Toronto’s product development community has evolved dramatically since its inception. In the retrospective below, you’ll find stories and reflections from many (but not all!) of those who helped shape Toronto tech.

2005-2010: “Be like Feist”

It seemed like just another grey and chilly day in November of 2005, when Teehan+Lax opened its doors to welcome a small crew to BarCamp Toronto. An unconference about all things web design and development, the event was part of a larger movement in cities around the world to build community through technology; if you were attending BarCamp, you were expected to present.

It’s more than a coincidence that this now-legendary event amongst old-timers in Toronto’s tech community was hosted by a design shop. But it does seem auspicious that follow-ups were hosted in Liberty Village. The neighbourhood was then a nondescript area of the city — a “wasteland” of old industry, parking lots, and not much else.

“I was in Liberty Village – wasteland,” TWG’s VP of Product, Tom Walsham, told me. “No nice coffee shops, Shoeless Joe’s was the only place you could go to eat. You didn’t have any reason to go there; nobody was living there.”

The 20th century brick-and-beam buildings of Liberty Village were waiting to be filled with something new.

The Before Times (2002-2004)

“We saw a few things happening in 2002 that we thought required a new type of company. The dot-com bust had provided a clean dividing line between the first generation of the internet (1995-2001), and what we felt was a new chapter.

We saw technology commodifying. If you wanted to build a website in 1996, most corporate IT groups didn’t have the process, resources, or capabilities to do it. Companies hired large consultancies and agencies to do this. By 2002, things had changed. Web technology had become operationalized inside corporate IT. They were no longer looking for large end-to-end help, but rather specialized help on the thing they still couldn’t do, front end design.

We saw the value shifting from the back end to the front end. We wanted to create a company that could meet this new demand with a speciality service. Eventually, the term Web 2.0 would come to define this new time period. […] While we didn’t know it at the time, we were coming to the same conclusions that the lean and agile movements would popularize over the next few years.”

– Jon Lax (The making of Teehan+Lax: The Story of Our Company)

For those willing to look past the surface, Toronto in the early 2000s was burgeoning with activity — in technology, arts, urbanism, and design — about to drastically transform the city. You’d find flyers promoting FITC (originally known as Flash in the Can, and initially dedicated to Flash development) on Queen St. West lampposts just steps away from a strong art scene packed with small galleries. If you were lucky, or knew where to look, you could catch The Constantines, Feist, or Broken Social Scene playing an intimate show somewhere nearby.

BarCamp Toronto was happening just a short walk from the Gladstone Hotel, which began restorations in 2003. Opening its doors to artists of all stripes, the Gladstone hosted the very first Come Up To My Room, a showcase of local alternative art and design talent. A few years later, in the depths of winter and harsh freezing temperatures, more than a hundred urbanists, technologists, and some of the top bureaucrats would also show up at the Gladstone for TransitCamp, a throwdown of technology, policy, and civic activism, using enthusiasm to heat up the newly reopened, still-uninsulated building. Along with 401 Richmond, the Drake Hotel, and later, the Centre for Social Innovation, the Gladstone helped give rise to the reclamation of old 20th century spaces as hubs for art, culture, and tech.

Much like the indie acts putting Toronto’s music scene on the map (while Drake was still attending Degrassi), the ‘indies’ packing the floor at BarCamp and DemoCamp were building the city’s design and development scene. Those early meetups set Toronto on a course that would see companies like FreshBooks, Wattpad, TWG, Normative, and Teehan+Lax rise up, showing that, yes, you could build world-class products north of the border, with design and development as the centre of gravity driving the action.

“Indie is the new mainstream – Be like Feist:
1, 2, 3, 4… smaller acts pack the floor.”

– David Crow, Danger Capital founder

“I think very specifically about 2005 to 2010 as a time where the different worlds of product development, marketing, social media, agencies, and service providers just started to blur,” Satish Kanwar told me. Now the VP of Product at Shopify, Kanwar at that time was hustling for his own startups, first Vdot Media, then Jet Cooper (acquired by Shopify in 2013). “I was still very early in my career, seeing all these communities starting to recognize the value in each other more clearly.”

“And David Crow [co-founder of the influential Canadian technology community StartupNorth] was everywhere,” Kanwar continued. “He was the grandmaster of it all! He made technology sexy. He would get people out to show their stuff off, get together, bring people in a room, make it about more than the code. He created this very positive feedback loop and reward cycle for people that would come out of the basements and the small offices, share what they were working on, and get to know each other. And I think to see more people encourage your work, it was revolutionary.”

“An office to call our own.”

“That’s [2008] when we moved to the Burroughes Building and found a nice little space there, the first independent office to call our own. We painted one of the walls the green we still use today for TWG; it had a window that overlooked all of the construction that was starting to happen in Toronto back then. At the time, we had unobstructed views of downtown and the CN Tower.

