For over three decades, the most consequential builders in Canadian tech came out of one place. No one owns it. We just decided to make a room and coordinate a little better.
PayPal had one. So did Fairchild. A tight cluster of people who built something together, scattered, and then spent the next twenty years quietly seeding everything around them. Waterloo has been doing exactly that — across hardware, AI, fintech, infrastructure, and a dozen companies you'd recognize — without ever stopping to acknowledge it.
No one owns a thing like this, and no one should try. But after thirty-plus years, we figured it was worth coordinating a little better. So we decided to make a room — no stage, no sponsors, no badge scanners. A small, deliberately chosen group of founders and operators, a campfire, and two days to talk about the things that actually matter when the conference floor empties out.
The first edition is small by design. Get the room right, set the tone, and let it become the thing people clear their calendar for every year.
The format is a campfire at the back of the park and roughly twenty people around it. Honest conversation about financing in the AI era, ownership, infrastructure, and what's actually BS now — held the way you'd hold it among people you trust.
Zero to thirty-plus years out. The people just starting, the people in the thick of it, and the ones who wrote the playbook — trading notes across cohorts that rarely sit at the same table.
Each year the room covers the cabin for a couple of younger founders who couldn't otherwise be there. The mafia takes care of its own — and recruits the next one.
Most of the room is people we already know. But a handful of spots are held for builders we haven't met yet — because the point isn't to keep this small forever. It's to widen the reach, open the door, and help more people get something out of this group.
