The Next Generation

BetaKit Most Ambitious

The IRL revolution

Socratica (Waterloo, ON)

Georgia Berg on making space for messy.

I’m in the changing room of a hockey rink in Waterloo, Ont., stress-eating a chicken shawarma.

Andre is using a ratchet screwdriver to adjust Santiago’s Iron Man suit. Sophie is running through her script in the showers—where the acoustics are good—while Maisha fine-tunes the bass-playing robot. Rishi is pacing back and forth, finding the perfect rhythm to unveil his urban planning software for the first time. There are nine or so more of us in various stages of preparation.

We are a group of University of Waterloo students, here to participate in Symposium, an annual World’s Fair-style exhibition of passion projects.

Since starting in 2022, Symposium has scaled in scope and ambition with each edition. When I first participated last year, I stood beside my poems (glued to Bristol board) in front of a few hundred people. This time, I’m about to talk in front of a capacity crowd of 2,500, with a few thousand more watching virtually.

Included in this crowd are a few strangers I’d met on the internet who are crashing on my couch for the night: one took the train from Montréal, another took a plane from Boston, the third came in on the GO Bus.

A pyrotechnics license has been obtained for the show.

Symposium is the largest, loudest event organized by Socratica, a student-led community that runs small, high-trust group events, where any kind of creative work can thrive.

To understand Socratica’s origins, you need to understand the University of Waterloo. Along with the school’s world-class co-op program comes intense focus on becoming a great employee: grinding LeetCode, launching side projects, attending hackathons.

But the hustle isn’t matched by a strong creative culture for the university’s history of graduating artists, entrepreneurs, and engineers. The return to in-person studies after the COVID-19 pandemic saw many young people looking to build new communities.

So Socratica was started by Adi Sharma and Aman Mathur: at least once a week, students meet for Pomodoro sessions, snacks, and socialization. At the end of the session, participants demo what they’ve been working on: everything from elaborate yo-yo routines, game jams, watercolour painting, book reading, hardware construction and software development.

Everyone wants to have made something, but only a small fraction are interested in the boots-on-the-ground reality of making things, which often requires long hours, repetitive tasks, and recuperating from all the plans that failed. The internet provides a gallery of finished projects, emerging easily from nothing, without metadata to track the unglamorous, thankless work someone put in.

Socratica is thoroughly unsentimental about the pains of building. At the last session I attended, a student demoed his free, open-source 2D animation platform. He shared the progress he had made: after four hours of hard work, the splash screen was a few hundred pixels larger. “You can see that it looks totally different now,” he joked.

We all clapped and cheered him on, because frustratingly small changes are a reminder that nothing worth doing is easy.

Rolling with the chaos is a core component of Socratica, which features no explicitly defined leadership roles. As such, there are no roles to apply to or be fired from: if you want to see something done, you do it. In the past, “something” has meant everything from film festivals to bonfires.

Socratica has quickly attracted the attention of investors and sponsors, but—more importantly—its spirit has proliferated around the world.

Anyone interested in starting a Socratica node in their city can find documentation on the Socratica website that walks them through setup, covering everything from branding to lighting. There are now more than thirty nodes, which are as close to Waterloo as Guelph and as far as Singapore, and run with no external oversight.

If this sounds like an experiment, that’s because it is. Socratica is a passion project shared by self-starters who come to the table with different pursuits but share the same desire: a place to socialize with fellow nerds while getting an idea off the ground.

Socratica gives its members the license to do what they truly care about. It also instills a sense of collective responsibility: the “host pledge,” which is recited at sessions with new people present, contains the promise to befriend anyone who isn’t already otherwise engaged in conversation or work. Having a community of people in your corner removes the friction that can make starting something new feel insurmountable.

For a long while after I started attending Socratica, I didn’t show what I was working on, because writing felt too personal to reveal half-finished. I loved watching other people demo what they were working on, but I was very precious about “my process.”

