Tech Thursday

Amazing time in #Edmonton last night! 🪩 We hosted an Upper Bound After Party and a Street Car ride over the High Line bridge. Thanks to everyone who came out, and to the Mayor of Edmonton Andrew Knack for joining us. Our Edmonton Steering committee is crushing it: Kirsten Sokolovski, Lan (Scaleup) Tan, MBA, iGP and Madeline Hann. Join them at an upcoming Tech Thursday event. Thank you to Edmonton Global (Angelica Menck, MBA), Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) (Hanna Demoz and Amor Provins) for helping support the event. And thank you to our sponsors Artemis Canada (Carly Livingstone), RBCx (Dennis Agbegha, BSc, MSc. and Chloe Xing Schimpf), Alberta Enterprise Corporation (AEC) (Milanne Desfosses and Tracey Scarlett MBA, ICD.D) and Boast.

When's the last time you saw a CEO live-demo what they're actually building? Nic Beique, Founder & CEO of Helcim, is joining us at Tech Thursday next week to do exactly that. He'll geek out on his prototyping process, walk through the interactions that led to their latest product breakthrough, and give you a raw, behind-the-scenes look at how Helcim builds outside the roadmap. This one's going to be fun. RSPV link at the comments 👇 Big thanks to our sponsors for making these events a possibility including: Boast, Neo Financial, Skip, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG), Alberta Innovates, Crestview Strategy, and Motiv.

"Our goal is to build Canada's first trillion dollar company." That's what Graeme Harrison told me on camera, standing inside Foundation, the downtown Calgary data centre site he and Dan Chapman are building under Simply Silicon. Canada's biggest tech company is worth around $100 billion. They're betting they can build the first to hit a trillion. This is the first episode of Tech Thursday: House Calls. A new on-site interview series where we go inside the companies, into the rooms where the work is actually happening, and have the conversation there. What we covered: - Why they publicly called an Alberta data centre bubble in 2024, and what makes Foundation the inverse of the projects they think won't get built. - The conduit network underneath downtown Calgary that even Elon Musk couldn't replicate at any price. - The "just sovereign vs also sovereign" framework for evaluating Canadian AI infrastructure companies. - Why Calgary, in their analysis, beats Houston, London, and San Francisco for this kind of build. - The plan to scale from one site in Calgary to many across North America. Full recap is in the Calgary Tech Newsletter, link in the comments. Full Video on YouTube also in the comment. Massive thanks to Graeme and Dan for letting us spend the morning at Foundation. House Calls, episode one. We're booking the next round now.

This Thursday, we're going inside the decisions, tradeoffs, and lessons from building fintech at scale in Canada w/ Wealthsimple. And it's SOLD OUT💥 Wealthsimple's engineering and product leaders will walk us through how they went from investing app to full financial platform, how the team is structured to ship at that pace, and how they're approaching AI internally. 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 It's going to be a good one! We'll see you there. Big thanks to our sponsors for making these events a possibility including: Boast, Neo Financial, Skip, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG), Alberta Innovates, Crestview Strategy, and Motiv.

"It's a skill issue." Graeme Harrison of augur vc on why Canadian VCs hide behind 12-week underwriting timelines and how that conservatism becomes a death spiral.

"If you put an AI operator on the wellhead, you increase production by 18%. That's the kind of arbitrage where infinite capital should be flowing in. So why isn't it happening?" Josh Malate, Co-Founder and President of Ultimarii Ltd. on why AI adoption in heavy industry isn't moving at the speed the math suggests it should.

What if your exec team didn't just set strategy, but actually wrote the code? When building starts at the top, it changes how a company innovates. 👨💻 That's exactly how Helcim operates. From the CEO down, they build alongside their engineers. It's not a value on a wall. It's how they work. We're thrilled to co-host with Helcim for a behind-the-scenes look at how their Founder & CEO, Nic Beique, explores "0 to 1" opportunities: the experiments, the trade-offs, and the ideas that don't sit on a traditional roadmap. Real code, live demos, and a candid look at how builders think, iterate, and ship. Join us on May 28th, featuring: Nic Beique, Founder & CEO at Helcim Moderated by: Philippe Burns, Co-Founder at Tech Thursday We'll see you there! RSVP link at the comments 👇

$100B in assets under administration. 3M Canadians. $750M raised at a $10B valuation. Wealthsimple is one of the most exciting companies in Canada right now. Next week, I'm sitting down with the Wealthsimple team to talk about how they actually build. Excited to have three product and engineering leaders, on stage in Calgary, walking through the operating model behind one of the most prolific product years a Canadian fintech has ever had. 10+ new products shipped in 2025. Futures, Trade Plus, Norbert's Gambit, options expansion, SWIFT membership, the credit card. All from teams that are surprisingly lean. What we'll cover: How Wealthsimple went from an investment product to a near-complete suite of financial products in five years. How their lean and fluid teams help them ship products remarkably quickly. Why their leadership cancelled their Cursor subscription and what they're using instead. How they're thinking about AI internally. Effectiveness over token-maxxing. The speakers: Jocelyn Jeffrey, Director of Engineering at Wealthsimple. Sam Newman-Bremang, Sr. Director of Product at Wealthsimple. Channing Allen, Senior Engineering Manager at Wealthsimple. Channing joined when his startup Plenty was acquired. Full circle moment, his co-founder Emily Luk Allen, CFA, CPA, CA was on a Tech Thursday panel in SF in 2024. There's only a handful of spots left. Link in the comments.