SF has a 6-9 month innovation lag on the rest of the world right now. Nobody there is sharing what they're learning. That gap is yours to close.

Founders fresh from Game On's San Francisco immersion shared what actually shifted when they got in the room - what Canadian founders skip, what they overthink, and what they'd do differently now. TX Zhuo (Fika Ventures), Jason Gray (Pioneer Fund) and Andre Charoo (Maple VC) brought the investor lens on what separates the founders they back from the ones they pass on.

Go to benchmark, not to fundraise. And "Fortress Canada" is a revenue problem, not a safety net.

Some investors chase trends. Maveron bets on behaviour shifts before the market catches on - it's how they backed eBay, Zulily ($2.4B exit), and Flywire. ​Jason Stoffer broke down exactly how that lens works for Canadian founders pitching US consumer investors.

Michele Romanow was direct: "You can convince anyone to do anything once. People come back and buy a second time because they genuinely like the product." Distribution beats community. The brands winning right now aren't outspending everyone on Meta, they're finding where their customer already lives and showing up there first.

Tyler Handley and the co-founders of Tre’dish brought the founder side - what all of this looks like when you're the one building it.

Will Hsu launched Mucker with no LPs, no documents, no office. Just a website. 150 applications in 4 days. 15 years and 300+ companies later, he sat down with Alex Norman for the conversation he doesn't have on the speaking circuit.

Be contrarian before it's obvious. Different beats better. Interview your VC like you'd hire for the role. And stop spending 80% of your time raising - the money follows the momentum.

"The problem is the problem. You can't pivot the problem. Focus on solving something different - not building something better."

Packed. Line up around the block. Wealthsimple's money machine sending paper bills into the air, Tre'dish's roulette giving away groceries - waterfront, sun going down, the whole community in one place.

A week of panels, firesides, and market overviews needed a night like this. The co-founder conversation that started over a burger. The intro that didn't need a warm email because you were already standing next to each other.

Canadian fintech founders are too cautious - and it's costing them.

Ricky Lai (Portage) mapped where the capital is actually moving: AI-enabled companies are getting funded at 3.5x the valuation of those without, and fintech multiples are converging with SaaS for the first time. Jane Podbelskaya made the case for embedded finance as the growth lever most founders are sleeping on.

​Wayne Pommen closed it out with the line that stuck: stop treating Canada as a ceiling. Push harder, bigger, sooner. The best time to build in fintech isn't coming, it's now.

"If you're building in insurtech and it's not AI, don't bother raising. Not this year. Probably not next year either." - ​Christian Lassonde

That set the tone. Then ​Andrew Ostro and Danish Yusuf showed what surviving this category actually looks like, one Lloyd's contract that took two years, 1,800 broker licenses built from scratch, compliance software nobody else made. The moat isn't the product. It's everything you had to build to keep the product alive.

A curated group of revenue leaders closed out the week over dinner and said the things that don't make it into the all-hands. AI hitting faster than teams can absorb it. The real cost of rebuilding mid-growth. The number that looked fine until it didn't. Operators being honest with each other and leaving with a clearer answer than any playbook had given them.