SPEAKER_01 0:00

One of the biggest risks I see sometimes with entrepreneurs, um, especially entrepreneurs that are coming out of, you know, if we're coming out of the corporate world where you're you've grown a career and and you, you, as you grow, you're used to knowing. You're supposed to know everything in your area. And you come into entrepreneurship. And I don't care if you've got an MBA or whatever, you're not gonna know everything. Every day there's gonna be something you feel really dumb about.

SPEAKER_06 0:28

What a great journal. We're so happy everyone came. I know there was a little bit of panic about the rain. It was supposed to be a rooftop and sunny and stormy event. I think Lozini more stormy than we are sunny, but I we're so blank to have you all here. My name's Brianna Blee. I'm a director in Deloitte's uh GI3 practice. And I joined Kaloido 18 months ago when they acquired the software company I co-founded. So this is a really full circle moment for me. I co-founded business called Pocketed in 2021. And we built software to help companies find and access more government funding. And we've been through the entire startup journey, as I'm sure many of you in the room either are going through or have been through. And part of that journey took us to the stages of the forum, where in 2022 we won the forum pitch competition. And then after that, we got to participate in Ace Tech's programming through IOAP funding. And we've been part of so many of these places and these ecosystems that have now come together in this room tonight. So it's really full circle. I'm so grateful for the work that you both do along with your teams in this ecosystem. As someone that's benefited from the programing, I can really speak to the immense value that it brings. And to be able to share it tonight with all of you. Again, it just feels so full circle. So I'm gonna ask my colleague Srini Jarma to come up on the stage to offer a land acknowledgement and to talk to you about a lot of our flagship programs at Deloitte.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

I guess you're thank you, Brianna. Yeah, amazing. So I'm Shreeme. If uh you don't know me, I'm a senior manager here at Deloitte in the Grands and Incentive practice, and I also help hold the Path Safety program in BC. But before I talk a little bit about that, I just want to take a minute to acknowledge that we are gathered today in the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of Musqueams, Palmish, and Sliptu peoples. We're grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and build community on these lands. And we recognize and respect the enduring connection these nations have with this territory. And as you can see, tonight is about community. So we have founders, investors, ecosystem builders. One of the things that we love about BC is that all everyone's ready to share their journeys, get vulnerable, and talk about the strawberries that take case, all the things that don't quite make it on LinkedIn Posts. So, in terms of uh the Fast City program, uh it's a technology program that recognizes the fastest growing technology companies in BC, and we're so, so proud. We had uh close to 50 applications from VC alone, which is incredible considering the size of our commons. And uh what stands out most isn't the growth is the collaboration. So many of the founders and leaders, in this room included, uh are actively supporting each other, sharing knowledge, making introductions, and helping strengthen the ecosystem for everyone. And that's exactly why evenings like these matter. So I'll say thank you again to ASEC at the forum and for all of you for being here. Uh, we hope you enjoyed the conversation and made some new connections. Now, please join me in welcoming Angela and Tristan.

SPEAKER_03 3:38

Thank you so much, Shreeme. Thank you to the whole Deloitte team. Thank you to all of you for showing up today. This is such an exciting conversation. Kristen and I were just uh basking in all of the energy. And so we want you to continue all of those conversations that you were having. Also afterwards, we're just going to have a bit of a conversation here to help ensure that you have an opportunity to share a little bit more vulnerably. You know, this series of stormy stories and the podcasts that I've recently launched with Ace Tech was inspired by the notion that, you know, sometimes we feel like we have, as entrepreneurs, to put on a brave face to go out into the world and do what it is that we do. And it can be hard to recognize and realize that there are struggles along the way. We've chosen this path, but it is inherently nonlinear. And uh it's important to know that I think everyone in this room would have something, some kind of setback that they could talk about. And I want you to know that you're full of, you know, folks that you can reach out to and share that with. And we hope you do after the conversation that we have today. So uh I'm gonna get started as I normally do. This is odd because we're doing this live. Um, so we're gonna have our conversation, then we'll open it up to QA and um then give you all an opportunity to chat with each other about your own stormy stories. So, welcome to the Stormy Stories Show. I'm Angela Robertson, CEO of Ace Tech, a nonprofit membership society for technology CEOs and founders. We exist so that no CEO has to grow their business alone, and so that every CEO and founder, along with their teams and their companies, can thrive. Today's guest is Kirsten Copeng Telford, CEO of the forum and co-founder of EPACT Network, an emergency preparedness platform used by millions of families, community organizations, and local governments across North America. A serial entrepreneur and award-winning strategist, Kirsten is now helping women founders access the capital, mentorship, and networks they need to build and scale successful businesses. Welcome to the Stormy Stories show, Kirsten. Thank you, Angela. I'm thrilled to be here. So you co-founded EPACT Network after recognizing the need for better emergency preparedness and communication. What inspired you to tackle that challenge through technology?

