ZAKHOMUTHContact

Writing

Essays from Substack, and the posts worth keeping from the blog I wrote while starting Upverter, 2010–2013. Each one is a plain page.

2026

2025

2024

2013

  • Disruption: Hacking Startup Travel

    Running a company from Toronto forces the CEO to travel. How to concentrate that disruption on one gritty person and keep the team productive.

  • The Thing You Love

    Why have you drifted away from the work you love and are best at? Would returning to it restore focus and grit?

2012

  • 25 Hardware Startups That Will Exist

    A 2012 list of twenty-five hardware problems startups were expected to solve, and a list of things that will look silly in hindsight.

  • Toronto Is Broken

    Toronto's startup ecosystem is young and broken: weak founder network, small ideas, no scale-experienced talent. Which parts to fix.

  • My Coach & My Scorecard

    An advisor's no-nonsense CEO scorecard: strong on vision, financing and recruiting, weak on marketing and evangelism.

  • Chateau Upverter

    Upverter's Toronto hacker house, the family-style culture behind it, and why early-stage founders should live and work together.

  • Build Your Own Hardware

    Every large software company builds hardware. The next giant in either category will have to own the whole user experience.

  • Sad, Tired, and Alone: My Ongoing Battle With Startup Depression

    A candid account of recurring founder depression, why it happens, and how to climb out.

  • Toronto: Dear Waterloo, It's Not A Zero Sum Game

    The Toronto/Waterloo startup rivalry is pointless. The future is equalization across cities, not a new single mecca.

  • Why The F@*K Didn't We Just Make An App?!?!

    Back-of-envelope app-economy math: software has become a commodity, and tooling is about to make hardware as easy to build as apps.

  • Toronto: How We Hire The Best.

    Upverter's recruiting playbook for Toronto: build a co-op pipeline early, earn referrals through brand and honesty, own the talent problem.

  • Toronto: Why Are We Here?

    Why Upverter stayed in Toronto after YC: the talent is there and wants to be there, even though it is a poor place to raise money.

2011

  • Insight

    Two design goals for winning at community building: build something beautiful enough that people leave the tab open, and give them a reason to hit refresh.

  • Upverter in 130 Seconds

    The investor pitch: a $4.6B EDA market, incumbents that do not understand the web, an underserved hobbyist segment, GitHub and Salesforce as models.

  • Guess Who Made It Into The US?!?!

    The border saga resolves: a sleepless trip to Pearson, a calm twenty-minute secondary inspection, and landing in SFO. Be good, be prepared, be candid, understand the rules.

  • Man, Big Stu is Getting Old!

    A family cruise for a father's sixtieth, and finally being admitted to the US by an officer who had read the border post.

  • U.S. Border Status Update

    Thirty-nine days in: a consulate visa application suspended because Canadians do not need one, and why no officer will overturn the first guard's note.

  • Random Thought: Activation Energy

    Writing daily sharpens thinking, but leaving a coding flow to write, email or take calls carries a high activation energy.

  • HTML5

    The W3C HTML5 logo, why HTML5 will kill Flash, and why building an EDA tool as an HTML5 app looked like the right bet.

  • Operational Transforms

    A short primer on operational transforms as the mechanism behind real-time collaborative editing, and why a schematic editor needed them.

  • Distributed Effort... Again...

    A founding team split across Palo Alto, Toronto and Exeter: what is lost without co-location and the tooling that keeps it working.

  • US Border Status Update

    Three days after the refusal: the three avenues being pursued to clear the file, and a resolve to keep working remotely from Canada.

  • My US Border Nightmare

    Detained and refused entry at the Lewiston bridge and then Pearson on the way to California, with a ranked list of the author's own mistakes.

2010

  • Wound A Little Tight

    An inventory of founder stress: family pressure at Christmas, incorporation and vesting paperwork, sixteen-hour days, tense founder dynamics.

  • Parallax

    A visit to Parallax, makers of the BASIC Stamp, their decades of de facto open hardware, and the resolve to build tools for companies like them.

