I am Shei Goldberg
I was twelve the first time I tried to build a business. My older brother Jean had found a comic at a flea market called Hustler Humor, which tells you most of what you need to know. The kids at my school had pocket money and not much to spend it on. The vendor wouldn’t sell to a twelve-year-old, so my brother did the buying for me. I had exclusive supply and a captive market, and for a few glorious weeks business was exceptional.
Then I made one strategic error. I showed my mom a joke I thought was funny.
The next morning she marched me to the principal’s office. I confessed, handed over my stock and named every customer. My mom offered my profits as reparations for what she was now calling, with remarkable specificity, a porn ring. Mr Ellis, the principal, did his very best to look serious. He confiscated 25 magazines, which I can only assume became his private collection.
At school I loved maths and physics. In 2000, loving those meant one career, teaching. So I chose engineering, partly for a reason I have rarely said out loud.
In grade 11, an English teacher told us that technologies can be lost. His example was the slide rule, a whole way of calculating that had already vanished. It stuck with me. I worried that one day we might forget how to build tall buildings. If I became an engineer, maybe I could help make sure we didn’t.
That worry has come back in a new shape. We are building AI now, a revolution as big as the railways. Maybe bigger. Maybe much bigger. And one of the biggest concerns is that even the people building it don’t fully understand how it works.
I still care about the same thing I did in grade 11. More than anything, I want us to understand what we build. We are living in a critical moment, and I think it will be remembered for centuries. I pray humanity finds a safe path through it.
I half wish I’d had the nerve to study physics. The two subjects I loved went on to explode into possibility. But the road I took gave me twenty two years inside four big organisations, mostly in data, looking for interesting ways to add value.
At 44 I left. I moved my family to a small town in Nova Scotia and became the at-home parent to our two boys. On the side I am running the experiment I have wanted since I was twelve. I am building something of my own, with AI doing the heavy lifting that used to take a team. I would rather be building in this moment than watching it.
If it lives in someone’s head, it isn’t a system yet
One idea runs through all of that, and it happens to be the thing I sell. It starts with a teenager worried we would forget how to build tall buildings. It is awake again now that we are building AI nobody fully understands.
I keep almost nothing in my head. I spend my attention on two things, my boys and working out what this AI moment actually means, and everything else gets written down. If it is not written down, it does not exist.
So I build the same way. The follow-up fires on its own. The review ask goes out without anyone remembering to send it. The domain is in your name, not sitting in someone else’s account. A business that depends on somebody remembering is not a system. It is a person with a good memory, and one day they are on holiday.
You probably have no spare attention either. You are good at the actual work, and the system around it was never the job you signed up for.
The back room, and what it hid from me
When I started work, my dad gave me one piece of advice. The corporate world is stressful, he said, so be the guy in the back room who holds the technical keys. The one nobody bothers, because everyone knows they can’t do without him.
I lived by that for twenty two years. Now I am the whole company, and there is no back room. There is sales, and admin, and people to call. Left alone, I would still rather be building something beautiful.
But the back room hid something from me. I like people. A lot. That part of me is a seedling, and I am looking after it on purpose.
The work itself
Everything I sell runs on my own business first. The guides, the assessments, the follow-up, the measurement. You are looking at it.
If you would rather check the work than take my word for it, that is the right instinct.
Tell me what you’re working on
Not a pitch. Say what you are trying to fix and I will give you a straight read.