My parents came to Canada with $2,500.
Not as a beginning - as a reversal. A civil war in Sri Lanka made the choice for them, and they left behind what would have become generational wealth: the standing they'd built, the future that was already theirs. They traded it for $2,500 and a country they'd never seen, and started over from below the beginning.
They went backwards on purpose, betting everything on a bigger version of a life they wouldn't fully live to see. That bet is the reason I get to build any of this. The freedom to do it on my own terms is the inheritance they crossed an ocean to leave me.
So I climbed the ladder they came here for. CPA at KPMG. Thirteen years at PepsiCo, where I built an e-commerce business from scratch and scaled it from $100 million to over $1.5 billion. By every measure on the checklist, I had arrived.
And then I left it - to build something that was mine.
What I learned building JoyLeaf had less to do with cannabis than with people - how power works, how respect differs from being liked, how most ceilings are just stories we tell ourselves. The plant is the arena. Leadership is the work.