SPEAKER_01 6:32

So I spent much of my career focused on how technology can improve lives. But the story of EPACT actually starts way back in 1995, where I spent a year as an exchange student in Fukushima, Japan, actually building websites for the Fukushima Internet Task Force. And I would imagine that nobody in this room had heard of Fukushima until 2011 when the earthquake and tsunami happened in Japan. And you may remember a nuclear reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. One of them was separated from her children for three days and didn't know for uh 24 hours if they were even alive. So uh for anyone in the room who is a parent and sends their kids back to school in September and fills out some paper earthquake forms and gives their kids a pack of band-aids or whatever. Um the uh you'll know when I sent my kids back to school that September and I looked at um what we do to prepare for and respond to emergencies, um, I recognized a significant gap that I thought that we could solve through technology. And so my co-founder uh Christine Summers and I um built a loose plan for uh ultimately a social network type of connection to help people prepare for emergencies. Uh, went uh and she went out to a school district, and without having written a line of code or even having more than three PowerPoint slides, we uh locked down a pilot. And uh and the rest is uh is long and sometimes stormy history.

SPEAKER_03 8:34

And I think that really grounds us in the immediacy of what was required and what you know drove you to put this together after successfully growing and exiting EPAC. What then motivated you to take on the role of CEO at the forum and focus on supporting women entrepreneurs?

SPEAKER_01 8:55

So I've been fortunate to have um been involved in the tech ecosystem since very, very early on in Vancouver. In fact, my first business, um, Idea Park Communications was part of Vancouver's first tech incubator back that a few people in this room might remember from back during the dot-com boom. So um, but I also knew as a woman entrepreneur and a woman in tech that women do face some extra challenges uh in building businesses. And so when I left EPACT, I had the opportunity to step onto the board of the forum and um a couple of board meetings in our CEO stepped down, and we were at a point where we were ready to scale the forum. It was work that I had lots of experience with. And so I stepped in as the interim CEO, and that was three years ago. Um after a few months, I fell in love with the organization, the team, many of whom are in the room today, um, and the community of folks building super, super meaningful businesses. Um, what I also saw, though, is this tipping point moment for women entrepreneurs. You know, I saw that in the two decades since I had started building companies, this this so many more women building companies, so much support in the ecosystem for women. Um and also a potential for a pushback in uh in society at the time. Um and I thought if we could all just paddle in the same direction, we could not only change things for individual women building businesses, but we could actually make systemic change so that our daughters don't have to like this just is a non-issue. So I raised my hand, put my resume in the in the ring. Um, I'm an entrepreneur, so I had to make a resume. That was that was the scariest part. Um, and I applied for the job.

SPEAKER_03 11:05

And here we are. And here we are indeed. I think that's um putting it a bit modestly given all of the success that you've had in those few years as well. Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

So you've also been a tech CEO, and you're also now leading an organization that supports tech companies. What motivated you to take on the role with Ace Tech?

