 So, we are for the next portion of the afternoon, we are going to hear from a couple of speakers and we're going to get more to the side on side and figure out what will be next. We have five remarkable individuals, each who are doing very different things related to tech and all have a unique story. We're calling this part, what will be next? Career options based in tech. Our first speaker is Zoya Jihwa and she's the founder of As We Are Style. She's celebrating and she's all about who you are as you are in this moment and which is exactly what we've been talking about. So, let's welcome to the stage Zoya Jihwa. Come on up Zoya. I'll just give you a high fiber. So, when the cold damp weather arrived to Vancouver in December 2014, I was struggling to find clothes that were warm, comfortable and stylish because in addition to dressing for a Vancouver's sporadic weather patterns, I also had to consider my equally unpredictable pain. Alongside an autoimmune disease called lupus, I live with a chronic pain condition called fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is characterized by intense pain and muscles and soft tissues. Essentially, any pressure to tender points including my shoulders, my arms, my abdomen and my thighs feels as though I'm pressing on bruises, painful and uncomfortable. For these reasons, I was not a fan of wearing tight jeans or closely fitted tops or multiple heavy layers which were the popular trends at the time. One chilly morning, I opened my closet to discover that I owned more pajama pants than real pants. I had spent so much time between doctor's appointments and my home that somewhere along the way I had completely lost my sense of fashion. After having a good laugh, I decided that it was time to rebuild my wardrobe. I chose to invest in clothing pieces that reflected who I am and how I wanted to feel. At local clothing stores, I found relaxed fit pants with an elastic waistband which are amazing, by the way. I found loose tops that were still flattering and light accessories that added a bit of sparkle to my outfits. Not only did these clothes reduce the pressure on my tender muscles and reduce the severity of certain medication side effects, but they also made me feel confident. I became curious to know about whether others were also dressing to make themselves feel better in some way, physically or emotionally. When I asked my friends who live with various physical and mental health conditions if they were also dressing for their daily challenges, they all said yes, each with a story to share. We did not all have the same diseases or disabilities but we did experience similar symptoms, medication side effects and emotional moments. I saw an opportunity for us to connect our individual stories to a greater community of empowerment and impact. This is when, as we are emerged, as we are an online fashion community for people who are facing health challenges with style and with courage. It combines peer mentorship and storytelling to support individuals who are experiencing symptoms and medication side effects of diseases, disabilities, chronic pain and other sources of discomfort. This is a platform to move together from problems to possibilities. It's a space to celebrate small steps forward, whether that's getting out of bed in the morning or stepping outside of the house for a breath of fresh air or discovering a personal style that's as unique and special as you are. Over the past two years, I've had the honor and great responsibility of sharing the personal stories and styles of some amazing people in our own community. And here is one of them. This is Sierra. And last year, Sierra, who I'd never met before, sent me an email to say that reading the stories on As We Are was such a great reminder that she loves fashion and experimenting with different clothing styles, but more importantly that she was not alone in her health challenges. It turns out that during her teenage years, Sierra experienced several mental health challenges, including anxiety and anorexia. More recently, following an ankle injury that didn't heal correctly, she was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome, a condition that involves the central and peripheral nervous systems, resulting in symptoms such as pain or such as nerve pain and skin sensitivity. Sierra looks for looser clothing pieces that don't rub against her sensitive skin. She opts for a backpack instead of a handbag to avoid putting too much pressure on her shoulders. And she looks for versatile pieces that she can wear to school or to activities that bring her happiness, such as yoga, traveling, or hiking. A week after Sierra shared the As We Are article with her network, I received a heartwarming message from her. She said, since I shared the As We Are feature, I've had so many wonderful conversations with people about invisible illness, mental health, eating disorders, body image, and vulnerability. It's like the blog post opened up a space for me to share these conversations, and it was a bridge to some really important and meaningful dialogue to be had. A friend of mine who I had no idea struggled with an eating disorder message me, my second cousin that I didn't even know was my second cousin or even existed, saw the post through a family member, and we connected as she has chronic regional pain syndrome. And my friend who is designing a community program for teens about body image and mental wellness connected with me. I could go on, but the point is that I thought you'd be happy to know the ripple effect of a single story. All of this was a response to a single story. Health obstacles can feel overwhelming, and while focus is often placed on living a vibrant life