Founder Keith McCall on building companies, software, and real-world execution.
I was working at IBM, making about $40,000 CAD annually — roughly $30,000 USD — living in Toronto and trying to do all the “right” things. My wife worked as a private school teacher. We bought a house, partly because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and mostly at the encouragement of our parents. In hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have.
It was 1991. I had just graduated from the co-op program at the University of British Columbia and was stepping into my first real job at IBM. Over the previous few years, I’d worked with IBM in Vancouver and Calgary. I thought I had a plan: Build a career in sales and marketing. Keep coding as a passion on the side.
Building the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Ticket Server wasn’t the important part. The pattern behind it was.
In 1995, the web didn’t query anything. It was designed to host documents. Pages didn’t respond. They didn’t generate. They didn’t connect to live data. If you wanted a new page, you wrote a new file. Inside IBM Toronto, I built something that broke that model.
There are places that exist for meetings. And then there are places where things actually happen. For me, the Columbia Tower Club was the latter.
AI agents are only as effective as the structure of the data they operate on. Architecture determines usefulness.
In 1994, I was a young software developer at IBM Toronto working on the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), porting the security component Kerberos from Unix to MVS and OS/400: the operating systems behind the most serious mainframe and midrange platforms of the time. Also serious: how bad the cafeteria food was.