They joined us at the first annual ‘Tech Founder’s Stampede Summit’ that we co-hosted with House831, with help from the C100 and Fintech’s Canada. We had 50 founders from across Canada join us. The event was sponsored by Float, BLG, Boast, RBCx, PNC Bank, and Fortinet.

This is our recap of one of the conversations from that summit. It got spicy. The panelists:

• Rob Khazzam, Co-Founder and CEO of Float

• Jeff Adamson, Co-Founder of Neo Financial (and SkipTheDishes)

“If you’re a founder building a startup and you’re complaining about the government or regulation, that’s a victim mentality. It’s not going to get you very far.” Rob Khazzam

Missed this one? Check out our recap videos on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts and follow us on Instagram for updates on everything Tech Thursday.

Introduction: An Industry Frozen in Time

Jeff set the stakes early. Canadian banking has been essentially frozen for over a century, and somehow it costs about the same to do your banking today as it did 150 years ago, despite everything technology has done to every other industry. Five players own roughly 96% of the market. That is the wall both founders have spent their careers running at.

But the wall is finally cracking. Questrade just became the first new Schedule I bank in a very long time. Revolut has moved in. Ramp is doing more here. And a wave of homegrown fintechs is raising real money, including Float’s own recent round. Jeff also flagged the flip side: capital is concentrating hard, with a sliver of companies absorbing a huge share of it, so if you are not a category winner or an AI-native company, the fight for funding has only gotten harder.

We worked through three things. Why the new competition is good for everyone, how these companies actually move, and why the founders think the real bottleneck is mindset, not policy.

1. Competition Is the Point

The takeaway: New entrants do not just win customers. They force the incumbents to get better, and every so often they force the rules to change.

Both founders are unusually enthusiastic about competition, including the competition coming for them. The logic is simple. An oligopoly under no pressure has no reason to improve, and 150 years of flat banking costs is the receipt. When Float ships a feature that makes a bank executive turn to their army of VPs and ask why they do not have it yet, that is a win for every Canadian SME, whether or not they ever become a Float customer.

Jeff’s favourite example is the NSF fee. At Neo they never charged one. Instead of dinging a customer $45 the moment their account ran short, they would notify the customer, hold the payment for a day to give them a chance to top up, and only decline it if the money never showed. The government noticed, asked why the incumbents were charging $45 for the privilege of being broke, and capped the fee at roughly $10.

“It’s literally the definition of getting kicked when you’re down.” Jeff Adamson, on the old $45 NSF fee

“Competition is what’s going to benefit us all. It’s going to force the incumbents to be better.” Jeff Adamson

Why this matters: The NSF story is a clean example of the whole thesis. A fintech does the right thing, the incumbents look bad by comparison, and policy follows. Competition did not just move the market, it moved the law.

Brought to you by:

Calgary has always brought the energy. But spending time at the Tech Founders Stampede Summit made it impossible to ignore just how much is being built here right now.

As a sponsor of this year’s Summit, we had the chance to be in the room with some of the best founders in the country — people building world-class products, not just for Alberta, not just for Canada, but for global markets. The conversations were sharp, the ambition was real, and honestly, it still feels early. That’s the exciting part.

Float is Canada’s intelligent financial operating system, combining modern financial services and software to help businesses spend, save, and grow. Trusted by more than 8,000 Canadian companies, Float provides high-limit corporate cards, automated expense management, next-day bill payments, high-yield accounts, and industry-leading support, all built in Canada, for Canada. Find us at floatfinancial.com

2. Speed Is the Moat

The takeaway: In a market full of five-business-day incumbents, the durable advantage is velocity. It is also the hardest thing to protect as you scale.

Rob’s whole operating philosophy is built on urgency. Customers who are told to wait five business days get an answer in five minutes. Things the market builds in six months, Float builds in six weeks. He is allergic to victory laps.

“We’re cockroaches. What are we doing today to make the business better, and act as though this whole thing could disappear at any moment if we don’t stay ahead.” Rob Khazzam

That attitude has a name. At Uber, Rob ran on a system he calls “kills or dies.” Every Monday, each person commits to something they will definitively finish that week. Not “work on the sales pipeline,” but “sign 10 drivers.” Not “look into a vendor,” but “pick one and submit the purchase order.” At the end of the week the team does accountability out loud, in front of everyone, including the misses. He brought the same ritual to Float.

“Not tomorrow, today. Not next week, this week.” Rob Khazzam

Jeff’s take on culture was more about stakes than speed, and he had the Skip stories to back it up (the stair-running for late sales reps, the “prime time” call blocks where opening your mouth on the floor was a nightmare, the rep who did the stairs on crutches). His point underneath the war stories: culture is a distillation of the founders’ values, and the job is to make people feel the stakes are genuinely high without crushing them.

“You want people to feel like the stakes are super, super high in what they’re doing.” Jeff Adamson

Why this matters: Speed is the one thing an oligopoly cannot copy quickly. It is a cultural asset, not a product feature, which is exactly why both founders obsess over it and why it gets harder to hold as headcount climbs.

3. Build, Don’t Complain

The takeaway: Starting a company is a form of national service, and most complaining about policy is a distraction from the actual job of building. They also think Canada has some real, shameful policy failures worth naming.

Jeff’s framing was that Canada over-indexes on old, concentrated incumbents. The average age of the top ten companies in the country is around 145 years, and when you work inside a business your great-grandparent might have worked at, you become a steward rather than a builder. The downside of a big swing is enormous, so nobody takes it. His fix is cultural: get more people to see that starting companies and taking on the incumbents is how you actually build a country.

“The way we can make our community and our country a lot better is by taking on some of these big incumbents and pushing them.” Jeff Adamson

That mindset doesn't stop at the company level, it extends into policy too. There's a real push right now to get bigger, growth-oriented ideas, SR&ED reform, tax reform, even the year-of-national-service debate, into the public conversation so politicians have the cover to act.

That's the productive side of pushing for change. But the founders were just as quick to name where policy has genuinely failed. Both are frustrated with open banking, or consumer-driven banking, which finally got royal assent after roughly a decade of consultation. The comparison Jeff reached for: imagine still living in the era where you could not keep your phone number when you switched carriers. That is banking today.

The room pushed further on where that regulatory bar sits when a question from Dan Eisner of True North Mortgage turned the conversation to bank licenses. The consensus: a full Schedule I license is not the panacea founders imagine. The capital requirements are punishing, and for most fintechs you are better off solving for money movement and data portability than becoming a deposit-taking institution. Rob's version: Float has no interest in becoming a bank. It wants faster rails and customer-permissioned data, not a balance sheet to defend.

Why this matters: This is the productive tension of the whole evening. These are the founders most committed to building their way out of any problem, and also the ones most willing to say out loud that some of Canada’s policy failures are real and embarrassing. Both things are true. The discipline is knowing which bucket a given complaint belongs in.

Takeaways for Builders

1. Compete on speed, not permission. If the incumbent takes five business days, do it in five minutes. Velocity is the one advantage an oligopoly cannot quickly copy.

2. Make “kills or dies” your unit of planning. Weekly, definitive, and public. Not “work on X,” but “X is done by Friday,” with accountability out loud.

3. Hire for tenacity over pedigree. Rob’s view: bet on a bright, self-starting person to learn almost anything. You are not building rockets.

4. When you do need domain expertise, hire the misfits. The people who got pushed out of the big incumbent often carry the most valuable tacit knowledge and the right risk tolerance for a fast company.

5. Build the fallback, not the bank. Keep the license option in your back pocket in case the incumbents gang up, but a full deposit-taking charter can bury you under capital requirements. Solve for rails and data portability instead.

News from Friends 🫶

• Kindr, building AI tools that automate insurance verification and phone reception for dental clinics, is looking for a Founding Engineer to lead backend development and shape their technical roadmap. Learn more and apply here.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

Stampede brings in roughly $400 million into the Calgary Stampede, and when the Mastercard Economics Institute dug into last year’s spending data, they found some interesting insights: an 18% overall boost at local merchants during Stampede, a 29% jump at restaurants and a massive retail spike the day before anything officially starts, driven by thousands of people realizing at the last minute that they don’t own a cowboy hat.

We heard this on the first Friday of Stampede, hours after the parade, inside an immersive barn at the brand new Sam Centre. The occasion was a Tech Thursday session co-hosted with Mastercard on the digital economy, and the lineup was incredible:

• Claude Guay, Member of Parliament, Parliamentary Secretary for Energy and Natural Resources, and former CEO of IBM Canada

• Anne Butler, Managing Director of Payments and Regulatory Oversight at the Bank of Canada

• Ruhee Ismail-Teja, VP of Policy and External Affairs at the Calgary Chamber

• Benjamin Jacob, SVP of Services at Mastercard

• Jennifer Sloan, SVP of Government Affairs and Stakeholder Engagement at Mastercard

• And, myself, Philippe Burns, Co-Founder of Tech Thursday

This is our recap of the top ideas from the conversation.

“We are not Team Pitchfork that believes the world is gonna go to hell with AI and robots are gonna take over. But we’re not Team Pompom either.” Claude Guay

Missed this one? Check out our recap videos on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts and follow us on Instagram for updates on everything Tech Thursday.

1. Stampede Is an Economic Driver for Canada

The takeaway: Stampede isn’t just a cultural moment, it’s one of the cleanest windows into how Canadians actually spend, and the patterns in the data are more actionable than most businesses realize.

Benjamin walked through the Mastercard Economics Institute’s analysis of the 2025 Stampede. The headline numbers: an 18% total spending boost at local merchants versus baseline, restaurants up 29%, and meaningful international demand: preliminary travel booking data for 2026 shows travel to Calgary growing this year from the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, and Australia.

But the insight he kept returning to was timing. The single biggest retail spending peak happens the Thursday before Stampede, when everyone scrambles to get outfitted.

Ruhee sharpened the point from the Chamber’s side: the Stampede doesn’t publish visitor targets because demand is so sensitive to economic conditions, which makes planning brutal for businesses, especially restaurants sitting on perishable inventory. The data to de-risk those decisions exists. The gap is sharing it in real time.

Why this matters: Value from big moments isn’t evenly distributed. It’s shaped by timing, location, and behaviour and the businesses that can read those patterns get to act on them while everyone else is guessing.

2. The $1.7 Trillion Question: Who’s Responsible When Your AI Buys the Wrong Hat?

The takeaway: Agentic commerce, or AI agents that search, compare, and eventually complete purchases on your behalf, is projected to be a $1.7 trillion market by 2030, and the entire thing runs on a trust problem nobody has fully solved yet.

Benjamin laid out the shift: 71% of consumers say they want AI to streamline their shopping. The next wave isn’t AI helping you research a purchase, it’s AI executing the purchase on your behalf with strict guardrails and parameters. And that raises questions we never had to ask when humans were at the helm.

If your agent puts a dark-coloured hat in the cart when you asked for a light one, and it ships. Whose fault is that? How does a retailer know the request behind a transaction is actually authorized? How do you know your agent is buying from a legitimate site?

Mastercard’s answer is a trust layer built into the network itself, they call it Agent Pay. With authentication and agentic tokens that register intent, so merchants and banks have the data to know who (and what) they’re transacting with.

“These are things we didn’t have to worry about in the past because we were right at the helm. When you’re letting those decisions be made on your behalf, we want to make sure the data that merchants and banks are going to need is all available to them.” Benjamin Jacob

Why this matters: 2030 is not far away. Every retailer in Calgary is about to have a new kind of customer: an AI agent comparing their price, inventory, and reputation against everyone else’s. Being legible to agents is about to become a distribution channel.

3. Team Pitchfork vs. Team Pompom: Inside Canada’s AI Strategy

The takeaway: Canada’s new AI for All strategy, built from input from 11,300 Canadians, is deliberately a frame rather than a fixed plan, organized around trust, adoption, and sovereignty. And the government is refreshingly candid that Canada leads the world in AI research while lagging badly in AI usage.

Claude Guay is a rare profile in Parliament: a former startup founder and IBM Canada President now serving as a Parliamentary Secretary. His summary of the government’s posture became the line of the night, not Team Pitchfork (AI doom), not Team Pompom (AI cheerleading).

On trust, the strategy points toward regulation to protect children’s data, take down deepfakes, and defend against foreign interference, which, he noted, is already happening. On adoption, the plan is to put AI in everyone’s hands: tools for every postgraduate, AI in school curricula, education and tax credits for small businesses, and a $1 billion commitment to applying AI to healthcare. On sovereignty, Canadian-based models running on Canadian infrastructure that businesses can trust.

He was equally direct about the scale-up problem, from experience: a round he could raise $1 million for in Canada was worth $10 million in Silicon Valley, and the next round $100 million versus $10 million here.

His test for trustworthy AI was simple:

“Always be wary of AI that cannot quote the sources of where they got the information. AI should be a tool that augments Canadians and Canadian businesses, not replaces them.” Claude Guay

Why this matters: The strategy explicitly frames AI as an everyone-technology, not an enterprise-technology. For Canadian builders, the signals to watch are procurement (will government buy Canadian AI?), certified sovereign models, and the small business adoption programs, because that’s where the market gap is biggest.

4. Inside the Bank of Canada’s Playbook for Trusted Payments

The takeaway: The Bank of Canada sees payments as the literal plumbing of the economy, and Anne Butler’s team is building the modern guardrails that let innovations like real-time payments, tokenization, and agentic commerce scale with confidence.

On Anne Butler’s first day at the Bank of Canada, a team member put a giant blue plumber’s wrench on her desk: a reminder that she’s in charge of the safety of the plumbing of Canada’s financial system. It’s still there.

Her survey of what’s flowing through those pipes right now reads like a roadmap of where payments are headed: stablecoin exploration, tokenized deposits and assets, agentic commerce, and real-time payments arriving in Canada at the end of the year. Her team’s job is making sure Canadians can embrace all of it safely, and the frameworks are landing fast: retail payment providers are now supervised, draft consumer-driven banking regulations were published last week, and stablecoin regulation is on the way.

Her framing for anyone building in payments: the regulatory work isn’t a compliance exercise. Trust is the product, and it’s what lets a small business have a great revenue day during Stampede weekend without thinking about the rails underneath.

“That opportunity to help build and keep expanding that trust is really exciting, and it’s really important for us to build as an economy.” Anne Butler

She also delivered one of the best unscripted moments of the afternoon. Riffing on our AI predictions wall (more on that below), she shared that she recently used Claude to build herself a tool that scans the internet for risk signals relevant to the payments business, with no coding background at all.

Why this matters: The institutions overseeing Canada’s financial infrastructure aren’t reacting to innovation from a distance. They’re adopting the same tools, building the frameworks in step with the technology, and treating trust as the foundation that lets the whole ecosystem move faster.