when you are feeling better, my intention is to create a space where people can celebrate and embrace who they are as they are in this moment. As we are is definitely about fashion, but it's also about feeling empowered while living with a disease or disability. Each person that I featured on as we are is extraordinary, not just because of the fabrics of their clothes, but because of the fabrics of their lives, in which they have woven moments of courage, fostered closely in communities, and intentionally stitched together the values and activities that bring their lives meaning today, right now, as they are. I want to end with three key learning moments that have come from my experiences of creating an online community. The first is to look for the larger narrative. What I have found is that the experiences that feel the most isolating and painful and personal are actually the ones that unite us. We all have our own pain to deal with. For some of us, it's with health challenges, but for others, it might be emotional pain, painful relationships, financial pain, or the pain of loss. Perhaps there was a challenge that you went through where you felt alone. I encourage you to ask yourself, what was the bigger story there? Was there a hidden opportunity in that obstacle? What did I learn about myself, and how can I view that challenge as a catalyst for change, connection, and hope? From myself, reflecting on these questions showed me that there was an unmet need to create a positive community and resource for people who are facing health complications that impacted several aspects of their lives, from their sense of independence to their clothing choices. I learned that my story was actually one of many, and that these stories were stronger and louder together. The second point is to embrace empathy. We are living in a digital age that offers us seemingly infinite opportunities to connect, and I chose to create an online platform because I believed this would be the most accessible avenue to reach people in similar situations to me. While there is so much content available out there, I have learned the importance of having an authentic voice. Storytelling can take many forms and utilizes the collective strength that results from individual vulnerability and courage. With social impact and empathy at the heart of As We Are, I look forward to leveraging the power of these stories to one-day design products and services that foster well-being, increase independence, and enhance quality of life for people who are living with health challenges. I encourage you to also bring empathy into your work to discover how your authentic voice can echo and inspire others to use their own. The third point is to act on your curiosity. We can take ownership of our learning experiences inside and outside of the classroom. Alongside As We Are, I am in the process of completing my undergraduate degree in sociology, sustainability, and entrepreneurship at SFU, and actually since grade 12, I've always had a side project that has allowed me to explore my talents and interests and skills, and this has ranged from running community programs to presenting workshops to starting blogs. I would start from where I was with what I had, placing focus on possibilities rather than perfection. I would ask for help from a teacher or a mentor or a friend to create something and share it and just see what happens. I encourage you to also take your learning into your own hands and at your own pace to find a balance of meaningful activities that energize you and allow you to gain experience in the fields that you're interested in. Today, I am feeling a lot better than December 2014, and while my symptoms still linger, so does my hope. When I was diagnosed with lupus and fibromyalgia, it was like my whole world was being turned upside down. Thankfully, I've learned that life is like a snow globe. Sometimes things have to be shaken up for us to realize just how beautiful, magical, and precious it truly is. Here's to celebrating and embracing who we are as we are in this moment. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome job. What an inspiring story. Thank you, Zoya. Act on curiosity, embrace empathy. Wow. Super cool. So our next speaker, again, we talk about passion and purpose. Has taken his passion. He was a firefighter and made it a purpose. And he's going to talk about his drones, but not only drones, but how he's used it to save lives in pretty incredible situations. Please welcome Robert Atwood, CEO of Hummingbird Drones. Come on up here, Robert. Grab applause. There you go. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Hey, guys. So my name is Robert Atwood. I'm a co-founder of Hummingbird Drones. It's a huge pleasure to be here on stage talking to this audience and share a little bit about myself, our company, our history in tech, and some of the really cool things that we've had the privilege to be a part of over the last three years. Well, I hope my story resonates with those of you who are getting into tech. I hope, too, that it dies and it provides some level of inspiration for those of you who aren't. I'll tell you why. If there's anybody surprised to find themselves where they are today, working in tech, running a software company, it's mean. I didn't take the traditional route. In fact, I started with a natural resource science degree from Thompson Rivers University. It's kind of like a forest science degree. And then from there, during the summers, I worked as a firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service as an initial attack firefighter. To be honest, at that point, there was nothing else I wanted to do. I had my career set out. I wanted to be a firefighter. I