It’s not every day you get to sit in on business conversations between physicists, engineers, venture capitalists, and molecular biologists, but at Edmonton Startup Week’s Deep Tech Day, those types of conversations are par for the course.
“It’s extremely important for people in Edmonton to rally around each other.”
Janet Bannister,
Staircase Ventures
Deep Tech Day is the first deep tech-focused day of programming in Edmonton Startup Week’s 13-year history. Built on the success of Edmonton Unlimited’s prior deep tech symposium this past June, the day’s itinerary brought together investors, researchers, technical founders, and ecosystem leaders to discuss the opportunities and challenges of trying to commercialize in a field as complex as deep tech.
Deep tech refers to companies, products, or innovations within the broader tech ecosystem that are based on cutting-edge research or engineering breakthroughs, rather than business model innovations.
Programming opened with a conversation between Nizar Jaffer Somji, a lifelong entrepreneur, on his time founding Matrikon, an Edmonton-born industrial operational technology software company that sold in 2010 to Honeywell for $139 million USD ($145 million CAD). In conversation with leadership from both Edmonton’s Sprout Fund and Eecomobility, Somji spoke at length about Matrikon’s journey from a one-person startup to a globally competitive, publicly traded tech company with operations in six continents and more than 600 employees.
While not specifically a deep tech company, Matrikon’s story mimics many of the dynamics deep tech founders experience today: tackling complex problems amid a rapidly changing technical landscape and the challenges of exporting the solutions to a global audience.
Somji’s fireside chat was followed by a panel discussion between a handful of prominent Edmonton deep tech founders, including Zero Point Cryogenics’ founder and University of Alberta physicist John P. Davis, G2V Optics’ CEO and Ph.D in engineering, Ryan Tucker, and Future Fields biotech co-founder and COO Jalene Anderson-Baron.
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“A lot of advice technical founders receive is: find yourself a business person,” Tucker, whose company develops LED solar simulators that mimic the sun for testing solar panels and cells, said.
Tucker told audiences that his business relationship with G2V founder Mike Taschuk works because Tucker, as the “business person,” has both a technical understanding and the ability to translate that information into terminology investors and customers could understand.
“I see a lot of teams not starting with the right combination of chemistry,” he said. “Trust and shared vision is such an important part of team formation.”
Deep Tech Day closed out its program with two back-to-back panels on investment and accessing venture capital. The first honed in on how to use pilot programming to build commercial traction, and was moderated by Sprout Fund’s Kristina Milke with discussions on how to parse pilot opportunities and whether there are pathways to building lasting commercial relationships.
“There are two types of ecosystems: Silicon Valley, and everybody else.”
Allen Lau,
Two Small Fish Ventures
The second and final seminar brought Allen Lau, co-founder of early-stage deep-tech venture firm Two Small Fish Ventures, together with Janet Bannister, the managing partner of Staircase Ventures, for an ask-me-anything style session where they answered submitted questions from Edmonton founders. Questions ran the gamut from what the most common commercialization mistakes university founders make to what would make VCs pass on a company even if they like a founder.
But it was Lau and Bannister’s parting comments that made the biggest impact, with both VCs reiterating that Edmonton is as equally positioned as any other non-Silicon Valley ecosystem to build, grow, and be successful in deep tech.
“There are two types of ecosystems: Silicon Valley, and everybody else. So you’re not alone,” Lau said. “Edmonton is a very large city to build a company with world-class people; you can scale that to a few hundred employees without any problems. By that time you’re well on your way to being a world-class company; you can set up a satellite office and still headquarter here.”
“It’s extremely important for people in Edmonton to rally around each other, to build a community and believe that great companies can be built here,” Bannister said. “Ecosystems that have a can-do attitude that lifts others up can be extremely successful.”
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy Jesse Cole for BetaKit.