SPEAKER_03 11:30

Um, yeah, interesting uh journey and parallels, like we talked about before. Um I'm not a founder, I have so much advo admiration for founders, but I have lived the founder to CEO scaling journey with a MadTech company that I was very fortunate to be involved with in the growth scale and exit story. Um, and then I even stayed on with the company. I was asked to continue on as CEO. Um, and I managed to have it in me for three years to stay on on the other side of acquisition. Um it took a toll on me, a major toll, something that I don't think any amount of preparation would have led me to believe how much things can change so quickly overnight. I'm sure many folks here who've been through an exit, and you know, even with a strategic acquisition, there's still just changes in the market, changes in the customer, changes in people that you can't anticipate. And I felt so strongly for the team and the vision and everything that we built that I started to put my identity so closely to what was happening. And as those views were shifting away from what really aligned for me, um, I found it hard to step away on my own terms until it was done for me. And so I made a pact with myself that I wasn't going to allow that to happen again if I could. If I could with my next opportunity, I wanted to make sure that whatever I was doing, it r met my own values, um, whether it was starting my own business or whether I would be fortunate enough to join another organization. And because I had experienced what it was like to be a member at Ace Tech, and I knew what a source of grounding and insight that provided. I mean, the folks at my round table, most of them had never been through an exit, but they were there to support me, and they were there to provide that foil, that outside lens that helped to sort of unmask some of these things that we tell ourselves, right, to get through the hard times. So I just thought, you know, everyone should be able to have access to programs like this, or should be supported, or should at least know that this kind of support system can exist. And not only can it, but it will make you a better entrepreneur. So uh yeah, when I was fortunate enough to step in as interim CEO at GASTEC, um, that's that's how I came to be here. And I feel very fortunate to be able to work with so many of the people in this room. Um, and as I'm sure you do, you draw inspiration from folks who you get to see their journey every day.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Absolutely. It's it's so inspiring. I've said to a few people in the room already, hearing about their businesses, you know, we think about entrepreneurship as, you know, the pursuit of the pursuit of money. But what I what lights me up around entrepreneurship is that every entrepreneur, no matter what they're doing, is making a a change in the world. They're making a ripple, whether small, or in the case of some of the, you know, some of the med tech um innovations that I've seen in this room. And, you know, it's there's there's work that's being done that is changing the world. And that makes going to the work in the morning much, much easier. Um but thank you also for sharing your story because I think the um, you know, exit is something we talk a lot about starting businesses and a lot about scaling businesses, and we don't talk enough about exiting businesses and the impact of that um on people and approaches. So we're at the forum, we're actually talking more and more um about it because I think it um knowing what we're getting into is uh is important. Knowing what and knowing what happens when we come into uh when we bring other people into the business, whether they're acquiring it, investing in it. Certainly, I've said stormy stories there for another day.

SPEAKER_03 16:04

Amazing. And so through your work at the forum, you've worked closely with hundreds of founders across Canada. What patterns do you see in the entrepreneurs who successfully scale their business? Maybe not necessarily the exit side, but who are successfully growing, scaling. What patterns emerged?

SPEAKER_01 16:23

I think first of all, I always um think of entrepreneurs, the ones, especially those that are scaling and taking, taking risks every day as brave. It's just a very, very brave pursuit to get up every morning and um decide to keep going. Um I think that I see people that overcome limiting beliefs. We all have them, no matter how successful you are, right? They um, but the ability to overcome those beliefs, um, the ability to ask for help, even I've talked about this, right? Whether that's help at work or it's help in our personal lives, uh, to enable the space to actually show up and scale a business. And then I think on the more on the business side, clarity of vision is a fundamental system, a system that supports that growth step by step. And I know Ace Tech is brilliant at supporting that. Um, and then also the ability to storytell. So um the ability to use passion uh and energy to attract aligned support.

unknown 17:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

And how about you? I mean, same question, right? You uh um you're working every day with amazing, amazing folks, many of whom are in this room. What do you see as the common thread?

SPEAKER_03 17:50

Yeah, I mean, the one word that came to mind the other day when we were talking about this um was grit, right? This isn't for everyone. And I think it's easy to glamorize nowadays. You know what it means to be a founder, to exit however many times, you know, all of the different LinkedIn metrics that you want to put on your tag lines or whatever, but it's hard. Each of these milestones is hard. Even if you are an expert in your perceived field or you've come up with this solution and you are, you know that you have product market fit, it doesn't stop there, does it, right? You're back at the beginning again, you're, you know, you're scaling while you're inventing. It takes grit. So, I mean, it's just, I think that's why it's so inspiring, right? Because, you know, a lot of folks do this without necessarily having the sort of wins celebrated from the rooftop, right? Sometimes it's just about going back into that meeting room when you absolutely, with every fiber of your being, don't want to be there, right? So, you know, there's the those moments that I think, you know, you have to find ways to kind of pat yourself on the back at every stage and make sure that you have that grit to keep you going. You've experienced both building a startup and leading a national nonprofit organization. How has your definition of leadership or what it takes to, you know, live with grit uh evolved throughout those different chapters?