loved what I was doing. We spent the summer flying around in helicopters to remote and unique parts of the province. We hung out with really cool people and almost as a side note, we got to fight fires. It was kind of like a summer camp for adults. I was positive that's what I wanted. At the time, I wasn't looking for a change and I wasn't looking for anything new. And I definitely wasn't looking to start a tech company. Today, primarily, Hummingbird is a software company. We specialize in implementing drone technology and innovation as part into the wildfire landscape. Three years ago, when we were firefighters, we saw an opportunity to fundamentally shift how wildfires were suppressed. An opportunity to create a safer workspace for other firefighters, for our friends, and ultimately to create a more cost-effective way to fight fires. At the time, though, it was an incredible risk to quit doing what we were doing. We had jobs. We had careers. We had tons of friends. But it was a risk that was worth taking. This afternoon, I'm going to talk about how that risk is playing out and paying off by sharing with you an experience that we've had recently that made this whole endeavor worthwhile. So, as a company, primarily, we work for the BC Wildfire Service. We fly drones over wildfires and we locate hotspots. We use infrared sensors or thermal sensors to detect heat. When we're scanning a fire, we aren't looking for open flames, though. We come in after those flames have already subsided. So, we're just looking for subterranean heat, burning roots, and smoldering embers. You can see, kind of, up here, what we have are actually three hotspots. And those are just coals burning, but they appear quite brilliantly. So, it's really easy for us to find them, locate them, and provide that information to firefighters. In fact, there isn't really that big of a difference between looking for those smoldering embers and actually finding bodies. We can see over here, kind of the same thing, but those are humans. And while we didn't make the connection ourselves, our local search and rescue group, Kamloot Search and Rescue, saw, like, I think they read an article about us in the newspaper and they contacted us and asked us if we could, if we would be interested in pursuing some opportunity with search and rescue. We tentatively agreed, but we weren't really sure what we were signing up for. It took a year of preparation, a year of field exercises, false alarms, contract negotiations, equipment failure, but just three weeks ago, it all paid off. I'm going to show a video here. This is the first search and rescue operation, successful search and rescue operation with a drone in western Canada. It's a little bit hard, so you'll have to bear with me here for a second. What we have is a lost subject. It's probably about three in the morning at this point. It's cold. There's a foot of snow, and they've been missing since about three o'clock in the afternoon. What we have here is a search team working their way towards them. So we located the subject and we directed the searchers to not just one, but two. One of the craziest things is when we started searching for these people, there were actually seven people missing, and when you're cold and you're exhausted, you don't always make great decisions, and one of the things that they did was they actually all split up, so they were all over the mountainside. Here we have the search team getting pretty close to our first lost subject and a second lost subject realized what's going on, and they start making their way too. The whole time this is going on, we've been working at this for hours, and the sense of total relief and exhilaration was really palpable. We were maybe a kilometer away from flying the drone, but through the radios, we felt like we were part of it, and we really felt the emotion on the ground as these people were finally being rescued. We can see that search team one has made contact with the subject, and the rest of the search team is moving towards them, and then the second person here is coming across. These people, it's cold, they're tired, they're hungry, but just again this profound sense of relief when these things go well. We see as the search team will actually all get together, they'll huddle, and they'll all make contact. Now we didn't ever anticipate doing something like this when we started. It was all about wildfire. But wildfire, you're kind of lacking a real human element to it, with wildfire just looking for smoldering embers. And we missed out, I think, on these types of events where in the moment, you really get to feel the impact. We didn't start out intact, but I'm incredibly, incredibly thankful that we're here now, and I don't know what you're thinking as you're moving forward and you're thinking about university and you're thinking about what you want to do next, but even if you don't necessarily pursue tech or become an engineer or software developer, I can almost promise you at some point in your life, there's going to be an opportunity where you can really take it and really run with it. And based on our experience alone, I really encourage it. Thank you. Thank you. All right. I feel like there's more dancing needed. I don't know, I'm a dancing machine. You guys feel like more dancing? Who here's heard of EA? Who here's heard of EA? EA Sports? Yeah? Played it? Yeah? Okay. So I'm thinking we get Aaron from EA Sports to dance. What do you guys think? He's like going like this. All right guys, come on up here and come on. Let's do this. All right. That was not part of the agreement, so cut me some slack there for the moves. My name's Aaron McCarty. I am a senior producer working on FIFA. Some of you