Creative writing is almost always done alone, behind a closed door. This has its merits, but I am so thankful that Socratica has changed my very black-and-white way of thinking. Surprise, surprise: reading aloud the opening paragraphs of a story I had just written was a lovely experience. People gave a shit about something I’d just made, even though it was still a stumbling newborn! Having people be curious about your work-in-progress rather than the final product can be incredibly creatively freeing.

Symposium was a big night in a Waterloo hockey rink, but it wasn’t the point. At any size and scale, Socratica makes space for the kind of effort underrated in most of the world: messy, passionate, and occasionally overambitious.

Socratica is a community where trying something new means more than doing something perfectly, which is a great source of freedom for people with big ideas.

It’s a force multiplier for individual creativity.

Disrupting the youth mental health crisis

acceleratorKHP (Toronto, ON)

In 2023, Kids Help Phone had more than 4.7 million interactions with young people in crisis, the highest service volume in the organization’s history.

Providing frontline mental health services to young people across the country, the organization is no stranger to grim numbers: Mental health is a struggle for more than half of Canadian youth, for whom suicide is the second-leading cause of death. Seventy percent of people living with a mental illness saw their symptoms begin before the age of 18.

Dealing with this escalating crisis has provided the organization with perhaps the world’s largest dataset on youth mental health, including more than 45 million individual messages. Last year, acceleratorKHP was created to unlock the power of this data and transform how digital mental health solutions are built, tested, and scaled. The goal is to bridge the gap between clinical research and technology so that new supports reach young people more quickly.

Mental health services lag well behind other clinical fields in terms of innovation and access. Through this work, acceleratorKHP hopes to shift the landscape of youth mental health support with strong technological infrastructure, targeted insights, and new service pilots, turning a Canadian crisis into an opportunity to lead.

No beer pong on the cap table

Front Row Ventures (Montréal, QC)

Does your lead investor live in your dorm?

It’s a unique situation faced by founders funded by Front Row Ventures, Canada’s largest student-led investment fund.

FRV is currently active on more than 25 campuses in Québec, Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta, with an investment team made up of students who have prioritized investing in underrepresented groups.

Since its launch in 2016, FRV has raised over $6 million and invested in more than 50 Canadian startups, which have gone on to collectively raise over $200 million in follow-on capital.

FRV operates as a non-profit and reinvests its proceeds back into its educational offering, Front Row Academy, which has trained more than 300 student entrepreneurs and venture associates.

“We want to back more entrepreneurs across Canada, to have more impact on the ecosystem, to back high-performance and diverse companies, and to train the next generation of tech talent in Canada,” said Emmanuelle Coppinger, FRV’s managing partner. “Because Canada needs it.”

A bridge to the world

Cansbridge Fellowship (Toronto, ON)

The logo of the Cansbridge Fellowship was inspired by a traditional Chinese footbridge.

Founded in 2011 by William and Diana Yu, the organization provides Canada’s most promising undergraduate students with a bridge to Asia, and to thinking differently about the world.

“If you’re not thinking global, you’re not thinking big enough,” said William Yu.

With an acceptance rate of less than two percent, the Cansbridge Fellowship admits 15 undergraduate students from across Canada each year. They receive a $10,000 scholarship to complete a self-directed internship in Asia, take part in an intensive one-week bootcamp and conference in Silicon Valley—where Yu is now based—and form a lifelong network of individuals focused on being leaders of their industries and pushing the boundaries of their field.

“Seeing the calibre of undergraduate students who’d been a part of the program helped me realize the impact we could have at a young age,” said Gonzalo Soto, a Cansbridge Fellow in 2022.

The program is now his bridge to an alumni network that’s diverse, impressive, and motivated. Fellows hold regular meetups across the country, and have founded companies including Xatoms, Tuuli, Avo, Mosaic Manufacturing, V2, smartARM, Juniper, and Onova.

Feature image courtesy Creative Studio via Unsplash.