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When Philippe Burns worked at Neo Financial, his responsibilities revolved around building interpersonal relationships — like creating a 50-person customer experience team to onboard half a million new Neo customers in just four months. But when Burns, who had studied sociology and social entrepreneurship at university, was tasked with helping Neo hire more senior-level tech staff, he quickly noticed a lack of social and networking events for the tech community at-large.
So, instead of hosting recruitment events for Neo, Burns opted for a weekly networking event series, Tech Thursday. Tech Thursday was run through Neo until this past July, when it became its own company with Burns as the co-founder and Neo as the title sponsor for its events. It’s been running in Calgary for one-and-a-half years (and in Winnipeg for two-and-a-half years).
Tech Thursday in Calgary usually meets at The Pioneer and averages around 100 attendees per event, which are all listed on Eventbrite. Each event focuses on a topic that falls into one of four pillars: business topics, technical topics, local trends and DE&I topics. Past events have discussed innovations in hydrogen, the impacts of AI and cloud in investment management, mental health tech, or featured panels and fireside chats with various organizations. The company has city-specific steering committees who generate event and topic ideas. Around 67 per cent of the audience is made up of senior-level folks in tech such as managers, c-suite executives and founders, while the remaining audience is mostly intermediate and junior folks.
“What we wanted to create is this environment where you could go meet with your peers, learn from what they were building and creating, and really showcase some of the awesome work being done in these two communities,” says Burns.