might have recognized this game. Anybody like video games in the crowd? Anybody played FIFA? All right. So what's my job working on FIFA? Essentially, I'm in charge of the world's biggest video game, which is kind of scary when I say it out loud. Good news is they didn't just put me in the job. I've been doing this for about 12 years now. I cut my teeth making video games, developing gameplay for FIFA. Developing gameplay for FIFA and designing gameplay for FIFA, what that is is actualizing what happens in the sports and turning it into the video games. So every time a player kicks the ball, any time a player heads the ball, how the players move on the pitch, I was in charge of designing that and helping that come to life in the game. It's kind of a cool job and I love working at EA. So I'm going to tell you a few reasons why I love you working at EA and tell you a little bit about what it's like to work at EA so you can have an idea of what a life in the video game industry might be like. First thing is I get to play video games whenever I want at work and nobody's going to fire me, which is kind of cool. But really and truly, the biggest reason I like making video games and working in the video game industry is because I get to inspire emotion in the fans that play our games. So millions and millions of people, a lot of people in this room play FIFA every year and it's my purpose in the world to bring a product to them that inspires them to play and be happy and that's also very cool. I get to be creative and solve problems every day at work and that can be anything from why is this feature that I created not working the way that I wanted it to work or how do I take human behavior or athletic intelligence and translate that into math to what's the next big thing in video games? How do I dream up some big idea and make that real in FIFA? And that's also very cool. Also, at EA we have a pretty cool campus to work at. Here you can see a picture complete with a football pitch, a roller hockey rink, a beach volleyball court, a gym indoor basketball, and the list goes on and on. It's a very cool place to work but more important than the facilities are the people that I get to work with. I work with some seriously intimidatingly intelligent people. I can think of a time in my first six months on the job in a meeting with a room full of software engineers discussing how to make a feature work and the conversation was going every which way. I actually went home and started to question, am I really smart enough to do this job? I consider myself a smart person but I'm going, maybe I'm not. If I was dumb I probably wouldn't realize it by now but it's a hard thing to do to make video games. It seems like fun in games but it's challenging. But the cool thing about it is when you're put in a room with highly motivated, highly passionate people who are very intelligent special things happen and you make cool stuff. So for a lot of disciplines in the creative space and technology, there isn't necessarily a conventional way to go about getting into the industry. We've heard a lot of talks about technology and what it means to learn and aspire to work in technology. At EA there's more than just software engineers. There's a lot of disciplines around the technology that contribute to the technology like our artists. We have character artists. We have lighters. We have modelers, animators, environment artists. We have designers and producers like myself. We have project managers, data analysts, analysts, physicists and the list goes on and on and on of all of the ways that you can contribute to the technology that we build every single year in FIFA. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I got into making games. I was a soccer player a lot like Messi. Maybe a little better than him, clearly not. I played here. I'm a Vancouver native. I was born and raised. I played for Van City. I played for the BC team and after high school I went to Jamaica to play internationally. I have dual citizenship, Canadian and Jamaican. So I played internationally for Jamaica. Then I moved on and I got a scholarship at Oregon State University and played for four years down there. And while I was at Oregon State I picked up a degree while I was playing soccer, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with a minor in pre-med, which is kind of weird. And really what it was was me not knowing what I wanted to do. I thought I was going to go there and become a physiotherapist but ended up changing course and taking business. But in that process of discovery I took a few classes at university that I think were invaluable to me in my career. I took argumentation and critical discourse. I took some advanced calculus and I took a year of computer science. And all of those things have come back to me tenfold in my career in making video games, which may not sound like what you would think except maybe computer science. Anyways, I came back to Vancouver pursuing my career and a friend of mine who was a software engineer at Electronic Arts recommended me to a team that made FIFA Street to do motion capture a lot like you see Lionel Messi doing here. So I did that for the FIFA Street game and I was coming towards the end of my career as a soccer player and I took a liking to what the guys were doing. I got to know the animation directors, the producers. Long story short, I took a few more steps in my career but I ended up with a producer job on FIFA 08. Now that's not a conventional way to become a producer of video games, but it's the way that I got in there and it's the way that a lot of my co-workers got in is roundabout ways to get into the games industry. And things are changing now and there's