[5] Holmes won a district-wide programming contest in the fifth grade,[6] and the prize was an Apple IIc which was rewired to run off of a car battery.

After dropping out of university in 1997 Holmes moved back to his hometown of Vernon and started his second business, a pizza restaurant called Growlies.

[10] To re-pursue his passion for computers and be a part of the emerging tech industry, Holmes sold Growlies in 1999 and moved to Vancouver.

[10] Seven of the 21 employees at Invoke were tasked to work on building out the Hootsuite tool, at the time a freemium product that would enable businesses to incorporate social media into their marketing campaigns.

Today, Hootsuite has nearly 1,000 employees, and over 16 million users around the globe and has expanded its reach into the Enterprise-level market for large-scale social media solutions.

[18] Holmes claimed that the book inspired Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein to tweet for the first time in June 2017.