Lessons in Reinvention After My Car Crash

For most of my early life, hockey gave me direction. Growing up in Toronto, everything revolved around the rink. I moved away from home at a young age to play at a high level, lived in multiple cities, and trained every day with a single objective of maximizing my skills and going pro. I could measure progress easily - either I moved up or I didn’t. And when I was drafted by the New York Rangers in 2005, it was the ultimate confirmation that the structure I had committed to was working. 

A few years later, that structure disappeared.

After dealing with injuries that required shoulder surgery, I was involved in a serious car accident. While driving on Highway 401 toward downtown Toronto, my car was hit by a transport truck. I was airlifted to Hamilton Health Sciences Centre with a brain hemorrhage, contusions, lacerations, and severe damage to my parietal lobe. I spent several days in a coma and experienced temporary hemiparesis on my left side. My hockey career was over, immediately and permanently.

What followed was not a single moment of clarity, but a commitment to another, similar sort of process. Looking back, that process can be broken down into a few practical lessons.

1. Commit Fully - But Accept When the Path Changes

Hockey taught me that discipline, repetition, and operating under pressure were key skills for success in any venture. It also taught me that some paths are narrow. When you commit fully, you have to accept that the same focus that drives success can limit your ability to accept when that path must change, for whatever reason. For me, once it was clear that my hockey career was over, the work became finding a new direction for that focus rather than clinging to the old one.  

2. Treat Openness as a Skill

What came next was less about inspiration and more about openness. Without a single track to follow, I became more willing than I probably would have been otherwise to explore unfamiliar things. While still recovering, I came across early Y Combinator content online. I was drawn to the idea that small teams could build meaningful systems from scratch. 

3. Change the Environment to Accelerate Learning

That curiosity led me to China. I wanted to be somewhere unfamiliar, where I had to adapt quickly and learn by doing. Living and working there meant learning new ways of thinking about business, technology, and scale. It removed any assumptions I didn’t even realize I had and forced sharper, incisive ways of thinking. When you remove comfort and certainty, you pay a lot closer attention to everything, and learning increases exponentially.

4. Have Courage to Build What You Envision 

When I realized I had to reinvent myself, I became much less anchored to how things had always been done. That openness extended into my views on technology. I started paying attention to crypto and blockchain early, primarily because I was more willing to question existing infrastructures, including those that underpinned our financial system. In 2017, that thinking led to the founding of Polymath, a platform designed to bring regulated financial securities onto blockchain rails. Polymath worked because it addressed inefficiencies before they were widely acknowledged. I would never have acted on them without the courage that came from my recovery.

5. Remain Open for Reinventions

The same openness now applies to artificial intelligence. AI, like crypto once was, operates in a space where standards are still forming. Building companies like Sapien requires comfort with uncertainty and ambiguity. Having already had one career end abruptly, that uncertainty feels manageable to me. I’m able to focus on fundamentals and build a path forward based on the strength of my own structures. 

I didn’t plan to become an entrepreneur or to work in emerging technologies. A car accident forced me to move on from hockey and rebuild myself, but it also removed the pressure to follow conventional paths. Being open to new countries, new industries, and new ideas has served me well because it keeps so many options open to me. 

Hockey taught me discipline and resilience. Recovery and reinvention taught me flexibility and mental strength. Together, they shaped how I build new companies today.

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