepared for a final evening before the long drive home.

This was my first stay at the house as its owner, and I kept pinching myself in disbelief at my good fortune. For over a decade, my wife and I had been searching Canada for an escape from a world on the edge of becoming unhinged. After exploring everywhere from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Breton to Vancouver Island and the Gaspe Peninsula, we stumbled upon Charlevoix, this relatively small region of tremendous geographic diversity thanks to cosmic intervention, and we fell in love. We fell in love with the water, with the mountains, with the artisanal farms, food and drink, with a slower pace of life all communicated in French, with living at the edge of civilization. When you climb a mountain in Charlevoix and look north, you sense both a void and a fullness of unadulterated life all the way to the North Pole.

The memory of that afternoon stands out as a milestone marking before and after, much like every day of a major life event or decision. The prior year had been one big disorienting transition, as I'd lived the classic case study of a private equity deal gone bad. On the downside, I'd been berated and bullied into stepping down from running my own company, which subsequently went from profitable and growing to hemorrhaging cash and floundering. On the upside, I could finally buy this property and still pay to put my children through college. And I had gained freedom to work on something new. Like Charlevoix, my life has been a strange convergence of natural forces that ebb and flow cyclically, beautifully, at times painfully, with a logic that only ever becomes apparent in hindsight. I have failed more than almost anyone else I know, and yet somehow it has all worked out — at least so far. I had built four businesses by that day in early 2023, and run two others, and as I looked out at the dawn the following morning before hopping into my friend's pickup for the ten-hour drive back home, I knew I would start one more. I would call it Soapless.

This diary is a real-time, real-life story in the making. It is now early 2026, three years from that fateful decision and two years since Sans Savon (Soapless in French) breathed its first breath. Through this series of Substack posts, I plan to share how an idea becomes a business — the moments of inspiration, the key assumptions, the strokes of luck and the frustrating setbacks. But while the pretext of this story is entrepreneurialism, my goal is to share more completely. No journey exists in a vacuum. We create our lives in the context of the relationships we build, the values we hold true, the dreams we simply cannot relinquish. Through Sans Savon I am manifesting a dream for my life that would not have been possible without everything that came before — the strokes of luck, the debilitating blindsides, the fortunate misfortunes, even the unforced errors. Life is hard and life is beautiful. We make plans with the certainty they will never work out as we thought and the understanding that true value accrues from making the journey itself. This is my story. I am excited to see where it goes.