SPEAKER_01 19:34

I mean, I think what maybe was a little bit surprising is how much it is the same. Um, you know, I whether you're scaling a business or you're scaling, you know, a national organization, a national movement, um, if you're building a business, if you're building an organization that's driven from purpose, that's what leadership goes back to. Um whether you're aligning people behind uh your private sector enterprise or behind the, you know, behind a social venture. Um I think for me the biggest evolution though was um realizing that, you know, well, at the forum we have a small team of paid staff members, 20 people across the country. Um in leading the organization, I also have the pleasure of being the custodian of the relationships and leading to um and leading in our own way almost a thousand volunteers, donors, and sponsors that lend us their their personal and professional brands, a community of tens of thousands of entrepreneurs that consider us their community. And so I think it took me a while to realize that my job was not just to communicate and align all those folks in the community of behind purpose, but also to understand what motivated them and what, you know, when you're asking a large group of volunteers to support, really understanding what lights them up and what they need to be able to show up and do their best work in supporting our community. So it it took a while to realize, wow, this is actually, this is a really large, this is a really large team. And it's, you know, it's no different than the in most ways. And thinking about how we support our paid team members, um, it's just a lot bigger and a lot more complex.

SPEAKER_03 21:38

But I think that's sometimes what um gets overlooked, right? You mentioned that it's a lot of the same, but as as you grow a team like that, it's I think sometimes it's easier to feel like disconnected. How do you keep that sort of tight knit closeness of the team and that sort of energy even out? As you're growing and scaling to that size of team, like to thousands.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

I think it ki it comes back to alignment around purpose and recognizing that if there's clarity of vision, there's clarity of purpose, and there's communicate, there's communication and values alignment, the right people keep supporting. So I mean that's simple. It's it's a lot. It's a lot, but I think it's like anyone who's, I'm sure there's folks in the room who have grown organizations of that size. And it's it's how that vision gets passed across the organization through all of the different parts.

SPEAKER_03 22:46

I think that's totally fair. And I think it's a great reminder, right? Because we can start with a vision and feel like it's, you know, everywhere we look, it's on our whatever board documents, it's in our self-president, on the poster, right? But you have to live it and breathe it into the organization. Um we know every founder faces unexpected obstacles. What has been one of the stormiest moments in your entrepreneurial journey and what did it teach you?

