Have your say at #TechVAN on February 23

TechToronto has expanded to the West Coast, with its inaugural TechVancouver event sponsored by Lighthouse Labs, happening on February 23 at 6 pm at the Unbounce office. Like its East Coast counterpart, #TechVAN features a stellar lineup of presenters from the local tech scene, including Kevin Sandhu from Grow, Andrew McLeod from RentMoola, Kimberly Hansen from playground.fm, Spencer Thompson from Sokanu, and Jayesh Parmar from Picatic.

For those looking to attend the Vancouver version of one of Toronto’s biggest tech networking events, organizer Alex Norman is offering a little extra incentive this week: the chance to make a full community announcement in front of the crowd. “Whether you want to promote your new app, get new users, or hire a key position, you’ll get 30 seconds in front of the audience with a slide of your design and the mic,” Norman says.

Tech Vancouver

How to enter the TechVancouver contest

“To enter, join the Meetup group at TechVancouver.org and leave a comment on the February event with your announcement. We’ll choose one winner at random! But don’t worry if you’re not selected: you can still make your announcement in front of the audience during our Community Open Mic, you’ll just have 10 seconds to do it — so make it quick!”

Why is this happening in 2016? The city is attracting more events like #TechVAN because of a robust and growing tech ecosystem, Norman notes. “Vancouver has a large enough number of founders and community organizations that we can reach out to make a monthly speaker series sustainable. There may be fewer startups than in Toronto, but there’s already many mature tech companies around here, like Plenty of Fish, Hootesuite, Cymax, Vision Critical, BuildDirect and others. Certainly, the technology sector is more prominent in Vancouver than Toronto.”

The regular speaker series events will continue to focus on lessons learned. “Both ecosystems can benefit from closer ties to other communities in Canada,” Norman says. “As well, we can highlight how both communities have great talent and can compete with the best talent globally. What we would like to explore is why tech has been so successful in Vancouver compared to Toronto and the rest of Canada and see how we can strengthen cross-Canada ties.”