Canada Now
Sparking bold ideas to help shape what’s next — through an unapologetically Canadian lens.
Canada Now
How Tech Ecosystems Compound: Lessons from Vancouver — with Dennis Pilarinos
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What makes a technology ecosystem stronger over time?
It isn’t one company, one funding announcement, or one breakthrough. Ecosystems compound as people gain experience, talent moves between companies, founders reinvest their capital and knowledge, and organizations take chances on the builders around them.
Dennis Pilarinos has experienced that process from almost every angle.
After studying computer science and business at Simon Fraser University, Dennis held senior roles at Microsoft and Amazon — becoming the first AWS employee in Vancouver and helping establish what would grow into a major local technology centre. He later founded Vancouver-based Buddybuild, which was acquired by Apple in 2018. Today, he is the founder and CEO of Unblocked, helping engineering teams and AI agents access the organizational context behind their code.
In this conversation, Dennis and Ashley explore how Vancouver’s technology ecosystem has evolved, why the arrival of major global companies can strengthen a local startup community, and what happens when experienced builders choose to stay, reinvest and build again.
IN THIS CONVERSATION:
• Why Canadian founders may need to think bigger
• How attitudes toward failure affect the next generation of builders
• The role of founder networks, global capital and experienced talent
• Why Canadian organizations need to take more chances on Canadian technology
• Whether Canada is moving quickly enough to adopt new tools
• How AI is lowering the barrier to creating software — without removing the harder work of building a durable business
• What Canada can do to retain more talent, experience and intellectual property
It’s a conversation about how technology ecosystems become more than the sum of their parts — and what lessons Vancouver may offer other emerging technology hubs.
Learn more about Dennis Pilarinos:
https://linkedin.com/in/dennispi
Explore Unblocked:
https://getunblocked.com
CANADA NOW
Canada Now companion article and show notes with full episode resources (coming soon): 🍁 https://canadanow.beehiiv.com
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Why AWS strengthens Vancouver’s tech ecosystem
00:25 Dennis Pilarinos and Vancouver’s technology story
02:10 From Simon Fraser University to Microsoft
04:17 Building Microsoft’s Vancouver development centre
06:28 Why Buddybuild was built in Vancouver
08:26 Canadian startups and global venture capital
09:43 Buddybuild’s Apple acquisition and local reinvestment
12:43 Canadian founders, ambition and global scale
15:01 Canadian and U.S. attitudes toward founder failure
16:51 Vancouver’s startup community and founder networks
19:31 How AWS and big tech develop local talent
22:02 Unblocked: Organizational context for AI agents
24:05 Navigating the early stages of AI adoption
26:59 AI adoption in Canada versus global technology hubs
29:33 Trust, visibility and choosing Canadian technology
32:35 How AI is changing software development
35:12 Evaluating AI tools by business outcomes
37:15 The future of Canada’s AI talent and technology ecosystem
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I remember at the time when AWS opened their office here that I got a lot of like kind of flack, like, oh, you know, it's bad for the ecosystem. And I think in almost every capacity, it's actually really good for the ecosystem. It continues to build that center of gravity. You have 3,000 people here. People at some point say, Hey, I want to go work on something else. They've developed a bunch of skills that they've learned that are portable to other companies that are in that ecosystem.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Canada now, where we explore the ideas, builders, and businesses shaping Canada's future. I'm your host, Ashley Smith. When we talk about building a strong technology ecosystem, we often focus on individual startups, funding announcements, or the number of jobs being created. But ecosystems aren't built by one company or one breakthrough. They grow over time as people gain experience, teams form and reform, knowledge and capital are reinvested, and talented builders make the deliberate choice to build here. My guest today has experienced that process from almost every angle. Dennis Pilarinos began his career after studying computer science and business at Simon Fraser University. He went on to hold senior roles at Microsoft and Amazon, becoming the first AWS employee in Vancouver and helping establish what would grow into a major local technology center. He later founded Vancouver-based Buddybuild, which was acquired by Apple in 2018. Today he is the founder and CEO of Unblocked, a Vancouver technology company helping engineering teams and AI agents access the context behind their code, including not just what was built, but why. In this conversation, we explore how technology ecosystems compound the ripple effects created when large global companies establish themselves in Canadian cities, what can remain after a successful company is acquired, and why Canada needs to become much better at recognizing and telling the stories of the people building here. We also look ahead at what Vancouver and Canada already have working in their favor and what it will take to produce more globally significant companies in the years ahead. Dennis, welcome to Canada Now. Thank you so much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, you have a really interesting history. And I we won't be able to dive into all of it because we just don't have the time. But I do like to provide the context for our audience to understand your point of view, what's informed some of the decisions you've made and some of the opinions that you hold today. So I would love to have a quick uh review of kind of where everything started for you, and then really look at, you know, what brought you back to prioritizing living and building and growing companies in and around Vancouver.