a lot more streamlined paths to become a video game creator and I'll talk about some of those in a minute, but I just wanted to let you know that really the thing that drives video game makers and drives us to make great games is the passion for the subject matter. I get over the years that I've been making video games, I've been asked by so many people who've come up to me and said, well that's really cool, you make video games, that's awesome. You get to meet people like Harry Kane and Lionel Messi, that's really cool. How do I do that? What should I be doing now at the stages that a lot of you guys are in in your lives to prepare myself for that career because that's something I want to do? As I said before, or what I tell them is, well it depends, what do you want to be? If you want to be a programmer it makes a lot of sense that you go and study computer science at university. If you want to be an artist or a modeler or an animator, there are programs in the city like the Art Institute and VFS and places like that that have courses designed to prepare you for that kind of career. If you want to be a producer or a designer you could fall into it like I did and learn on the job or you could go to some of those schools I mentioned a moment ago who are starting to have design programs that can prepare you for that too or you can just start making games and some people have done that and got kind of good at it and got into the profession that way. But when I have that conversation with people who want to know what they can do to prepare this there's three things I always tell them no matter what it is that they want to do and the first and the foremost is you have to be passionate about the subject matter. You've got to love games, play games, play every game that you can and keep a little pad there and take some notes about ideas that you might have about how it works or what you would like to change. I can't tell you the number of times I found an old pad with scratch on it that is five years later become a really compelling feature for FIFA. You have to like problem solving. I love doing things like cross birds and Sudoku and these kinds of things and problem solving is a huge element. I'm sure not just in video games but a lot of the technology enterprise that you've heard about today. The other one I tell people is in school, in high school, in university, don't sleep on math. I was one of those people I can think back in high school in trigonometry listening to the professor talk about angles and sine curves and exponential curves and thinking where am I ever going to use this in my life. Well the answer is making video games. We use that stuff all the time. I can't tell you how shocked I was that first six months on the job when the producer that was in charge of teaching me how to make games broke out so katoa. I don't know if you guys know remember so katoa sine equals opposite over hypotenuse. We use that in the first six months on my job and I was like oh my god I never thought I was going to use this advanced calculus has come into play in some of the designs that we've done and understanding how that works is useful in making games. I know that sounds a little far fetched but I like to think of video games as the place where play, creativity and math and logic all meet in the middle and it's a creative industry built around technology. I'm going to give you a quick example here to illustrate what I'm talking about. So what you're looking at here is a screenshot of what we call our test bed on FIFA and this is the game but stripped away of all of the art assets and the content that make it look beautiful when you play it so that we can use that processing power to show us a whole bunch of information about the decisions we're making so we can make the game better and better and better. I've created a little scenario probably not a very realistic one here but the goalkeeper in blue here is way out of position and he needs to run back to his goal and the player in red has the ball and he can score seems like a pretty simple solution we got to get that goalkeeper to run back into the goal but it's not always that simple there's a lot of decisions that need to be made on every single frame of gameplay to decide what's the right way to do that that goalkeeper he can run forwards he can backpedal he can sidestep he can run looking over his shoulder there's a lot of ways that he can get from point A to point B and we always need to tell him which way to do it so the way that we do it in this scenario is we measure the angle from the middle of the goal to the goalkeeper to the ball and that angle sort of tells us his field of vision so we translate that behavior of the goalkeeper which is what do I need to look at where I'm moving is it here is it there and by the size of that angle we dictate how he's going to move so as he's running at the beginning he'll run straight forward as he gets a little bit further he might look over his shoulder and as he's approaching the goal and that angle gets really big he might backpedal so he can see the ball at all times and you might not always have the information about what that angle is so you got to use things like so katoa to figure it out math is hugely important in in creative things like making video games that's a very simple example I kind of included this screenshot I'm not going to explain what all of these debug lands are but I just wanted to point out how complicated a thing like a video game can get all of that debug input is information that we use to calculate where the ball is going to go every single time you kick it on the pitch and that's not all the calculations that's just some of them so it's a very