The BetaKit Podcast Channel
The BetaKit Podcast Channel features weekly podcasts discussing both Canadian tech and innovation, as well as global tech from a Canadian perspective.
Episodes
“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” creates a homecourt disadvantage for Canadian tech. He’s trying to kickstart a solution to our nation’s procurement woes with a new summit called Source Canada, so buyers and sellers can spee...
“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. What does sovereign social media look like? And what will prevent Gander from devolving into every other social network? CEO Ben Waldman joins to answer these questions and many more.
This ep...
“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 customer demand (safely and responsibly); to reskill employees; even to kill their old company to let the new AI-first version live. What are the challenges and opportunities? Featuring Michael Buhr (C100), Aydin Mir...
“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 revolution has put a gun to the head of CISOs: embrace unsafe data practices or get fired. They’ve told him the cybersecurity risks are a “ticking time bomb.” Pennarun joins The BetaKit Podcast to ex...
“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 mouth and suddenly Canada needed a defence tech sector. The Icebreaker’s Matthew Lombardi was conscripted by the federal government to help map that sector; he joins to explain why many of ...
“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 Amber Mac is on the advisory board of Rally, a new tech festival in Toronto dedicated to digital wellness for teens. She desperately wants parents to know the reasons why their kids are talki...
“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 security aspects.”
Forget vibe coding and Nvidia chips: if you want to understand how AI is changing tech, look at how it is being applied to a heavily regulated industry in need of digital tra...
“ 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 and podcaster Matt Cohen joins to discuss the insane revenue numbers generated by the new cohort of AI startups, and how VCs are navigating the froth by updating their evaluation criteria (a...
“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 has a lofty goal: help launch 50 AI companies in the next five years *and* keep them in Canada. Is it enough to stop our country’s AI brain drain? The entrepreneur, computer science profe...
“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 and ChatGPT-4o instance. What value does this AI strategist, engineer, and philosopher get from talking to a chatbot every day? How does he navigate the technology’s sycophantic tendencies,...
“ 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 Canada’s first commercial rocket launch. Three startups solving for the future of humanity. One founder sending messages to his future self. This special episode contains select highlights from B...
“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 broader Canadian tech ecosystem, and how community evolves with each generation. Ambition, government support of tech, and the state of the Québec ecosystem also came up before the grandma judge...
“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) and Raquel Urtasun (Waabi founder and CEO) sit down with Ada CEO Mike Murchison for a discussion about the frontier of AI and the role Canada might play in bringing it to the physical world....
“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 joins to discuss the renewed federal interest in quantum technology, how it relates to Canadian sovereignty, and where the money to fund it should come from.
The BetaKit Podcast is presente...
“ 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 'Ambition made in Canada' during Toronto Tech Week. Recorded live at Homecoming.
The BetaKit Podcast is presented by Invest Northern Ireland—the gateway to international growth.
International Tech companies are discove...
“ 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 and safety is a Canadian working out of Dublin. In town to speak at the BetaKit Town Hall for Toronto Tech Week, Aaron Rodericks first joined The BetaKit Podcast to discuss his journey from government to social media,...
“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 Most Ambitious: our first-ever print issue, telling stories of bold ambition in Canadian tech.
Consider this your Most Ambitious director’s commentary companion, Read more
“ 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 Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook. If you’re wondering why your company is so bad with its go-to-market execution, or which rules need to be bent (or broken) to win in the att...
“ That's what we wanna change, right? For future companies, more Canadian investors on the cap table so that we can see those benefits come back through investment, through mentorship.”
Jill Earthy, CEO of InBC Investment Corp—a provincial Crown corporation with $500 million of direct and indirect capital to deploy—joins to discuss the state of Canadian venture, the role of organizations like hers in BC’s...
“Be a customer of Canadian startups. This is the thing that every company needs. Nobody died from having too many customers.”
The CEO of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Cam Linke, joins to discuss the next phase of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy and how Amii stands apart from other national AI institutes, Vector and Mila. Recorded live from the Upper Bound AI conference.
The BetaKit Podcast is p...
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