Harley Finkelstein

The needle trade or the schmata business, which is sort of the Jewish version of that, the reason you see so many Jewish immigrants go into the schmata business, the needle trade, is because low barrier to entry.

They couldn't go to biotech.

Biotech had a high barrier to entry.

You couldn't be, you couldn't have no money and start a biotech company or start a pharmaceutical company or start a technology company.

But the clothing business, you need a sewing machine and that's it.

And I, it's wonderful that we have that industry that's been built here.

But there's a lot of people that ended up building those companies that built it because they had no choice as opposed to because they chose to be, like James chose to be in this industry.

You got to check them out.

They're great.

One thing that I think a lot of people, and I myself made this mistake, was that you end up, when you think about the idea of a mentor, you end up thinking about the 360 of the mentor.

Like, I'm going to emulate everything about the mentor.

My experience has been that, back to the spiky object thing, that any mentors that anyone watching or listening have in their lives, they probably are really good at something, like really good, obviously they wouldn't be a mentor otherwise, but they're probably lacking in other areas entirely.

And I had a mentor early on in my life that ended up convincing me to go to law school.

And I won't say his name now because I'm about to say something fairly, well, he won't mind, but I won't say his name anyway.

He's the one that convinced me to move to Ottawa to go to law school.

He convinced me to go to law school to become a better entrepreneur, not become a lawyer.

Great man.

I've known him since I was a child.

I was actually, years before, I was the ring bearer at his first or second, I think his first wedding or second wedding.

Which brings me to my point is that this guy is an amazing career mentor and helped me more than almost anyone else.