complicated thing and much like math if it doesn't add up ultimately it doesn't work so you kind of have to be spot on on understanding how all these things work together how they logically live so that we can make sure that the game plays fun and plays correctly the last thing I tell people is don't be afraid of teamwork I was also one of those people in high school or in university whenever I got assigned a group project I would moan about it oh I'm going to have to coordinate my schedule with all these other people oh what if this guy doesn't carry his weight what if I get stuck with all the work well the truth and the fact is if you get into the video game industry every single thing you do is going to be done in a team even the things that you think are going to be done in isolation by yourself are so interdependent on everybody else's work that you can't work in a vacuum everything is is done in in teams so you need to sort of embrace that culture and that ideology of working in teams if you play on sports teams know that you're learning the skills that can take you further ahead in an industry like the video game industry so I've got one last thing I'm going to leave you with before I get off stage and what that is is if you really are passionate or interested in getting into the video game industry and you think it's something for you don't feel like you need to wait don't feel like you need to go to school for four years to learn how to program before you can start making games there's lots of tools out there there's online courses that are free that can teach you a simple scripting language so you can get your hands dirty now and start to learn about the process because the things that you'll learn trying to make a game and failing are far more important than than than the things that you can learn when you're in the job and and doing task day to day that stuff is invaluable and will serve you throughout your career so I'm going to leave you with that thought I hope to see some of you guys someday working in the industry and crossing paths and I hope you got a little bit of something out of what it's like to work at Electronic Arts thank you my dancing partner thank you Eric so the cool thing is that last image you guys saw they actually did as he spoke about EA FIFA but they did the woman's version so before the woman's World Cup in 2015 we actually got to go into EA and get all dressed up and dolled up and did those these emotions and so the cool thing is when you go play FIFA on the woman's side make sure you play me because I'm in goal and I've never never ever let a goal in so so don't don't let me down okay just making sure you know that but that was so cool loved EA loved our time of then love what they've done to the woman's game as well so next up he wastes no time okay so he's accomplished a little bit in life he started as an engineer then he became a lawyer then he started a startup company so Byron stays busy and he's gonna come here and talk to you today about his great life and success please welcome Byron whoo thank you thanks how awesome was Erin I want his job actually um so thank you and good afternoon my name is Byron Tom I'm an associate director with the BDC IT venture fund and I'm here to tell you a little bit about venture capital my role in the tech ecosystem and then a little bit about my background and maybe try to give you a piece of advice or two so I'm left-handed and it's that one okay quick poll how many of you have used some of these technologies from some of these great companies google apple facebook so pretty much everyone what about companies like watt pad anyone okay great foodie maybe a little bit more b2b okay well one of the things you probably never found as a commonality between them is that all of these companies at one time or another used venture financing as part of their growth story venture financing itself is actually a huge part of the tech ecosystem because it allows companies to grow and scale in a way that they wouldn't be able to do by themselves what is venture capital you ask well venture capital is a type of financing like I said that is used by early stage companies it's not for everyone but it works really well for companies that are growing and scaling fast venture capital is typically the second third or fourth type or stage of capital that's early stage companies go after at the very earliest stage we usually tell inventors and entrepreneurs to go to their friends and family to get initial capital for companies that are a bit further along typically we say they'll go after angel money and so this is money from high net worth individuals or maybe ex entrepreneurs or ex business people who are looking to stay in the tech game often angel money comes with a lot of advice because it these people have a lot of lessons and scars that they're able to kind of pass along and venture capital comes after this sometimes it's at the seed stage and some and often a little bit later but companies that are seeking venture capital often have figured out what we call product market fit and are looking to scale or grow really really fast as a VC I spend most of my time looking at companies and identifying the ones that I think are going to win and then helping them not only it's helping them succeed not only with my money but with leveraging kind of the network and the connections that my fund has within the ecosystem I'm evaluated on how well my companies do which is often directly tied to how much money my fund receives when the company is sold or gets listed on a public exchange this is what we call a liquidity event and I love my job I love venture capital mostly because of the amazing people that I get to