  • Founder Bromance

    Fourteen-hour days with a cofounder: you will run out of things to say, you must genuinely like each other, and never partner with someone who cannot be wrong.

  • December?!?! Already?!?!

    Why a made-up mid-December demo deadline was set: it forces trimming to the critical problems and lines up with when fundraising must start.

  • Social Black Magic

    What the founders learned about company social presence: Twitter for reach, Facebook of questionable value, the blog as the only owned channel.

  • Meet The Founders!

    In SF, the founders reconsider and hastily assemble an application and intro video for a Bay Area startup bootcamp.

  • A Letter To Our Parents

    An open letter to the three founders' parents: the company, the thanks, how the Waterloo friends decided to quit, and a request to hold them accountable.

  • Heading to San Francisco

    Heading to SF to network. Open-source hardware leaders respond eagerly to a mission-driven email; one says it feels like the 90s again, for hardware.

  • Reaching Around

    Cold-emailing prominent open-source-hardware people, and the takeaway that anyone notable should make their email and location easy to find.

  • I wake to sleep and take my waking slow

    A prize-winning Remembrance Day speech, given at sixteen, about a great-uncle killed at sixteen driving a tank near Juno Beach.

  • In Browser, Pure Javascript, XMPP Client

    Why a browser chat client reusing Google and Facebook accounts needs its own XMPP server, a comparison of jabberd2, openfire, tigase and ejabberd, and a recommendation.

  • Bestest Opa Ever

    A tribute to a Dutch immigrant dairy farmer: a short biography and childhood summers fishing on the farm.

  • Interperting Ads-Words Results

    Google AdWords search volume as an order-of-magnitude market-size signal, in the Steve Blank customer-development sense.

  • Something Is Getting Harder

    A framework for early-stage security: address social threats socially, harden public interfaces to the 90% mark, audit on a sliding scale.

  • Backing Up Our Future

    Amazon S3 as a zero-maintenance backup target for the company's database and repos, with setup steps.

  • Split Personality

    Switching between business-development mode and hacking mode in one day wrecks both. Batch days by mode.

  • Zero (The Not-So Long Wait Is Over)

    Running out of personal money two months into full-time work, and reasoning about delaying fundraising until there is more to show.

  • User Experiance and Fist Over IP

    A UX crash course (Krug, Norman, Fowler) distilled: test on real people early, keep it self-evident, users scan, make the user feel smart.

  • The New Living Plan

    The founders decide against renting and alternate between parents' homes until funding or ramen profitability.

  • Proof Of Concept

    Resisting the urge to build the whole tool, and instead proving the risky object-model hypotheses with a functional subset first.

  • Koolaide In The Ocean

    Blue Ocean Strategy, why investors respond to it, and the struggle of positioning a new market while still supplying conventional numbers.

  • Cost Effective Housing

    Line-by-line math on whether the founders should rent together in Toronto. A lease costs $20-56K of runway, so it waits until money is raised.

  • Plant, Nourish and ...

    How hard it is to plant and protect a user community, the tension between capitalizing on it and serving it, and partners not yet fully committed.

  • Coolest Font Ever

    How the name Upverter was found (an EE clock-multiplier term), why it worked, and the open-source Orbitron font in the first logo.

  • SR&ED Hurts My Brain...

    Trying to understand how SR&ED refunds work for a pre-revenue startup, and whether founder-salary loans can net money.

  • Deadline No. 2

    The second deadline slipped because day-job partners closed no tickets. His own accounting: eight of twelve tickets and sixty logged hours.

  • Housing Dilemmas

    A cofounder commuting from San Francisco, the Toronto apartment search, and the problem of partners who only work nights.

  • Django CMS

    Step-by-step instructions for getting django-cms running after losing six hours to broken examples.

  • Whats In A Name?

    Ranked criteria for naming a web startup: spellable, .com available, verb-able, under eight characters.

