Toronto: Demonstrating It Has What It Takes to be A Leading Tech Hub

I am a very big fan of the city in which I work, Toronto. More specifically in a neighbourhood known as Liberty Village – which is definitely an emerging tech hub within Toronto.

This is my third opportunity holding a leadership role at an earlier stage tech company.  My previous role had me commuting to SFO every month to a company located in Sunnyvale, CA -- so I have firsthand knowledge of working down in the Valley as well. But, a few years ago I exchanged the monthly trips to SFO with the ability to stay in Toronto, cycle to work over 50+ times a year (taking into consideration the Canadian winter) along the the shore of Lake Ontario.

Given my role as President of BioConnect, I often find myself reading the latest offerings online regarding different tech news. One of the articles that really hit home for me, combining two of my favourite things; Toronto and tech, was published by Tech Crunch. It speaks about Toronto being a tech start up center for the world.

Given my background and current role, I wanted to provide  an Insider’s view of working at a tech company, in the awesome city of Toronto - comparing my own specific experiences relative to what Josh Guttman states in his Tech Crunch article.

Finding Engineering Talent:

In his article Josh mentions, “Most people don’t realize Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America (only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are larger) and produces the most engineering-focused university graduates each year. There are 150,000 full-time students enrolled in universities throughout the Greater Toronto Area, all within 90 minutes of the city center.” Here at BioConnect we have definitely taken advantage of this.  

We have been growing our engineering talent rapidly since moving to Liberty Village 16 months ago. So far, we have had very good success hiring recent grads from York University, University of Waterloo, and Queen’s University.

Also worth mentioning is the quality of the candidates coming from local boot camps. Finding talent from these boot camp programs has also been really positive for us. Programs run by the likes of Lighthouse Labs, Bitmaker, and Firehose Project are delivering young technical talent to augment what is available through the traditional universities. In fact, our latest Rails developer came from Firehose.

The teams running these programs are very open to developing partnerships with tech companies all in the spirit of feeding the right companies solid, young talent. We continue to work with them on everything from an office tour to a mentor program where our engineers can play a role in developing future engineering talent. This is something I am really looking forward to.

Supportive Local Government:

Josh’s second point that really hits home is his discussion around the encouragement and support from local governments. BioConnect has been very fortunate to have established a number of partnerships with government agencies that have allowed us to grow at a pace faster than we would have otherwise been able to fund ourselves. In particular, we have been successful at securing meaningful R&D funding through the Industrial Research Assistance Program / National Research Council (IRAP/NRD) – in excess of $500K over our partnership with them.

Ariel Epshtein, our IRAP Advisor, has been a consummate professional championing BioConnect within the NRC - and we have been able to deliver the business results over the last couple of years to make those investments in us count.

Not all the support comes in the form of financial bursaries and the IRAP / NRC is a great example this too. They recently hosted a seminar by the well know Professor Dr. Robert Cooper on the principles of new product introduction and Voice of the Customer research, and have shown success facilitating meetings for BioConnect with domain experts in the areas of IoT, Software Development & Architecture.

We have also been able to take advantage of both provincial and federal programs supporting young new hires:

BioTalent Canada - Rob Henderson and Stephen Zrudlo have been big supporters of BioConnect and we have been fortunate to have had multiple recent millennial hires qualify for their national wage subsidy program.

COJG - the Canada-Ontario Jobs Grant is administered by the provincial government and provides financial support for training / professional development of our young awesome workforce.

The support for BioConnect at a municipal level from the City of Toronto has also been great. In particular, Joe Mazzei, Senior Tech Advisor at City of Toronto (and fellow cyclist). Joe was eager to come meet us once we moved into Liberty Village and he has proven to be invaluable in getting BioConnect connected to the tech community in Toronto - facilitating introductions with Meet-up Organizers, fellow tech company CEO’s, and much more. 

An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem to Thrive:

Josh goes on to say, “The international community has long regarded Canadians as being kinder, friendlier and a more accepting culture; in my experience, its true.” In mine as well, and this not only goes for the citizens of this country but to those blazing their own entrepreneurial paths as well.

Where do I start? MaRS Discovery District and the great people who work there! Krista Jones, Head of Learning, has been a champion of BioConnect and our partnership with MaRS has grown significantly over last 6 months. BioConnect has also been registered in MaRS’ scaling program - where Krista and team provide specific support for young tech companies that are now in growth mode and I personally now participate in a monthly SaaS Founder Group, hosted by MaRS, whose mandate is to share best practices / learning to those young growing companies in Toronto.

Just last week we were invited down to meet a few of the Google Cloud team to talk software development, architecture, and scaling best practices. We know we can tap Krista Jones and Salim Teja for guidance on everything from raising capital to conducting primary research. 

What else? In June, BioConnect was fortunate enough to be recognized by @C100 and joined 15 other companies for 48 hours in the Valley -- yet another vehicle, supported by some of Canada’s most influential organizations that promotes innovation in Canada.

There is no question we are doing good things at BioConnect but I can attribute a material part of our success to the city in which we work, the exploding talent pool, and the very vibrant, supportive eco-system that we are lucky enough to be part of.