The BetaKit Podcast Channel

"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." 

OpenText's Shannon Bell (EVP, Chief Digital Officer & Chief Information Officer) explains how she rolled out AI systematically at one of Canada's largest tech companies. As OpenText embraces human...

"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 Waterloo to Silicon Valley. He explains what pulled his company south, why his peers are eager to make a similar leap, and what (if anything) could convince him to return to Canada.

The BetaKit...

"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 what we do as long as we are a Canadian defence company."

Dominion Dynamics founder and CEO Eliot Pence wants to build Canada's first "defence prime." On this episode of The BetaKit Podcast...

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 2025 tells of Canada, and what juicy nuggets of tech policy and financial commitments need to be dunked in the dipping sauce of greater detail. Let's dig in!

The BetaKit Podcast is presented by Zoho, d...

"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 1994. Recorded the day after the AWS outage, Rae joins to explain why such outages happen and what they reveal about the economics of the internet and Canada's digital sovereignty goals.

This episode of The BetaKit Po...

"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...