Building a thriving tech community in the Prairies with Tech Thursdays

Left to right: Katie Fitzgibbon (Senior HR Manager at AbaData), Fahad Zaidi (Engineering Manager at Neo Financial), and Philippe Burns (Co-Founder at Tech Thursday). Photo by Paola Contreras/www.paolacontrerar.com

If you’re asking someone in Calgary where to go to learn about the burgeoning tech scene, you’re likely to be answered with another question: “What are you doing this Thursday?”

Tech Thursdays are weekly events held in both Calgary and Winnipeg, designed to bring the tech community together. With panel discussions and professional development opportunities, the events draw in more than a hundred attendees every week — from smaller start-ups to senior founders.

Spearheaded by Neo Financial as a place to foster the growing tech ecosystem with discussion and networking, the event launched in Winnipeg in 2022 before quickly gaining traction and expanding to Calgary in 2023. 

As a result of their growth and high attendance every week, Tech Thursday has been spun out of Neo Financial to be its own company, which launched in July.

“It’s exciting for the community, and it’s certainly exciting for us,” said Burns — now the official co-founder of Tech Thursday. 

“We’ve heard from founders and investors that we really were supporting the ecosystem. It was a realization that, ‘Oh, there’s something valuable here. We could really make something out of this.’”

The idea for Tech Thursdays originated while coming out of the pandemic, when members of the Neo Financial team noticed that Winnipeg’s tech community was starved of in-person connection. Philippe Burns and Paul Card saw an opportunity to unite the community under a single, consistent weekly gathering.

“Coming out of the pandemic, there were just no regular events taking place for the Winnipeg tech community,” said Burns. “When there were events, they would often overlap, leading to scattered attendance. So, we decided to bring the tech community together under one roof every week.”

The gatherings have rapidly grown from humble beginnings to become fixtures for tech professionals in both cities. Starting with a handful of attendees, Tech Thursday grew from approximately 10 participants to over 100 each week in Winnipeg. In Calgary, the event now averages around 125 attendees weekly.

Neo Financial is still the title sponsor of Tech Thursday, and other partners include SkipTheDishes, Manitoba Technology Accelerator, Calgary Economic Development, Google Cloud, Confluent, The Pioneer Event Co, Amiron Ventures, Norima Consulting, Go Oil, and Float.

The secret to Tech Thursday’s success lies in its focus on community development. Unlike typical recruitment or sales pitch events, Tech Thursday prioritizes meaningful conversations, idea-sharing, and connection-building, explained Burns. 

Steering committees in both Winnipeg and Calgary ensure that event programming reflects the communities’ needs, with a wide array of speakers and topics. From technical deep dives to business strategy to diversity and inclusion, the events cover the gamut of subjects that speak to their variety of attendees (including senior executives, founders, engineers, and all those tech-curious).

“We want people to find jobs, but we don’t want this to be a recruitment event,” said Burns. “We try very hard to make sure it’s a place to learn about what people are building, how they’re building it, and why it’s exciting.”

It’s also about learning from entrepreneurs at different stages of their careers.

Chloe Smith, co-founder and CEO at Mercator AI, first attended a Tech Thursday event in Calgary last year when she was invited to speak on a panel about AI. 

As a pre-seed founder, she told Burns that she wanted a chance to talk to founders who were a few steps ahead of her to learn from. Not long later, she was moderating a panel about how to scale up a business with the founders of SkipTheDishes, Neo Financial, and Float.

“A lot of [Tech Thursday’s] content is very homegrown,” she said. “It’s pretty cool to have had a conversation at an event prior that turned into a topic we were able to bring to the community. That’s just a direct relationship to the culture and how innovative and how quickly we can jump on new ideas.”

Expanding the impact

Held at The Pioneer downtown, Calgary’s Tech Thursdays have rapidly become the larger market for the event series, averaging approximately 180 RSVPs each week.

Burns said approximately two thirds the attendees are senior executives, founders, and C-suite professionals. This focus on attracting experienced talent was deliberate, he added. While Winnipeg was in need of events in general, Calgary had plenty of events for emerging talent — but there wasn’t much diversity in career levels.

“In Calgary, we identified a gap in events that really targeted senior talent,” he said. “We found that there weren’t regular events bringing out people who had been working in tech for eight to 10 years.” 

In Winnipeg, held weekly at King’s Head Pub, Tech Thursdays have become a cornerstone of the tech community. Their RSVPs may be lower than Calgary’s, but that’s largely because it’s become a given that the community will be there, said Burns.

“In Winnipeg alone, the events have facilitated over 30 new hires across partner companies,” said Burns. “It’s been very inspirational for the community, it shows that we can really do this here.”

The programming at Tech Thursdays is guided by four pillars: business topics, technical topics, local trends, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In Calgary, recent events have included discussions on Calgary’s growing biotech sector, women in tech, and Indigenous perspectives on tech and business. 

Burns highlights that each week, about 50% of Calgary attendees are new faces who bring a continuous deluge of fresh perspectives and ideas. 

“One of the things that we struggle with in (Calgary) is that we don’t really have a lot of spaces to congregate with different perspectives,” said Smith. But she added that what Burns and Tech Thursday are doing is changing that.

“It’s helpful to have multiple perspectives in the tech ecosystem in Calgary because it helps bring diversity of thought.” she added. “Let’s get together and share ideas in the city — there’s an appetite… I think it’s a reminder that people do want that community. Tech Thursday events are so incredibly well attended. It really shines a light on the fact that there could be more of these things.”

Looking ahead

As Tech Thursday has been spun out on its own and continues to expand, there are plans to build up the event series. The team is looking into recording and broadcasting the events, creating what Burns calls “a mix between a TED Talk and a Tiny Desk Concert.” 

This would allow the broader Canadian tech community to engage with the Tech Thursday discussions, and possibly draw in attendees from across the country.

But Burns still harkens back to the importance of maintaining the in-person experience, even if the events go digital. 

“We don’t want people to not come because they could just watch it online,” he said. “The goal is to ensure that the in-person connections and meaningful conversations that define Tech Thursdays remain central to the experience.”

There are also discussions about expanding to Vancouver and Toronto, and expanding outside of Tech Thursday and into wider community events. Burns said they’re looking at representing some of their partners at the mesh conference, which is also growing in Calgary and Toronto, and building up the existing communities in Calgary and Winnipeg.

With the new chance to focus his efforts entirely on Tech Thursday, Burns said there will be plenty more growth opportunities and a larger expansion by 2025. The vision will remain the same, but there’s a “new energy” for the next chapter.

“What we want to do is create that community meeting space,” said Burns. “Where there’s a very casual environment for you to come and talk about what you’re working on with the idea that, hopefully, this can be one of the catalysts to us becoming a tech hub that — maybe not rivals — but competes with Silicon Valley in a way that’s very unique to us.”

Learn more about Tech Thursday events here.