Marcus New is the Managing Partner & Chief Entrepreneur of InvestX Capital. InvestX investments have included; SpaceX, Airbnb, Lyft, Impossible Foods, Pinterest, Spotify, Palantir, Dropbox, Docusign, Kraken and other global category leaders. Furthermore, through Marcus’s family office, he has led more than 150 private placements into early-stage private and public companies.    Prior to InvestX, Marcus was the Founder and Chairman (and previously the CEO) of Stockhouse Publishing – one...

Founder & CEO of Terramera, Karn Manhas is an entrepreneur with more than 15 years of leadership experience in government, community, and business development. Karn is responsible for the vision and strategic direction of Terramera, which develops high-performance, plant-based alternatives to synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers, including products for agriculture, professional and consumer applications.  Prior to Terramera, Karn was elected as the youngest member of the...

Jay Giraud is an automotive tech entrepreneur focused on launching companies that redefine mobility. Jay has built successful products and companies by marrying disruptive solutions with disruptive business models as the founder, inventor, and CEO of three automotive tech startups. These include his current company, Damon, with a mission to cause a paradigm shift for safer, smarter motorcycling. Mojio, a Scalable, secure and hardware-agnostic platform and SaaS provider to build and scale...

Evgeny (Ev) Tchebotarev began photography in 2002 and since then he has spent the entirety of his professional career dedicated to the betterment of visual creativity. In 2021, He co-founded Sloika in order to build a new NFT experience for photographers. In early 2004, before Facebook and photo-sharing sites, Ev created 500 px, a community for millions of photographers to meet and share photos and information. Between his two startups, Evgeny was Skylum Software’s Chief Growth Officer...

Tanis Jorge is a serial tech entrepreneur and a leading advisor on entrepreneurship and building successful cofounder partnerships. Throughout her career in startups, spanning the last 20 years, Tanis has cofounded, scaled, and successfully exited multiple data-driven businesses with the same partner.   Her successes culminated with her most recent venture, Trulioo, which she co-founded in 2011. Between 2011 and 2015, Tanis served as Chief Operations Officer of Trulioo, working to lay the...

Marlon Thompson is an angel investor, startup founder and experienced advocate for diversity in business. Thompson founded Future Capital in 2020 to change the landscape of startup investing across North America. In addition to his role as CEO at Future Capital, Thompson serves as a member of the Board of Directors for QueerTech - a Montreal-based non-profit organisation that aims to queer the tech ecosytem, and as a Venture Partner for LOI Venture. Prior to launching Future Capital -...

Chris Albinson is the President & CEO of Communitech, Co-Founder & Managing Director of the BreakawayGrowth Fund, and visionary founder and past chairperson of the C100. Albinson has been an early investor in impactful companies, including Pinterest, Docusign, Newbridge Networks & Juniper Networks. Chris is a mentor and/or advisor for TechStars, Garage Capital, SAAS North, and the Canadian Innovation Exchange. Earlier in his career, Chris was a General Partner at JP Morgan...

Toufic Boubez is a serial entrepreneur with three successful exits to his name. He was the founding CTO of Saffron Technology with a mission of building cognitive computing systems for Big Data which was acquired by Intel, Metafor Software where he developed next-generation machine learning analytics and anomaly detection for IT Ops and Security that was acquired by Splunk, and Layer 7 Technologies one of the most successful vendors in the API Management/ SOA Governance and Security space...

Michelle Zatlyn is co-founder, President, and COO of Cloudflare, the Internet security, performance, and reliability company on a mission to help build a better Internet. Prior to co-founding Cloudflare, Michelle held positions at Google and Toshiba and launched two successful startups. Michelle currently serves on the board of directors for Atlassian and the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Foundation. Michelle has been named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list and was part of Marie...

William Johnson is the founder and managing editor of the Vancouver Tech Journal. With a focus on business and technology, William’s writing has been featured in outlets including Maclean’s, The Globe & Mail, BCBusiness, and the Daily Hive. In addition, William has been a speaker on communications and innovation at events like the #BCTECHSummit, TechVancouver, Marketing Connect, and BC AMA’s Vision conference. Being an Ontario transplant, William studied political science at Carleton...

Janet Bannister is the Managing Partner of Real Ventures, Canada’s preeminent early-stage venture capital firm.  In addition to leading Real Ventures and working with her large portfolio of rapidly growing tech companies, Janet is very active in the Canadian tech ecosystem; she is on the Boards of Communitech in Waterloo and Vector Institute in Toronto. In 2004, Janet launched Kijiji.ca and grew it to become one of the most visited websites in Canada.  This year, Janet became the co-chair of...

