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Here's what this month's Together Toronto speakers shared with 400+ people. Four ideas worth applying as you build or grow your startup.

Kevin Callahan had been quietly benchmarking Uniblock against OpenRouter since day one. Weeks after Stripe agreed to pay north of $7 billion for it, he announced his own AI router, Hopscotch Labs.

Most founders see a $7 billion competitor acquisition as a door closing. Kevin sees it as proof the market is real and big enough for more than one winner. Ten coding-agent companies are already worth tens of billions each, in a category people assumed would end up with just one.

But how do you know if such a fight is worth taking on?

“Look at what the giants are actually shipping right now, not what people fear they might,” Kevin said. Decide if it's a fight you can win, get people to believe you can win it, and move fast enough that what you built six weeks ago already looks outdated.

Avril Sun's family ran a restaurant for 28 years and closed it for $0 in 2023 because nobody, not even them, could say what it was worth. She built Succession AI to close that exact gap. “Don't just learn your customer's pain, experience it,” Avril shared.

Customer interviews tell you the problems people already know are solvable. Living the problem yourself surfaces the ones nobody's even named yet, and those are usually the real ones.

If you hadn't lived the pain personally, she recommended working inside the industry first. There's no shortcut to the texture that comes from doing the work. Catch Avril’s full talk here.

Ujwal Arkalgud, founder of Orbit, talked about a private equity deal that collapsed at the eleventh hour in 2019, and he traced it back to his company playing two different games at once.

Game one is building something so specific and valuable that a buyer acquires it, because they don't have the time or expertise to build it. Game two is building a profitable business that can run without you, valued on cash flow and retention instead of IP.

Each calls for a different playbook for where you spend, how you raise, and what you optimize for. Mixing them, pitching yourself as irreplaceable while chasing revenue to survive, sends a confused signal to everyone watching.

His advice? Don’t try to time an exit. Build relationships with the buyers you'd eventually want, the same way you'd build relationships with customers, and let the timing sort itself out.

AI is the ultimate copy-paste machine, says Azam Khan, founder of Trax. It generates volume fast: hundreds of thousands of lines of code, more options than any team could ever review. That volume isn't the value.

Azam shared how AI works across two stages: expand and contract. AI makes expand nearly free, generating options in minutes. Contract is where you narrow those options down to something reliable for a customer who can't afford downtime. AI hasn't made that part easier.

The product still takes just as long to build, even with AI. What AI buys founders is speed to certainty, knowing within days instead of months whether an idea was ever going to work.

AI isn't impressive because of the technology, Azam says, any more than a printing press was impressive as a machine. It's impressive because of the demand for language, and how much you can do once you can process it at scale.

Get the full scoop on each speaker’s story on TechTO's YouTube channel.

On September 28, Health Toronto brings 200+ founders, clinicians, operators, and investors together to unpack the real questions around regulation, funding, clinical trust, partnerships, and AI.

In partnership with TechExit and the U of T Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus

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