We started to grow our team and made a conscious decision to activate ourselves and the community around us. We hosted and organized events like NerdLearnTO, built around good people drinking wine and talking to each other about doing interesting things.

I was good friends with Mike McDerment from university — he had a web agency called Anacon — and we were sitting in Shanghai Cowgirl on Queen West when he told me about his idea to make an online invoicing platform. I hummed and told him that there was Quicken and other companies who had that market cornered, and I’m so glad I was wrong.

We went to the first BarCamp and then DemoCamps, presented some of the projects we were getting involved with at TWG. Around that time, there was a great initiative called LeanCoffeeTO, started by Satish Kanwar and Mark Reale. We had been studying and learning about Agile development and different approaches including Scrum, Kanban, and lean startup methodologies. We were small startups and small agencies helping each other navigate the industry, and those friendships remain strong today, almost ten years later.”

– Dominic Bortolussi, TWG Partner and founder

The revolutionary idea that Torontonians could play a part in the future of the web — and that you didn’t have to move to play your part — began to draw a wider audience. BarCamping, DemoCamping, TransitCamping (none of this involved actual camping, which kind of seems like a missed opportunity) eventually culminated in Mesh in 2006. Billed as ‘Canada’s Web Conference’ and hosted at MaRS (itself a newly formed innovation space for the city), Mesh threw open the doors for the grassroots community to connect with leaders from business, publishing, and other worlds about to be disrupted by the internet.

Mesh was also able to draw U.S. attention, a major point of validation for a nascent tech community craving it. Early Mesh conferences featured the likes of PR pro Steve Rubel, GigaOM founder Om Malik, and Canadian expat turned Valley investor Paul Kedrosky. Importantly, these leading figures weren’t just speaking to Canadians about the future of the web, they were speaking with them. For a conference dreamed up during a dinner conversation about blogging, Mesh demonstrated the power of network effects.

The Magic of Mesh

“After the first BarCamp, a few people were going to get together for dinner. There was a sense that something big is happening, and so Matt Ingram, Rob Hyndman, Mark Evans, Tyler Hamilton, we talked about a common thread, which at the time was about blogging.

At the end of that dinner, we thought, ‘more people need to get together and talk about these things, and why don’t we host a conference’? And just eight or nine weeks later, we had a conference. We didn’t have any money to promote it, and so we wrote a few blog posts, and people just started showing up and buying tickets. We sold it out.

Then we had to follow through on this, and with our day jobs, we scrambled to organize all the details — venue, schedule, all the logistics. Sheri Moore helped us organize the events, Stuart MacDonald joined our organizing group, and MaRS gave us space. The first few Meshes were at MaRS, and it was fantastic. Mesh became an anchor event — the word got out, and there was bit of a fever — it was a surreal experience.

At that dinner, we were right: people wanted to get together. They just didn’t have a venue. We created that venue, and the people came; we hoped for it, and we were proven right.”

– Mike McDerment, FreshBooks/Mesh co-founder

2010-2015: “Create more value than you capture.”

Many of the values and ways of working taken for granted today in Toronto go back to those early unconferences. “This one time, at BarCamp” was popular enough to be immortalized in a T-shirt, and “create more value than you capture” (liberally borrowed from Tim O’Reilly) eventually became a cornerstone mantra of the community. But, arguably until about 2010, the community was still intermittent, turning on and off with each event. Or as Crow put it, “you weren’t able to sustain yourself by going to events, drinking beer, and eating pizza.”

That critical mass would come in the years to follow, as the city was hit by a wave of tech growth that coincided nicely with Drake’s graduation from Degrassi to Toronto’s global ambassador. The list of incubators, accelerators, coworking spaces, venture capital firms, product shops, and startups launched from 2010 to 2014 is far too long to include here; it’s easier to point to the curated guides posted by Crow in 2012 and 2014 to help the community keep track of its own growth.

Much like the community’s early beginnings in Toronto’s West End, King and Spadina became the next point of connection, spreading branches out along Adelaide, Richmond, and any side street with cheap rent and a decent wireless connection. Fledgling companies outgrew their first homes, moved into their own offices (saving a few hot desks for friends), and transformed what was once a ghost town into one of Toronto’s busiest tech districts.

Again, the growth drew U.S. attention, this time in the form of acquisitions and funding. Google was one of the first to swoop in, grabbing BumpTop before heading down the 401 to snap up PostRank and SocialDeck. SocialDeck wasn’t the only social gaming play at that time, as then-giant Zynga snagged Five Mobile in 2011 to establish a studio in the city. The acquisitions kept coming in 2013, with Shopify grabbing Jet Cooper to establish a beachhead in Toronto, and Pivotal doing the same with Xtreme Labs. ScribbleLive shot back in 2014, acquiring Toronto’s CoverItLive from U.S.-based Demand Media, marking an end to the liveblogging arms race (remember when social media was fun?).

