This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ryan Courtnage, the 51-year-old cofounder of the donation-management platform Benevity, who lives in Creston, British Columbia. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
When I exited my last endeavor in 2020, I purchased a large piece of land out in the mountains. It’s 22 acres.
My cofounders and I built something from scratch that continues to make a positive change in the world. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. Still, I didn’t feel like I was building anymore. Eventually, being a founder gets to a point where all of your time is spent managing teams, which I found very tiring. I’m an introvert.
That’s when I was like: I’m kind of done with this. I need to do something different. I’m just going to get my hands greasy and go be a lumberjack for a while, which is what I did.
It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of heavy equipment, learning about diesel engines and hydraulics, and how to properly fell a tree, and building little outbuildings. It’s really rewarding, hands-on work that is completely different from what I spent my career doing, which was sitting in a chair behind a monitor.
I don’t consider myself retired. I consider myself to be on a sort of sabbatical, taking a break.
It was an enjoyable transition. I wake up in the morning and think: my goal today is to get the skid steer working again, or I don’t have enough firewood to get us through the winter. I put my mind to it, complete it in a day or two, and then sit down and have a beer in the sun.
I’m on grid. It feels very remote, though. It’s raw land. I’ve got a little excavator, and I’m trying to turn mountainous slopes into flat areas that I can use to build buildings. I call it “homesteading,” but I’m not fully self-reliant. In the summer, there’s a lot of fruit that you can pick off the trees, but we’re not farming, and we don’t have animals.
I built a geodesic dome from a kit on our property, so we’ve got a glamping experience on Airbnb that people can book. Last year was our first year. It keeps you really busy. It’s not highly profitable, but it does feel rewarding, and it gives you an outlet to talk to different people all the time. My day is a lot of busy work out on the mountain, and then trying to find as many little moments as I can to enjoy the day, like getting out my fly rod or going out on the lake to cool off.
How I’m bringing tech to the land
Moving out here was a rupture in my lifestyle. I didn’t look at a computer screen for probably a couple of years. It wasn’t really until ChatGPT came out that I really started paying attention again.
AI coding reinvigorated my lust for building with technology. I’m getting back to not sleeping at night. I didn’t use to sleep at night, and then I stopped working and slept really well. Now, the wheels are constantly turning because there’s so much that I can accomplish so fast.
One of the things I’m passionate about is bringing technology, especially artificial intelligence, into the trades. I’ve been dabbling quite a bit with a home assistant setup, with cameras everywhere and sensors throughout the land, so I know what’s happening with my water tanks or what the temperature is underneath the house.
Now, I’ve got an OpenClaw system that’s running and is fully aware. It’s actually got a personality where it thinks that it lives in my crawl space — which it does, on a laptop on a shelf — and it’s got access to all the sensors and cameras throughout the property, and is able to tell me if there’s any anomalies or if somebody’s come onto the back end of my property.
It’s expensive. I was shocked when I saw all the tokens I had burned running it. Yesterday, I was chatting with my OpenClaw, working through some ideas, and this morning I looked at my bill: I’d spent $10 on tokens. It does add up.
I pay for a Google AI Pro plan. When I’m developing with Google Antigravity, I constantly hit limits that put me in a time-out for half a day. It works really well with all the things I want to do outside, though.
I’m not building for profit, at least not yet. I’m getting my hands dirty, making sure I’m on the bleeding edge. I don’t know where I’m going to strike yet, but there’s going to be something in my future.
I’ve also got two kids: one in university, and the other in high school. If I know how to use this stuff, I believe I can help them gain an edge when they enter the workforce.
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