Mike Nickason Was Afraid to Show Anyone His Map

On Friday morning I met Mike Nickason for coffee at Balzac's at the Tannery, in the same building as Communitech, and he got there before I could buy him a coffee. He joked back that he was gonna offer to get me one! It had been a week since CTV ran his story about KW Live, and I asked him if his life had really changed that much. "I can't even put it into words," he told me. "Every aspect of my life has changed."

The day before, Mike had put tires on his car and taken it to the tire shop, and he said that as he backed out, he lost his power steering. "That's my old life," he told me. Then there's what he calls "this new life since I've been doing this." I had read the headline like everyone else, a 52-year-old forklift driver who started building software with AI. What I didn't know was how much of this a quiet guy is taking in at once, or how close he came to never showing the map to anyone.

20 yearsas a warehouse worker and forklift driver
April 2026when Mike started building KW Live, his first software project
7cities and townships on the map

A fire scanner on a map

When I asked Mike about the plan for KW Live, he went back to where it started.

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Since day one, it started with the fire scanner and then I realized how much open data there was, how fragmented it was.

Mike started pulling in other feeds, like the buses, and sat there realizing that three different systems were talking to each other on one map. Then he read that Kitchener has open data portals and wants people to use them. "And I shouldn't have read that," he told me, "because I went crazy."

If you read its site, KW Live now has roads, transit, cameras, weather, planning and public safety all on one map. Only Mike is testing it so far, so I haven't tried it myself, and he says there's a lot more behind the map. "Wait till they see what it actually does underneath," he told me.

The part I liked most is Mike's rule about where information comes from. "If I can't get it from the source, it doesn't get posted," he said. The AI he plans to add will sit on top of ordinary code that gives the same answer every time, so it can't change the facts underneath. "AI is not going to jumble up any of my info," he told me.

From grade seven to grade nine

Mike is from Cambridge and has lived all over the Region. "I grew up here, and I've lived everywhere, downtown, everywhere," he told me.

Mike has always taught himself things, whether that's working on his own cars or getting on bulletin board systems before the modern internet. But he told me school was very different.

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When I was younger, they wanted me to fail grade seven because the teacher didn't like me.

Mike told me the Board of Education was called in, and the school ended up wanting him to skip grade eight. His parents said no. "My response to that in grade nine, I went right to jail," he told me, and that's where he ended up getting his schooling. "I've been out of trouble for like 30 years," he said, and he doesn't hide any of it. "I am an open book if my story will inspire others," Mike said. "It made me who I am today."

"I'm a forklift driver," Mike told me. "I never thought I'd have a LinkedIn." As the attention grew, people he never imagined hearing from started connecting with him, including mayors and people from the police service. "That one hit me," he said, and he went straight to the time he spent in jail. "It's like so many full circles. It's really cool that I may have a chance to contribute to something with that."

Mike has been on computers his whole life, and he told me all of this should have happened to him 30 years ago, but something always held him back. He said that changed over the last couple of years. "I had to go through 30 years of b∗∗∗∗∗∗t to get to this," he told me. "I finally dealt with all that, and it just, everything opened up." When he looks back now, he said, "Everything I've done, it feels like it's led me up to this."

The first person to see it

For months nobody saw the map, and Mike's worry was simple. "I was afraid of looking stupid," he told me, and that worry hasn't gone away.

A lifelong friend knew a cameraman at CTV, and Mike told me he wanted that one person's opinion before he did anything else with the map. He said he wasn't asking for a news story. He wanted to hear whether it was cool, and he wanted the confidence to walk into Communitech. The cameraman said it was, and that's why Mike blames him for all of this. "It's his fault," Mike told me. "He told me it was cool."

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I showed one person that map, what I was building, and it changed my entire life.

After that Mike walked into Communitech, and into the Accelerator Centre, where he says "they have literally opened the doors for everything for me." Ruth Casselman, the Accelerator Centre's CEO, told CTV that going from forklift driver to tech company owner "is a pretty big jump." Mike told me that on his first day he got into an Uber to come in and said "welcome to the movie, buddy," because that's what his life feels like. He has a Communitech card now, and he still can't quite believe it. "Come here whenever I want," he said. "And I've never done this before."

The best man at his wedding, a friend from 30 years ago who now lives in the States, saw what he was doing on a four-year-old laptop. He sent Mike $10,000 and wouldn't take it back, and that paid for the desktop and the big monitors you saw on CTV. Before that, Mike was using old TVs as screens. When he saw that this could make money one day, he told me, he thought about how people had helped him.

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The first thing I thought was, I can't wait to help somebody else out.

A quiet guy on the news

Mike told me he normally doesn't talk much, and that he's super quiet. He also warned me he was "so yappy" on Friday because of all the excitement, and I'm glad he was.

All of this attention has been a lot for him. "I'm still kind of freaked out that it's happening," Mike told me. In a good way. He hates admitting it, but he said the attention has slowed him down a little, and that he needed the time because he hadn't stopped since April. Other media have reached out and he hasn't answered them yet. People also write to him who don't even want to try the map. They just want to tell him that he's inspiring them.

I asked Mike how he's preparing for all of it, and he said he isn't. "I'm just being myself," he told me, "just winging it." I told him he's doing a phenomenal job, and I couldn't think of any advice to give him, because he's doing all the right things. He told me he keeps hearing the same thing from his mentors, and he doesn't know what to say to that either.

The first paying customer

KW Live's site lists the Accelerator Centre's AC:Incubate program, a founder membership at Communitech, the first group in CCIN Vertex (a connected mobility program in Ontario), and startup programs from Google, AWS, Cloudflare and Neo4j. Mike's site is careful to say that none of these are investments or endorsements.

Mike told me every mentor says to pick one customer, and that's the hard part for him. He started out thinking about news, since it could save reporters from checking 20 different sites. Then he heard from people in travel, logistics, real estate, planning and development. He doesn't have a paying customer yet, and that first one is what he's working toward.

What he'd tell people building at home

My last question was what Mike would say to someone building at home the way he was. He said he'd been afraid of showing people and afraid of having the idea stolen, and that you can't live like that with AI anymore. "Don't be embarrassed now and don't be afraid to show somebody," he told me. There are a lot of people playing with AI at home who aren't in the tech industry, he said, and some of them don't realize what they're sitting on.

Mike told me four or five people have already written to say they copied his idea for their own city. "It bothered me and it scared me at first," he said. Now he thinks about how that's someone who found something that makes them happy.

Mike hadn't been back in Communitech since the news, and after the interview he was about to walk in and see what people said to him. I told him there is another door at the back of the building he could use if he needed a break from the attention. He told me he had already used it a couple of times.

You can find Mike and KW Live listed on Builderloo.