work with and so not only entrepreneurs amazing business people but often they're very involved in the technology and have great expertise expertise and things that you wouldn't even imagine I also get to know a lot of the venture folk and so the ecosystem around it who also have amazing and varied experiences that I like to look up to and I like to leverage so you're probably asking how did I get into venture and it's quite an interesting story that I want to share with you not only am I an investor but I'm also a co-founder of a startup of my own it's a it's a company called optical networks and it's based right here in Vancouver and I'll tell you a little bit more about it in a sec I should also tell you a little bit about my fund I'm part of the bdc it venture fund which is part of bdc the bank we manage about 300 million dollars investing in software companies across Canada we have 10 investment professionals and we have currently about 45 companies in our portfolio in bc uh we have 14 great companies uh across a wide range of software um there are companies that I interact daily with um and hope to help grow and scale I'm going to take a second just to talk about a couple of them or a few of them to kind of give you a flavor about the types of companies that I might find invest in so on the e-commerce or marketplace side we invested in companies like bill direct cymax and foodie in b2b sass we have companies like um mobify clue and elastic path I'm not sure if any of you are using it here today but the mobile app that the bc tech summit has used for all of the participants was made by our bdc portfolio company quick mobile and we also have companies that play in the big data space um two that I want to highlight are mojio and truly you and take maybe a couple seconds just to dig in a little bit so you guys probably weren't here yesterday but mojio was here on this stage talking with julia white from microsoft about the cloud platform that mojio has produced that takes information from tens of thousands of cars and pushes it to the cloud to allow people to access this data mojio working with team mobile provides us as a service to thousands of people across the us and they're going and they're going global probably by the next year there's going to be hundreds of thousands of cars um on the platform that are at every second of the day pushing crazy amounts of data to the cloud and allowing the analytics and everything else machine learning and whatnot um to act upon that truly you um is an is another great company here in vancouver um it's a leader in the global online verification space and its technology allows some of the world's biggest banks and software companies to identify over four billion people in the world this amount of data is absolutely staggering and it's all based on technology built right here in bc and so i wanted to kind of explain this to you because i feel that i am super lucky um to get to work with some of these amazing entrepreneurs and amazing startups although i'm not directly involved in the day operations of some of these companies my fund sits on the board and we are able to provide value to these companies by leveraging our network to other investors and also to um corporate innovators and different people within the ecosystem another thing that we're able to provide as an investor is a 30 000 foot view of of what the ecosystem looks like and we're able to kind of compare and contrast how one company is doing against another um and what i like to say is we're able to help identify the signal from the from for our companies from the noise so let's take a quick step back and talk a little bit about how i got to where i am just as an fyi i'm in my 30s and like a true millennial uh this already is my fourth career when i came out of high school i went to sifu and i studied engineering um i worked for a bit as an engineer for a number of companies here in vancouver and then i went to the university of ottawa where i went to study law after law school i moved to toronto where i practiced intellectual property law for a number of years and then about five years ago i came back to vancouver to start my own company uh with my co-founders and and then just about a year ago um i was asked to join the it venture fund and it was such an amazing opportunity that i couldn't pass up and so while it may seem like i went from one job to another and moved from city to city i always thought and i always looked at the bigger picture where others saw change i strongly believe that every job i took um was built i had built upon the skills i learned from the last i tell people all the time that while i may not be practicing as a lawyer or working as an engineer i still think like an engineer and i still think like a lawyer i'm proud to wear an engineering ring which reminds me every day about uh the types of technology and the impact that i can have on the tech ecosystem and how awe-inspiring that is um every day and so i i say this to tell you how lucky i i feel to be involved um in this space so stepping back even further i see as my i see my career as being um highly focused on innovation where the end education and jobs i took were simply looking at technology through different lenses venture is in my mind at least is a perfect fit for my background as it allows me to apply all my skill sets at the same time and let me walk you through a little bit of this thinking i went into engineering school to learn to think like an engineer being an engineer was a good side project but thinking like an engineer was something that i really wanted i went into engineering school because i loved science and i was always asking how'd they do that and engineering school