5. The Adoption Gap Is the Whole Story

The takeaway: 30% of businesses are adopting AI. Among small businesses, it’s 8%. That gap, not the technology itself, is the defining economic risk and opportunity in the room.

Ruhee brought the Chamber’s data: business challenges are up across the board, but so is optimism. Companies increasingly believe they can take on what’s coming. The problem is the K-shaped divide forming between businesses embracing AI and those standing still. Her advice for the 92% of small businesses on the sidelines: don’t start with a supply chain overhaul. Pick one or two measurable, low-cost use cases, even just smarter staff scheduling, and look back at the impact.

Benjamin put the stakes plainly with a line borrowed from his IBM days: you shouldn’t be worried about AI taking your job, you should be worried about someone using AI taking your job.

Tech Thursday’s contribution to the argument was standing outside the venue. The predictions wall. We built a tool where you scan a QR code, post where you think Canada’s digital economy will be in 2030. It was built by our designer, who has no coding experience, in about 10 minutes with Claude Code. Two or three engineers and a full day of work, collapsed into a prompt.

Why this matters: When the cost of building software approaches zero, software stops being a moat. The moats that remain are distribution, relationships, and expertise which, fittingly, is also the case for Stampede itself. As Ruhee pointed out, the most striking thing about Stampede week is how little anyone is on their phones. The deals still get done in person. Preferably in cowboy boots.

A Few Takeaways for Builders

• Stock the shelves before the party starts. The biggest Stampede retail day is the Thursday before it begins. Demand data beats demand instinct.

• Get legible to agents. By 2030, agentic commerce is projected at $1.7 trillion. AI agents comparing your product against competitors’ is a distribution channel/ Start thinking about how they’ll find you.

• Distrust AI that can’t cite its sources. Claude Guay’s test for trustworthy AI is a good default for choosing your own tools.

• Start embarrassingly small. With small business AI adoption at 8%, the advantage goes to whoever just tries something measurable this quarter. Even if it’s staff scheduling.

• Software is no longer the moat. A designer built our predictions wall in 10 minutes; a regulator with zero training built her own scanning tool. Your moat is distribution, relationships, and domain expertise.

A massive thank you to Benjamin, Jennifer, Claude, Anne, and Ruhee for being so generous with their time and insights, and to the Mastercard team for co-hosting an unforgettable first Friday of Stampede with us at the Sam Centre. Thanks as well to everyone who grabbed a hat, made a prediction on the wall, and joined the cowboy cosplay.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

The guest was Nic Beique, Helcim’s founder and CEO, who walked us through how the company went from reselling bank services to building a full payments processor from scratch, why he staffed that rebuild with junior developers, and how culture became the thing that held it all together.

"How hard could it be to build a Square or a Stripe from scratch?… It'll take 12 months... it took three years."

Missed this one? Check out our recap videos on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts and follow us on Instagram for updates on everything Tech Thursday.

1. Nobody Builds a Payments Company in Calgary

The takeaway: Helcim wasn’t built on a playbook. It was built on the conviction that small and medium businesses deserved to be treated better and a team willing to make it happen.

Nic is a self-taught developer. He was born in Texas, grew up in Montreal, moved to Calgary at 12, and by 15 was cold-pitching local businesses on websites.

By 2008, he was 23 and deep in e-commerce development at a moment when payments infrastructure was genuinely bad. So Helcim started building payment gateways, tried to partner with Canadian banks, got turned down everywhere, and eventually found a US bank willing to let them operate as a reseller.

That model ran for about 10 years. It worked, up to a point.

“We were kind of stuck as a reseller... if we’re gonna go and treat small businesses the way that we think they truly can be treated, we’re gonna have to go and get unshackled.”

The itch was always there. Square and Stripe were growing, but small businesses were still getting gouged. The reseller structure didn’t give Helcim the control to do anything about it. In 2017, after three years of persistent negotiation with their bank partner, Nic got the green light to go independent.

2. Three Years, 15 Junior Devs, and a Blank Slate

The takeaway: Helcim rebuilt itself from scratch with a team of mostly junior developers, and the naivety wasn’t a liability. It was what made the project possible.

Starting in 2017, Helcim pulled every dollar out of the old business and hired a team, most of them recent SAIT graduates, to build a full payments processor from the ground up. The original timeline was 12 months.

It took three years.

The reason wasn’t lack of effort. It’s that payments infrastructure doesn’t allow for lean development. You can’t release the hardware without the fraud detection, the ledger, the money movement, and the KYC systems all working together. Everything has to be ready before anything can ship.

“Nobody told us we were crazy. And nobody had enough experience to tell us we were crazy. So nothing seemed insurmountable.”

Helcim 2.0 launched in spring 2020.

3. Raising Capital When You Don’t Fit the Template

The takeaway: Helcim didn’t fit the standard VC template. What ultimately landed the Series A was something investors rarely list as a criterion: intentional culture.

The push to raise capital came from Helcim’s CFO, who walked into Nic’s office in 2021 and pointed out that nobody builds a payments company without investment dollars.

The fundraising process was a grind. Helcim was bootstrapped, had been technically operating for 12 years (which confused everyone), and was going after a market most investors thought had been already won.

“You realize how much venture capital is about templates and fitting within a box.”

Later, one investor told Nic what made the difference, it wasn’t the market size or the technology, it was that Helcim was unusually intentional about its culture.

That led to the Series A. Then the grind in 2024, through a tough fundraising market for the Series B round.

4. The Culture Book Nobody Expected Them to Publish

The takeaway: Helcim published its culture code publicly in 2021. What felt risky turned out to be one of the best recruiting decisions the company ever made.

The culture at Helcim is built around four values: we are builders, we are trustworthy, choose the harder path, and we are a company of many. The full culture book lives at helcim.com/theway.

Publishing it wasn’t an obvious choice. Culture books existed, but most companies kept them internal. Helcim’s logic was simple: people are going to find out what kind of company you are eventually, so you might as well tell them up front.

The one that gets tested most, in Nic’s view, is choosing the harder path.

“It’s easy to think about how you shortcut... we could increase rates, we could charge extra for that. You have to catch yourself and be like, first of all, it’s not your values.”

Helcim also runs what it calls open book management. Financials are shared with the whole company every quarter, including balance sheet, revenue, and cash runway. The fear going in was that transparency would cause panic in hard times and entitlement in good ones. The reality was the opposite. When Helcim went into the Series B fundraise with six months of runway, the team’s response was to push harder on product and marketing, not to run for the exits.

“People talk about it, but they don’t talk about it negatively. We’ve had people say, ‘I miss that era.’”

A Few Takeaways for Builders

• Conviction can outrun the playbook. Helcim’s 2.0 rebuild succeeded partly because the junior team was too optimistic to be paralyzed by the scope.

• The reseller years weren’t wasted. Ten years building customer relationships and learning the payments stack was the foundation for going independent.

• Culture books are recruiting tools if they’re honest. Self-selection works both ways. The people who read it and leave are doing you a favor.

• Transparency in hard times is an asset, not a liability. Helcim’s open book management held the team together through its hardest fundraising stretch.

A big thank you to Nic for being so open about the whole arc, and to Helcim for co-hosting the evening with us.

🧑‍💻 Helcim is hiring!

Helcim is growing towards a goal of 180 people by year-end, with openings across engineering, product, data, sales, and more. See the open roles at helcim.com/careers.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

Our job, instead of introducing the products, was to get inside the room where they got built.

The panel featured:

• Sam Newman-Bremang, Sr. Director of Product at Wealthsimple

• Jocelyn Jeffrey, Director of Engineering at Wealthsimple

• Channing Allen, Sr. Engineering Manager at Wealthsimple and former Co-Founder of Plenty

This is our recap of the top ideas from the conversation.

“We could literally not pay people to use a banking product at Wealthsimple. But we persevered.” Sam Newman-Bremang

Missed this one? Check out our recap videos on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts and follow us on Instagram for updates on everything Tech Thursday.

1. The Arc From Investing to Taking Over Your Life

The takeaway: Wealthsimple’s expansion from an investing product to a full financial life platform took five years of work that started with most people refusing to use the banking product. The momentum looks inevitable from the outside. From the inside, it was anything but.

Sam joined Wealthsimple five years ago. When he started, the company was an investing platform. The banking thesis was held by what he described as a small group running around campuses giving away bubble tea and trying to get people to download an app. It didn’t work. They couldn’t give it away.

The pivot came from listening. People didn’t want a Venmo for Canada. They wanted an alternative to their bank. Direct deposit. Bill pay. Interest. Wealthsimple built that, and the banking product is now a million-client business with $10 billion in cash and payment volumes in the billions.

Today’s announcement, in Sam’s framing, is the same arc continuing. Business chequing, household money management, and Kids and Teens accounts all build on the operating muscles developed during the banking expansion.

Why this matters: The companies that survive long enough to expand their scope this dramatically tend to share one thing in common, which is that the early scope was earned the hard way. The campus bubble tea era of Wealthsimple isn’t a footnote in the story. It’s the foundation.

2. How Wealthsimple Actually Builds

The takeaway: A nine-person engineering team can ship Kids and Teens accounts, Spend Insights, and household money management in parallel if you structure the work around small squads, embedded design, and a value the company calls naive ambition.

Channing’s team is nine engineers, organized into two-to-four-person squads, each working on a different product simultaneously. The Kids and Teens accounts, Spend Insights, and Households all came out of that nine-person org operating in parallel. The mechanism that holds it together is ownership at the individual level. Engineers take Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) ownership of projects within their workstream, including the technical design, the implementation, and the outcomes after the product ships.

Sam credited the culture itself, not the structure, with making the cross-functional model work.

“One word that comes to mind for me is humility. You’re bringing three people together with different perspectives, and you need to be humble that you don’t have the answer.” Sam Newman-Bremang

The cultural mechanism that powers the ambition side is something Wealthsimple calls naive ambition. The clearest example came from the same morning’s announcement. The $25,000 e-transfer limit Wealthsimple shipped this week started with the team deciding Canadians should be able to move their money without limits, before they were even legally allowed to send an e-transfer. To make it real, they became an Interac member, talked to politicians, and rebuilt the partner stack. The output was a single product launch. The input was naive ambition operationalized.

Wealthsimple also runs a structural ritual called Go Days. Three to five days where the entire team for an ambitious outcome gets in a room together, with schedules cleared. Channing described one recent example.

“We started the beginning of the week with zero lines of code written and a really derpy prompt that I had put together. By the end of three and a half days, we had a working end-to-end prototype shipped in production that we were able to use internally.” Channing Allen

Why this matters: A lot of companies have read the same books about small teams, ownership, and design-engineering collaboration. Wealthsimple’s version works because the culture values humility and ambition simultaneously. Those two things sound contradictory until you’re in a room where someone says “we should just let Canadians move their money without limits” and the engineers don’t roll their eyes.

3. AI in the Workforce, and Why They Cancelled Cursor

The takeaway: Wealthsimple has shifted nearly all of its AI engineering work onto Claude, including agentic workflows that operate outside the traditional Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The shift is changing not just how engineers work, but what the role itself looks like.

Jocelyn went on maternity leave in January 2025 and returned in January 2026. The 12-month gap turned out to be the perfect natural experiment.

“I came back to work and I was talking to a colleague, and I was like, ‘It seems like most things are the same.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we just don’t write code anymore.’” Jocelyn Jeffrey

She came back into a Claude world that did not exist when she had left. The Cursor cancellation, which we asked about explicitly, was tied to a broader shift she and Channing both described as moving past IDE-with-AI into fully agentic workflows. Cursor was the last traditional IDE. Claude Code, in their telling, is the new paradigm.

The team has been seeing pull request cycle times cut in half.

Channing extended the point to what this means for the engineer’s role. Code generation marginal cost is going to zero. Code review becomes more important. The ability to deeply understand the system you’re operating in becomes the moat. The ability to give a good prompt becomes a skill. System design, for younger engineers, becomes the area to invest in.

For PMs, the shift has been just as significant. Sam now expects every product manager to be able to query the data themselves, read the code base, and operate as a real-time analyst. The data scientist as bottleneck is mostly gone.

Why this matters: Most of the engineering organizations we talk to in Canada are sitting in the middle of an AI tooling conversation, weighing whether to expand or hold. Wealthsimple has already crossed over. They’ve cancelled the Cursor subscription, gone all in on Claude, restructured their expectations of every individual contributor, and built rituals around the new reality. The pace at which they shipped today’s announcement is partly downstream of that decision.

A Few Takeaways for Builders

• Surveys give you signal, not answers. The 1,700-client survey behind the household product told Wealthsimple where the problems were, not how to solve them.

• Multifaceted teams only work with humility. Wealthsimple’s product-design-engineering collaboration works because of who they hire.

• Naive ambition isn’t a slogan if you can name an example. The $25,000 e-transfer limit started with “we should just let Canadians move their money” before they were legally allowed to.

• Going vertical in the stack pays for the low-cost operating model. Wealthsimple is the first non-bank credit card issuer in Canada. They have accounts at the Bank of Canada. The fees stripped out by removing middlemen are what fund 2% cashback and 2.25% chequing interest.

A massive thank you to Channing, Jocelyn, and Sam for being so generous with their time, and to the broader Wealthsimple team for co-hosting the evening with us in Calgary.

Wealthsimple is hiring!

Wealthsimple has 30 open positions across Data & Engineering, Product Design, Product Management and more. Check them out here.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

For the first one, we drove down to Foundation, Simply Silicon’s data centre site in downtown Calgary, and sat down with Graeme Harrison and Dan Chapman. They co-founded Augur VC together and incubated Simply Silicon out of their first fund. Foundation is the first site. They have plans for more.

Most of the people in Canadian tech who pay attention to AI infrastructure already know about Augur VC. They’ve been one of the more publicly contrarian voices on the Canadian data centre buildout, with Dan in particular calling an “Alberta data centre bubble” months before the rest of the industry started using the phrase. And yet here they are, building one of the biggest data centre projects in the country.

This is the on-site conversation about why.

“Our goal is to build Canada’s first trillion dollar company.” Graeme Harrison

Watch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. And let us know what you want House Calls to visit next.

1. The Bubble They Called, and the Project They’re Building Inside It

The takeaway: Most Alberta data centre announcements are pitches that will never get built. Foundation is positioned as the inverse, with a specific customer thesis and physical infrastructure that’s genuinely hard to replicate.

Graeme has been blunt about the broader market for almost two years. He told us that starting in 2023, Augur was receiving two to three data centre pitches a day, seven days a week, for months. Real estate developers chasing the AI wave, mostly without a real customer in mind.