While Wattpad’s $17.3 million USD Series B in 2012 (featuring Union Square Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang), and 500px’s $8.8 million USD Series A in 2013 (featuring Andreessen Horowitz) demonstrated that serious U.S. ventures were willing to invest in Toronto companies, the flurry of acquisitions reignited longstanding community debates about the merits of selling ‘too early’ or ‘too quickly’ to U.S. suitors — debates that continue to this day.

For Ameet Shah, Five Mobile co-founder and now a VC himself, the period is remembered as one where Toronto’s potential was starting to be realized. Having survived the 2008 financial crisis, and on the cusp of a new mobile-focused era with the launch of the iPhone, “there was a new opportunity in front of us and the industry to go after it.” But that didn’t mean there weren’t also growing pains.

“The influx of capital with this great engineering talent base just set everything up: you’ve got this massive platform change from web to mobile, and everyone’s sort of panicking, no one’s got this figured out. And here’s Toronto with a whole bunch of people that have a tremendous amount of [mobile] experience sort of saying, ‘look at me, we’re here’.”

– Ameet Shah, Five Mobile co-founder

“When Zynga acquired us, everything I thought I knew about product management, I had to throw out the door,” Shah said. “They were at the cusp of this data-driven product management style, and what it forced us to do from a hiring perspective was we really started optimizing for really smart people because we could run them through the Zynga playbook of how to solve problems.”

The educational benefits of a U.S. acquisition was a sentiment shared by Sheetal Jaitly. Now the founder of TribalScale, Jaitly was a director of business development at Xtreme Labs when it was acquired by Pivotal.

“The first thing that happened when we got acquired by Pivotal is that we came into this machine,” Jaitly told me. “We were always great at building apps, but Pivotal really started to show us the light: what happens after the app is built, how are you actually going to deploy it? We were always at the handoff point — we built the app and we’d hand it of to the DevOps team on the client side. Being able to learn the full end-to-end lifecycle of how to launch a product was huge.”

Both Shah and Jaitly agreed that the exposure to new processes and platforms more prevalent in Silicon Valley than Toronto at the time became a net positive for the city as engineering and product talent was released back into the ecosystem. “The best outcome from all of the acquisitions that occurred in and around that time was that it sort of forced the ecosystem to level up; it taught people something that was net new,” Shah said.

That Year Everyone Sold or Shut Down (2015)

When Teehan+Lax announced the company was shutting down in January 2015, it sent shockwaves across Toronto’s product and design community.

“It’s a tremendous loss for Toronto having a world class design agency close its doors, but there’s an opportunity here, while the spotlight shines on Toronto (perhaps all too briefly), for the rest of the design community to show the world that Teehan+Lax was not the lone light here,” Lee Dale, co-founder of Say Yeah!, said at the time.

In an interview with BetaKit, Jon Lax listed seven companies that made him “bullish on the scene” going forward: Jam3, Heist, Normative, TWG, Say Yeah!, Nascent, and BNOTIONS. Before the year was up, two of these companies would also be gone.

Heist tapped out in June, along with BNOTIONS, which sold to what’s now called Symbility Intersect. Endloop would follow in July, acquiredby Demac Media. Almost a year to the day of T+L’s closing, Gallop Labs sold to Big Viking Games.

In explaining its decision to shut down, Teehan+Lax spoke to the concept of escape velocity, the “work and investment required for established companies to break patterns in their business to find new levels of growth and sustainability.” A difficult proposition when “every service company is three months away from going out of business,” as Heist’s Christopher Hayes put it.

2015 revealed the number of Toronto product and design companies struggling to balance the pressures required of scale. It also demonstrated that, for companies choosing scale, the best place to start is by grabbing the talent around you. It was a lesson well-learned (see: Shopify and Tiny Hearts; TWG and B House).

The influx of cash, activity, and attention didn’t come without tension; that oft-repeated, difficult to define concept of value was used both as a rallying cry and a weapon. No oral history of the Toronto product community is complete without at least one ‘get off my lawn’ quote from Crow.

“In 2012, there seemed to be all these other entities with larger backing and funding who had different motivations — they were trying to achieve metrics as opposed to just creating value,” Crow said. “And as more money came in, the ecosystem evolved. For better or worse, there were people who just wanted to hang out and be internet famous with their BS funds or accelerators, and others who were service providers, and good actors.”

“That’s what really got me involved in this specific movement: I literally just wanted to connect with other people like myself.”

– Ria Lupton, WWCode Toronto chapter founder

One clear benefit to the explosion of growth in the Toronto ecosystem was that it also made the community more diverse. Those early unconferences were very male and predominantly white. While this fact didn’t change overnight (and frankly still hasn’t changed completely), an influx of diverse voices and faces from 2010 onward slowly started to change the ratio, thanks in no small part to the people leading the next wave of community events. #DevTO, Girl Geeks Toronto, WWCode Toronto, and TechGirls Canada are a few of the organizations that created space for more perspectives and broader participation in product development.