SPEAKER_01 23:19

So I'm gonna do a two-part answer. Could be like 300, but just two. Um, so in the, you know, uh yeah, a few years into EPACT, we we were lucky with EPACT. We um we were accepted into an accelerator fairly early on. We went through the Grow Lab Accelerator, it became Highline, um, raised money quite early. Um, and we and we and so we we started uh we started growing, but we had a business that was really complex. We were selling into the public sector. Um it was, you know, early pilots, then took sometimes months, years to close. And we hit a point where we just we hadn't made enough progress. We we were running out of cash. Um, and we, you know, hit that point that many, many startups do, where we we, you know, we had a few, we had some, you know, we had lots of different ways we were hoping to raise money. Um, but we were like down, like really down to the wire, like paying the payroll out of my line, you know, out of my bank account. Um and we actually and we actually had done some layoffs. We had taken people down, you know, we had gone to our team, we had a super, super purpose-aligned, super supportive team. People took, I never get the microphone in the right place. I'm good. Um people had taken pay cuts. We had we had gone through every nickel we were spending in the company, and we had cut literally everything. And I still can remember sitting in the in a uh a little meeting room, and I'm on the phone with um, can't remember Shaw or Tellus, um, and I'm dropping our internet. We're a tech company. I'm dropping our internet to like, you know, like the, you know, like the package your grandma has. Like and my and Christine, my co-founder, came in and she had tears in her eyes, and she was like, hang up the phone. And uh, we had received uh a win grant, million-dollar win grant from Western Economic Diversification. It unlocked a bunch of matching venture capital, and we were back to the races, but we were down to within minutes, right? Um, but the lesson out of that was we knew what it took if we had to turn things off. And we also ran after that differently, right? We knew what things really were important and what things were frivolous. And that was probably the biggest thing that saved us in that little, you know, thing that happened in 2020. I'm not sure if anyone else went through that. That thing that started in 2020 and they said was gonna end in a week and went on for years. So during the pandemic, we um so for those of you who aren't familiar with EPAC, it's a system that's used primarily in um kids' programs, parks and rec, girl guides, the YMCAs to collect and manage kids' emergency information, check kids in and out of child care programs. And so when the pandemic hit and every child care program across North America shut down, we were in a pickle. And we had we had raised a Series A in uh early in the fall of 2019 of 2019. We you know, and we had uh one of the one of the banks had come in with a line that uh matched about a third of that money. So we had runway, we had runway. Um, and overnight we had our revenue had dropped to almost nothing. Um, or we couldn't access the line. We deployed a bunch of our venture capital. And so, but we'd been here. And so we went through, we went through that all again. We went, we we were able to do it quickly, right? We were able to say, okay, what can go? Went to our team, they were like, yep, we're in, we'll all take a cut, a pay cut. And then we did the other thing that I think is the most critical lesson in life in general, but in in business, um, which is when doors start shut, closing, looking for windows. And so we we were scanning, we were operating in uh almost every province and territory in Canada. We were operating in about half the US states. They all had different COVID lockdown protocols, blah, blah, blah. Our team was watching every one of them. We realized that YMCAs were giving free child care for frontline workers. We gave the Y all the YMCAs our product, brought on a whole bunch of new clients for no, you know, they were getting it free to start, but it meant that as things started to open, we'd increased um our client base. We also were lucky enough to have a um a check, we had built an app for checking kids in and out of um daycare. So we took a very, very early gamble that people were gonna have a check-in to check in and out with COVID stuff. We didn't even know one was doing it yet, and we got our developers working. We built a COVID check-in app. Um, and so we were ready as soon as that became a thing. Uh, and that meant that every one of those parks and rec departments across North America that was using our product needed to upgrade to our IS to a higher level. Um, so that brought our revenue, you know, we we charged per kid. So maybe half as many kids were going attending camp, but we were they were in a higher um package. So it brought us through the pandemic. It created, in the end, it created uh our product went in the US uh parks and rec space from a nice to have, this is a paper saver, to this is something that everyone has to have. And so it did open uh a window for exit, which we took earlier than we probably would have, you know, had the world not turned on its head. But um yeah, so it was it was a wild ride.

SPEAKER_03 30:14

What gave you the confidence? Because you mentioned in that there's two really distinct stories, right? One where you're about to turn off the lights, and then one where, you know, you've actually then able to turn the lights on maybe earlier than others. What gave you the confidence to make those decisions in those times? Because it's, you know, in those moments that there's a lot of pressure on you and being the founder in that seat. What did you draw on?

SPEAKER_01 30:44

The we had a really good team. And by that point, you know, by that point we had a, you know, we had a bigger team, they knew the market and they were not watching everything. We had Trello, we had a Trello board, we had a Trello board where we were literally like every day, people were responsible for watching and posting what was happening in different jurisdictions. And so we were it, you know, we were guessing at patterns and we also knew we had to do something. Like we couldn't sit. I guess that's the nice thing about when you've got no choice, is you have to make a choice, right? You have to pick, you have to pick something. And so I think, you know, we it wasn't easy, right? Because so many things were moving so fast. We were looking at and say, you know, we're talking to literally like the film industry was was checking people, you know, needed apps for checking in and out. We were talking to the healthcare sector, we're talking to all these different sectors, trying to figure out what we could do. And in the end, we thought, you know what, we have built the business in this area. We need to keep, and we no one knows what's gonna happen on the how long this pandemic is gonna go or what's gonna happen on the other side of it. So let's just focus our energy in this, let's do the best we can to make this business as strong as we can on the other side. So in some ways, that was a bit more of a conservative play. We may have done way better. We there, I still think sometimes like, okay, maybe we could have gambled and like tried to go into a completely different, you know, as some companies did like unbelievably well. We went, we went uh a bit more conservative route. Um, but that was, you know, that's what we knew we could do. It's what our investors were comfortable with. And evidently what you were also comfortable with, right?

