Toronto Tech Week and the New Era of Canadian Startup Ambition

**Boris Wertz** (0:00)
The pace of innovation is faster than ever before, and that means everything is changing every single day. I think founders and investors need to be more adaptive all the time. There's no set pathway, there's no playbook.

**Matt Cohen** (0:10)
Once you accept that, your level of ambition goes through the ceiling. The way you approach problems goes through the ceiling. Your ability to learn goes through the ceiling.

**Farhan Thawar** (0:17)
Why not make one employee 10, a hundred, a thousand employees worth of output? Remove the toil.

**Ben Vinegar** (0:22)
There's still humans in the loop, pretty much for any good piece of software right now. You go after the hardest problems to solve.

**Fahd Ananta** (0:28)
I think there's some real killers in Toronto. I think there's some real killers. Like I don't know if I can say that as well. I think there's some like real excellent people in Toronto.
And I actually think like part of their archetype is to say like a little bit quiet and lay low. But if you get to know them, I think you really like uncover this hidden alpha within the city.

**Eliot Pence** (0:44)
We're going to build a $10 billion company in three years.

**Matt Cohen** (0:46)
Welcome back to Tank Talks. I'm your host, Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures. In this week's episode, I'm bringing you something a little different. A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited by the gracious team at Toronto Tech Week to set up a live podcast studio at the Toronto Homecoming event. It was a fantastic opportunity to connect with leaders from across the Canadian tech ecosystem. During the event, I recorded live conversations with Boris Wertz from Version One Ventures, Lawrence Mandel and Farhan Thour from Shopify, Ben Vinegar from Modem.dev, Andrew Chow from Neo Financial, Fahad Anadha from Opendoor and Roach Capital, and Eliot Pence from Dominion Dynamics. In this episode, you'll hear highlights from those recordings, candid conversations on building and scaling companies, navigating the current markets and what's ahead. A sincere thank you to the Toronto Tech Week team for the invitation and for creating such a vibrant gathering. But before we get started, a quick word from our amazing sponsor.
This episode is brought to you by Deel, our exclusive partner for our Toronto Tech Week podcast studio. Here's something every founder learns the hard way. Your best next hire is rarely in your zip code. Deel lets you hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. A lot of our portfolio companies love using Deel to hire exceptional talent globally. But don't listen to just us. Companies like Karna, Revolut, Reddit, and 35,000 more use Deel to process tens of billions of payroll annually. For Tank Talk listeners, you can receive our exclusive offer for up to 5,000 Deel credits, plus for a limited time, free US payroll for founders for life, by visiting deel.com/partners/tanktalks.
That's deel.com/partners/tanktalks.

**Matt Cohen** (2:21)
Of course.

**Fahd Ananta** (2:22)
Let's go.

**Matt Cohen** (2:22)
Well, Tank.

**Fahd Ananta** (2:24)
Thank you for coming here.

**Matt Cohen** (2:25)
How's Toronto Tech Week going for you?

**Boris Wertz** (2:26)
So far, so good. It's great to feel all the energy here in the room and doing the whole week. So excited.

**Matt Cohen** (2:33)
You went back to back. You had Vancouver Web Summit, Toronto Tech Week.

**Boris Wertz** (2:37)
Yeah. Toronto Tech Week is like a thousand times better.

**Matt Cohen** (2:40)
I appreciate it.

**Boris Wertz** (2:41)
It's forms up. It's community driven. It's not like this top down Web Summit stuff. Don't worry.

**Matt Cohen** (2:45)
We don't have this on the West Coast anyway, so it's good. I want to ask you quickly about the state of the markets right now. You've been investing at the early stages for a very long time. You're running Version One now. You've been on several funds. What is so different about today's environment of investing at an early stage that you've never seen before?

**Boris Wertz** (3:02)
You know, listen, I think it's like the pace of innovation is faster than ever before, and that means like everything is changing every single day. And I think founders and investors need to be more adaptive all the time. There's no set pathway. There's no playbook. It's really getting invented on a daily basis, and that just means a lot of six and zacking for founders and for investors.

**Matt Cohen** (3:23)
You know, we were talking the other day about how just the time founders used to take to build, to scale, to hit inflection points. They just don't have that luxury anymore.

**Boris Wertz** (3:32)
Yeah, I feel like you need to be almost perfect from the gate on and come out of the gate almost perfect, execute like crazy, and build a company. So it's a tough, tough childing time for founders.