Let's Be Problem Solvers, Not Disruptors
One Founder's Path from Big Tech to Pacific Northwest Forests
We are Stella and Amy. We share firsthand stories at the crossroads of tech, business, and culture, helping leaders craft actionable cross-cultural strategies. Together, we bridge cultural divides and bring the world a little closer—one step at a time.
Felix had worked in tech for over ten years—Amazon, startups, most recently as a Senior Director at Zendesk building AI products. So when a fellow parent from his kid's school approached him about a "timber industry opportunity," Felix's first reaction was honest: "I don't understand the timber industry at all."
That admission led to an unusual first meeting. Instead of coffee or a conference room, Felix found himself deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, watching trees get cut down, loaded onto massive trucks, and transported to sawmills where they'd be processed into lumber. He walked through the entire supply chain in a single day—from forest floor to factory floor.
"I wanted to see it firsthand," Felix recalls. "Our first meeting was actually going directly to the forest—from cutting trees on the mountain, loading them onto trucks, delivering them to the processing plant, and walking through the entire factory."
What Felix discovered in those forests would eventually lead him to leave his comfortable big tech job and dive into an industry that hadn't changed its core measurement processes in over 100 years.
This is the story of how stepping outside your career comfort zone—literally into the woods—can reveal extraordinary opportunities.
Entering a World Frozen in Time
The timber industry Felix encountered was unlike anything in his tech background. At his first industry conference—200 people gathered in Victoria, British Columbia—Felix was "the only Asian face, and the only non-white face. Everyone else was traditional American white men, mostly middle-aged and older."
This wasn't just demographic homogeneity; it turns out the timber industry is a tight-knit community built over generations. The industry in North America is dominated by multi-generational families, many now in their fourth or fifth generation of ownership. Felix's co-founder represents the fifth generation of his family's 150-year timber legacy.
"These families are very familiar with each other, and it's multi-generational," Felix explains. "This person's son was someone else's former apprentice, that person was someone else's former company partner. There are even intermarriages—it's quite a wonderful community."
These families control vast loggable forests across the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes region, and southeastern United States. Their business model is straightforward and traditional: grow trees, harvest when mature, sell to sawmills, replant. It's stable, predictable, and has sustained these families for generations.
The Hundred-Year-Old Problem
At the heart of the timber industry lies a measurement challenge that hasn't evolved since the beginning of the timber industry. When forest owners sell trees to sawmills, every truckload must be measured by certified third-party inspectors—similar to real estate appraisals where neither buyer nor seller can be trusted to provide objective measurements.
Currently, when a truck loaded with logs arrives at a sawmill, an inspector physically climbs onto the truck and measures each log individually with a ruler, recording diameter and length to calculate volume. The inspector also manually scores each log for defects—knots, bends, damage from freezing or insects—that affect pricing.
"It's very labor-intensive," Felix explains. "You need people to manually measure, and I have videos of people climbing up and down—very hard work. It's also dangerous because logs can roll and shift."
The entire process takes 20-30 minutes per truck. Drivers wait. Operations bottleneck. In addition, the system lacks any verification. Once measured, logs are immediately processed, making it impossible to check accuracy or resolve discrepancies among different measurers.
For someone who'd spent a decade optimizing digital systems, the optimization opportunity was obvious. Felix and his co-founder saw an opportunity to automate this process using computer vision—essentially creating a "highway toll booth" for timber measurement.
From Forests to Startup Reality
Their startup is still in its early stages. The eventual solution will use cameras and algorithms instead of human inspectors to measure the timber load on trucks. Trucks would drive through a "vision tunnel" equipped with multiple cameras capturing images from different angles. The system would automatically process measurements in the cloud and deliver results to drivers' phones within minutes.
After Felix left his Zendesk position to pursue the startup full-time, he learned his first harsh lesson about building a startup: "Building any product from zero, no matter how simple the product seems initially, is really difficult. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
To name a few problems his team encountered: Network cables that worked perfectly in home testing caused signal interference in industrial settings because longer cables act like antennas. USB connections seemed convenient for development but proved unreliable outdoors, requiring expensive industrial-grade connectors. Camera frequencies had to precisely match lighting frequencies to avoid strobing effects invisible to human eyes but devastating to image quality.
"I rely quite a bit on AI. I ask ChatGPT first for most things, and it can help me solve about 70-80% of problems." For deeper algorithmic challenges, he recruited PhD students specializing in 3D reconstruction from satellite mapping, autonomous vehicles, and robotics.
Building Tech in Traditional Industry
Traditional industries like timber typically have decent market sizes with thin profit margins—exactly what makes them unattractive to big tech companies but perfect for lean startups. "If you do a tech startup in timber, it might have annual profits of tens of millions with a team of just 5-10 people. That's actually very good business for a small tech team," Felix explains.
Meanwhile, companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta deploy their top talent on high-margin sectors like search, advertising, and recommendations. They won't assign hundreds of engineers to tackle niche industrial problems, leaving room for specialized teams.
Most importantly, established industries and companies provide built-in product-market fit and distribution channels. The problems have existed for a long time, waiting for someone to solve them.
The validation came quickly. Before presenting at their first industry conference, they had secured one paying customer for pilot testing. Immediately after their presentation, a second customer with 30+ locations across North America approached them, offering to start with one site and potentially roll out across their entire operation.
Let's Be Problem Solvers, Not Disruptors
Felix's journey from big tech to founding a startup in Pacific Northwest forests is fascinating. In an era where "disruption" has become a Silicon Valley buzzword, what traditional industries actually need are technologists willing to roll up their sleeves, spend time understanding established communities, and solve real problems with AI and other technologies. The timber industry didn't need to be disrupted—it needed someone who would climb onto trucks, walk through sawmills, and earn the trust of multi-generational families before building better tools.
The biggest opportunities aren't waiting in the next social media app or crypto protocol—they could be hiding in plain sight across manufacturing floors, supply chains, and century-old processes that serve massive markets but have never attracted Silicon Valley's attention. For technologists seeking meaningful work with clear impact, the path forward isn't about disruption—it's about joining these industries, understanding them, and helping them evolve. Sometimes innovation begins not with breaking things, but with getting your hands dirty and asking: "What if we could make this better?"
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