“What got me interested was being a computer engineer and making a career switch towards marketing, but also noticing [the homogeneity of] the group that was getting represented, doing speaking gigs, and getting press,” said Ria Lupton, founder of the Toronto chapter of Women Who Code, which launched in 2014. “Obviously, I believe that coding is important and that everyone should have basic tech literacy and digital skills, but it was also those connections and sense of community that drove me to those groups.”

While Lupton said that the initial intention of these emergent groups was generally to “make friends, have a sense of community, and hang out,” they also evolved organically alongside the capabilities of the ecosystem.

“Our first couple of events had much fewer attendees in formal product management or design roles,” Daryna Kulya told me. Kulya founded Product Hunt Toronto back in 2014 while working at Deloitte. Now she works as a Product Manager at Vidyard.

“Today, our events are filled with both experienced and new product managers and designers,” Kulya said. “There are now more and more seasoned product leaders who have shipped multiple products and are willing to share their knowledge.”

“The true potential of Toronto.”

“It’s fun to look back at the early days of Mesh, LeanCoffee, DemoCamp with David Crow and his crew, but all of a sudden now we were seeing the creation of TechTO, and more events than any of us really could begin to count.

Today, I really think Toronto has identified itself in its own right. I don’t hear anyone referring to us as Silicon Valley North anymore. I hear people saying that we’re from Toronto. That comes with an understanding of the fact that the ecosystem and technology is more diverse — certainly is inclusive of more women, people of colour — far more than was the case a decade ago.

What’s really interesting now is that you’re starting to see a lot of organizations who are leading in this area, who are leaders in the technology space, recognizing their own accountability and the work that they need to do in order to ensure this ecosystem is truly open and accessible to everyone.

The reason why I think that this is so relevant is because it’s in the richness of diversity that your greatness can grow. Toronto’s technology ecosystem in its infancy wasn’t very diverse. It was good, but it was not great. Now, as we’re starting to make the movement towards an ecosystem that is more supportive and inclusive, I think we’re only now starting to see, or will start seeing, the true potential of Toronto — we are coming close to seeing our true potential, but to get there we still have work to do.”

– Adil Dhalla, Centre for Social Innovation Executive Director / My City Lives co-founder

Present Day: More Life

Ten years ago, it was a big deal for a Toronto tech company to open its doors for a community event. Now, those same companies employ their own community managers, with shops like TWG, Rangle, and Pivotal hosting events at a regular cadence. Larger community events like TechTO and WWTOattract hundreds of attendees, requiring some of the city’s largest event spaces to hold them. TribalScale hosted its first daylong digital innovation event this year. It would have been a huge deal for Mayor David Miller to attend TransitCamp in 2007; in 2017, Mayor Tory’s attendance is expected. Shopify’s Toronto office regularly plays host to provincial and federal ministers. There’s now a community event for every shape, size, or interest.

“I’m bullish on where we can be – we started with about six people, then we had 60, now every month maybe 600 people come out. One day, we will be 600,000 people.”

– Mike McDerment, FreshBooks CEO and co-founder

“We’ve gotten to the point today where if I press ‘go’ on an event, it’s very rare that we are not able to get anywhere from 500 to 1,000 RSVPs,” said We Are Wearables founder (and former BetaKit Senior Editor) Tom Emrich. “But that’s not how it started. It started with me trying to fill co-working spaces, and hoping that 100 people would show up.”

Emrich correlated the growth of events like WWTO, which launched in January 2014, with that of the broader Toronto tech community, noting that he has been unable to replicate a wearable tech event at the same scale in other cities. “Toronto made it easy to be the home for wearable tech,” he said.

Thankfully, many these community events are also about more than “drinking beer and eating pizza,” with a renewed commitment on diversity and inclusion. #MoveTheDial and Change Together are two recent examples of initiatives backed by broad tech partnerships that wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago — the connective tissue simply wasn’t there. Those strong partnerships for change are also extending beyond the Toronto’s tech bubble into other sectors, whether in health with #Tech4SickKids or civic responsibility with Code for Canada. The rolodex is bigger now, with government and corporations acting as equal partners.

Lupton told me “it was so hard to get sponsorship in 2011” for women in tech or related events. “It was just people doing them on the fringes, and somebody would notice you and give you money,” she said. “Now, I feel like there is a lot more money and funding opportunities for these organizations.”

“I’d like to see our tech community recognizing its civic potential, and thinking about the impact tech companies have on the city — not just in terms of the jobs they create, on the way they help shape what the city actually is and how it works.”

– Gabe Sawhney, Civic Tech Toronto co-founder

Toronto’s product and design shops aren’t just acting locally, however: they’re thinking globally. Symbility Intersect, TribalScale, and TWG have all opened international offices, and Wattpad, FreshBooks, and Shopify are all globally recognized brands.

