- TechTO
- Posts
- Day 1, 2 & 3 of TTW. The bar is set.
Day 1, 2 & 3 of TTW. The bar is set.
Plus: two market overviews that will change how you see your category.
You are receiving the Community Edition of today’s newsletter - upgrade to a Member to receive additional perks and experiences
We kicked off Toronto Tech Week with three events and the energy has been unreal. Here's everything that happened.
HERE'S THE LATEST:
Hackathon - Sunday May 24
Some of the best companies started as a Sunday experiment. One challenge: build AI that runs your life. By 5pm, teams were demoing products that didn't exist that morning. The winners weren't the most technical, they were the ones everyone immediately wanted to use.
Thanks to Backboard.io, ElevenLabs, Codalio, Motion, Tangerine, and Rootly.
TiEQuest Summit | Monday May 25
Some rooms you leave with a business card. This one you leave with a different perspective on how you're building.
TiEQuest has been gathering Canada's best builders for 21 years. This Monday felt like all of them at once, Kirk Simpson ($537M exit), Janet Bannister (founder of Kijiji), Mike McCauley (BufferBox, acquired by Google), Eva Lau (Wattpad, US$660M exit), Liza Akhvledziani Carew ($1B+ at Chexy), Willson Cross ($27M day one), and Nipun Sharma (world's first autonomous pizza kitchen). Two $15,000 prizes. One morning nobody left the same.
The Growth Table | Monday May 25
Growth-stage founders, one private dinner, zero filters. The biggest shift in the room: the way everyone is thinking about growth has changed. Less headcount, more leverage. Less acquisition, more retention. The founders compounding fastest right now aren't doing more - they're doing the right things better.
Boast Funding Stage | Tuesday May 26
"If you raise once, you will raise 3 or 4 more times." Jack Newton said it and the room went quiet. We brought the founders who've lived the full journey on one stage because the funding conversation you actually need isn't in any playbook. Don't raise when you need the money. Build the relationship before you need the cheque.
Full talks dropping on our YouTube soon. Subscribe so you don't miss them.
Thanks to Boast and the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus.
Beyond the Trade - A New Era for Canadian Fintech with Questrade | Tuesday May 26
Inside Questrade's new downtown Toronto office, the people who have been building there for decades talked about their work the way founders talk about their companies. Salim Naran's fireside pulled back the curtain on where Questrade is actually headed - 27 years in, 100% Canadian-owned, and still building like they have everything to prove.
Don't let the week end without being in one of these rooms.
🗓️ 9:00 AM - Market Overview: Fintech co-hosted with Affirm
Wayne Pommen built PayBright from 5 to 250 people - Apple, Hudson's Bay, Wayfair, Samsung, and Sephora as clients - sold it to Affirm, and now runs global revenue as CRO. He sits down with Alex Norman to unpack where Canadian fintech is heading. Jane Podbelskaya (Charge Forward, formerly Georgian and Bain) brings the embedded finance lens. Ricky Lai (Portage) and Abraham Thomas bring the investor view on where the next wave of capital is moving.
Sharp signal. Right room. Before your competitors get it.
🗓️ 1:00 PM - Market Overview: Insurtech
Andrew Ostro spent a decade as a licensed actuary at Towers Watson and Oliver Wyman advising the world's largest insurers before co-founding PolicyMe. Danish Yusuf led McKinsey's digital financial services practice before building Zensurance. Jai is building General Magic - AI infrastructure making brokerages feel 10x bigger without adding headcount. Christian Lassonde (Impression Ventures, $150M+ AUM, backed Wealthsimple) brings the investor lens on where the capital is quietly moving.
The founders and investors cracking this category open don't usually share the same room. Thursday they do.
🗓️ 6:00 PM - The Quiet Part Out Loud: A RevOps Dinner with Vasco
To end the day, we're bringing together the people actually running revenue. The conversations revenue leaders have after the meeting ends - what's actually breaking, what AI is doing to pipeline, what nobody says publicly. CROs, COOs, Chiefs of Staff, and Directors of Revenue Operations at $5M+ companies being honest over dinner.
The week started with builders. It's ending with the people who scale what builders create.
PARTNER CONTENT
We’re excited to partner with TechTO for Toronto Tech Week programming to connect
Toronto’s innovation ecosystem.
At the intersection of artificial intelligence and health sciences, the Schwartz Reisman
Innovation Campus Ecosystem Team brings together the people and ideas shaping the future of technology and care.
Embedded within one of the world’s leading research environments, our ecosystem connects founders, researchers, investors, accelerators, and institutional resources in shared proximity so discovery and commercialization can happen side by side.
Technical insight, clinical expertise, capital, and venture execution converge within one co-located, living network. Through intentional convening, curated initiatives, and industry-defining dialogue, shared momentum builds across the ecosystem to accelerate innovation from discovery to scale.
Members get to our signature events for free. That's what the $249/year gets you - free access to every Together and vertical event, exclusive discounts on all member events, and a private Slack where the conversation keeps going after the event ends.
Reply