“You have these people building on the thesis of ‘build it and they will come.’ That’s not how it works in this space. If you don’t have an offtaker in mind, strong relationships, an understanding of what they want, the vast majority won’t convert. The vast majority will end up stranded, and so you’ll see wealth destruction.” Graeme Harrison

Dan extended the point into what he sees as the structural failure of most Canadian data centre developers right now:

“If you don’t know your customer, or you’re trying to sell to your customer based on what they wanted four years ago because it took you that long to build a project, do you have a product? You don’t have a product. You need to sell for what the customer wants today, that they’re willing to pay for today. Or you need to be foresightful enough to see, this is actually what they’re going to need, because this is where the world’s going. It’s very rare to see that kind of insight out of the developers in Alberta, unfortunately.” Dan Chapman

What separates Foundation, in their telling, is the combination of three things: an existing physical site with characteristics that can’t be replicated, a specific use case (inference, not training), and a customer base they’ve been building relationships with for the better part of two years.

Why this matters: The thesis they’re building from is that Calgary is about to become Canada’s first AI-native city. Not the city with the most data centres, but the city where the infrastructure exists for next-generation AI services that need low-latency inference close to where people and machines actually are. Humanoid robots that need to offboard their thinking to the cloud. Industrial AI cameras. Autonomous delivery. The kinds of services that don’t work if your data centre is in the middle of nowhere.

2. Why Calgary, and Why Now

The takeaway: The combination of Calgary’s energy infrastructure legacy, its capital concentration, its proximity to San Francisco, and its regulatory simplicity makes it, in their analysis, the best market in the world for this specific kind of build.

This was the section of the conversation that probably surprised me the most. I expected a hometown pitch. What I got was a structured comparison against the global alternatives.

“Calgary, thanks to its energy legacy and its infrastructure legacy, is really a one-of-a-kind place. Its cultural values, its proximity to San Francisco, the natural gas of Alberta, the deregulated market here, the ability to largely move without an overburden of permits. If you scour the whole world and you give a score and stack rank every market, Calgary’s number one. And it’s not just number one by a little bit. It’s number one by a lot. It beats Houston. It beats London. Certainly San Francisco can’t do this on its own.” Graeme Harrison

Graeme went on to make a point that I’ve been thinking about since we left the site. The companies that have generated the most value in the last decade are not, when you look at them carefully, software companies. They’re infrastructure businesses dressed in software clothes.

“Google’s an infrastructure business. Microsoft’s an infrastructure business. NVIDIA is a physical world business. These are all companies that make things and print cash off of physical assets in the physical world.” Graeme Harrison

Dan added the capital concentration argument that Calgary boosters often miss. It’s not just that there is capital in Calgary. It’s that the people behind that capital understand infrastructure investing in a way that capital concentrated in other Canadian cities does not.

“There’s a concentration of capital here, and it’s not just that there’s venture funds, there’s private equity. It’s the people behind the investments out of Calgary. Individuals that have built their livelihoods, built their legacies, and want to continue their legacies into infrastructure. This is the next macro mega category of infrastructure: data, the intersection of chips and power, and whatever powers that electricity, the ocean of natural gas that we sit on.” Dan Chapman

Why this matters: The argument here isn’t civic pride. It’s that infrastructure businesses get built by people who already know how to build infrastructure businesses. Calgary has that talent at a density that very few other cities in North America can match. That’s the bet.

Brought to you by:

Boast - Are you leaving innovation capital on the table? Boast combines AI-powered automation with specialized tax expertise to help tech companies maximize R&D credit returns. Join 2,000+ businesses who’ve secured $675M+ in funding. Get your free assessment at boast.ai

3. The Moat, the Trillion Dollar Goal, and the Just Sovereign Versus Also Sovereign Framework

The takeaway: Foundation is the first node in a planned network of sites with similar physical characteristics. The moat is the sites themselves. The goal is to use that moat to build something the country has never produced before.

We spent the back half of the conversation on what comes after Foundation, and how big this could actually get. The conviction here is meaningful.

“Our goal is to build Canada’s first trillion dollar company. Canada’s biggest startups have only grown to about the $100 billion scale. That’s a big company and it’s a big success, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve never done anything that’s breached the next level above that. And that doesn’t really make sense, because we’re extremely well positioned to do it.” Graeme Harrison

The plan, as Graeme described it, is to acquire sites across North America with the same kind of physical characteristics Foundation has. Existing infrastructure that can’t be replicated by a new entrant, no matter how much capital they have. He used the example of the conduit network underneath downtown Calgary.

“If I came along, an Elon Musk, and I’m like, ‘I’ve got infinite money, hey City of Calgary, can I tear up eight miles of your roads in the next few months to lay fiber?’ You’re gonna be told no, no matter how much you put on the table. It’s just too disruptive at this point to replicate.” Graeme Harrison

We also got into the conversation about sovereign compute, which has been one of the more confusing topics in Canadian AI infrastructure over the last year. Graeme has an unusually clean framework for it.

“There’s a great framework that we use, which is: is a company just sovereign or also sovereign? If it’s just sovereign, you’ll see that it lives in lobbying land. It markets exclusively to governments. It exists as a byproduct of RFP land. Those companies, from our perspective in VC land, aren’t investible. You become a creature of the moment of policy wins. Also sovereign: what we’re building here is not aimed at delivering a sovereign service inherently. It’s aimed at making money and being globally competitive. But because it’s air-gapped and not even touching the internet, we can also do a sovereign play.” Graeme Harrison

Why this matters: This is the part of the conversation that most clearly distinguishes Simply Silicon from the broader Canadian sovereign-compute conversation. The companies that win, in their telling, will be the ones that are competitive on global merit first, and capable of serving sovereign use cases second. Not the other way around.

A Few Things That Stuck With Us

A few moments from the conversation that we keep coming back to:

• Graeme on Canadian builders. “Canada makes the world’s best entrepreneurs. We have an ultra high talent production rate compared to other places. You grew up on the prairies like us. There’s nothing to do all day. There’s no trees around. You’re taller than the grass. You’re looking around, you’re like, ‘Why am I even on this world?’ It leads to this ability to see more and to want more.”

• Dan on the wealth ambition. “My greatest goal is to create an obscene amount of wealth for all of these people in Calgary who have placed their bets on us, so that this cycle can just grow and grow and grow.”

• Graeme on government industrial policy. “Canada makes incredible entrepreneurs. We don’t do a great job of taking that talent and converting it to billion dollar outcomes. The sovereign compute RFP you’re seeing is a symptom of that. It’s trying to pull something out: ‘we want to give this industrial subsidy, we want to create this value chain. We recognize it’s not happening naturally. Instead of creating the conditions for it to happen naturally, why don’t we try and force it?’ Well, it never works.”

What’s Next for Simply Silicon

The team is in the middle of standing up Foundation. They’ve been acquiring additional sites across North America with similar physical profiles. The plan is to scale the model from one Calgary site to many, in the cities where the AI native economy needs the infrastructure to live.

We’ll be back to visit. House Calls, after all, is about going to see the work.

Massive thanks to Graeme and Dan for letting us spend the morning at Foundation, and for being as candid as they were on camera. And thanks to the Simply Silicon team for the tour.

Coming up at Tech Thursday:

🏦 May 21st - SOLD OUT!

Topic - Building Fintech in Canada w/ Wealthsimple

Co-hosted by: Wealthsimple

Featuring:

• Channing Allen, Senior Engineering Manager at Wealthsimple & Co-Founder at Plenty

• Jocelyn Jeffrey, Director of Engineering at Wealthsimple

• Sam Newman-Bremang, Sr. Director of Product at Wealthsimple

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

Join Waitlist

💰 May 28th

Topic - Nic Beique: The Builder CEO

Co-hosted by: Helcim

What does it really mean to be a builder? Helcim’s Founder and CEO, Nic Beique, shares what he’s been working on firsthand, from early ideas to real code.

Featuring:

• Nic Beique, Founder & CEO at Helcim

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP

🪩 July 6th - Tech Stampede Summit After Party 🤠

Co-hosted by: House 831 and RBCx.

Join us for an evening of connection, conversation, and a bit of Stampede energy with the Calgary Startup Community.

​In partnership with Fintechs Canada and Canadian Fintech Newsletter.

Buy Ticket

This is the first episode of Tech Thursday: House Calls. If you’d like us to visit your company next, reply to this email or send a note to: philippe.burns@techthursday.ca

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

So when I went up to Christina Lake last October to visit Cenovus and asked the team how they were using AI, the answer gave me the impression they could be doing more. The infrastructure is there. The problems are real. And almost nobody is using AI in genuinely interesting ways yet.

But there are companies who are. Three of their founders sat down with us last Thursday.

The panel featured:

• Keri Lee, Managing Director and CEO of Blue Marvel AI

• John Mortimer, CTO of Geologic AI

• Josh Malate, Co-Founder and President of Ultimarii

This is our recap of the top ideas from the conversation.

“AI adoption moves at the speed of trust.” - Josh Malate

Missed this one? Check out our recap videos on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

The Frame: The Buyer Is Different

The single biggest theme of the evening was that selling AI into heavy industry is not the same business as selling AI into the rest of the market. The customer is an engineer, a geologist, or an accountant, trained to be right rather than to iterate. The deals are slow because they should be. And the company isn’t going to die if they buy from you, but their plant might if they buy wrong.

That changes the playbook. We worked through three pieces of it: how innovators actually earn the trust to be in the room, what an AI-native energy or mining company would look like, and why heavy industry’s data moat may end up mattering more than its model choices.

1. The Speed of Trust

The takeaway: Selling AI to oil, gas, mining, and power isn’t a software sale. It’s a multi-year relationship where the innovator has to do most of the proving.

Josh Malate framed it most directly:

“AI adoption will move at the speed of trust. We need to overcome this trust barrier with customers, and there’s a whole bunch of components that come into that. We’re rooted in very specific information and data, and then we are subject matter expert informed. Not only are we a team of about 20 technologists, plus another 20 in the Philippines, but we have a team of almost 30 subject matter experts. Past leaders of regulatory bodies. Individuals who have acted on behalf of companies filing applications with regulators. We bake in the industry knowledge of folks that have been doing this for 30 years to build trust, and lead to adoption.” - Josh Malate

That trust-building is structural, not cosmetic. Subject matter experts aren’t a marketing accessory at Ultimarii. They’re a roughly equal-sized cohort to the technologists.

John Mortimer, whose team scans rocks for mining companies, described the parallel pattern in mining. The product isn’t sold to executives; it’s earned by being right in front of geologists, over and over:

“You have to characterize what’s in that ore body. The really conventional way is that you’ll write it on paper and then send it off to the other team. When we started to scan the rock, we started to give this digital view of it. The way you have to prove that it’s going to be worthwhile is that you get very, very consistent results. And the way we did that was by having geoscientists and geologists involved in the process. Saying, ‘Look, you’re looking for these sulfides. Here’s the sulfides. Here’s the tool doing this. Here’s how you can rely on that tool.’ That curve of adoption was a really long time.” John Mortimer

Why this matters: A new buyer pattern is emerging across the panelists’ customers. AI ethics committees, often led by a Chief AI Officer, now sit between vendors and the operational team. Keri framed it well: nobody quite knows what these committees do yet, but they’re real, they’re proliferating, and they’re shaping which vendors get in the door. If you’re selling AI into heavy industry, expect to meet them.

2. The AI-Native Energy or Mining Company

The takeaway: AI-native isn’t a software-versus-incumbent story. It’s a question about who has the data, who has the expertise, and how AI changes the moat.

Josh Malate offered the most strategically interesting framing of the evening, around a Microsoft-coined concept called the “frontier firm” strategy:

“As opposed to being a software company that’s leveraging this technology, selling software licensing fees and getting valued on 10x that, why don’t I just enter the market and compete with my customers and do it better than them? In our realm, we have all this intelligence about how projects get approved. If we truly have an edge on where you can site a power generation project, we can efficiently do it. Wouldn’t we be best suited to actually just raise capital on that basis and make a portfolio of bets to do so? When I think about what an AI-native oil and gas company looks like, you’re using this data and technology advantage to actually enter the market and compete against the incumbents.” Josh Malate

In other words: in some categories, the AI-native company doesn’t sell software to oil and gas. It becomes oil and gas. The capital is there for whoever proves the arbitrage.

Josh extended that to a sharper hypothetical:

“I met a friend, he has an AI operating company. He says, ‘If I put my AI operator on the wellhead, I increase production by 18%.’ And I’m like, if that’s the case, I will give you infinite money to buy every wellhead. That’s the finance theory of it. If you have created this arbitrage, then infinite capital should go there. So why isn’t that happening? There’s friction in the market.” Josh Malate

John Mortimer pulled the question back toward what AI native actually requires, structurally:

“No data, no AI. You need good quality, clean data for everything we do. And that’s actually one of the differentiators we have. There are a lot of companies that scan rock in different ways. They’ll take photos of it, they’ll scan it with one type of scanner, they’ll do various things. But to do that consistently and reliably, and within a certain tolerance over time, is really hard to do. The industry for a very long time has dealt with really bad data. Unstructured, errors, human errors, unvalidated, in different types of records. So when you start to look at the power of what an AI-native company would do, it would start with having really good access to structured data.” John Mortimer

Why this matters: Both Josh and John landed at the same conclusion from different angles. AI-native doesn’t mean replacing humans. It means humans whose judgment is amplified by structured data and good models. Josh put the philosophical version of it most clearly. As inference costs fall toward zero, what becomes scarce is high-quality human judgment. The company that wins is the one that injects expert humans into the loop most effectively.

Brought to you by:

Boast - Are you leaving innovation capital on the table? Boast combines AI-powered automation with specialized tax expertise to help tech companies maximize R&D credit returns. Join 2,000+ businesses who’ve secured $675M+ in funding. Get your free assessment at boast.ai

3. The Data Moat

The takeaway: The companies in this space are sitting on data advantages that compound. The question is who actually captures the value.

Keri Lee’s data position is one of the most interesting in Canadian industrial AI:

“We have over a hundred years of industrial data, in the five years we’ve been operating. That allows us to train pretty unique models, where we can look at things like sequences. So when an operator is in a gas plant and is running this sequence, we can help you predict what might be going wrong in another area of the plant. One of the things we’re toying around with is creating a benchmarking service. Imagine you’re a refiner located in Western Canada. Wouldn’t you like to know how you benchmark against all other refiners in your class?” Keri Lee

Geologic AI’s data position is comparable in scale and even harder to replicate, given the physical infrastructure required to generate it:

“The average time from exploration to when a mine site is active is 15.7 years. Seventy-five percent of that is exploration. What we do is trim that time down. Even once you’ve got a mining site, let’s say you’re mining for copper and you think the ore body is on the north side, and you start drilling holes and realize the south side doesn’t have as much, now you don’t have to mine it. If we can improve the profitability of that by even a few single-digit percentage, it’s huge for a mining company.” John Mortimer

The economic stake in mining is enormous, and the cycle is long enough that even partial improvements compound. John mentioned that one oil major he’d been speaking with recently burned through $10 million in cloud credits in a single week running simulations. Whoever owns and structures the data underneath those simulations is going to capture a meaningful chunk of that economic value.

