Business and startup events in Greater Victoria

Anu's Take

Worth the afternoon if you are raising in the next twelve months, and the reason is the second half. The panel runs an hour, the social runs ninety minutes, and a room built by a national law firm, a bank and a local fund is one you want the extra time in. The advertised subject is how the AI boom moved valuations and terms, which is genuinely unsettled. The part about planning liquidity years in advance is the advice everybody gets free and takes late.

Anu's Take

The gap between building something and explaining it is old, well documented, and still unsolved. What has changed is that a growing share of the handoffs in between no longer runs through a person at all: one system summarises for another, and whatever made the product worth buying quietly does not survive the trip. Panels like this one tend to get lively enough to go there, which is the part I would want to hear.

Anu's Take

Worth a look if you build, finance or approve housing, and mostly for the sequencing. Two earlier sessions catalogued why delivery is slow and costly; this is the first one where companies turn up with tools aimed at that list. The listing still promises three angles and names two, so you are booking on the premise rather than the lineup.

Anu's Take

The range is the reason to go. A bioprinting company, a sustainable goods company and an ADHD tools company do not share a playbook, so the same question should come back with three genuinely different answers.

Anu's Take

'What problems should we solve' is usually followed by 'why'. Sometimes it arrives the other way around, depending on how the quarter has gone. Either way the job underneath is the same: solve problems, make people happy. Everything else is a feature nobody asked for.

Anu's Take

As a tenth generation farm boy from Ontario, the circular economy is very dear to my heart. Dear enough that I took the circular economy micro-credentials course at BCIT a few years back. The premise here is the one that matters: circular materials do not fail on chemistry, they stall on everything around the product.

Anu's Take

Ownership is the whole argument here. A community can host the generation and still watch the value leave, and which way that goes is usually settled in the financing structure long before anything gets built. One speaker named so far and she is on the capital side rather than the developer side, which is the right end to start from.

Anu's Take

Worth an hour if the defence market is anywhere on next year's list, and the reason is Karl Swannie. He built Echosec here, selling open-source intelligence to national security and public safety buyers, and Flashpoint bought it in 2022, so the room holds someone who finished the route rather than only people mapping it. There is a quiet joke in the structure too: the readiness programme being previewed is subsidised by PacifiCan, so Ottawa is funding the lessons on how to sell to Ottawa.

Anu's Take

Ukraine is innovating on the battlefield at a pace never seen before. This is your opportunity to hear about the how and why, without having to enter the theatre.

Anu's Take

In 2006 Wilkinson was pulling espresso in this city for six dollars an hour and teaching himself web design between shifts. He is now Executive Chair of the holding company that owns the agency he built out of that. The listing is one line and the venue turned up late, which is either confidence or a to-do, and the arc is worth the hour regardless.

Anu's Take

The detail that stuck with me is the pitch format: three minutes, no slide deck, bring the product if you have one. Somewhere out there a founder is on version nine of a deck that will never be opened in this room, which may be the most useful thing this event does all day. Victoria is the last qualifier before the national final in Mississauga, so whoever wins gets a month to work out what they actually said. If your pitch only works with the pictures, this is a good place to find that out.

Anu's Take

'Typical timelines' is carrying a lot of weight on this agenda, and Ottawa publishes the real numbers. A complex reliability screening runs 120 business days, and a secret clearance adds up to another 120 on top of that. Separately, 123 Defence's own eligibility questionnaire asks whether your leadership will commit a year of time and resources before you begin. Those are the same fact told twice.

Anu's Take

Most of the cost here is decided before you start, by which level a contract lands you on. Canada's own programme runs 13 controls at Level 1, 98 at Level 2 and 200 at Level 3, and the top two are still under development. So the useful hour is the one that tells you which of those you are looking at, rather than how to pass it.

Anu's Take

Three thousand members, a claimed two hundred billion in collective impact behind them, and volunteers running the whole thing since 2015. Bohdan is in from Toronto for two hours of it. People who build something that size rarely make themselves this easy to meet.

Anu's Take

Almost everything on the Where's Anu calendar happens in Victoria, which is its own kind of blind spot. The Island economy does not just run through Victoria, and the clue is in the name. For three days a year the rest of it shows up wearing name badges. That is worth the drive north on its own.

Anu's Take

The session that earns the day is the closing one, sorting $10 tasks from $1,000 decisions. Everyone can already tell which is which, and we all still do the $10 one first because it can be finished before lunch. A Friday booked out to make a couple of the expensive calls instead, with your own numbers in front of you, is the hardest thing on any owner's calendar to justify and usually the only thing that moves.

Anu's Take

More than two dozen AV manufacturers in one room is not a number the Island usually sees, and most are brands you have specified without ever touching the hardware. Lunch is covered and parking is reimbursed, which tells you plainly who is paying for the day. Come with a project and it pays for itself.