Today is a special episode of the AfternoonT as I have Sarathy Niacker and Jason Smith co-founders of Klue - an AI-powered Competitive Enablement platform designed to help product marketers collect, curate, and deliver actionable competitor insights to empower revenue teams to win more business. Sarathy is an experienced software professional with a deep background in data processing, security, and design. Prior to founding Klue, Sarathy has played an important role with local tech firms...

Sunil Sharma is the Managing Director of the Techstars Toronto Accelerator, Techstars' first accelerator program in Canada. Previously, Sunil was founder of Extreme Startups, managed a Canadian Consulate in California, and worked as a venture capitalist. Sunil has taken on the co-organizer role for one of the largest tech and startup conferences in the world, Toronto’s own Collision and is the co-host of Web Summit in Lisbon where last month I witnessed him introduce some of the world’s...

Web Summit is an annual technology conference held in Lisbon, Portugal. The conference's theme centers on emerging technologies and venture capitalism. Web Summit's partners range from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, with attendees representing all levels and sectors of the global high technology industry.  Since returning to Canada, Chris has been asked questions about the event by many people and the professionals he met there. So, we decided to host a special Web Summit Edition of...

Cybele Negris is a serial entrepreneur, seasoned board member, speaker, mentor, and columnist. In 2000, Cybele became the CEO & Co-Founder of Webnames.ca, Canada’s original .CA Registrar. Cybele serves on multiple boards including Blue Shore Financial,Canadian American Business Council, Science World, BCAA, The Royal Canadian Mint, BC Small Business Roundtable, Riverview Lands Redevelopment, and Women get on Board. A Hall of Fame Inductee of Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women and...

Mike Potter is the co-founder and CEO of Rewind, a leading cloud data backup provider trusted by over 30,000 businesses to protect their data on platforms such as BigCommerce, Shopify and QuickBooks. A veteran entrepreneur,  Mike has over 25 years of experience building solutions for the software, cloud and data analytics space, including tenures at Adobe and Mozilla. He earned his MBA from the University of Ottawa and his B.Eng in Mechanical Engineering from McMaster University. Mike...

Bertrand Nepveu has spent his entire career working in the field of computer vision. From a very young age, he knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur like his grandfather and change the world. Hardcore gamer since Donkey Kong on the Coleco Vision, he became obsessed with virtual reality when he tried the PowerGlove on the NES. Bertrand founded Vrvana in 2005 in order to fulfill his dream of improving the gaming experience by bringing the user inside the game. In 2017 he sold the company...

Bertrand Nepveu has spent his entire career working in the field of computer vision. From a very young age, he knew that he wanted to be an entrepreneur like his grandfather and change the world. Hardcore gamer since Donkey Kong on the Coleco Vision, he became obsessed with virtual reality when he tried the PowerGlove on the NES. Bertrand founded Vrvana in 2005 in order to fulfill his dream of improving the gaming experience by bringing the user inside the game. In 2017 he sold the company...

Kirk Simpson is the co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based Wave. He’s a serial entrepreneur, having started multiple businesses prior. Kirk has led Wave to become an internationally disruptive fintech company, building a team of more than 200 people before being acquired for $537 million. Kirk is an advisor for the Creative Destruction Lab at Rotman, an active angel investor, and has been a mentor for the Next36. He believes in paying it forward and loves to empower up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

Tobyn Sowden is the CEO of Redbrick, the parent organization to a growing portfolio of companies. Redbrick has been ranked the 5th Fastest-Growing Company in Canada and 2nd in software, by PROFIT 500. Tobyn is responsible for defining Redbrick’s overall business strategy, including new product development and future business growth. His extensive professional and personal experiences have given him valuable expertise in building, launching, and growing award-winning companies, and delivering...

Andrew Reid is the founder of Rival Technologies, Co-founder of Rival Group Inc., and Group CEO. He also founded Vision Critical, a cloud-based customer-intelligence platform provider. An industry visionary, Andrew has long been an evangelist for change and a passionate advocate for creating a workplace culture people want to be a part of.

Matt Smith is a technology entrepreneur who has founded multiple technology startups, including Thinkific and Later, both highly successful SaaS companies that help businesses succeed online. Thinkific is an online course platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses. In 2020, Thinkific’s 50,000 active course creators earned hundreds of millions of dollars in direct course sales. Later has helped over 4 million people from global brands to...

Alison Taylor is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Jane, an online platform for healthcare practitioners that delivers a unified approach to online booking, charting, scheduling, video services, and payments. Now, Jane helps thousands of practitioners across the world with the business side of their practice, so they can focus on what they do best — helping their clients. Alison’s company has gotten here by pushing the envelope and challenging tech industry norms. Jane doesn’t have a sales team,...

Philippe Beaudoin is a venture scientist constantly looking for ideas that can improve society. In 2020, he co-founded Waverly where he and his team are building a discovery engine for our increasingly diverse social and content landscapes. Before that, in 2016, Philippe co-founded Element AI, a world leader in enterprise AI.