The BetaKit Podcast Channel

"It seems irrational, and irrational behaviour is where drama lives, it's where comedy lives. It's where all the fun is." A communications tycoon built an empire turning airwaves into cash. Now, his son, long dismissed...

"It used to be that Silicon Valley was the kind of Mecca of the entrepreneur. What's happening is everyone has got the tools that used to be crowded in there. Now what we need to do is get the capital." Minister Evan...

"The technology is there, and everyone loves cool technology, but it doesn't need to be a party trick. It needs to be something that's driving a meaningful business outcome, so pick your challenging problems."...

"In the beginning, we were like, 'this must be a scam' because with the way things move in Waterloo and Toronto, it seemed way too fast." A chance pitch competition connection took Colare co-founder Nain Abdi from...

"Too many American subs dominate this market. Eighty percent of what we buy is from American companies. We wanna reverse that. We wanna make 80 percent of what we buy from Canadian companies. So we frankly don't care...

It's a power-packed post-Budget panel podcast featuring a plethora of Canadian policy wonks! Vass Bednar (Canadian SHIELD Institute), Benjamin Bergen (CCI), and Jaxson Khan (Aperture AI) join to explore the story Budget...

"We were sleepwalking our way into this new economy, and we've had a bit of a wake-up call." Ian Rae, CEO of Aptum and a member of Minister Evan Solomon's AI Task Force, has been building internet infrastructure since...

"If you're a founder in Canada, you have a playbook, which is: try to get outside of the country as soon as possible. Try to sell outside of the country." Raymond Luk thinks the "cultural belief we're not good enough"...

"It's one thing to say 'let's do this in a sovereign way.' It is a whole other to actually do it." Gander Social is attempting to do something that seemed inconceivable six months ago: build a Canadian social network...

"Don't talk to your customers because your customers will keep you in the place that you used to be." AI adoption is now an industry-wide mandate. It's putting a lot of pressure on Canadian entrepreneurs: to scale with...

"That's the literal term several CISOs have used with me unprompted: 'ticking time bomb.' There's no world in which this doesn't explode the way it's done right now." Tailscale CEO Avery Pennarun thinks the AI...

"It actually allows us an opportunity to build sovereign capability and leapfrog to get our armed forces where they need to be by taking advantage of leapfrog Canadian technologies." US President Donald Trump opened his...

"There's a really good chance that a young person's parents—or even their friends—don't even know that this individual is building a relationship with these chatbots. And that's where the danger exists." Tech expert...

"We're going to find in the next year or two that the amount of leakage actually goes up quite a bit because I think the focus on AI is just moving really, really fast. But I don't see the same energy going into the...

" That's also quite daunting as an investor to be able to put money into something that is perfect for now, but will it last three to five years? Will it even last three to six months?" Ripple Ventures managing partner...

"A win for AXL is that, ten years from now, instead of nine of the top ten biggest and most successful companies in the world being on the West Coast of the United States, half of them are in Toronto." Dr. Daniel Wigdor...

"How is this thing—running in a data centre with Nvidia GPUs—understanding what I'm saying with such nuance and such depth?" Former DarwinAI CEO Sheldon Fernandez spends a lot of time in dialogue with Solace, his friend...

" This isn't just about doing something cool because space is the next frontier. This is a key domain for economics, for national security, sovereignty, job creation, and everything." A company trying to achieve...

"History never stops. It's a living reality." In celebration of Startupfest's 15th anniversary, founder Phil Telio joins to discuss the origins of the international tech festival, its connection to Québec and the...

"The talent here is incredible, right? When we started faculty, I walk in the class and there's Jimmy Ba. Every time you guys train a neural network, you're using his algorithm." Sanja Fidler (Nvidia VP of AI research)...

"The current government is really plugged into what's needed." One step closer to quantum data centres with the launch of his company's advanced photonics packaging facility, Xanadu founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook...

" It's kind of that 'Valley or bust' mentality which breaks the ecosystem and really hurts Canada." Harley Finkelstein (Shopify), Mike Katchen (Wealthsimple), and Aidan Gomez (Cohere) hold a candid conversation about...

" The company fascinates me… because they have such interesting concepts internally. One of them being 'treat the company as a future adversary,' which I have never seen anywhere in my career." Bluesky's head of trust...

"I want to put ambition in people's hands. You say it doesn't exist—you're going to hold it, you're going to flip through it, you're going to see it." BetaKit CEO Siri Agrell joins to discuss today's launch of BetaKit's...

" Subversiveness is a way of changing the system. And I think what we're seeing right now is that all systems are changing." Entrepreneur and Startupfest founding partner Alistair Croll has co-authored a new book, Just...