With the growth has come a hunger; the most common complaint you’ll hear from a Toronto product shop these days is about talent rather than tech stack. While Wattpad and Shopify’s leaders have advocated the government for a Global Skills strategy to acquire senior talent, a whole ecosystem has sprung up to fill the pipeline with a new generation of young and hungry indies.

Standing at the intersection of King and Spadina would put one within walking distance BrainStation, Lighthouse Labs, HackerYou, BitMaker, and Canada Learning Code. As digital literacy crosses over into the mainstream (even the Prime Minister has learned to code), the rise of bootcamps for development, design, and marketing ensures Toronto’s ecosystem can sustain its forward momentum.

“In 2009, I was here for university, and moved here for school – I worked with a lot of different industries, and worked in PR,” Senior Product Designer Andréa Crofts told me. “I noticed bootcamps popping up and since I wanted to get into tech, I came to TWG after learning development at HackerYou, and went to university for design. Through development, I got a framework for design.”

Canada Learning Code

“I remember there being a lot of energy and excitement in the tech community back [in 2011]. The fact that Ladies Learning Code started with a tweet says it all: I tweeted something (to my 400 followers) about how there should be a group in Toronto for women who want to learn how to code, and there was so much immediate excitement that the idea just sort of took off. There was something special about that time, because I don’t think the same thing would happen today.

The rise of coding bootcamps is really exciting to me. In addition to HackerYou, there are four other coding bootcamps, all of which are now registered as Private Career Colleges. The most exciting part for me is that bootcamps tend to see higher numbers of women than traditional computer science programs. Course Report has found that 43 percent of bootcamp students are women. At HackerYou, in our vocational program, we’re closer to 65 percent female, which means that every year, we create about 100 female developers, most of whom begin careers in Toronto.

Combined with the great work coming out of Canada Learning Code and other non-profit and charitable groups, plus the effort from our federal government to invest in the skills of the future, I’m feeling very optimistic about Toronto becoming the most diverse tech community in the world over the next five years.”
– Heather Payne, HackerYou CEO and founder

Taking the lead

As we near 2020, the city’s tech ecosystem feels primed to transform into something more. Now might be a good time to reflect on how we move forward.

“We are still a generation one software camp,” McDerment told me. “We’re at the tail end of our first generation, and need more of those breakout companies getting built, and to scale our anchor tenant companies. We need more companies exiting, a cycle that needs to repeat itself a bunch of times. There will be a lot of carnage, but the big companies that scale up are fundamentally what leads to the regeneration.”

We need not shy away from the carnage. It’s how great products, companies, and communities get built. But how does Toronto reach that scale? How do we build better products and stronger companies to get to the next generation?

“I’d like to see less glamorization of entrepreneurship and more consideration of it as an intentional choice, not a glamorous choice. I see a lot of starry-eyed people who see the glamour but not the grind. Glamour & Grind.”

– Tom Walsham, TWG VP of Product

“I have very strong opinions on the next few years,” Normative CEO Matthew Milan said. “Thinking about the future, and understanding where the new lines ought to be drawn – suffice it to say the age of traditional design is slowly coming to the end and a lot of tools, approaches, and skills developed in the last 10 years are going to be of diminishing value going forward.”

As the new lines are drawn, and new approaches to design and development are adopted, it’s important to stay grounded in what that got us here in the first place.

“The ethos — highly engaged local community — that existed [back in 2008], it’s important to keep that going and encourage people to more quickly reach the conclusions that took a lot of us a long time to reach,” Walsham said.

Two years ago, Jon Lax told me that his advice to any design company is to

“be a great company from Toronto but not a great Toronto company. Build a company whose skills are so unique that people from all over the world will seek you out to do what you do best.”

What it means to be a great Toronto company has changed since those grey and chilly unconferences more than a decade ago. Beyond creating value, the Toronto ecosystem is now creating core values — something so unique, so Toronto, that people all over the world will seek it out. I’d bet on that over anything.

View article on betakit.com

The post Create more value than you capture: an oral history of Toronto product development, published by BetaKit appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Today is #GivingTuesday, an international movement promoting giving and volunteering that takes place each year after Black Friday & Cyber Monday. Marking the “opening day of the giving season,” it is a day where charities, companies, and individuals join together to share commitments, rally for favourite causes, and think about others.

Today we want to celebrate how those in Canada’s tech and innovation community are giving back and making the world a better place in hopes that it will inspire all of us to give back more, and to give back better.

While writing this article, I looked at dozens of initiatives led by people and organizations in this community- far too many to recognize here. It was incredible to see how committed people in this community are to making a difference. For the purposes of this article, I focused specifically on giving that is directed to charities and nonprofits supporting people in need, rather than contributions to the tech community.

