You know how sometimes you meet someone and think their life is such a train wreck, you don’t want to pile on by warning other people about them?
Yeah, that ain’t me.
DO NOT HIRE THIS GUY.
Shawn Donald Gulliman is a sales person working out of a Vancouver motel room with a really sketchy past and a much more sketchy present.
He’s worked around the public markets since the late 90’s, sometimes in IR, sometimes in sales. He sometimes works under the company name Paladin Management Company, and sometimes under variations of his own name.
For most of that time he was just a gormless caveman plodding from company to company in short spells, but more recently he’s become a desperate, threatening extorter and blackmailer of every company he comes in contact with.
We brought him on as a commision-only sales contractor in 2023, and allowed him to work from home because he was having some mobility issues after being ‘hit by a car.’ Inside the first month, his ‘house burned down,’ so we advanced him some cash to get him into a motel and out of what looked like a bad situation. He sold one program for us in the following year, a super cut-priced deal to the guy he used as a reference when applying for the job. He constantly promised more deals were close but they never materialized.
For us, because he was commission-only, we didn’t care much that he wasn’t selling well. Or at all.
Until we got a note from someone who nearly became a client but backed out at the last minute, with screenshots of text messages he was getting from our guy that were, well, bonkers.
There are more. The texts contained all sorts of threats that if the company in question didn’t buy a program he would short the guy’s stock, “bring around some big guys to fuck [him] up,” trash his company across the internet, and drag his name through the mud.
Upon hearing about this, I was mortified. I’ve spent years building a reputation where, if you didn’t like me, it’s likely because you’re a shady character doing shady things and I let people know about it, but I’ve never crossed over to the dark side. My reputation as a journalist has been established over 15 years and is worth more to me than short term gains.
Our entire business model is ‘integrity’ and this douchelord was single handedly burning it down from within.
When we learned what he was doing, we fired the dude on the spot and set about contacting other clients and those we knew he’d called on recently to see if this was a random experience.
It was not.
Here he is extorting a small mineral exploration company on CEO.CA for $5k after they had him do a month of IR work and decided he ultimately wasn’t up to the job. He wanted that money not as back pay, but in return for not trashing their name online. CEO.ca mods quickly banned him once notified of the abuse, but it wasn’t the first time.
Here he is back in 2016, bashing Doubleview Gold, again after they’d removed him from IR.
With the employer he was with before me, a large scale IR firm, he reportedly attempted to actually choke out his boss when he was let go, leading to the filing of a police report, and at the company he worked for AFTER us, a large public markets message board site, he once again made threats to do personal, physical, and reputational damage to his employer if they didn’t pay him a lump sum to go away.
To any company considering hiring this dude, take the above as fair warning that you shouldn’t.
And to those who might have found themselves on the wrong end of his threats, yes, Gulliman reportedly has priors for assault and has had run-ins with the BCSC back in the 90’s, but don’t pay him a red cent. He’s no longer physically capable of doing anyone physical harm and doesn’t have any ‘friends’ who’ll come around and teach you a lesson – at least not friends he doesn’t owe money to.
This is how you handle him properly.
Tell him to GTFO and live your life.
Gulliman is no physical threat to anyone. He can barely walk these days, he’s usually drunk by 11am, and he’s such a luddite that he’s likely incapable of seeing this post.
He’s been on Twitter since 2012 but only ever made one tweet.
SLTA Filed an 8k to the SEC today confirming a $20,000,000 funding agreement! Nice!
— Shawn D Gulliman (@ShawnJon8870) March 14, 2014
If you do get into it with him, his story constantly changes. He’s rich, he’s shorting companies, he’s living in Whistler one minute…
..and the next minute he’s ‘dying of cancer.’
Whether he comes to you with the name Shawn Gulliman or Donald Gulliman or S. Donald Gulliman, tell him to take a long [drunken, stumbling] walk off a long pier.
And tell him my 1-wood is waiting for him to show up at my office.
— Chris Parry
Ohhhh wow. Just came across this now. I’ve had many encounters with this clown throughout the years both as an investor and a colleague (which is being generous). I have seen firsthand his boorish behavior and his threats to people in the industry. The stories I could tell….. bottom line is Don or Shawn or whatever he is going by is a walking trainwreck and to be avoided at all costs. A true loser in every sense of the word.
Indeed. He just called me to tell me he was waiting outside my office with a bat. I went outside and he was nowhere to be seen.