Keri quantified the benchmarking-style ROI on the operations side:

“A customer we’ve been deployed with across 15 sites for over a year, we’ve reduced the number of alarm and events for them by 10 million. Very low bar would be a dollar per alarm. So we’re saving them about 10 million dollars a year in human efficiency. Those are 10 million alarms they don’t have to acknowledge and they don’t have to look at. That’s probably one or two less FTEs.” Keri Lee

Why this matters: All three panelists argued, in different ways, that the moat in heavy industry AI isn’t the model. The model commoditizes. It’s the data, the customer relationships, and the workflow integration. That favors operators with long histories and platforms with deep integration over generic AI vendors building wrappers on top of frontier models.

A Few Takeaways for Founders

A few practical points that came out for founders specifically:

• The buyer is the operator, not the executive. Plant managers, geologists, and engineers will be the ones who decide whether your product survives a procurement cycle. Earn their trust first; the executive sale follows.

• Your subject matter experts are part of the product. Across three different companies, the answer to “how do you build trust” was structurally the same: pair technologists with people who have decades inside the customer’s industry.

• Don’t underinvest in IT and security. This is where pilots die. The OT organization wants you. The IT organization is the gatekeeper. Plan accordingly.

• The data moat is real, and it’s harder to copy than the model. A hundred years of industrial data, or 2.5 million metres of scanned rock, is not something a competitor catches up to in a quarter. If you’re building in this space, your data strategy is your strategy.

The Closer

We closed the panel by asking each panelist what the next five years look like for energy and mining as a percentage of Canadian GDP.

Keri Lee pointed to the global perception of Canadian tech she encounters when traveling. “They’re like, ‘Oh, Canadian tech, you guys are vetted. This is legit. You guys have probably struggled through a lot of unpaid pilots.’ We’re very lucky to be in this province and have universities graduating these amazing engineers. We take that for granted here, but it definitely shows up when you travel.”

John Mortimer framed it through critical minerals. “We’re in a critical minerals crisis, and that crisis will get bigger. Mining companies are going to have to adapt. And in the oil and gas space, you know, a major talked about running a set of scenarios, and they burned through $10 million in cloud credits in a week. The confluence of all of this means there’s a lot of pressure on us to adapt. The AI-driven companies of the future are going to embrace that, but they’re going to do that with the talent.”

Josh Malate went the most optimistic. “I have no choice in my mind, but for the Canadian energy and mining and power generation industries to be number one in the world. We have everything we need to do so. I really see entrepreneurship as the answer. I’m meeting with junior oil and gas companies again. They’re back. What I think is cool about the technology that’s available now is that these teams can now start to build from the ground up. AI-native. SAGD was the same thing here. Those resources were not recoverable. A technology shift made them recoverable. Entrepreneurial people who took the risk built that. That’s my call to everyone. We need those people, and I think we have them here.”

Coming up at Tech Thursday:

🏦 May 21st

Topic - Building Fintech in Canada w/ Wealthsimple

Co-hosted by: Wealthsimple

Building in Fintech, and doing it at scale, leaves you with a lot of lessons. Hear directly from Wealthsimple’s engineering and product leaders about the decisions behind some of Canada’s most-used financial tools: what they launched, what they learned, and what they’d do differently. Featuring:

• Channing Allen, Senior Engineering Manager at Wealthsimple & Co-Founder at Plenty

• Jocelyn Jeffrey, Director of Engineering at Wealthsimple

• Sam Newman-Bremang, Sr. Director of Product at Wealthsimple

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP

💰 May 28th

Topic - Nic Beique: The Builder CEO

Co-hosted by: Helcim

What does it really mean to be a builder? Helcim’s Founder and CEO, Nic Beique, shares what he’s been working on firsthand, from early ideas to real code. A behind-the-scenes look at how Nic explores “0 to 1” opportunities: the experiments, the trade-offs, and the ideas that don’t sit on a traditional roadmap. Featuring:

• Nic Beique, Founder & CEO at Helcim

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP

Enjoyed this recap? Subscribe to not miss another Tech Thursday recap, and keep an eye out for our brand-new on-site interview series, Tech Thursday: House Calls, launching soon.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

Two of Canada’s leading fintech companies, two incredible panels.

Find your Thursday below 👇

🏦 May 21st

Topic - Building Fintech in Canada w/ Wealthsimple

Co-hosted by: Wealthsimple

Building in Fintech, and doing it at scale, leaves you with a lot of lessons.

Hear directly from Wealthsimple’s engineering and product leaders about the decisions behind some of Canada’s most-used financial tools: what they launched, what they learned, and what they’d do differently.

Featuring:

• Channing Allen, Senior Engineering Manager at Wealthsimple & Co-Founder at Plenty

• Jocelyn Jeffrey, Director of Engineering at Wealthsimple

• Sam Newman-Bremang, Sr. Director of Product at Wealthsimple

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP

 💰 May 28th

Topic - Nic Beique: The Builder CEO

Co-hosted by: Helcim

What does it really mean to be a builder? Helcim’s Founder and CEO, Nic Beique, shares what he’s been working on firsthand, from early ideas to real code.

A behind-the-scenes look at how Nic explores “0 to 1” opportunities: the experiments, the trade-offs, and the ideas that don’t sit on a traditional roadmap.

Featuring:

• Nic Beique, Founder & CEO at Helcim

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP

Brought to you by:

Boast - The R&D Tax Credit Platform Built Different

✓ $625M+ secured for clients

✓ 1,700+ companies served

✓ Hundreds of hours saved

✓ 100% audit defense

Boast combines AI automation with specialized tax expertise to maximize your innovation capital. Get started at boast.ai

🫶 News from our Friends

DMZ - Applications are now open for American Express Canada's Backing Canadian Small Businesses, a grant program aimed at empowering locally significant small businesses to grow and drive community impact. 100 Canadian small businesses will be selected to each receive a $10,000 CAD grant and mentoring support from DMZ, including small group sessions and one-on-one meetings with experienced program mentors. Apply by May 19 here.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

The panel featured:

• Derrick Hunter, CEO of Bluesky Equities and board member of Alberta Enterprise Corporation

• Graeme Harrison, Managing Partner at Augur VC

• Michelle Scarborough, formerly Managing Partner of BDC Capital’s Thrive and Women in Technology Funds

• Cam Linke, CEO of Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute)

This is our recap of the top ideas from the conversation.

“Management fees are like heroin. Once you get addicted to them, it’s impossible to stop.” — Graeme Harrison, citing Tony Fish

Missed this one? Check out the full panel → on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

The Frame: The House Is Flooded

The conversation opened with a metaphor: government funding to a tech ecosystem is like water to a houseplant. The right amount is essential. Too much and you get root rot. Right now, the house is flooded.

That flood shows up in three places: grants, venture capital, and non-profit ecosystem support organizations. Each comes with its own version of the same problem: misaligned incentives. We worked through all three.

1. Grants: The Incentive Problem

The takeaway: Canada has built a grant ecosystem that is structurally misaligned with what actually builds successful companies, and founders pay the price in lost time.

Cam Linke captured the dynamic best when he laid out what alignment actually looks like in venture versus what it looks like in most Canadian grant programs.

“As an investor, I’d love to have no employees in a company, they’re all just painful, and have all of that go to my exit. Whereas the government wants to have all employees in the company when they’re putting money in. So you’re completely misaligned on incentives.” — Cam Linke

Cam’s broader point: Canada has stacked grant program after grant program around metrics that aren’t aligned with venture outcomes. Programs measure jobs and survival rather than revenue or customer traction. The result is an ecosystem that keeps companies alive instead of forcing them to either find product-market fit or return their talent to the community.

Graeme Harrison was direct about what he tells founders considering a grant application:

“The amount of times you can talk to a customer, that’s the only thing that’s really valuable when you’re at the pre-seed stage. The idea that you could spend eight months applying for a grant is just so off the competitive meta. There’s no point doing it. You’ll probably die as a business before you find out if you’re going to get the grant.” — Graeme Harrison

Why this matters: Pre-seed and seed-stage companies should be iterating quickly. Long grant cycles artificially extend the feedback loop between founders and customers. The exact loop that needs to be as short as possible to build something that works.

2. Venture Capital: The Returns Problem

The takeaway: Canadian VC is heavily dependent on government LP capital. That dependency has shaped GP behaviour in ways that hurt founders, and the returns of the asset class as a whole reflect it.

This was the longest section of the conversation, and it’s where the panel got sharpest.

Michelle Scarborough explained how the structure of Canadian VC creates fundamental misalignment between fund managers, their LPs, and the founders they back:

“We’re looking to invest in your company, partner with you, which means we’re married for the next 10 years, 15 years around the right timeframe these days. But I know my limited partners need to get their money back in seven or 10 years at the top. So now I have to artificially work with you to say, ‘Hey, can you speed up your exit?’” — Michelle Scarborough

She also surfaced the broader returns picture: Canadian VC funds have historically returned around 1.1 to 1.2x MOIC, meaning you put a dollar in and you get a dollar back, on a 10-to-15 year timeline. That’s not the asset class working as designed.

Graeme, whose firm Augur VC has deliberately not taken government LP capital, explained why that decision was deliberate:

“People get addicted to management fees. Tony Fish, who’s a 30-year VC, recently wrote that management fees are like heroin. Once you get addicted to them, it’s impossible to stop. You see these big fund-of-funds, especially out east, where they’ve gotten so much money out of government that they’ve become more of a grant-writing agency in disguise, as opposed to a traditional venture investor seeking to convert distributions into profits.” — Graeme Harrison

Derrick Hunter built on the point with a number that stopped the room:

“There’s vanishingly few venture managers in Canada that are ever going to reach their carry. It’s less than 10%. Once you know you’ll never hit that 8% hurdle, you’re just in the business for the rake. And if you’re just in the business for the rake, you don’t have an incentive to sell anything ever, because if you sell, your AUM goes down.” — Derrick Hunter

Derrick made the broader structural point that’s now becoming central to this debate: there’s a difference between economic development and venture capital, and Canada has been blurring the two.

“There’s absolutely a role for government in economic development. AEC’s mandate legislatively says it’s an economic development organization, and it’s checked every box. But when there’s all these restrictions [like] invest in this region, invest in this class of citizen, it’s not venture anymore. We’ve confused the two in this country, and that’s why we’re on a bad track.” — Derrick Hunter

Why this matters: Pace of play matters. Graeme noted that San Francisco VCs regularly write pre-seed cheques in 30 minutes. In Canada, the same decision can take 8 to 12 weeks. That difference in tempo isn’t a minor cultural quirk, it’s a direct consequence of the LP base, and it costs founders real time at the most critical stage of building.

Brought to you by:

Boast - Are you leaving innovation capital on the table? Boast combines AI-powered automation with specialized tax expertise to help tech companies maximize R&D credit returns. Join 2,000+ businesses who've secured $675M+ in funding. Get your free assessment at boast.ai

3. Non-Profit ESOs: The Alignment Problem

The takeaway: Canada has hundreds of accelerators and incubators, but the ones that work share a structural feature: alignment between the program, the founder, and the outcome. Most Canadian programs don’t have.

Cam framed this argument better than anyone has in public so far:

“YC puts in money, they get a part of your company, and they’re successful when you exit. Most things in Canada that we call accelerators aren’t actually set up that way. We have a whole bunch of accelerators that mimic what’s going on at YC: there’s dinners, there’s classes. But they don’t have alignment. The best programs create alignment between the entrepreneur, the program itself, and the outcome. Most of our programs aren’t set up that way.” — Cam Linke

Derrick brought a useful counterexample. He’s been a fellow at CDL Rockies since day one, and noted that CDL began as a privately financed program where investors put in their own money and time. That structure was private capital and private mentors. The early version worked.

The risk, several panelists noted, is that programs end up reporting on metrics like job creation and one-year survival rate, which are easy to claim and not strongly correlated with actual outcomes.

Michelle named the deeper structural issue:

“If all the organizations are getting their money from the same pots, and there’s no discussion at the board levels about how they’re going to incentivize good behaviour, we’re not going to get there. It’s not spread the peanut butter. It’s how do we get entrepreneurial thinking out of the brain and into action so we have the right people helping the right companies be successful.” — Michelle Scarborough

Why this matters: When ESOs report on metrics that don’t reflect actual founder outcomes, more programs get funded that produce more reports, but not necessarily more successful companies. The fix isn’t more programs. The fix is alignment.

The Closer: What Would You Change?

We closed the panel by asking each panelist what they’d do with a magic wand. The answers were unusually concrete.

Derrick Hunter: Eliminate Alberta’s provincial capital gains tax. “You only benefit if you’re a taxpayer in Alberta. There could not possibly be a bigger magnet to the world saying we’re open for business with entrepreneurs.” The cost would be about $400 million against a $80 billion provincial budget, which is, in his words, trivial compared to the signal it would send.

Graeme Harrison: Pay the top 2 to 3% of students at the best Canadian universities to drop out and start companies. “You’re not going to see the same yield off of a culture that’s highly institutional that you will from one with real grassroots entrepreneurship behind it.”

Michelle Scarborough: Stop waiting for permission. “The only way we’re going to get ahead is if we compete. We have all the tools and resources here. Let the markets decide to a greater degree, take best practices from the U.S., and stop naval gazing.”

Cam Linke: Fix Canadian procurement. “The biggest source of funding every startup should want is customers. We’re terrible at being customers of Canadian startups, as the government, and as corporate Canada. Fourteen percent of Canadian GDP is procurement. If we stopped being biased against Canadian companies, you’d fix almost all of this.”

A Few Takeaways for Founders

A few practical points that came out for founders specifically:

• Look at your VC’s LPs before you take their money. Their incentives become your incentives. Government LP capital often comes with checklist requirements that can shape how a fund manages its portfolio.

• Pace of play is signal. If a fund takes 12 weeks to write a pre-seed cheque, that tells you something about how they’ll behave at every subsequent decision point.

• Don’t tie your thesis to a policy wind. Defense, AI, sovereign compute, critical minerals: policy windows open and close. As Graeme put it: “Find something you’re nuts about and run off into the desert by yourself.”

• Customers solve more problems than capital does. This came up across all four panelists, in different ways. The companies that don’t get caught in any of the three traps tend to be the ones that figured this out early.

A massive thank you to our panelists for being so candid, and to everyone who came out for what turned into one of the most substantive conversations we’ve hosted.

