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They say those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach or do often slither upward into the arid bureaucratic tundra—perhaps as Assistant Vice President of Strategic Alignment and Euphemism Coordination. I should know. I spent years suffocating in that tepid soup of institutional mediocrity.
Let’s be brutally candid: I am not a successful entrepreneur. My Substack pays just enough to let me splurge on imported toilet paper.
But entrepreneurship, as it turns out, isn’t always about glory or yachts—it’s often the direct result of existential nausea. One reaches a point where sitting through another meeting about “transformational engagement metrics” feels like waterboarding via jargon. So one bolts. Or limps away.
Or crawls into one’s garage to blend raw chicken and beef with bone meal.
Now to the escape plan. No IPOs here. No exit strategy with a bow. Just a handful of attempts, some still twitching, others fossilized. The ideas, some started, some just crawling out of the starting gate.
Exhibit A:
Nikas Raw Dog Food. Earnest, underfunded, briefly promising. COVID mauled it, yes, but the idea remains. Human-grade, pathogen-free, HPP-processed. It still lives in theory. And in my garage. All 12,000 empty HPP ready packages. My mother-in-law keeps asking me to throw them out. No.
Exhibit B:
Ensign Score. A noble effort to test applicants on basic skills and current affairs. It died at the hands of a web developer who left me with a flaming heap of code and a glossy interface. The business plan still makes sense. The execution resembled a toddler playing with server cables.
Exhibit C:
Substack. Here we go. Something that actually works. Not much, mind you—$550 a month (postscript, now $1000) —but it feels earned. I say what I think, I reach a growing audience, I remain unchained from the HR department. I offend the correct people. There’s no greater metric.
Exhibit D: TÖBÜ
A Euro-awkward streetwear brand. High-GSM hoodies, low-expectation marketing. Still pending. Still stupid. But somehow, charming.
Exhibit E:
A dating app called Hunters and Farmers. See below.
Alongside all this, I still teach—at a university whose administrators have yet to develop a persecution fetish. The other university? They went full Inquisition. Human Rights complaints, gag orders, shunning rituals. I expected Kafka. I got North Korea with better branding.
I’ve taught courses on entrepreneurship, which is rather like a eunuch lecturing on foreplay—somewhat theoretical, unburdened by results, and always laced with the faint aroma of fraud. I don’t claim success, only sincerity. At least I haven’t yet made a LinkedIn video series about “vision” in front of a ring light and a fake plant.
Now, don’t mistake me for one of those tenured termites who lecture on capitalism while pulling a taxpayer-funded pension from the Marxist Fantasy League.
I actually respect entrepreneurs—the real ones. Like my neighbour who manufactures things made out of aluminium, guardrails, not really sure. But he put four kids through university by making industrial product out of aluminium (that’s British spelling and us Canadians are supposed to be onboard with our old overlords).
He, and those like him, not the smug suits in administration, are the quiet heart of a functioning society.
The odds, of course, are against me. They always are. I’m not cashing in my retirement savings to fund operations—largely because I don’t have much retirement savings, and if I did, I’d use it to bribe someone to erase my memory of ever working in academia.
I want to be the captain of my ship, even if it’s an inflatable dinghy circling the drain. God may steer the ocean liner, but I’ve still got an oar and a middle finger for the shoreline.
I’ve made my attempts. I wrote business plans for Indigenous entrepreneurs in Fort Mac, and some actually succeeded. My former TA turned his plan into Vitaly Designs and is now doing very well, though I think my contribution was limited to nodding like a bobblehead and saying, “Go for it!”
My own first foray? A tutoring service in the MBA days. Printed flyers. Tear-off strips. Ancient sorcery. It paid the rent and then went the way of all posters—torn, rained on, and irrelevant.
Then came my pièce de résistance in tragicomic ambition: www.nikasrawdogfood.com—the entrepreneurial equivalent of charging the enemy with a plastic spoon. It had momentum, even a website, until COVID stomped it into mulch. I was also teaching thirteen university courses at the time (the pedagogical equivalent of juggling chainsaws in a wind tunnel), which meant I made every possible mistake twice.
The product, ironically, is now quite good—HPP-processed, pathogen-free, human-grade meat for dogs. Five parts meat, one part organ, some bone meal, vegetables. Basically what Gwyneth Paltrow eats. The problem? I still have thousands of bags aging gracefully in my garage. A literal monument to misplaced optimism.
Next came Ensign Score: a testing platform to measure employee competence. Imagine LinkedIn, but honest. It required software. I hired a developer who, in retrospect, must’ve learned code from a cereal box. I paid thousands for a broken website and a digital tombstone. The idea is solid. But so is lead, and I’m not selling pencils.