SPEAKER_02 32:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:44

You've spoken about unlocking financial, social, and wisdom capital for entrepreneurs. Why are those three forms of capital equally important when building a company?

SPEAKER_01 32:58

So I think those um I think that one of the one of the biggest risks I see sometimes with entrepreneurs, um, especially entrepreneurs that are coming out of, you know, if we're coming out of the corporate world where you're you've grown a career and and you, you, as you grow, you're used to knowing. You're supposed to know everything in your area. And you come into entrepreneurship. And I don't care if you've got an MBA or whatever, you you don't, you're not gonna know everything. Every day there's gonna be something you feel really dumb about. And so I think access to wisdom and not just, you know, so this is why at the forum we run educational programs, but a lot of our educational programs are actually just access to the right people at the right time who hold those bits of wisdom that you might need to make a decision.

SPEAKER_03 33:54

And it's really hard to measure, right? But I'm sure so many people here can count on a conversation that they've had at the right time, right? I know I've also experienced that, you know, where it's about showing up and being in the room to allow those collisions to happen, right? And sometimes being involved in a broader ecosystem gives you that access to folks that can help you build that wisdom capital. Um we've seen that Canada's startup ecosystem continues to evolve. Uh, what opportunities do you see for the next generation of founders, particularly women entrepreneurs building technology companies, of which I'm sure there are several in the room. In fact, I know there are because I've had some great conversations with them already.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

Um so I think the good news for women building in tech now is um we have come a long way in the last 20 years. There, you know, there's uh a little bit less unconscious bias. Um and guys, when I talk about unconscious bias, you know, in women, uh women entrepreneurs, that unconscious bias is in the minds of women and men. It's not a it's not a you uh you versus uh us at all. It's the the shifting in um what a success, our our um unconscious uh view of what a successful entrepreneur looks like. And that um and that is changing, I think, as we see more and more diversity um in uh in entrepreneurship and in tech. Um but I think that's still something that uh that women in tech uh are facing and something that we need to continue to wrap support around. Um I think that uh with financial capital still probably the hardest, the the place that comes up the most. Um, AI is creating an opportunity for women to be um to be able to get a little bit further for all entrepreneurs, right? We're able to maybe bootstrap a little bit further because we can develop, uh we can develop at a at uh a much lower cost than we would have been able to pre-AI. So I think that for women will allow women to potentially get to that scaling. You know, we know statistically women um are only about half as likely as men to hit even half a million in annual revenue. So women are hitting these walls pretty early. And so I think that's that's something that uh if we play our cards right, we'll be able to get further. Um but I also think that I actually many things I had on my notes, actually, people have said to me um in this room tonight, and I'm like, oh gosh, now they're gonna think I cough, I just stole it. They said, but um the other thing that I love about uh the AI, the uh era of AI that we're in is that I think a lot of the innovation in AI will come from outside the tech sector, right? We're see, you know, we see this is the opportunity to see diversity of thought, people that are creating, working in different areas of healthcare or climate or you name it, and they're seeing opportunities, um, and they're seeing opportunities to build tech companies. And so I think um coming with the tech hat on, as a tech community, we need to figure out how to open arms to those people. We see it all the time in the forum. We see founders coming in that have like deep, deep experience in areas outside of tech, but they see what can be done if we can AI enable whatever that area is. So helping to build bridges into tech, helping to find great co-founder, technical co-founders, great CTOs, this I think is an opportunity for the sector and for women on both sides.