Coming up at Tech Thursday:

April 30 (Tonight!) — How Energy and Mining Can Lead AI Adoption in Canada

Energy and mining don’t usually headline AI conversations. Maybe they should. The data density, operational scale, and high stakes of these industries create exactly the conditions where AI delivers real value, and the companies operating in this space are starting to move faster than most people realize. Featuring:

• John Mortimer (CTO, GeologicAI)

• Keri Lee (Managing Director, BlueMarvel AI)

• Josh Malate (Co-Founder and President, Ultimarii)

Get Your Free Ticket Here

May 21 — Building Fintech in Canada with Wealthsimple

Building in fintech at scale leaves you with a lot of lessons. We’re co-hosting this one with Wealthsimple, with their engineering and product leaders sharing the decisions behind some of Canada’s most-used financial tools: what they launched, what they learned, and what they’d do differently. Featuring:

• Channing Allen (Sr. Engineer at Wealthsimple, Co-Founder at Plenty)

• Jocelyn Jeffrey (Director of Engineering, Wealthsimple)

• Sam Newman-Bremang (Sr. Director of Product, Wealthsimple).

  Get Your Free Ticket Here

  ---

🫶 News from our Friends

eStruxture is launching CAL-3, their newest data centre, on May 22nd in Calgary! This event is more than a grand opening, it’s a gathering of the community that makes the Alberta Tech Corridor one of the most exciting ecosystems in North America. It brings together 200+ decision-makers, government officials, and the innovators who are driving our local economy forward. More info and RSVP here!

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

• CoolIT Systems, a liquid cooling pioneer for AI data centres, is being acquired by U.S.-based Ecolab for $6.6 billion - one of the largest Canadian tech exits ever.

  • Founded in a Calgary garage in 2001, all 650 employees are set to receive cash payouts of up to eight years of annual salary through a broad-based ownership program. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026.

• Calgary’s Blackline Safety is going private in a deal valued at up to $850 million.

  • The acquisition came by an affiliate of Francisco Partners, a global investment firm focused on technology, marking one of the largest recent exits in Canada’s industrial technology sector.

• Neo Financial closed a $150 million CAD inaugural credit card securitization with BMO Capital Markets and Calgary-based SAF Group, entering institutional capital markets for the first time.

  • The transaction marks a first for a Canadian fintech, adopting a funding model traditionally reserved for Canada’s largest banks.

• Simply Silicon secured 12 MW of powered capacity in downtown Calgary as the site for their first supercomputer, Foundation.

  • This positions Foundation to grow over the next year to 10,000+ GPUs; Canada's largest at more than $300 million in silicon alone.

• Flora Fertility closed a $6.9 million seed round to build out the first individually-owned fertility insurance platform, with plans to expand across the U.S. before coming to Canada.

  • The round was led by ManchesterStory, with participation from BDC Capital, TruStage Ventures, and others.

• Calgary’s Krux, a leader drilling optimization technology was acquired by Austrailia’s IMDEX.

• Shift Connect, a leading Canadian provider of foreign exchange and global payment services, acquired Alberta-based firm Olympia Currency and Global Payments.

• Canadian aerospace company NordSpace announced the launch of NordSpace Ventures, with Alberta-based Wyvern as its first portfolio member.

• Denvr partnered with Ottawa's Dominion Dynamics to develop Canada's first sovereign AI simulation environment for autonomous drone aircraft, purpose-built for the Canadian Armed Forces and NATO allies.

Brought to you by:

Boast - Are you leaving innovation capital on the table? Boast combines AI-powered automation with specialized tax expertise to help tech companies maximize R&D credit returns. Join 2,000+ businesses who’ve secured $675M+ in funding. Get your free assessment at boast.ai

In the News 📰

• Neo Financial became the second fintech to join Interac e-Transfer as a direct participant.

  • Neo joined after Interac expanded eligibility in 2025 to RPAA registered payment service providers.

• Loon said its CADC stablecoin has passed $300m in total volume.

• NanoTess announced a distribution deal with diabetes care company Embecta.

  • The deal will see Embecta distribute NanoTess’s NanoSALV Catalytic, a topical gel that uses tiny, catalytic particles to accelerate healing in chronic wounds, to more than 14,000 pharmacies across Canada.

• Wagepoint, a leading provider of payroll software for small businesses announced the launch of Timesheets, a built-in time entry feature.

• Neo Financial partnered with United to launch the United MileagePlus Neo World Elite Mastercard.

• Helcim launched its Payment Extension, allowing merchants to use Helcim's payment processing within their existing software.

  • The extension supports 20+ platforms at launch, with plans to expand to 100+ by end of 2026.

Achievements 🥇

• Quickly announced they received SOC 2 certification, validating their security practices meet a recognized standard.

• Alex Todorovic, CEO at Arbor was named a finalist for Technopreneur of the Year at the Canadian SME Small Business Magazine National Business Awards.

• Mikata Health was named a 2025 Top Health Tech Company Globally by TIME.

• Cashew, LiORA, and Eavor were named recipients of the 2026 CIX Startup Awards, chosen from 370+ applicants vetted by 94 North American investors in the Emerging, Early, and Growth categories respectively. Eavor was also named to the 2026 Global Cleantech 100.

• CropMind was selected as the only Alberta company in the 14-startup 2026 Google for Startups Accelerator: Canada cohort.

New Opportunities 🚀

• Kindr is hiring Founding Engineer based in Calgary.

• Knead is hiring an Account Executive.

• Applications are now open for the THRIVE Global Impact Challenge 2026!

  • The application deadline is May 15th.

Upcoming Events 👇

⚖️ April 23rd - The Future of Government Funding in Tech

Speakers:

• Derrick Hunter, President & CEO at Bluesky Equities

• Michelle Scarborough, Former Managing Partner of Thrive Venture Fund at BDC

• Graeme Harrison, CEO & Managing Partner at Augur VC

• Cam Linke, CEO at Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP

⚡️ April 30th - How Energy & Mining Can Lead AI Adoption in Canada

Speakers:

• John Mortimer, CTO at GeologicAI

• Keri Lee, Managing Director at BlueMarvel AI

• Josh Malate, Co-Founder and President at Ultimarii

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP

A big thank you to all of our sponsors for making these events a possibility including Boast, Skip, Neo Financial, Alberta Innovates, Motiv, Crestview Strategy, and BLG.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

Last month, we co-hosted a fantastic panel with ElevateIP Alberta ‘IP Mistakes That Cost Founders’. The key areas we talked about were:

1. Why early-stage founders should focus on traction first.

2. Which IP mistakes can actually kill a company.

3. When patents actually add value and when they don't.

4. How to pick a brand name that's both protectable and memorable.

5. What IP maintenance really is.

6. What investors are actually looking in your IP data room.

Our speakers were:

• Jason Howg, Partner and Regional Group Manager at BLG

• Kurtis Broda, Co-Founder & COO at Wyvern

• Danny Zahynacz, Founder at RAD Medical Technologies

Moderated by: Louise Lee, Partner at BLG

→ Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple

We covered (w/ timestamps):

00:00 – Intro: The true value of intellectual property for early-stage startups.
01:14 – Speaker Introductions: Perspectives from satellite, legal, and medical device sectors.
03:25 – Realistic IP Considerations: Balancing product development with legal protection.
05:28 – Founding Mistakes: The critical importance of IP assignments and competitive analysis.
08:29 – Low-Hanging Fruit: Implementing NDAs and identifying trade secrets.
10:26 – Strategic Planning: Deciding when to patent and the role of AI in IP searches.
13:00 – Patent Value: Understanding the business purpose and jurisdictional costs of filing.
14:59 – The "Secret Spice": Using trade secrets to complement existing patent portfolios.
22:01 – Strategic Branding: Choosing memorable names and avoiding expensive rebrands.
30:02 – Routine Maintenance: Managing data rooms and tracking competitor developments.
38:45 – Business Outcomes: Aligning IP strategy with revenue and manufacturing know-how.
41:01 – Audience Q&A: Global market prioritization, infringement risks, and medical regulations.

1. Why Early-Stage Founders Should Focus on Traction First

Early-stage founders have a ton on their plate: from product development, to fundraising, to customer traction, and even hiring, it can be easy to make IP mistakes in the early stages of a company.

Kurtis (Wyvern) broke it down in plain terms:

“Your patents aren't really worth anything until your product and company work. The thing that matters is your traction and your customers. You don't wanna make mistakes that will preclude you from IP success in the future, but until your company actually has traction and is valuable, it's more like: try not to make mistakes.”

2. Which IP Mistakes Can Actually Kill a Company

With the chaos of early-stage companies, as Kurtis mentioned, it is vital to not make mistakes, especially critical ones that can harm your company. Three key mistakes that stuck out to our panel:

1. IP assignments: Make sure your founding documents, and every agreement, whether employee or contractor, explicitly assign IP to the company. As Kurtis mentioned, this was missed entirely on Wyvern's setup docs.

"It could be a company killer if somebody doesn't get along and just doesn't wanna do that assignment later on."

2. Vague NDAs: generic NDAs are very difficult to enforce. Kurtis' advice: be as specific as possible about what you're actually protecting.

3. Hurrying the patent process: as Danny (RAD Medical Technologies) pointed out, rushing to file patents can have a negative impact, especially if the project shifts throughout the process, risking your patent not covering the final product.

"You get to the end of the project, ready to release it commercially, and realize the design has pivoted pretty far from your original IP."

This week in Calgary 👇

April 16th - LIVE Season 3 Finale: The Founder Mindset Podcast

Co-Hosted by: Thin Air Labs

Guests:

• Brian Ford, VP, ATB Business Solutions

• Brad Parry, President and CEO at Calgary Economic Development, and CEO at Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund

• Andrew MacIsaac, CEO, at API

• Ashley Gallant, Senior Executive Recruitment Consultant and Marketing Lead at Artemis Canada

• Hosted by: Leah Sarich, Head of Story at Thin Air Labs

RSVP

3. When Patents Actually Add Value… And When They Don’t

As Jason (BLG) mentioned, you create value for a patent; they do not create value for you. Before filing a patent, a simple question should be asked: why? If you cannot answer the ‘why’, with reasons such as blocking a competitor or building IP assets that investors care about, it is not the right time.

Brought to you by:

ElevateIP Alberta gives you access to the funding, support, resources and tools you need to protect your startup’s IP and grow your business. Learn more at their website.

4. How to Pick a Brand Name That’s Both Protectable and Memorable

Branding options can be a practice of paralysis by analysis, and while they are important, our panel agreed that availability and memorability were vital when choosing a name.

Jason candidly explained his experience with founders naming companies:

"They had a little brainstorming session, everybody wrote down what they thought would be really clever, they put it in a hat, and they picked a name. And then I look at the name and I think: this is a terrible trademark.

Naming is not nothing, however, as Danny reflected on his experience of holding off on trademarks and using the money elsewhere, only to realize he covered the IP process in retrospect:

"When we started out, our plan was always to partner with a bigger brand for distribution, so the brand of my company didn't matter so much to me. Four years in, I wish I'd applied for a grant and just covered the trademark process upfront."

5. What IP Maintenance Really Is

IP maintenance can cover a variety of topics, but one takeaway stood out above all else: it is vital to maintain IP assets proactively. How this looks for our panel in practice:

• NDA tracking: Kurtis has set up an automated Claude task that runs monthly, flagging expiring NDAs; proactive tasks that keep you in the know before it’s too late (like hypothetically realizing during a risk disclosure with Lockheed Martin that your NDA expired).

• Competitor monitoring: Danny sets a calendar reminder every six months to search what competitors have filed patent-wise, while Wyvern has a Slack channel dedicated to competitor intel. As Danny put it:

“The sooner you know, the sooner you can adjust, pivot, do what you have to do. It works both ways: both on IP health and understanding what that's going to look like for valuations.”

6. What Investors Are Actually Looking For In Your IP Data Room

Investors doing due diligence comes down to two major categories: agreements and assets.

Agreements involved NDAs, contractor agreements, employee agreements, and ultimately, can the company prove they own what they say they own? As Jason stated:

"You need agreements. Handshakes and hope aren't a great method."

The other category, assets, focuses more on product itself: patents, trademarks, and even trade secrets can serve as a valuable asset to deliver to investors. However, as Kurtis mentioned, traction can provide a buffer with the IP data room:

"If you have traction, investors give you leeway on the IP data room. If you're marginal, missing IP could just be the reason they walk."

🔜 What’s Coming Up in April:

April 23rd - The Future of Government Funding in Tech

Speakers:

• Derrick Hunter, President & CEO at Bluesky Equities

• Michelle Scarborough, Former Managing Partner of Thrive Venture Fund at BDC

• Graeme Harrison, CEO & Managing Partner at Augur VC

• Cam Linke, CEO at Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP

April 30th - How Energy & Mining Can Lead AI Adoption in Canada

Speakers:

• John Mortimer, CTO at GeologicAI

• Keri Lee, Managing Director at BlueMarvel AI

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

• More speakers TBA!

RSVP

🫶 News from our Friends

Osler & Scotiabank, are teaming up to host Calgary’s first Premier AI Finance Demo & Vibe Coding Day on April 22nd. More info on the event here.

Uniting the Prairies (UP) is back April 29-30 in Saskatoon. It brings together high-growth prairie founders and 75+ investors from across North America in a 2:1 format that’s helped drive $40M+ raised since 2022. More info and tickets here.

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

April in Calgary is stacked! Four events coming your way this month.

Find your Thursday below👇

💡 April 2nd - Your Business is on the Line Live Recording

Every week, host Shubh Sidhu invites guests to bring their business ideas, workplace problems, and entrepreneurial dreams into the studio, and helps them figure out if the idea is brilliant, terrible, or somewhere in between.

This time, the audience is part of the show too! Got a business idea you’ve been sitting on? A workplace problem with no clean answer? The floor opens to audience pitches.

Speakers:

• Tate Hackert, Co-Founder & CSO, ZayZoon

• April Hicke, Founder & CEO, Toast

• Philippe Burns, Co-Founder, Tech Thursday

• Shubh Sidhu, Founder & Host, Your Business is on the Line

RSVP

🎙️ April 16th - LIVE Season 3 Finale: The Founder Mindset Podcast

Co-Hosted by: Thin Air Labs

The Founder Mindset, the podcast where veteran broadcaster Leah Sarich asks Canadian founders one simple question: “Why would you do this?”, comes to Tech Thursday for a Live Recording.

This season finale brings together the organizations supporting the growth of founders Leah chatted with all season long. Join us and get insights on what to look for in a banking partner, the right investor, how to commercialize and how to find executive tech talent.

Guests:

• Brian Ford, VP, ATB Business Solutions

• Brad Parry, CEO, Calgary Economic Development and OCIF

• Andrew MacIsaac, CEO, API

• Ashley Gallant, Senior Executive Recruitment Consultant and Marketing Lead, Artemis Canada

• Hosted by: Leah Sarich, Head of Story, Thin Air Labs

RSVP

⚖️ April 23rd - The Future of Government Funding in Tech

We’re bringing together seasoned investors and ecosystem builders who’ve been close to these programs for a candid, grounded discussion on the state of government capital.