SPEAKER_01Well, like you mentioned, I went to school at Simon Fraser University. Uh, I had the opportunity to do co-ops, is what they call them in Canada. Internships is what they call them in the US. And I did an internship uh at Microsoft. Uh so my first um it was actually while I was in university, I had my own company. And so we were doing sales automation software. Um, I'm old, so I don't know if you remember Palm Pilots, but we were building, yeah. Okay, so I can always gauge like roughly where someone is in terms of like their tenure around or around technology based on Palm Pilots. But uh we were building sales automation software for Palm Pilots. I thought it'd be interesting to go work at a big company, um, see what that's like. So I got an internship or co-op at Microsoft, had one year left of school. Um, that internship was like quite formative. I thought it'd be really cool to kind of go and work there. Um, and so I got an offer in my last year, in my basically in the last week to finish my last year and then move to Seattle or Redmond and work in Microsoft HQ. So that's where it started. Um, is working with ironically in a building, uh there's, I don't know, something 100 and some odd buildings in Redmond. It's a large campus. A company in from Vancouver had just been acquired. It was called Encompass Labs, which became SharePoint, which is a big product for for Microsoft. And my hall, the hallway that my office was in was right next door to a bunch of Canadians who had just moved back from Vancouver. Oh, interesting. So it's like just yeah, which I haven't even thought about for years, but um, there was a bunch of us who basically moved from Vancouver around the same time and to go live in the States. And that's that's where it started 20 somewhat years ago. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And then what were you thinking about when you were deciding to come back?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So the first time I kind of had an opportunity to come back was as I kind of ascended the ranks through Microsoft. I thought um, you know, very personally, I thought it'd be interesting to um create an opportunity for myself and other folks who worked at Microsoft who might want to come back to Vancouver for either personal reasons or quality of life, or I thought there was actually some strategic value, in fact, um, for Microsoft purely from a company perspective. My last year and a half at Microsoft was building and running the development center here for them. And so that's how I wrapped up my career at Microsoft is helping establish the development center here in Vancouver.
SPEAKER_00I'm curious um what observations you've made or what patterns you've noticed since making that decision, whether it be gaps in the ecosystem here, anything notable that feels distinct to Vancouver that maybe has even changed over time.
SPEAKER_01I mean, yeah. 15 years ago, there was very few kind of opportunities for folks to who want to move back. So my way of thinking about it is like I'd love to move back to Vancouver as a technology worker and have an opportunity to work on something that I'm interested in, in the town that I love, in the city that I love, the country that I love, and you know, get paid relatively well by doing it. And it was really hard to find the intersection of those three things. I think that's less so the case these days. I think uh folks who are working in technology in general in general have many opportunities that are now available for them. And I think that will continue to be a growing, uh, a growing, growing opportunity for them. I think as anything has a life cycle, early days, it's like those opportunities don't exist at all. And you have to find them or create them or kind of solve that problem. And now as those opportunities exist, you start thinking about kind of like lesser prop problems on the Pavlovian scale, right? Which is like you need kind of the fundamental building blocks first. And now you're like, well, as a company builder, I wish we had more people who had more experience going from like not zero to one or but one to a hundred or a hundred to a billion, right? So, but that those are all problems, right? Or I consider happiness problems. Like the ecosystem is evolving. The problems that you're solving are those of scale as opposed to to initiation.
SPEAKER_00I'm curious how um the environment at the time shaped your decision to like build and scale your own company. So I'd love to think a bit about Bodybuild as an example. What did getting that off the ground look like for you? And then I'd love to unpack some of the decisions you made after you exited.