  • Mantella VP

    A first VC networking event in Toronto: what worked and what to fix.

  • Glorious Metrics

    A homegrown Django metrics app tracking lines of code, check-ins, runway and update cadence, with the architecture behind it.

  • Hacking On The Go

    Hacking from a bus on a tethered laptop, and the discipline of working everywhere because every expense burns runway.

  • Django

    Evaluating Django against Rails, and noticing the community is large but light on professional programming experience.

  • The First Day of School

    Difficult school years, finding footing by grade ten, and two younger brothers' very different first days.

  • Our Python Toolset

    The Python server-side toolchain: git, SCons, IPython, nose, coverage, PyLint and cyclomatic complexity scripts, with install and run commands.

  • Results Of Our First Deadline

    The first demo deadline: what shipped, partners who missed the call, and why more work would have been busy work to hit a date.

  • Summer Holidays

    Adults lose the freedom to daydream. Starting a company restores it.

  • Where is the Line?

    Architecture versus shipping: every design discussion must produce code within a few days.

  • My Last Day At Sandvine

    Last day at Sandvine, and how a summer at Infosys and a first day soldering under a scope revealed an aptitude for hardware.

  • Damn, This Boy Can Code

    The first 1,764 lines of Python, and why a Redis-style OBJ:ID:ATTRIBUTE key-value store beats MySQL for schemaless data.

  • Looking At The Competition

    Why OrCad, ViewDraw, KiCad, Eagle and gEDA all fall short: connections are hard to see, too many clicks, bad libraries, ugly, unhackable.

  • Chile Anyone?

    Weighing the Start-Up Chile subsidy against splitting up the team, and concluding they meet almost none of the criteria anyway.

  • The Mystical Business Plan

    Skipping the formal business plan for an executive summary, and what is exciting and nerve-wracking about the market.

  • Week One (Officialy)

    The first official week as a team: accomplishments, dated milestones, and an explicit risk list.

  • Picking up with a Startup

    Do not talk down the idea. Sell the big vision and the passion.

  • Day 2 - Biz Weekend

    A founders' weekend spent settling equity split, share timing, culture, roles, and minimum value propositions for three ideas.

  • Paul Graham (might be a Jedi)

    A dozen Paul Graham essays read before a founders' weekend, and the observation that local mentors and VCs were saying the same things.

  • The End of an Era

    Why he left Sandvine: a company that aged into nine-to-five while the young unmarried engineers shipped every crisis.

  • Define Your Life

    Going so deep on the playground that teachers reported him missing, and the month before going full-time as the days that define a career.

  • Biz School

    A long brain-dump of everything a first-time founder does not know about VC terms, valuation, boards, hiring, PR, monetization and culture.

  • The Mystical Search for Money

    How little money separates a founder from a demo and real financing, and why the estimate keeps growing.

  • My First Little Upset

    Working through a mother's doubt with a written worst-case Q&A and a list of actions to earn family support.

  • Setting Up Unit21.ca

    Every server-side tool chosen for the first company toolbox (web server, CMS, mail, LDAP, tracker, wiki, CRM, git, DMS, ERP) and why.

  • My Obsession with Tools

    Thirty hours integrating best-of-breed tools with single sign-on, and the realization that tooling is pointless without work to do.

  • Resumes Suck

    Resumes strip out personality and group fit, the signals that matter most in hiring.

  • The Tribal Village

    Humans evolved for fifty-person villages. Which tribal role (leader, council, worker, misfit) do you naturally fill?

  • Cost of a Day in Life?

    Prospective budgets fail because they are contrived; retroactive, trend-based budgeting works, and a founder can live on about $10k a year.

  • A Life for Sale

    Selling everything to fund runway, and how nothing else seems to matter once startup delirium sets in.

  • But You Don't Travel?

    Two years of weekend travel while working abroad, Rajasthan and Barcelona above all, and why it stopped to pay down debt.

  • Day One

    The decision to quit a job and start a company, told alongside the door-to-door computer business run at sixteen.