Expect real perspectives, hard-earned lessons, and honest takes on what a more effective funding landscape could look like going forward. Walk away with a sharper lens on how government capital fits (or doesn’t) into the startup journey, and what the ecosystem could realistically push for.

Speakers:

• Derrick Hunter, President & CEO, Bluesky Equities

• Michelle Scarborough, Former Managing Partner of Thrive Venture Fund, BDC

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder, Tech Thursday

• More speakers TBA!

RSVP

Lunch & Learn Workshop: Unlocking R&D Tax Credits in 2026: What Calgary Innovators Need to Know

If you’re developing software, creating hardware, solving technical challenges, or just broadly building innovative products or services, you’re likely eligible for significant R&D tax credits.

​Join Carlos Coelho, MBA and Jared Roach from Boast for an interactive lunch & learn session that cuts through the confusion around Canada’s SR&ED program and the unprecedented opportunities for Calgary’s innovators in 2026. RSVP here!

⚡️ April 30th - How Energy & Mining can Lead AI Adoption in Canada

Energy and mining don’t usually headline AI conversations. Maybe they should.

The data density, operational scale, and high stakes of these industries create exactly the conditions where AI delivers real value. They’ve been generating complex, high-quality data for decades. The infrastructure is there. The problems are real. And the companies operating in this space are starting to move faster than most people realize.

Speakers:

• John Mortimer, CTO, GeologicAI

• Keri Lee, Managing Director, BlueMarvel AI

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder, Tech Thursday

• More speakers TBA!

RSVP

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

Last week, we hosted a SOLD OUT panel on ‘The Tech Behind Data Centres’ with our friends at the Western Canada Data Centre Alliance. The key areas we talked about were:

1. Why hyperscalers flipped from ‘never natural gas’ to building gas plants beside their data centres.

2. Companies like VoltaGrid are providing off-grid power generation to power Gigawatt-sized plants to avoid 7 year wait times with local utility.

3. The importance of building data-sovereignty capability in Canada.

4. Liquid cooling technology and the push to 100% heat capture.

5. We spent $1.3T just maintaining our grids over 20 years. Now we need 50% growth and nobody knows the bill.

6. Data Centres in space? How liquid cooling will work in space.

Our speakers were:

• Thomas Farran, VP at Longbow Capital

  • Longbow is an investor in VoltaGrid, a company that just signed a 2.3GW deal with Oracle.

• Benjamin Sutton, Product Marketing Manager at CoolIT

  • CoolIT was acquired last week for $4.75B, the city’s largest tech deal ever.

• Joe Gentile, Account Executive at eStruxtures Data Centre

  • eStruxtures is Canada’s largest data center provider.

Moderated by: Vlad Oujegov, Founder of Western Canada Data Centre Alliance

→ Listen on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple

We covered (w/ timestamps):

01:05 - Introduction of the panel
01:31 - Discussion on increasing rack density and Alberta's emergence as a "frontier market".
04:05 - Massive scale of 2-gigawatt projects in Canadian history.
06:01 - "Collocation" and eStucture's role as a Canadian-owned operator.
10:52 - VoltaGrid and the transition from powering fracking sites to data centers.
16:01 - Liquid cooling technology and its necessity for modern AI chips.
21:47 - The "Tier" rating systems of site reliability
24:47 - "Bring your own power" theme and the challenges of grid interconnection.
35:08 - "Sovereign compute" and data residency for Canadian companies.
40:18 - The economic "boom" associated with large infrastructure builds.
45:16 - Rapid-fire round on tech trends and challenges for the industry.
48:36 - Audience Q&A covering heat reuse and space-based facilities.

1. Why Hyperscalers Flipped from ‘Never Natural Gas’ to Building Gas Plants Beside Their Data Centres

Three years ago, hyperscalers wouldn’t touch natural gas. Now it’s the consensus bridge fuel until nuclear comes online in the 2030s. The shift happened because grid power simply can’t scale fast enough and the demand for AI compute can’t wait.

Vlad (WCDCA) put it bluntly:

“I remember talking to a bunch of hyperscalers about three years ago, and most of them were saying, ‘We’re never gonna do natural gas. We’re not interested. Stop talking to us about it.’ And then a switch flipped.”

Tom Farran (Longbow Capital) added the context:

“Five years ago, natural gas power was legacy. It was going the way of the dodo. I don’t think that’s true anymore. It’s the most reliable and the most cost effective way that you can get power within the next one to two years.”

2. VoltaGrid: Off-Grid Power Generation to Avoid 7-Year Utility Wait Times

When you need a gigawatt of power, you can’t just call the local utility. The infrastructure upgrades alone take 5-7 years. VoltaGrid, one of Longbow Capital’s investments, spotted the opportunity to bring mobile, natural gas-powered generation directly to data centre sites, and the results have been staggering. Tom explained:

“If you go to the utility today, it’ll take you five to seven years to get actually plugged into the grid... natural gas becomes kind of the easiest way to do it. And Alberta is a beautiful place for that because we have the skills, we have the resource, and we have the people that know how to manage all of that.”

VoltaGrid started by powering fracking operations with trailer-mounted generators and pivoted when they realized the power profile of a frac spread was eerily similar to an AI data centre. They now have 5 gigawatts under contract, roughly five times the size of Calgary and half of the Alberta power grid.

Brought to you by:

Boast - Are you leaving innovation capital on the table? Boast combines AI-powered automation with specialized tax expertise to help tech companies maximize R&D credit returns. Join 2,000+ businesses who've secured $675M+ in funding. Get your free assessment at boast.ai

3. The Importance of Building Data-Sovereignty Capability in Canada

With geopolitical tensions rising, the question of who controls Canadian data has moved from niche policy debate to nightly news. Any American company operating a data centre in Canada falls under the Patriot Act, meaning the US government can demand access to that data. Joe Gentile (EStruxture) didn’t mince words:

“Any American company that operates a data centre in country here is under the Patriot Act. So effectively what that means is the American government can come up and say, give me your data, all of it... Data sovereignty allows Canadian companies to land here under a Canadian brand without the American government looking in.”

eStruxture is Canada’s largest Canadian-owned data centre company, operating exclusively in this country, with facilities in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. Their new Calgary build will be the largest in Western Canada at 90 megawatts, and they expect it to sell out within two years.

4. Liquid Cooling Technology and the Push to 100% Heat Capture

Since 2023, Nvidia’s AI chips can no longer be air-cooled. Period. That’s made liquid cooling mandatory, and Calgary-based CoolIT has been preparing for this moment for 25 years.

Ben Sutton (CoolIT) explained the shift:

“The chips from Nvidia since kind of 2023, they are only able to be liquid cooled. You can no longer cool them with air... This liquid cooling was no longer optional. It was no longer the most efficient way to do it. You had to do it. You have no choice.”

The industry is now pushing toward 100% heat capture, completely fanless servers where all heat is removed by liquid. The efficiency gains are massive: PUE (power usage effectiveness) is dropping from a historical 1.6 down toward 1.1, meaning less than 10% of power goes to cooling. As Ben put it: “Air is an insulator, right? What do we use in all our buildings? It’s not great for cooling. Liquid is kind of the direction of travel for the future.”

CoolIT currently cools 7 of the top 10 supercomputers in the world. In 2023, KKR bought CoolIT for $270M, last week it was announced that KKR sold CoolIT for $4.75B. The biggest tech deal in Calgary… ever. They now have over 140 open positions as their revenue and headcount doubles year over year.

5. We Spent $1.3T Just Maintaining Our Grids Over 20 Years. Now We Need 50% Growth. And Nobody Knows the Bill.

This was perhaps the most sobering stat of the evening. Our power grids barely grew between 2000 and 2020, yet we still spent $1.3 trillion just keeping them running. Now we need at least 50% growth in the next decade to meet data centre and electrification demand. Tom laid it out:

“From 2000 to 2020, our power grids did not grow or maybe fractionally. We still spent $1.3 trillion maintaining them through that period. Now we’re gonna basically at least 50% growth through the next 10 years. I don’t know how much we’re gonna spend on that.”

The solution isn’t simple. Utilities worry that ratepayers will foot the bill for gigawatt-scale data centre connections. The panel discussed hybrid approaches: dual-track systems where onsite generation can feed the grid during off-peak times and power the data centre otherwise, benefiting both the operator and the community.

6. Data Centres in Space? How Liquid Cooling Would Work in Zero Gravity

The final audience question went big: with Nvidia announcing chip classes designed for space-based data centres, is this the future? Ben brought the reality check:

“A vacuum is way worse [than air as an insulator]. Yes, there’s a lot of solar power there to use, but dissipating that heat is gonna be a nightmare... if data centres are gonna be adopted in space, they’re gonna have to be lower powered chips or larger chips. They’re gonna have to use different cooling technologies and they’re gonna need absolutely enormous radiators to dissipate the heat.”

He noted that two-phase (evaporative) cooling, which is passive and doesn’t rely on pumps, is likely the path forward for space applications, since a failed pump in orbit isn’t exactly a quick repair job. It’s a fascinating thought exercise, but the panel’s consensus was clear: there’s plenty of frontier territory left on Earth before we need to look up.

👉 Check out all of our upcoming events here!

LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Thursday Live Podcast

→ Listen on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple

We covered (w/ timestamps):

0:00 - Adam's background: from Olympian to VC to founder
1:50 - The Wayfair couch that started Second Shop
2:50 - Why the moat is distribution, not the marketplace
5:50 - The $400M problem hiding in Costco's returns
7:20 - Raising money for a capital-heavy business
8:50 - VC as an accelerant, not life support
17:50 - Why the Canadian VC model is broken
20:20 - Government R&D grants: how to play the game
39:20 - The Olympic qualifier that shaped how he builds

Share

1. The moat isn’t the marketplace. It’s the truck.

“These big retailers have no issues selling the product, but managing the stuff that doesn't stay sold is the big problem.”

SecondShop sells open-box and certified refurbished Appliances, Furniture, and TVs from major retailers and manufacturers. On the surface it looks like a resale marketplace. But the real business is the physical distribution network underneath it. Moving a fridge across the country requires a very specific set of logistics capabilities that most companies don’t have. Froese’s co-founder Cedric built a $250 million business doing exactly that. The marketplace is the interface. The network is the asset.

This matters because it inverts a common assumption in Canadian tech. We tend to celebrate software-first, capital-light businesses. Froese is building something deliberately capital-heavy, and the weight is the point. The logistics network creates compounding defensibility that no pure software competitor can replicate. Not every great tech company looks like a SaaS dashboard.

Upcoming Tech Thursday - IP Mistakes That Cost Founders

Are patents worth it? When does a trademark actually matter?

Join us on March 26th for a conversation on the IP decisions founders regret and how to avoid making them yourself, Co-Hosted by ElevateIP Alberta.

Speakers include:

• Kurtis Broda, Co-Founder & COO at Wyvern

• Jason Howg, Partner and Regional Group Manager at BLG

• Danny Zahynacz, Founder at RAD Medical Technologies

• Moderated by: Louise Lee, Partner at BLG

RSVP to the event here!

2. The problem hiding in all major retailers and suppliers is worth over $200Bn, just in Big and Bulky products.

“That segment alone just in appliances is a $200bn problem for all major retailers and suppliers, just in Big and Bulky products.”

Adam’s insight started with a Wayfair couch that came in the wrong colour. They offered him a new one rather than taking the first back. He couldn’t understand how a company would absorb a $1,000 loss like that, so he followed the thread. What he found was that big retailers running online drop-ship programs have no infrastructure for what happens when a product doesn’t stay sold.

The biggest retailers are sitting on over several billion in available revenue in appliances alone. Layer in TVs, home furnishings, and the next categories, and you have a systemic gap that nobody was seriously solving. That’s SecondShop’s beachhead. It’s a structural problem that had been hiding in plain sight.

3. Venture capital should be an accelerant, not life support.

“The big thing for us coming into this was I did not want to be dependent on venture capital to survive. Venture capital is a tool to help us accelerate our roadmap. But the underlying is this business needs to be what we call a going concern. It needs to operate on its own without needing life support.”

Froese was explicit about this: SecondShop was designed to operate as a going concern without a dependency on venture capital. VC is a tool to accelerate the roadmap, not to keep the lights on. He framed every fundraise around specific inflection points, not open-ended growth mandates. The business had to work first. Then capital could make it work faster.

This is a quiet indictment of how a lot of early-stage companies in Canada get built. Too many founders sequence their business around fundraising milestones rather than revenue milestones. Froese flipped that. Revenue came first, profitability was within reach, and then he went to the capital stack from a position of leverage. If your business dies without the next check, you don’t have a business yet.

Lunch & Learn Workshop: Unlocking R&D Tax Credits in 2026: What Calgary Innovators Need to Know

If you’re developing software, creating hardware, solving technical challenges, or just broadly building innovative products or services, you’re likely eligible for significant R&D tax credits.

​Join Carlos Coelho, MBA and Jared Roach from Boast for an interactive lunch & learn session that cuts through the confusion around Canada’s SR&ED program and the unprecedented opportunities for Calgary’s innovators in 2026. RSVP here!

4. The messy middle is the part nobody celebrates, but it’s where everything actually happens

“The messy middle is really scary, but when you look back on it all, that's the part where you really learned and grew, and really tried to solve a problem.”

Adam used the phrase ‘messy middle’ twice: once about company building, once about his athletic career. He spent years pursuing an Olympic qualification that didn’t come, then committed to another four-year cycle, and scored the shootout goal that sent Canada to Rio 2016. Then, did it again to qualify for Tokyo.

His point wasn’t that persistence pays off. It’s that the value is always in the middle, not the outcome. We’re wired to celebrate the raise, the exit, the headline. But the founders who last are usually the ones who genuinely like the problem more than the prize.

5. The founders who win are solving problems, not chasing exits.

“I am not building this company to make money. The byproduct of building a big company is a payout. That is not the reason I'm doing it.”

Froese closed the conversation with a line that landed quietly: “I am not building this company to make money.” He connected it to his years in Olympic field hockey, where he spent eight years pursuing a dream that paid nothing, failed to qualify the first time, and came back four years later to score the sudden-death goal that sent his team to the Games. When asked whether he’d start a company in Canada or the US, he sidestepped the optimization question entirely. He’s building here because he found a problem worth solving.

Canada has a growing habit of evaluating founders through the lens of venture outcomes, TAM slides, and exit multiples. Froese is a reminder that the founders who endure the messy middle, the ones who survive the nine-month grant cycles and the overnight policy reversals and the capital-intensive early years, are usually the ones who came for the problem, not the payout. That’s not a sentimental observation. It’s a pattern. The motivation has to outlast the math, because the math will break more than once.

