Executives from Cohere, MedEssist, Transformer Lab and Socratica shared their stories at the BetaKit Town Hall.
At the opening of the BetaKit Town Hall last night, BetaKit’s new CEO Siri Agrell told the sold-out audience that storytelling is critical to the success of not only Canadian tech companies, but the entire sector.
“It’s hard to stay in Canada if you want to be the best in the world at something. We have to change that.”
Ivan Zhang
As part of an event examining the state of Canadian innovation, productivity and optimism, the BetaKit Town Hall featured the stories of four entrepreneurs at different stages: an early-stage founder, an early-stage founder Expansion phase and an experienced repeat founder and newcomer to the ecosystem.
Joining BetaKit editor-in-chief Douglas Soltys on stage was Joella Almeida, CEO and co-founder of MedEssist, a digital health platform dedicated to improving patient care and solving critical problems for pharmacists; Ivan Zhang, co-founder of AI Enterprise Platform connections, which is reportedly on track to raise its next round of funding at a valuation of $5 billion; Ali Asaria, Founder of Well.ca, Tulip Retail and most recently Transformer laboratory; and Jocelyne Murphy, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, organizer of Socratica and founder of Wygo.
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Ahead of the headlining Fireside with Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, each Canadian tech founder on the panel was asked to answer two main questions: What challenges and opportunities are they currently focused on? What do you think needs to change in the Canadian tech ecosystem?
Given the diverse group, the panel discussion revealed some surprising commonalities, such as the overlapping issues of talent and sales for early-stage startups like MedEssist and scaleups like Cohere. There were also clear contrasts, such as Murphy’s direct call for the audience to develop a new sense of community (Wygo was founded to combat the loneliness epidemic), which came shortly after Asaria warned of the dangers of using Canadian technology in their own Bubble remains trapped.
Watch the full panel discussion on the viewpoints below.
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