taught me lots of things like it taught me how to look at the world through the eyes of technology where people see objects i see block diagrams and and where things see when things seem complicated engineering taught me to break them down into simpler bits and simpler bits again until i could actually break it down into something i could comprehend when i look at software i see user design i see user experience and i see the software infrastructure and modules that allows code and and and software to build up into the products that you see and spend time with every day because i'm an engineer i'm able to break down technology where i encounter it and understand the company's pitching to me in order in order to be able to identify when a company's technology is different is new is better than everything else i've seen in the in the marketplace as a lawyer i focused on intellectual property law mostly patents and licensing but my entire legal career was focused on the broader policy issues related to law and technology i went to law school to understand the interplay between law and tech i studied with important researchers and completed interdisciplinary work um on some of the most fascinating problems i've ever encountered i worked on privacy issues i helped develop coursework on the law of robotics for one of the universities um and i helped develop a complaint against facebook that forced the company to change its terms of use because i am a lawyer i'm able to identify what companies are allowed and not allowed to do how they work and the interplay between hr and contracts and financing and this has provided invaluable insight to helping helping a fund early stage startup companies being an entrepreneur it's a huge rush and i think this conference is a testament to the spirit of entrepreneurialism there's nothing quite like it and while there are many many skills that you'll learn being an entrepreneur for me the biggest skill i i learned was how to be resourceful when you're a founder you do pretty much everything because you can't hire anyone to do anything for you um and you need to figure out how to prioritize your time and to figure out what is mandatory and what's nice to have how to delegate and to trust people that you work with every day to do things that you may think you could do better but you just don't have time to do and making difficult decisions as part of this um and managing stress is a prerequisite but the rush of winning is contagious i can still remember how i felt when we got our first product order i can still remember how i felt when we got our first sale and when we did our first installation into a data center in Oregon it's quite amazing to actually physically install a product into an office um in a place that you've actually poured into a product that you poured your blood sweat and tears into creating and so because i'm an entrepreneur i am able to empathize with the startup folk that i meet with and deal with every day so tying things back quickly together um my journey has circled around the central nexus of innovation because i'm an engineer i'm able to problem solve because i'm a lawyer i'm able to organize and strategize because i'm an entrepreneur and i've run a startup i'm able to empathize with the with my fellow startup folk and i should add because i'm now an investor i'm able to identify companies that are hopefully going to provide my fine good returns at least that's the that's the hope um and i say that humbly because i admit that this is still a work in progress and that there's still lots for me to learn and there's still times for me to learn in how to think and be and act like a vc but this brings me to an important life lesson that i'd really like to share with you and i think canadians um and you kind of hear this as being kind of um a thought that was gone across this conference canadians are quite terrible at taking risks and i think we need to be better at this we need to be more confident in the decisions we make and we need to believe that we can be the best in the world because we're competing with the rest of the world on a global scale but i think we're learning how to be better at this i look out into the tech community and i see a huge swell of energy um and a swagger that i hadn't seen before and this gives me great hope that there are good things to come there are great companies here in vancouver in bc and across canada and i hope that we'll have huge um we'll have more huge success stories that can inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs including people like yourselves final point as i'm a few minutes over time is be thankful although i probably don't do it enough i try to recognize my privilege every day and i'm so grateful um for the help i've received in my career from my parents from my family from my mentors and my friends we live in amazing times technology is moving at a pace like we've never seen before um and it's such a great time to get involved in tech we need you and you and you and you um to get excited about building large scalable companies and i encourage you to explore your options in tech from whatever vantage point the world takes you whether it's an being an accountant whether it's being a coder a lawyer an investor there is no one way to get involved with technology and so don't let anyone tell you otherwise be passionate in whatever way you want to get involved but i do recommend you get involved because we need all types of people involved in tech and we need all types of diversity so that's how i'm gonna end there's a whole world of opportunities out there for you and whatever your ambitions i encourage you um to get involved in tech be curious thank you