→ Listen on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple

All Upcoming Tech Thursday’s

March 26th: IP Mistakes That Cost Founders, Co-Hosted by ElevateIP Alberta

Hear from:

• Kurtis Broda, Co-Founder & COO at Wyvern

• Jason Howg, Partner and Regional Group Manager at BLG

• Danny Zahynacz, Founder at RAD Medical Technologies

• Moderated by: Louise Lee, Partner at BLG

RSVP

April 2nd: Your Business Is On The Line Live Recording

Speakers include:

• Tate Hackert, Co-Founder & CSO, ZayZoon

• April Hicke, Founder & CEO, Toast

• Philippe Burns, Co-Founder, Tech Thursday

• Shubh Sidhu, Founder & Host, Your Business is on the Line

RSVP

🫶 News from our Friends

Knead Tech, a software company dedicated to transforming food rescue operations, is hiring an Account Executive! Check out the job posting here.

A big thank you to all of our sponsors for making these events a possibility including Boast, Skip, Neo Financial, Alberta Innovates, Motiv, Crestview Strategy, and BLG.

Saba El-Hilo, CTO at Certn, and Cullen Jennings, CTO of AI and Audio Visual at Cisco, join Tech Thursday for a head-to-head on everything from labour arbitrage, AI’s impact on the workforce, optimizing for timezones, and data sovereignty.

→ Listen on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple

Cisco (CSCO) is a massive, global networking technology leader with a market cap of $310B, and an annual revenue of $56.654B, and a workforce of approximately 86,200 employees.

Certn, is a Victoria-based provider of AI-powered background checks founded in 2016, has raised approximately $125M across 9+ rounds to fuel global expansion. Major funding includes a $50M Series B in 2022 (led by B Capital) and a $30M Series B extension in 2023 (led by EDC), with over 400 employees globally.

We wanted to bring these two CTO’s together to see where they aligned, and where they disagreed across a variety of topics.

“ In the last 50 years there has never been a good metric of programmer efficiency and AI hasn’t changed that.” - Cullen Jennings, CTO for AI at Cisco

We covered (w/ timestamps):

(0:00) Intro

(1:30) Career Development & Leadership Philosophy

(6:06) Remote vs. Hybrid Team Management

(11:09) Labour Arbitrage

(14:08) AI’s Impact on Junior Developer Roles

(20:40) AI Tools in Development Workflows

(26:38) Is the QA role safe?

(30:39) Data Sovereignty Requirements

(33:15) Monolith vs. Microservices Architecture

(38:58) AI-Powered Cybersecurity Threats

Share the Calgary Tech Newsletter to make sure your friends and loved ones stay up-to-date on all Calgary Tech news and thought-leadership.

Share

Brought to you by:

Boast - Are you leaving innovation capital on the table? Boast combines AI-powered automation with specialized tax expertise to help tech companies maximize R&D credit returns. Join 2,000+ businesses who’ve secured $675M+ in funding. Get your free assessment at boast.ai/techthursday

Labor Arbitrage & Global Talent Strategy

Where can tech companies find cost-effective talent without sacrificing quality? Cisco’s CTO Cullen Jennings shared insights on navigating the global talent landscape in an era of rising costs and shifting markets.

Key Takeaways:

• Don’t just look at hourly rates – Focus on dollars per unit of work delivered, not just cost per hour

• Tax credits matter enormously – Ireland offers ~35% back through R&D tax credits, making it surprisingly cost-effective, take advantage of Boast too ;)

• India’s costs are rising fast – Prices per unit of work have roughly tripled in the past seven years

• Quality hotspots – Canada, Ireland, and Israel consistently deliver high-quality engineers due to strong university systems

• China becoming complicated – Both politically turbulent and progressively more expensive

“If you are doing a startup and you are not talking to these people and getting your SRED here, like, stop what you’re doing, go do that. All the other things don’t matter.” – Cullen Jennings, CTO at Cisco

The Bottom Line: Smart companies optimize for value, not just cost, and leverage tax incentives to make premium talent markets more affordable.

AI’s Impact on Junior Developer Roles

Is AI replacing entry-level developers? Two CTOs debated whether eliminating junior roles creates a sustainable talent pipeline – or if AI tools simply shift where those roles appear.

The Great Divide:

• Saba’s view: AI acts like having “a bunch of junior developers at your disposal” – why hire and mentor when you can use agents?

• Cullen’s counterpoint: Junior engineers accelerated by AI may be more valuable than seniors; innovation comes from all levels

• The pipeline problem: If juniors aren’t hired today, where do tomorrow’s seniors come from?

• The evolution: Entry-level roles aren’t disappearing – they’re shifting to non-technical teams that need automation help

“What AI has done is it democratized writing software. The biggest opportunity for tech companies is finding the areas in the business that are slower to adopt technology.” – Saba El-Hilo, CTO at Certn

Certn’s Bold Move: Instead of hiring traditional support roles, they’re hiring developers for customer service teams to build AI-powered automation tools.

Reality Check: The Quality Assurance role in any tech company might be dead.

Upcoming Tech Thursday - Join us on March 12th for a Fireside Chat with Adam Froese, Co-Founder at SecondShop one of the most exciting marketplaces in Canada.

3 Areas we’re excited to go deep on:

1. Building a Marketplace in a “Non-Sexy” Category

2. Logistics as a Moat

3. Operator DNA

RSVP to the Event

AI-Powered Cybersecurity Threats

Deepfakes have evolved from obvious scams to convincing impersonations that fool even experienced CTOs. The arms race between fraud and detection is accelerating, and the attackers have the advantage.

The Threat Landscape:

• Voice cloning is trivial – Cisco’s translation tech can clone a voice with less than 9 seconds of audio

• Hiring fraud is real – Cisco unknowingly hired fake employees; one impostor wrote code for years before being detected

• Detection can’t keep up – Attackers use your own detection systems to refine their deepfakes until they pass

• The asymmetry problem – Defenders must win every time; attackers only need to win once

“We have hired employees that were not the people we thought we were hired. We have had people that were writing great code and later they were writing bad code. And it took us literally, this is embarrassing to say, but years to figure out that it was no longer the same person.” – Cullen Jennings, CTO at Cisco

What Actually Works:

• Stop trusting your eyes and ears – Treat video/audio like suspicious emails; don’t assume they’re real

• Process over detection – Strong identity verification, multi-factor authentication, and approval workflows matter more than deepfake detection tools

• Identity verification at scale – Collect geolocation data, device information, and implement rigorous verification controls

“The race of fraud versus detection – fraud vectors are moving a lot faster than detection.” – Saba El-Hilo, CTO at Certn

The Paradox: During interviews at Certn, a candidate appeared human at first but showed flickering video and odd speech patterns. When asked a simple personal question “What’s your favorite thing to do outside of work?”, the AI completely stumbled and reverted to reciting the job description.

→ Listen on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple

All upcoming Tech Thursday’s

March 5th: International Women’s Day. Speakers include:

• Shelly Badhesha, Director, Banking at RBCx

• Daniella Jasper-Okumagba, Founder & CEO at THE BRDGE

• Pam Krause, President & CEO at Centre for Sexuality

• Mikenna Gault, Senior Social Media & Creator Lead at Arcade Studios

• Angela Nguyen, Podcast Host at The Leader Within

• Sabina Bruehlmann, CEO at Nimble Science

RSVP

March 12th: Fireside Chat with Adam Froese, Co-Founder at SecondShop and former Olympian.

RSVP

March 19th: The Tech Behind Data Centres. Speakers include:

• Tom Farran, Vice President at Longbow Capital

• Joe Gentile, Account Executive at eStruxture Data Centers

• Ben Sutton, Product Marketing Manager at CoolIT Systems

• Moderated by: Vlad Oujegov, President & Founder at Western Canada Data Centre Alliance

RSVP

March 26th: IP Mistakes that Cost Founders, Co-Hosted by ElevateIP Alberta. Speakers are TBD

RSVP

🫶 News from our Friends

Althra, in-person accelerator in Vancouver, has opened their second cohort. Althra, writes first cheques into ambitious Canadian founders and backs them inside a full-time. Capital, real mentorship from founders who’ve built venture-backed companies, and direct access to investors, all built to help you scale something meaningful. Apply at althra.ca.

Subscribe now

With another strong month concluding, we are so excited to announce the March schedule for Calgary!

We’ll see you there! 👇

🎉 March 5th

Topic - International Women’s Day

We’re excited to bring back our International Women’s Day celebration, focused on recognizing the incredible women across Western Canada’s Tech and Innovation ecosystem.

As in past years, the program is shaped by women in the community. It will feature six speakers, each delivering a short, powerful talk of about 7 minutes, creating space for personal stories to be shared in their own voice.

Speakers:

• Shelly Badhesha, Director, Banking at RBCx

  • Topic: Playing Life on Hard Mode: How to Level Up When the Systems Weren’t Built For You

• Daniella Jasper-Okumagba, Founder & CEO at THE BRDGE

  • Topic: Built From Scratch: Entrepreneurship Without a Recipe

• Pam Krause, President & CEO at Centre for Sexuality

  • Topic: Why sexual health education matters for girls/women

• More Speakers and Topics TBA!

RSVP HERE!

🛍️ March 12th

Topic - Fireside Chat with Adam Froese

Co-Hosted By: SecondShop

Technology is reshaping retail, yet returns and excess inventory remain one of its biggest inefficiencies. Billions of dollars in goods move through fragmented channels every year, creating margin loss, operational drag, and waste at scale.

We’re thrilled to co-host this conversation with SecondShop to unpack innovation in e-commerce and what it means to bring structure to one of retail’s messiest categories.

Speakers:

• Adam Froese, Co-Founder at SecondShop

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP HERE

💾 March 19th

Topic - The Tech Behind Data Centres

Co-Hosted By: Western Canada Data Centre Alliance

Behind nearly every digital experience, from AI tools and SaaS platforms to banking, healthcare, and streaming, is physical infrastructure most people never see. We’re digging into the technology that allows modern data centres to operate reliably at scale.

From power distribution and advanced cooling systems to redundancy planning and high-speed connectivity, we’ll break down what it actually takes to keep the digital world online and why rising AI demand is pushing facilities to evolve.

We’re excited to co-host this conversation with the Western Canada Data Centre Alliance to explore how these facilities are adapting in real time and what that means for the future of infrastructure.

Speakers:

• Vlad Oujegov, President & Founder at Western Canada Data Centre Alliance

• Tom Farran, Vice President at Longbow Capital

• Joe Gentile, Account Executive at eStruxture Data Centers

RSVP HERE

📝 March 26th

Topic - IP Mistakes That Cost Founders

Co-Hosted By: ElevateIP Alberta

Join us for a conversation on the IP decisions founders regret and how to avoid making them yourself!

We’ll dig into when patents actually make sense, when they don’t, and how to think about trademarks and ownership from day one. We’ll also talk about what happens when IP details get overlooked early, and how those loose ends can turn into big questions at the worst possible time, during fundraising, diligence, or acquisition conversations.

Speakers:

• TBA!

  RSVP HERE

🎤 Don’t Miss a Panel with Tech Thursday LIVE!

We're bringing some of our favourite panels to Spotify and Apple Podcasts so you can listen to all of our incredible speakers at home, at work, or on the go!

🎙️ Check Out The Latest Episodes of ‘Your Business Is On The Line’!

A Thursday Media Podcast: “Your Business Is On The Line” is a business-comedy podcast hosted by Shubh Sidhu with super special guest co-host Philippe Burns.

Catch the latest episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Episode 10: CEaaS w/Dallas Price

Episode 9: HER & Reinventing HER & Las Pegas w/Joanna Pariseau & Melissa Ninaber

Episode 8: Bumble for Families & Arranged & Dog-gevity w/Rachel Zimmer

A big thank you to all of our sponsors for making these events a possibility including Boast, Skip, Neo Financial, Alberta Innovates, Motiv, Crestview Strategy, and BLG.

Miss a Tech Thursday? Subscribe to our YouTube to see full videos of our past events, listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and be sure to follow us on Instagram!

“Every entrepreneurial origin story starts with frustrations in some sort of environment that they’re operating in.”

- Amanda Julian, Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder, Monark

We were thrilled to co-host this event with DMZ and TDIP. Below is our recap of the event’s top ideas. We hope you enjoy!

Missed this one? Check out the recap on YouTube or listen on our Podcast. Also be sure to follow us on Instagram for updates on everything Tech Thursday.

Key Takeaways

• Build Something Borderline Embarrassing: The first iteration of any product/business should be borderline embarrassing, because the initial feedback received will be invaluable to the scaling process.

• Focusing On Revenue Is Much Better Than Relying On Venture Capital: Companies that prioritize revenue and reinvest profits into growth often build stronger businesses and give founders more optionality as they scale.

Build Something Borderline Embarrassing

• Vision and feedback are two of the most important ingredients in the scaling process. That often means building something that feels borderline embarrassing at first, and dealing with more early pain points than if you started with a polished system or product. But it also creates a faster path to pivoting, adjusting, and ultimately scaling.

• Why It Matters: If you focus too much on the actual offering and not the vision, it can be easy to lose sight of the problem being solved, cause friction when it comes to adjusting on the fly, and ultimately limit the scalability of the company.

A big thank you to the DMZ for including TD Innovation Partners on their Calgary tour. We’re grateful for the opportunity to spend time with such a strong and welcoming ecosystem. The conversations, energy, and ambition in the ecosystem were incredible.

TDIP is a full-service team providing bespoke, high-touch banking and financing solutions in support of Technology and Innovation companies at all stages. If you have questions about startup banking or want to continue the conversation, feel free to reach out to td.innovationpartners_sbb@td.com

Focusing On Revenue Is Much Better Than Relying On Venture Capital

• Revenue generation builds a stronger company than venture capital funding, particularly when that revenue is consistently reinvested. It strengthens cash flow, validates market demand, and keeps decision-making and control in the hands of the founder.

• Why It Matters: Venture capital is often treated as a requirement for success. This is not the case - and reinvesting capital, evidencing revenue growth, and continuing to build is not only a successful strategy, but will also make a business more attractive to potential investors down the line.

Hot Take: LLMs DON’T Create Value By Themselves

• LLM’s are often talked about as the future of work, and while they are a very powerful tool, it is important to remember that these AI products are only as valuable as the systems in which they are employed.

• Why this matters: Just because a company heavily uses LLM’s doesn’t mean they are inherently efficient; additionally, the presence of an LLM doesn’t signify ‘AI only’ work. The key to scaling while using these AI systems comes down to a combination of the power of LLM’s with human-created systems and thinking - neither works at their peak if they are siloed.

CTO’s Go Head-to-Head on February 19th!

🛠️ February 19th

Topic - CTO vs CTO

In this head-to-head conversation we’ll explore how leaders from a fast-moving tech company and a legacy organization make decisions about architecture, resourcing, and scaling their teams. The focus is on real trade-offs and the thinking behind the choices that shape how companies build and grow.