How companies give back

Strategic giving

When companies think about their charitable giving, there should be two primary considerations. One is your vision for the world and the causes that you believe in most strongly that will help to build the future you want to see. The other is your overall company strategy, goals and challenges, and how your giving program can help you achieve these objectives.

Some programs can build value for employees, some can help founders build their networks, some can help build the company brand. Together with Roger Chabra, I wrote an article for the Betakit Ask An Investor Series in June focused on why giving back is a good idea for startups, when to think about giving back, the benefits of doing so, and choosing a cause.

When compared to ad hoc initiatives, building a strategic giving program will yield superior results, both for the cause and for the company. These are a few strategies to help build a strong giving program.

Align with employee interests

A good place to start when thinking about how your company can give back is to engage your employees and find out what they care about. As part of Uberflip’s extensive Give Back program, they took part in a charity golf tournament for Silver Creek Preschool for children with special needs because a team member had a niece at the school and was passionate about the cause.

“I highly value the opportunity to give back to the community as I definitely didn’t get to where I am by myself.”
After Myplanet’s staff started coming together to sponsor Kiva small business loans borne of an inherent desire to make change in the world, it grew to a company-wide initiative with the company organizing fundraisers to increase the number and size of loans the team could offer. At Nulogy, after an employee had a family member who was in dire need of blood, the company rallied together to donate and has since coordinated a bi-monthly blood donation drive.

Nudge.ai supports employees by providing them with time off to volunteer. Andrea Corey, VP Product Development, volunteers with the Engineers-in-Residence program where she works with an elementary classroom to bring them hands-on engineering demonstrations.

“The goals of this program are to encourage interest in engineering and STEM, but also to promote diversity within engineering and showcase a wide variety of roles models,” said Corey. “I personally do this as I know that many girls and minorities face subtle forms of discouragement when it comes to STEM, and catching them early (before junior high) is important to increasing the diversity of students enrolled in STEM programs in higher education.”

Among many other charitable initiatives, the team at Wealthsimple has raised $20,000 for a Syrian Refugee family, participated in the Heart & Stroke foundation Big Bike Ride, and volunteered at the Food Bank.

“This is a hyper-competitive space and social responsibility can help you differentiate and create a strong employee value proposition.”

Mallory Greene, CSR lead at Wealthsimple, says that charity involvement at Wealthsimple typically starts with an employee championing a cause close to their heart. “We are happy to participate in any way we can. Being involved is a win-win: we engage our employees in meaningful work, and we donate to charities doing amazing things,” said Greene. “Giving back to the community is so important to keep your employees engaged, especially if you can take that next step and tie it back to your company’s mission. It’s important for employees to feel that they are making an impact.”

Supporting the causes employees care about could be one of the most effective ways for companies to retain top talent. According to a CHIMP report, ‘Workplace Giving is Good for Business’, companies with integrated corporate citizenship programs saw a 2.3x jump in employee retention. Seventy-nine percent of millennials want to work for employers that care about how they contribute to society, and 64 percent say that social responsibility strengthens their loyalty to the employer.

Give what you’re good at

While almost any form of volunteering or donations are appreciated by charities, support can often go the farthest when a company leverages its core skills to help a worthy cause.

Traction on Demand has an extensive community engagement program that focuses on building deep partnerships with charities in need of their services. “One of our developers was so touched by the overwhelming gratitude he received from one of our pro bono clients; it was such a meaningful experience for them,” said Michelle Malpass, director of community performance. “Our program is really powerful for recruitment and retention; this is a hyper-competitive space and social responsibility can help you differentiate and create a strong employee value proposition.”

Hubba

Earlier this year, Hubba launched a program with Nellie’s, a women’s shelter in Toronto, and Canada (Ladies) Learning Code, a not-for-profit championing digital literacy education. The program aims to improve tech proficiency and develop coding skills for the women at the shelter who were interested in improving job readiness.

Stephanie Little, Hubba’s manager of talent who spearheaded the initiative, says that “Hubba is involved in many social impact initiatives to give back to the community, and we’re well positioned to help remove some of the barriers that gaining decent tech skills has, such as access to computers, internet, and proper teaching.”

HoHoTO

For 10 years, Say Yeah has sponsored HoHoTO, an annual party celebrating a more inclusive digital community and raising funds for the YWCA Toronto Girls’ Centre technology programs. Say Yeah dedicates staff time to create content, design material, improve the website, and reach out to potential sponsors and partners.

Lee Dale, CEO at Say Yeah says, “It’s a challenging effort for our business to put so many resources towards supporting the event, but I believe it’s a positive experience for the staff in working together to make an impact and, more importantly, it’s incredibly rewarding to hear first hand from the people we’ve impacted through our work.”

Pro-bono services and products enable charities and nonprofits to access resources they couldn’t afford, while offering meaningful opportunities for employees to apply their skills and take on stretch assignments.