SPEAKER_03 38:02

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think it's a it um we need to maybe make tech building, you know, uh, cool again. I don't know. Something around, you know, I think people are so quick to be like, well, I'm not a tech company, I'm actually this. But like, let's be honest, we're all building something that uh and we're all connecting with something in tech. So I mean, why not just open the envelope there and sort of let folks come into the conversation? I think that's really important. I certainly have struggled with that. I feel kind of awkward whenever I say, like, oh, I was a CEO of a tech company. Like, was I? I was never an engineer, but I mean I was. And so I think it's uh subverting some of those, you know, what you said, unconscious bias, but then also us getting comfortable with those pieces as well, and being able to show up and stand in in those titles proudly is is a huge help too. Something that I'm definitely working on and learning as well. Um, I'd love to open it up to our audience. Are you good with that? Sure. Okay. Does anyone have any questions for Kirsten or myself? We have mics coming around, and I want to say thank you also. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

I think you just had a question over here.

SPEAKER_07 39:28

Hi, uh, thanks for that. That was great. Um so as we're now seeing that uh with AI, we're now seeing that things are starting to cost a lot of money for companies who really want to, you know, like talking and so on. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about yes, on one side it opens up, you know, the more democratizes building, but on the other hand, there's there's card those costs for building things that are really you know big. You need money for that. So, how do you see that uh kind of equilibrium?

SPEAKER_01 40:04

It's a good question. So um that is a good question. I don't know if I have the right answer for it. They you may know, you may have more insight from that.

SPEAKER_03 40:18

I don't know, do you have more analytics? And I guess I would just say that I think it's really easy, uh, especially at the beginning, to spend lots of money on an idea, a concept, a build. We all know that, right? And so AI adds this other layer to it, where I think people start to go, okay, well, you can build anything overnight. And you can, but it doesn't mean that it isn't costing you something, right? It's costing you time, or it's costing you money, or it's costing you whatever capital it is when you eventually go out and present this thing, whether it's could, bad, or ugly, to the people that you know, right? So I don't have like a straightforward answer to that, but what I sort of see is I think folks uh maybe starting to devalue their time that they spend on AI. Um, and I worry about the expense of that. So I just want folks to think about, you know, how much is it costing you um to build? Yes, sure, and how much you're paying Claude or whoever, not saying don't use those tools, but then also think about your time. And is that investment turning into something for you? That's certainly how I'm thinking about it in my own day-to-day. I don't know about you.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

Yeah, and I think that that's um how I would look at it is um, you know, if you're if, you know, when I when I say ability to build faster, to get to, you know, get to prototype faster, the or cheaper, it's not no, it's not no cost. It's like any question of how how long, how much are you going to have to invest to get to an MVP or to get to a prototype that is going to make it easier for you to be able to raise money. You know, when we um when we started EPACT, we had a team of uh, you know, we sold that pilot, and then we had a team, uh, we had to raise money right away because we and we had five engineers in offshore in Sri Lanka working um full-time for five months to build the product to build like really like a pretty crap um MVP. Um I think we can get there, you know, I think we can get there faster. At least we can show more, you know, we can show some early proof of concept much earlier with much less investment. And the question is the same as it was then is how much do you need before? How much do you need to be able to build show to raise capital or to get your first customer or what have you?

SPEAKER_05 42:59

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

There's one there.

SPEAKER_05 43:04

Oh, hi, thank you very much. I think the question is around traction and as we're trying to raise money.

SPEAKER_04 43:10

Uh if you prioritize the reach product in that way, or is it more about revenue? So when you think about, for example, were you prioritizing the reach, how many customers you were out there at or per customer, the revenue? Like how how how we think about that in terms of one of having these conversations with investors and funders, you serve the right answer, or is it a dependence?

SPEAKER_03 43:37

I'm just gonna paraphrase your question for the rest of the room because I don't think we could hear over here, but I think the question was around when you are in the phase of traction, how do you figure out what you're prioritizing, right? There's so many different sort of archoles that you can hit right at that phase, and it really does feel like that game. Um, so what what do you prioritize? Do you have? Some thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Yeah, we debated this, like um, I think that I mean it depends on it depends on your business, but really what an investor is looking for is path to revenue. Right? So, you know, and traction these days is typically unless you're showing massive reach that can be monetized in some way quickly, investors are looking for proof of um of revenue. If there are any investors in the room that would like to add to that or disagree with me, I'd love to hear it.

SPEAKER_02 44:44

There's a question here. Are we done? Oh, there's a question here. Do you want to do one more? Oh yeah, Ilya's first.