Note: This event will take place at The Princeton.

Speakers:

• Saba EI-Hilo, CTO at Certn

• Cullen Jennings, CTO for Audio/Video Collaboration and AI at Cisco

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP HERE

As always, a big thank you to our sponsors who help bring Tech Thursday to life: Boast, Neo Financial, Skip, Motiv, Alberta Innovates, Crestview Strategy, and Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG).

Calling women founders across Canada 👋

@DMZHQ’s Women Innovation Summit returns on March 19, and they’re going All In.

If you’re a woman tech founder building something bold, this is your moment. Apply to pitch live on the Summit stage for a chance to secure up to $200K in investments.

Applications close February 16. Apply now: dmz.to/WIS-Pitch

Cleanster has launched an exclusive Tech Thursday Voucher, offering a free $30 credit to all CTN Subscribers and Tech Thursday attendees. Sign up HERE to claim using code CLN-ML0X6HEG-BQENTF2NW7

After January seemed to fly by, we are very excited to announce our February schedule.

We’ll see you there! 👇

🛡️ February 5th

Topic - Innovation in Insurance: Next-Gen InsurTech

Co-Hosts - Flora Fertility

We're thrilled to co-host this event with Flora Fertility to explore what the future of insurance actually look like. We’ll break down the biggest innovations in InsurTech and what they mean for the industry moving forward.

Note: This event will take place at OFFSITE YYC.

Speakers:

• Christy Lane, Co-Founder & President at Flora Fertility

• Finn Magee, CEO at Insurtech Canada

• Diane Horsfield, VP Client Success at Trufla

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP HERE

🛠️ February 19th

Topic - CTO vs CTO

In this head-to-head conversation we'll explore how leaders from a fast-moving tech company and a legacy organization make decisions about architecture, resourcing, and scaling their teams. The focus is on real trade-offs and the thinking behind the choices that shape how companies build and grow.

Note: This event will take place at The Princeton.

Speakers:

• Saba EI-Hilo, CTO at Certn

• Cullen Jennings, CTO for Audio/Video Collaboration and AI at Cisco

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP HERE

🎙️ Tech Thursday LIVE has Officially Launched!

Tech Thursday is bringing some of our favourite panels to Spotify and Apple Podcasts so you can listen to all of our incredible speakers at home, at work, or on the go!

Check it out on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

A big thank you to all of our sponsors for making these events a possibility including Boast, Skip, Neo Financial, Alberta Innovates, Motiv, Crestview Strategy, and BLG.

Miss a Tech Thursday? Subscribe to our YouTube to see full videos of our past events thanks to Motiv, and be sure to follow us on Instagram!

This is our recap of the top ideas shared from the event.

“There has never been such a good time to start a company.”

Graeme Harrison, CEO and Managing Partner, Augur VC

Missed this one? Check out our recap videos on YouTube and be sure to follow us on Instagram for updates on everything Tech Thursday.

TL;DR

• AI Can Help, but Core Skills Remain Vital: AI is a significant part of the future, and with more widespread uptake, there will be a core need for people skills and other culture-building abilities in organizations.

• Business Models Are Actively Changing: As evidenced, the emergence of AI will have indirect impacts that businesses will face, relating to core business practices and value extraction.

• Remote Work Will Be Altered: As with most drastic shifts, what was believed to be the new ‘norm’ is already changing; and while this shift evidences a focus on culture and productivity, it’s important to remember that these shifts, while important, are rarely permanent.

This recap is brought to you by Boast, North America's Premier R&D Tax Credit Solution. Check them out here:

Calgary Tech Hot Takes for 2026 from Industry Leaders:

1. AI Can Help, but Core Skills Remain Vital

• AI, naturally, was at the forefront of the conversation; and while it was mutually agreed upon that it is fundamentally shifting how work will get done, it can’t be a replacement for everything. As Kelly mentioned, the need for people skills will only grow, as human connection is what builds culture and motivation, and if the people part is right, more often than not, everything else will fall into place.

• Why this is important:

  • This reframes how people should think about an AI-driven future. While there is plenty of wondering about how AI will change the workforce, it also provides significant opportunity for people to grow their intrinsic abilities, like people skills.

• Key Takeaway: AI is a significant part of the future, and with more widespread uptake, there will be a core need for people skills and other culture-building abilities in organizations.

2. Business Models Are Actively Changing

• As AI changes how businesses think about things like productivity, there will be an increase in reviews across the board, including things like the current SaaS business model (per user per month for example). As a result of increased scrutiny on business practices and expenses, there will be an emphasis on value, leading to a fundamental change on how some businesses operate, both internally and to their customer.

• Why this is important:

  • While AI isn’t directly the result for changes like these, the shift in business practices as a result of AI’s emergence will change how leaders and businesses think about the decisions they make. It serves as further evidence of the technological impact that spans wider than simply increasing productivity.

• Key Takeaway: As evidenced, the emergence of AI will have indirect impacts that businesses will face, and while this example is specific to SaaS, these behaviours will be seen cross-industry.

3. Remote Work Will Be Altered

• As with other business practices, the emergence of AI will create another shift in jobs, similar to what we saw in 2020/post-pandemic. While the change will be less drastic, similar to the aforementioned people skills, there will be more of an emphasis on qualitative work, especially in positions where automation could be more efficient.

• Why this is important:

  • The belief post-pandemic was that remote work was the way of the future, but with the automation of tasks that can be time-consuming, there will likely be another shift, focused on culture, people, and qualitative results.

• Key Takeaway: As with most drastic shifts, what was believed to be the new ‘norm’ is already changing; and while this shift evidences a focus on culture and productivity, it’s important to remember that these shifts, while important, are rarely permanent.

Hot Take: We Are NOT In An AI Bubble

• What is consistently mentioned when talked about AI is the concept that the widespread uptake of AI, both in business and every day life, is forming the newest ‘bubble’. While it is understandable why some might believe that, the panel came to the consensus that this is not a bubble, given the actual commitment (vs. strictly speculation), the solution of the intelligence bottleneck, and the upside it provides.

• Why does that matter? Dispelling the belief that this is just a bubble or fad is crucial to addressing the productivity crisis. If more businesses buy in to AI helping solve problems, free time, and solve the bottleneck, it would serve as a meaningful step forward to sorting out Canada’s productivity crisis.

Don’t Miss Our Next Events!

🧩 January 29th

Topic - From Service to Scale: Turning Real Problems into Productized Solutions

Co-Hosts - The DMZ and TDIP

We’re thrilled to be co-hosting this panel with our good friends, the DMZ and TDIP, who’re flying in from Toronto for this event! They’ve brought together three incredible founders that have gone through their program. The conversation will be around taking a service, and bringing it to scale through productized solutions.

Speakers:

• Amanda Julian, Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder at Monark

• Addy Graves, CEO and Co-Founder at Cashew

• Lourdes Juan, CEO and Co-Founder at Knead

• Moderated by: Justine Clark, Strategic Partnerships Lead at DMZ

RSVP HERE

🧩 February 5th

Topic - Innovation in Insurance: Next-Gen InsurTech

Co-Hosts - Flora Fertility

We're thrilled to co-host this event with Flora Fertility to explore what the future of insurance actually look like. We’ll break down the biggest innovations in InsurTech and what they mean for the industry moving forward.

Speakers:

• Christy Lane, Co-Founder & President at Flora Fertility

• Finn Magee, CEO at Insurtech Canada

• Diane Horsfield, VP Client Success at Trufla

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP HERE

As always, a big thank you to our sponsors who help bring Tech Thursday to life: Boast, Neo Financial, Skip, Motiv, Alberta Innovates, Crestview Strategy, and Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG).

We are so excited to kick off 2026 with a couple great events, and we hope you’ll join us to start the new year strong.

As a reminder, these events will be hosted at OFFSITE YYC NOT The Pioneer. You can get directions to OFFSITE on the event pages.

We’ll see you there! 👇

🔥 January 22nd

Topic - Hot Takes for 2026 Canadian Tech

Our first event of 2026 will be filled with unfiltered takes and predictions for the tech industry this year. We'll chat about AI, humanoid robots, workplace culture, and other hot topics.

Speakers:

• Kelly Schmitt, CEO at Headversity

• Mark Le Dain, Chief Revenue Officer at Fuelled

• Graeme Harrison, CEO and Managing Director at Augur VC

• Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday

RSVP HERE

🧩 January 29th

Topic - From Service to Scale: Turning Real Problems into Productized Solutions

Co-Hosts - The DMZ and TDIP

We're thrilled to be co-hosting this panel with our good friends, the DMZ and TDIP, who're flying in from Toronto for this event! They've brought together three incredible founders that have gone through their program. The conversation will be around taking a service, and bringing it to scale through productized solutions.

Speakers:

• Kelsey Hahn, CEO and Co-Founder at Monark

• Addy Graves, CEO and Co-Founder at Cashew

• Lourdes Juan, CEO and Co-Founder at Knead

• Moderated by: Justine Clark, Strategic Partnerships Lead at DMZ

RSVP HERE

🎙️ Tech Thursday’s First Podcast Partnership!

Tech Thursday is proud to announce a partnership with “Your Business is on the Line”, a business-comedy podcast hosted by Shubh Sidhu with super special guest co-host Philippe Burns.

Take a sneak peek below!

You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Podcasts and check out the first three episodes below!

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

A big thank you to all of our sponsors for making these events a possibility including Boast, Skip, Neo Financial, Alberta Innovates, Motiv, Crestview Strategy, and OFFSITE YYC.

Miss a Tech Thursday? Subscribe to our YouTube to see full videos of our past events thanks to Motiv, and be sure to follow us on Instagram!

Before we dive into some of the top stories of the year, we’d be remiss not to acknowledge the wonderful tech community that continues to put Calgary on the map as a tech hub. Between acquisitions, new innovations, or builders that continue to grow, 2025 evidenced Calgary’s ability to become a tech hub. Onto 2026! 🚀🚀

Major Tech Thursday Announcement 📈

• We Are HIRING!

  • Want to come work at one of the fastest growing Tech communities in Canada? Tech Thursday is hiring an Operations Lead!

• Apply here ➡️ Operations Lead

Top Stories of 2025:

Orienna Raises Series C

• Orennia, a platform for accurate data, trustworthy analytics and actionable research dedicated to the energy transition, completed their Series C funding in January.

  • This round of funding was led by Decarbonization Partners, a joint venture between BlackRock and Temasek, in addition to investments from existing investors.

    • Read the announcement here

Ontopical Acquired by Sovra

• Ontopical, a government intelligence platform, was acquired by Sovra, a leading GovTech firm with clients across North America, and is backed by KKR, an American private equity firm with assets totalling over $350B USD.

  • The Calgary-based Ontopical team is now leading Sovra’s AI operations, with the local office serving as the company’s AI Centre of Excellence.

    • Read the announcement here

Virtual Gurus’ Virtual Assistant Division Acquired

• Calgary startup Virtual Gurus sold its Virtual Assistant division to American-based Zirtual (their fourth acquisition since February 2024), marking what is believed to be Canada’s first tech exit by an Indigenous woman founder.

  • Through an AI-enabled, human-curated matching model, Virtual Gurus connected thousands of assistants from underrepresented groups with work opportunities across Canada and the U.S.

    • Read the announcement here

Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 Features Calgary

• Deloitte’s annual ‘Technology Fast 50 Canada’ released, featuring Calgary on the list itself, as well as ranked in watchlists and industry leaders.

  • Orennia and Zayzoon were ranked 11th and 22nd in the Fast 50 rankings respectively

  • Neo Financial was ranked 1st in the Enterprise - Industry Leader Rankings

  • Ava Industries and Arcus Power were ranked 11th and 14th in the Companies To Watch rankings respectively

    • Check out the rest of the winners here

Toast Takes Harvard University

• Toast, a company dedicated to helping women secure tech jobs that has over 20,000 members, was invited to Harvard to speak about their ‘Champions Program’, a way to help men stop just talking about equity and actually take measurable steps towards it.

  • Additionally, Founder April Hicke was recognized and presented with the Alumni Changemaker Achievement Award by Royal Roads University.

StellarAlgo Continues Changing The Sports Fan Experience

• Calgary-based StellarAlgo continues to shift the fan experience in pro sports, announcing in April a continued relationship with the NHL, and a new collaboration with the MLS and its 30 clubs announced in October.

  • The NHL and MLS join major sport properties such as the MLB, NBA, WNBA, and CEBL as collaborators with StellarAlgo, making access to fan data easier, achieving the highest-value fan engagement.

Nanotess Reaches ADBL; Opens New Office

• Nanotess’ product ‘NanoSALV’, a gel that speeds up the healing of wounds was added to the Alberta Drug Benefit List this summer, meaning it’s now covered for people on AISH and seniors, as well as others receiving government supports.

  • Previously, the ‘NanoSALV’ gel, which benefits in the healing of patients with diabetic foot ulcers, burns, skin diseases and pressure sores, was only available to patients in healthcare facilities.

  • Additionally, the Nanotess team opened a new office, now changing HealthTech at two separate Calgary locations.

Neo Financial Strengthens Senior Leadership

• Neo Financial announced several new members of their senior leadership in February, building off of 2024 where they were named the Canada’s Fastest Growing Company by the Globe and Mail.

  • Neo welcomed the following to their senior leadership team:

    • Amanda Broos as Chief People Officer (CPO)

    • Dana Saric as Chief Legal Officer (CLO)

    • Allemander Neto as Acting Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

    • James Nauss as Chief Operating Officer (COO)

    • Stefan Doan as Chief Information Officer (CIO)

Fuelled Continues Growth; Opens Collaboration Centre

• Fuelled, the leading online marketplace for energy-industry equipment, continued its growth, reaching a new landmark in October with 500 consignment listings.

  • Additionally, they revitalized their workspace, adding a Japanese-inspired speakeasy for collaborative work, and a sauna!

Symend Appoints New VP of Engineering

• Symend, an AI-Debt Collection platform, hired Tracy Huitika, formerly of Electronic Arts, Unbounce, and Beanworks, to be their VP of Engineering.

  • Under Tracy, Symend’s engineering team is poised to accelerate platform optimization, deepen customer impact, and strengthen its leadership in the market.

    • Read the announcement here

Tech Thursday Hosts Nearly 5,000 Calgarians

• Finally, in 2025, Tech Thursday hosted events throughout the year, totalling nearly 5,000 event attendees in Calgary alone.

  • Additionally, Tech Thursday was honoured to be the receipient of the ‘Ecosystem Supporter of the Year’ at the Alberta Tech Awards.

Thank You!!!

What a year! Thank you to everyone who makes Tech Thursday possible. From our attendees to our speakers, our organizers and our sponsors, it truly takes a village, and the support does not go unnoticed. Here’s to 2026 🚀🚀

~ Philippe and the Tech Thursday team