Engage your community

Charity can be a great way to rally your community together and do something greater than yourselves. OMERS Ventures has a strong network in the tech and innovation community and has leveraged this to raise money for charities (including Loran Scholars and Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario) through a poker series.

“It has been incredibly rewarding to see the OMERS Ventures Charity Poker Series develop into not only a meaningful networking opportunity, but one that is also giving back to so many worthy organizations.” said Nicole Kelly, community director at OMERS Ventures.

Eighty Eight regularly hosts fun events engaging their extensive network to raise money for charities.

Eighty Eight managing director Erin Bury says,

“We host a Disrupting with Digital breakfast event with the organizers of HoHoTO and part of the proceeds go to charity. We also hosted Startup Trivia Night where 50 percent of ticket sales went to the YWCA.”

For Toronto-based TWG’s 15th Anniversary Celebration, they’ve invited their community to help them raise $20,000 for #Tech4SickKids through a donation matching program. Matching programs like this are effective at encouraging team members and community partners to make a contribution, as people love to feel that their money is going further than they would be able to do on their own.

Tie business performance to your donation

Companies have an opportunity to raise money for charity in a way that builds strong connections with their community and creates an ongoing commitment to a strategic cause. Carrot Insights donates three percent of revenue per year to charity, which is divided evenly between the YMCA, The Heart & Stroke Foundation, and Diabetes Canada. The company’s mission is to make Canada a healthier, better nation, and this commitment aligns their business, charitable giving, and core values. From a strategic perspective, this enables the company to build partnerships with leading charity experts and thank them for their support, recruit team members who are passionate about the company mission, reinforce company culture, motivate business success, and lends authenticity and credibility to everything they do.

Bark ‘n Yapp, a peer-reviewed resource and social app for dog owners, runs a SmartStart Shelter and Rescue Program that donates $1 to a shelter on behalf of every adopted dog whose owner creates an account on the app. Since the launch of the program in March 2017, Bark ’n Yapp has donated and helped raise over $2,000 for dog shelters.

Authentically building charity into your brand is a wise move for leaders looking to engage and inspire. Long-term, companies can tie a charitable donation to the success of their company through an equity donation to The Upside Foundation of Canada. To date, over 180 companies across Canada have shared their future financial upside by joining Upside. The process is simple, and typically involves the donation of stock options or warrants that are converted to cash when a liquidity event occurs. That cash is then donated to the charities of the company’s choice.

Roy Pereira, CEO of Zoom.ai, says,

“Our team is proud to be able to say that we have made a commitment to giving back: it’s an important part of our employee value proposition. As a founder, I’ve gained a lot from being part of The Upside Foundation community. Pledging to give back with Upside is a smart thing for all founders to do as it requires no cash upfront, but can create massive value in the long-term.”

Charities that have benefitted from member company exits to date include the Mentoring Junior Kids Organization, East York Learning Experience, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, and PEI Literacy Alliance.

Tying your charitable contribution to a business metric ensures that your goals are aligned, and that your giving is sustainable for the organization. Committing to a giving program up front can build goodwill from employees, customers and the community.

Select a cause you deeply care about

One way to strategically build a social responsibility program is to go “all-in” on a specific cause. The best causes align both your business purpose and activities, and your charitable and community giving programs.

At Unbounce, the team is focused on supporting diversity, both within the company and as a charitable focus area. Last year, Unbounce hosted all of the 70 Ladies Learning Code Vancouver workshops at their Vancouver headquarters. To align with their goal to have 50 percent women speaker representation at their Call to Action conference, the team also sponsored 15 women from across North America to receive keynote speaking training as part of their CentHERStage speaker bootcamp.

CentHer

The CentHER Stage speakers’ bootcamp

Feedback, a Toronto company that allows users to order restaurant food at low prices during off-peak hours, focuses both their business and their giving strategy on the idea that “food is precious.” Their app inherently reduces food waste (already over 1,500 meals have been diverted from landfills) and for every order placed, a meal is donated to someone in need (more than 750 meals have been donated through Feed It Forward, Second Harvest and The Parkdale Community Food Bank). When a company’s business activities and charitable giving combine in support of a common goal, a much stronger impact can be made.

How individuals give back

Ben Zifkin, CEO at Hubba, is a leader that is known for his commitment to community. His personal brand extends beyond his leadership of one of Canada’s hottest tech startups to being a champion for charitable causes such as Canada (Ladies) Learning Code, The Upside Foundation, Venture Out, and #Tech4SickKids. Christian Lassonde, managing partner at Impression Ventures, and Jodi Kovitz, CEO of AceTech Ontario and founder of #MoveTheDial, have deeply embedded their passion for SickKids into their own personal brands and have leveraged their networks to rally people to come together to make an impact.

Authentically building charity into your brand is a wise move for leaders looking to engage and inspire, and can result in a significant impact on the causes they champion.

