How many members of Toronto tech does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
More than 700 members of Toronto’s tech community packed the Queen Elizabeth Theatre last Thursday to take a break and laugh about the issues they had been discussing all week at the Toronto Tech Week edition of the Socially Inept: Tech Roast Show.
The travelling comedy show features three “recovering techies”—Nikita Oster, Jesse Warren, and Austin Nasso—mercilessly mocking a willing audience of founders, tech workers, and those recently laid off.
“Part of the concept is making fun of the culture of absurd self-promotion that is inherent in the world of tech,” Oster told BetaKit after the show, matching his colleagues in a shirt that emphasized the “AI” in “LAID OFF.”
“It’s a way of feeling seen and laughing at ourselves,” audience member and cloud consultant Jeremy Foran told BetaKit.
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The venue’s orchestra section was packed with excited attendees hoping to be called out by the performers. Some sported branded merch from their presumptive workplaces, like Amazon, Groq, and the Toronto Internet Exchange.
Oster, Warren, and Nasso roasted tech founders in the audience by expertly eviscerating their SEO capabilities, disingenuous LinkedIn profiles, and questionable business concepts.
“How did the fucking Dutch East India company come up before your company?” Nasso jeered after an extensive Google search for one startup’s website. “This might be the worst SEO of all time.”
The show also featured a satirical news segment akin to Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, a game of charades to guess audience members’ total compensation, and a brief but embarrassing scroll through one participant’s Hinge profile filled with Toronto “tech bros.”
Through its haze of deep burns, the Tech Roast set also revealed nuggets of truth about the state of Canadian tech, particularly the dissatisfaction some have with the current job market. When one audience participant claimed on stage that there are “thousands of jobs out there,” he was met with jeers from the crowd.
“I think they disagree,” Warren observed as the crowd started to boo. A recent report from ComIT found that nearly 64 percent of Canadian IT workers would consider relocating to the US if a similar opportunity arose.
The routine culminated in participants proving how “human” (and not AI) they were through improvised empathy exercises, such as consoling a friend after their dog was hit by a self-driving taxi. The clear winner, as voted by the crowd’s cheers, was a stage-shy Google DeepMind employee who earned his spot on stage for a compensation package that he said eclipsed $500,000.
When the performers asked the DeepMind employee to offer advice for job-seekers, he said, “Go to the US!”
The show came two days after Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez decried what he called Canada’s “Valley-or-death mentality” at Homecoming and encouraged founders to resist calls to move south of the border.
Despite the tongue-in-cheek cynicism, the Tech Roast trio said the Toronto crowd cheered louder than most cities when asked if they liked their jobs, and whether they knew how to write code. Following the show, Oster said the onstage comments were genuine.
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“They’re pretty excited and rowdy here,” Nasso said. “I feel like it’s a slightly younger demographic overall … most similar to New York, energy-wise.”
This was Tech Roast’s second-ever appearance in Toronto. Oster said the group started doing shows in Seattle and Mountain View, Calif., then targeted the biggest tech hubs in North America through “empirical analysis.” Vancouver is the only other Canadian city to make the cut so far.
“Montréal is a fantastic city for comedy, but I don’t know if it’s a fantastic city for tech,” Oster quipped.
After two hours of lampooning Canadian tech, BetaKit felt it was time to rib the roasters. When we asked each of them to name a Canadian tech company, Oster beat out Warren with “Shopify!” by a half-second.
“You took the only Canadian company!” Warren complained.
BetaKit is the official media partner of Toronto Tech Week. Feature image courtesy Madison McLauchlan for BetaKit.