Bert Fairfax

I grew up the kid of immigrant parents who scraped together enough to send me to private school. I was surrounded by kids with nice cars and ski trips. We didn’t have that kind of money. My allowance was $10 a week, and by grade 4 I was using my paper route money to trade stocks at the kitchen table with my dad. At 13 I taught myself to code. At 14 I built pollit.com, one of the internet’s first online polling tools. It blew up. Millions of polls, massive traffic, clients like MTV and The New York Times. By Grade 11 the company was doing millions in revenue and I was hiring adults while still going to high school. I needed to run ads on all that traffic to make money, but every ad server on the market was built for big companies with big budgets. A teenager couldn’t afford any of them. So I built my own. At 17 someone offered me $2.5M for everything. I said no and went back to chemistry class. That ad server became AdButler. Today it handles over 100 billion ad requests a month for companies like Costco, HP, The Home Depot, and Microsoft. It’s been named one of the Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies by the Financial Times and a Top Growing Company by the Globe and Mail. Nearly three decades in, it’s still bootstrapped, still profitable, zero outside funding, and 100% uptime since 2017. I took everything AdButler generated and kept building. I co-founded Arvita Therapeutics where we’re developing mRNA cancer therapies for people with Neurofibromatosis Type 1. I’m opening Mari, a diagnostic imaging clinic. Through DoubleBlind Capital I invest in early-stage startups and have backed more than a dozen companies across SaaS, consumer products, and healthcare. I also own restaurants, a mobile home park, and commercial real estate. I like building and buying things that generate real cash flow in the real world, not just on a screen. I’m currently renovating a waterfront home in Victoria, BC. It’s the same city I grew up in, started my first company in, and never left. Everything I’ve built has been from here. Three things 28 years of building taught me: Your first company won’t be your best idea. It will lead you to your best idea. I built a polling tool to get traffic to my website. The traffic needed ads. The ads needed a server. That server became an 8-figure company. That company now funds cancer research. You can’t connect the dots looking forward. Saying no to money is harder than making it. Turning down $2.5M at 17 felt insane. But every time I’ve chosen long-term ownership over short-term cash, it’s paid back many times over. The hardest financial skill isn’t earning money. It’s not taking it when someone puts it right in front of you. Build the machine, not the product. Products come and go. What lasts is a system that generates cash flow and lets you point it at things that matter. I built an ad server. It gave me the freedom to fund cancer therapies, open a clinic, and invest in a dozen startups. None of that happens if I sell at 17. I write about this stuff here. Follow if you’re building something.