Chris Hamoen, CEO at AccountHQ, is a fierce champion for helping new immigrants and underemployed Canadians find work in tech.

Hamoen has long been a coach and mentor with Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) and says, “By being directly involved, we also grow as leaders in technology as we start to more deeply understand the challenges that these under-represented groups face.”

Keith Gelhorn, CEO at ADDtext, has built his business and his brand around mental health. Among many other initiatives, Keith founded the Nova Scotia ADHD Action Group, a monthly youth and adult ADHD support group. Gelhorn says:

“I highly value the opportunity to give back to the community as I definitely didn’t get to where I am by myself. I moved from British Columbia to Nova Scotia back in 2011 and didn’t know a soul here. I quickly learned that the only way to build a business was through relationship building. Since I ‘came from away,’ I knew I would have to be very creative in building that network. So, rather than waiting for people to come to me, I launched the Nova Scotia ADHD Awareness Expo and invited non-profits, corporate, and clinical groups to come together. I gave them a free booth, press, and the opportunity to pitch their programs to the rest of the group. That resulted in all kinds of cross connections, and most importantly established me as a connector and a doer.”

How communities give back

Startups and Beer brings the Waterloo Region tech community together a few times a year to connect in historically significant buildings, sample local craft beer, and fundraise for a local not-for-profit or charity. Consequently, the community partner builds more meaningful interactions with tech workers and prospective volunteers, donors, and ambassadors. Each event has raised more money than the previous ones for charity partners that have included Women’s Crisis Services, Extend-a-Family, and The Working Centre.

TechAide for Centraide in Montreal is run by the OSMO Foundation, Real Ventures, and Google Montreal and is a series of fundraising events throughout the year where all proceeds go to Centraide. In 2017 alone, the group has held a launch cocktail, a lunchtime bus tour for local tech executives and founders of some of the facilities Centraide supports and, most recently, a games night at the Google Montreal offices (which raised over $22,000 for Centraide).

TechAide

TechAide takes place at Notman House in May 2017

Startups Care is a grassroots volunteer organization in Vancouver. Over the last three years, the Startups Care initiative has raised over $30,000 and approximately 10,000 pounds of food for people in need. Every year for two weeks during the holiday season, they rally a group of companies to collect food and financial donations to benefit the Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB).

Chris Luft, founder of Monkey and Bot and Startups Care says, “Technology companies have had a profound impact on shaping the world in which we live and my hope for Startups Care is no different. I don’t think building a profitable business and being a good member of your community are mutually exclusive. True leadership is about building a future for everyone. A healthy community produces healthy people which is a requirement for any society looking to innovate and lead on the global stage.”

#Tech4SickKids is an initiative where the Toronto tech and innovation community is rallying together to raise $25 Million for state-of-the-art spaces and programs at SickKids. Forty top leaders in the Toronto community have come together to lead the initiative’s Advisory Council (including BetaKit!), and over 20 companies have already pledged to donate their upside to SickKids (through the Upside Foundation of Canada). One look around the room at the #Tech4SickKids Launch event on November 15 shows how a huge goal for charity can bring the community together better than anything else.

Venture Out is a conference hosted by non=profit Start Proud that connects LGBTQ2+ Canadians in tech with career opportunities, mentors, role models, and each other. Together with over 30 tech organizations as sponsors, earlier this year they hosted Canada’s first conference for LGBTQA+ students and young professionals interested in careers in tech and entrepreneurship.

The BC Tech Collective was founded to inspire and assist companies to build community impact programs, collaborate with one another on common interests and causes, and ensure the sustainability of community grassroots events. One annual event hosted by the group is Tech Pong, which in four years has raised over $250,000 for local charities. The goal of the collective is to elevate and expand the impact of these initiatives across the province for generations to come.

Looking to give back today?

Here are some ways that you can give back right now:

• Arrange volunteer activities for your team (TO Tech Gives Back is one organization that can help you with this)
• Sign up with BC Tech Collective, #Tech4SickKids, or other community initiatives
• Set up a pro bono donation program where you can donate your company’s product or services to charities (Pledge 1% offers great resources)
• Host a fundraiser
• Attend a fundraiser (see below)
• Sponsor a charity or nonprofit event in your community
• Apply to join the Board of Directors or be a champion for a cause you care about
• Offer your employees time off to volunteer
• Offer a matched giving program for your employees or your community
• Pledge to share your upside with The Upside Foundation of Canada
• Donate a portion of proceeds, profit, revenue, or a designated amount per signup/sale, to charity (Pledge 1% offers resources on setting up a profit donation program)
• Build a strategic CSR program for your company (start by finding individuals who care, engaging your team, and selecting a cause)
• Make a one-time or recurring financial donation to the charity of your choice

Looking to give back at an event? Check out the BetaKit events calendar for events near your area!

View article on betakit.com

The post How tech companies can give back, published by BetaKit appeared first on Say Yeah!.