SPEAKER_04 44:56

Yeah, we'll drop that.

SPEAKER_08 45:03

Hi, um, thank you for the talk. Do you mind diving in a little more about your exit? Um, I studied by FR in 2022. What led up to it? How did you make the decision? How did you know it was the right time? A little bit more detail about that would create.

SPEAKER_01 45:17

Sure. So um the uh so we hit a point um as you know, after we after um things started to open up again, we were, you know, our revenue had come back up, we were above where we were going into the pandemic. Um, but we had deployed a lot. We had raised that, we had raised a certain that series A, and we had not had enough time to kind of get to a series B. So we had, so we were sitting at, and sorry, and at the same time, what we'd seen in the mar our main market was US parks and rec. And um the demand for our product or a comparable product was very high. And the bigger um parks and rec vendors, software vendors in the US were either going to build or buy. So we had the, it really came down to we had this choice of okay, did we think we could actually build um raise enough capital? And it was 2022, right? So it was a weird time. There was like a little, you know, moment there we where we maybe could have raised, and then it was really not good. Um, and at the same time, the risk was that if we weren't successful in raising enough money to actually build it to actually really scale and probably enter some other markets, that everybody in our core market would already have a dance partner, basically. So that so we were exploring both at the same time and shopping for exit. We had an offer that um that we were happy with, we um and that our investors were happy with, especially at that time. Everyone was looking at things and saying, okay, we've had an we've had enough of we've had enough of the uncertainty of the pandemic and let's go for it.

SPEAKER_03 47:25

Amazing. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you so much. Oh, do we have time for one more, Leah, or are you ready? Just one. Okay, one last question. Oh, what's the lake?

SPEAKER_09 47:37

Okay, first of all, uh, thank you for getting me away from my agents. Two hours. I actually shaved and came out of the house. I needed a break. Um, I see a strong correlation between success with AI and its small business. Like the bigger the companies that we work with, we see much slower adoption. And I really think the next three to five years is going to be all about small business. And you were sort of mentioning about that ceiling that women are hitting and the correlation between size. I'm guessing that the ratio of uh male to female in companies is uh probably almost perfectly correlated with the size, right? And so with that huge advantage that AI is bringing to small business startups, I would say that's a huge opportunity right now for women. So, but you know, before we carry from the last question there, there's there's so much to learn about things like token optimization or how to hack CLI accounts versus API. And there's all this whole institutional language that you need to learn. And I just see this massive knowledge gap. And it doesn't take long. It takes, you know, a good three months of sleepless nights to come out the other side of it, but the opportunities are massive. How do you how do you bring those opportunities to women through your organization?

SPEAKER_01 48:49

Uh, thanks for that question. So we ran a program um last year in partnership uh with Digital called the AI Skills Lab Canada. And we ran uh two different levels of AI skills training um for women entrepreneurs across the country, both online and in person. The demand for it, uh the funding covered 250 people through eight uh eight-week-long training. Um we had a wait list of another 500. So the demand is there. We know this is this is both an opportunity and also a big risk because women are adopting AI at a slower, at a slower rate. And part of it is, you know, some of it is is time. Some of it is time, honestly, to spend the time learning. And so what we're doing now is um we're working to integrate AI training into our other programming because it's, I mean, it's moving so fast, people are coming along at different levels of knowledge, different ways that um that they've already adopted AI. So now we're looking at as we move forward, how is AI just part of all of the different programming we do so that we can support people at different growth stages with what they need, you know, whether they're at a scaling stage and they're looking at how can I improve my operations with AI, or they're at the beginning and they're looking at, you know, how do I create a MVP or a prototype or what have you. So lots, lots of work to do. Um, there's lots, we're continuing to look for partners in this side of the work for funding uh for funding buckets, which you know, there's obviously lots of money that the uh government is putting towards this. And I I think for the next couple of years, it's gonna be how do we actually turn that into training uh that gives people the knowledge they need at their specific stage of uh of business in a way that they can do while also trying to run a business.

unknown 51:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:00

No, yeah, not easy, not a lot of time to get dressed and come out to events, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:08

Go ahead. Okay, I think that's a breath. Thank you, um, Angela and Kirsten for sharing your stories.