Vlad Sherbatov: Vaulte is a Toronto based startup that
specializes in verifiable digital signatures. Meyer,
welcome to the program.
Meyer Mechanic: Thanks for having me Vlad.
Vlad Sherbatov: Why did you decide to start a company? And
why did you decide to start Vaulte?
Meyer Mechanic: Vaulte started when me and my co founder
Demetri. We're having beers one night, and we're asking
ourselves the question, why can't you sign your will,
digitally, the law said that it had to be in writing. But all
these other laws have changed for digital signatures, why not
wills? And the more we dug into it, and the more we dug into
digital signatures, the more we started to realize that there
were kinks in the armor, that these things weren't as
protective as we thought they were. And that if we really
wanted something that you could sign your will, with, which is
you know, all of your worldly possessions. We need to rethink
these from the ground up for compliance. Both of us liked the
idea of building something for ourselves. That's kind of
important, if you want to be an entrepreneur. It's funny because
different things motivate you at different times, when you're
building a company. I think in the phase where we were coming
up with an answer, what was fascinating to us was the hunt.
Why didn't this have an answer? What do we need to put into an
answer? What can we do? And then once we had that answer, then
well there was the next jump off, is we're going to dedicate
our full time to it. And that was, is the opportunity big
enough? Can we do something with it? Is this a hole that we want
to dive down for, you know, potentially the rest of our
lives? And all of those answers were interesting. And they test
your mettle every day. Because when you're in the slog of it,
and you know, something in the codebase isn't going right, or
you have a customer who's not happy with something, you know,
you question those decisions, but at the same time, what
motivates you through is I'm doing something interesting.
Vlad Sherbatov: Did you always want to be an entrepreneur, or
did this something that you decided to do right before going
into Vaulte?
Meyer Mechanic: I had a very safe route planned. And I went
into my MBA, knowing that I had a safe route plan for when I was
done with it. A third of the way through, something happened that
kind of derailed that plan. And that pushed me into a world
where I was able to really explore, I was suddenly in open
water. And I really got to open my eyes to say like, oh, this is
what life is like on the open water. And I kinda got the catch
for sailing. From there. Building your own boat and
sailing across the ocean just seems like the next natural
step. And it feels great. One of the things that gets underlooked
so often when you're starting a company, is the fact that none
of us can do it alone. The most important thing you're gonna get
as an entrepreneur is your community. Surround yourself
with good people, surround yourself with good mentors,
surround yourself with good accelerators. Before I give a
shout out to any of my professors, I need to give a
shout out to my partner Dimitri. He's our he's my CTO, he's my co
founder in this. And you know, the nights that we're up till
two in the morning, just discussing how to build this
thing have been fascinating ever since. of the professors that
inspired me that have sort of gotten me to this point. There
was Neil Buckley at York University, who was my game
theory Prof. Which sort of taught me about the math behind
how people think. There was Francesco Bova, who was my
accounting Prof, at Rotman, too, who's answered some of the most
insane questions for me, even now. Last year, we were talking
about blockchain economics on your balance sheet, which is as
boring of a subject as it sounds, but the actual answers,
they were fascinating,
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