Then there’s my Substack, Freedom to Offend, which makes $500 a month. A pittance, yes, but also the most honest money I’ve earned in years. I write. I offend. I lose subscribers and gain the right ones. It’s not a business plan—it’s a lifeline.
Project three: TÖBÜ—a streetwear brand I started with a German friend who, like all Germans, takes unserious things very seriously. High-GSM hoodies, quirky slogans, Euro-cool without the heroin. We sell hoodies to dozens. Not thousands. Dozens. But they’re good hoodies. The umlauts alone are worth $20.
Then there’s the dating app. Yes, I know. Just stop laughing. It’s called Hunters and Farmersand is based on the revolutionary idea that maybe people aren’t just horny algorithms swiping through meat racks. It’s for those who want something real, not just someone who looks good on the Instagram grid. The app failed, of course—because like real relationships, it required effort and didn’t harvest dopamine in 4.3 seconds. But it should work. I still think so. Somewhere in the pile of shame, next to the dog food bags, it waits.
In sum: I’ve failed. Often. With style. And with documentation.
But here’s the uncharitable truth: I’d rather shovel dog food than spend one more hour listening to a middle manager explain “strategic vision” using clip art and jargon harvested from a TED Talk.
The real builders—the young men digging up my yard, the Indigenous entrepreneurs grinding it out in Fort Mac—these are the people with courage. In many ways better than me. But I’m not finished.
Post Script: Eighteen Months Later
The Unearned Resurrection
This little war log died. Fired from my professorship less than a week ago.
Buried under the psychological sludge of fighting for my job, for my name, for my sanity. I didn’t build an empire. I didn’t save my professorship.
Fired six days ago for the crime of calling Hamas Nazis.
But—and this matters—I don’t feel like I failed.
I answered the bell every round. The university paid off the judges, ran the match in a dark basement, and declared themselves victorious before I entered the ring. But I stood. I wrote. I fought. They never answered my arguments because they couldn’t. They shunned, gagged, poisoned the well, and declared silence to be virtue. It worked—for them. Temporarily.
So yes, I was fired. But in truth, I was released. Released from purgatory, from the barren dungeon of bureaucratic sadism. And now? Now I teach a few courses elsewhere. At a university where free speech still has a pulse.
(Though, let’s be honest, the same group of zealots tried to get me canned there too.)
As for Nikas Raw Dog Food, the dream isn’t dead. Just sleeping. My dogs ate the final 30 bags.
The hoodies? Still boxed. Still mocking me from the basement like failed art projects. But to throw them out would be to admit defeat. They stay. As does the dog food. It blocks the garage. I park on the driveway.
My shit depth perception guarantees I’d wreck the car backing in anyway. So thanks dog food packaging.
Substack? It’s not top 1%, but it’s top 5%, and rising. I’ll take that.
This isn’t failure. This is forward motion. I was pushed out of the classroom, yes—but only into a louder, sharper, less censored microphone. If you want to sneer at me, take a number and get in line behind the tenured dullards and anonymous HR sadists. But here’s the thing: I’m still moving. Still writing. I tried painting, made a birthday card for my daughter two days ago but that has no entrepreneurial legs. She preferred the one I did with Dollar Stores supplies when she was 13.
Still jabbing at the gods of mediocrity with a fountain pen sharpened into a spear.
The mortgage is being paid, the kids and pets eat, though the guinea pigs are such drama queens each morning you’d think they were auditioning for Les Misérables: Rodent Edition. They squeal like they’ve been rescued from a gulag, only to be given cucumbers instead of kale.
But the point is—I’m not dead yet. And neither is the truth, though they’ve tried to bury it under administrative jargon, DEI gloss, and cowardice disguised as policy. They can shun me, fire me, blacklist me, erase my name from the departmental list—but they can’t shut me up.
Because failure, real failure, is surrender. And I haven’t. I answered every round. I got bloodied, sure. The university paid off the judges, tore up the rulebook, and tried to gaslight the crowd into thinking I started the fight. But I stayed on my feet. And now I’m just switching rings.
So let them watch with their arms folded and their smiles tight. Let them toast their temporary victories. The match isn’t over until they lower me into the ground—and even then, I might just have a closing argument.
I’m doing something called gain capture and momentum investing in an unregistered account. I make more in a day that I made in three months of dog food sales. We will see. Crawling.
Nothing’s over until they lower me into the ground—and even then, I plan to haunt them with footnotes.
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