SPEAKER_01Sure. Um, so Buddybuild, I mean, from a company and product perspective, it was a problem that I'd faced. I'm a, you know, I always like to joke, half joking, half serious. I'm a mediocre developer and a relatively impatient person. That part's the serious part. Uh the joke is that I'm a mediocre developer, I'm not good at all. But and so in trying to unlock a very straightforward workflow, I realized that it was actually surprisingly painful to accomplish this developer workflow. And so I had realized, like in building the AWS office here, that there is world-class talent that exists here or is willing to move here. And so as I started thinking about the company and figuring out, well, where do I want to go and build that? Again, purely from a business and economics perspective, let alone kind of the personal feelings I have for it, it just made a lot more sense to build it here in Vancouver. Early in that process, you need to find, you know, there's two parts of it. It's like you have a great team, but you also need to have the financing. So they need to have a financing partner who's willing to take that bet. Canada in general has evolved its uh ability for foreign um venture capitalists to be able to invest in Canada and reduce the amount of restrictions and friction involved in actually doing that. So that has gotten progressively easier, and I think that helps the ecosystem. So we are fortunate to have a US-based investor who I would say just kind of mature in terms of how they would think about investing in in Canadian companies, even relative to Canadian investors. There have more risk, I would say, more appetite for risk. So, purely from a business perspective, world-class people, um, the economics made a ton of sense. We had a business partner that was willing to, or a financing partner that was willing to do it. Um, and so I don't know why you wouldn't at that point. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I am curious, and I know that the landscape, as you mentioned, has changed, but connecting the dots between small local startup with uh an international investor, how does that where's the bridge? Like, are they exploring the region as a tech hub, or are you finding capital through now your network?
SPEAKER_01Increasingly, like so I would say, you know, through the network was kind of where it started. And I think through numerous um, you know, outcomes, it's increasingly people are who are sophisticated investors from around the world are looking for opportunities to invest, no matter where the company is, right? I think like the arbitrary borders that we have in terms of business opportunities continue to be um pulled down. Yeah, I think for us, it was as a consequence of like some network that we have, but you know, I like to think about like folks who work on the financing part of it, they basically sell money, right? Like that's what they're ultimately doing. Their product is money. And so they're trying to find the best opportunity to deploy that capital so they can get a return on it. You know, if you can be discovered and there's no friction in deploying that capital from their perspective, why wouldn't you as well, right? Um, if there's, you know, a world-class team or some differentiation.
SPEAKER_00I know you had obviously a lot of success with that company. You had sort of the scenario that I think a lot of builders and founders look for with a successful exit to a company like Apple, which I think I'm assuming is probably a best case type of scenario, also pro for your own profile in many ways. But I understand that when you exited, um, you did decide intentionally to reinvest some of the proceeds that you made into local companies. Yeah. And then you started on your next idea. I'd love to know a little bit about that thinking, returning the capital into the local builders and how that's transpired. Like, what has that meant for you?
SPEAKER_01There's I like to live my life by like a handful of these different quotes. Um, one of them is like, I remember it was actually in high school. I can still think of my math teacher, where he had all these posters written along the wall. And one of them was from I think Einstein, which is like, if I've seen further than anyone else, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants. To me, that interpretation means that like you were fortunate to be in a place where you got to advance something or do something because of the people that were there before you. That's kind of one of the ways that I think about it. There's um, I think almost like a an obligation that you have to like pay it forward, right? So if you're fortunate to have these outcomes, how do you help other people achieve those same, their, their desired outcomes, whatever they might be? So for me, yeah, there was uh a certain amount of the proceeds of the acquisition from my my own personal um part of that that I set aside and I said, you know, um, I will invest in companies where I think I can be helpful and uh see how we can just continue to like scale up that ecosystem.
SPEAKER_00And am I able to ask how that's sort of generally played out for you in terms of the companies you've invested in?
SPEAKER_01I mean, it's always the people, right? Like the people that I've met and some of the things that they're working on, I think are just like I either have a personal passion uh around the problems and and the people. So that that's been incredibly like personally rewarding. Financially, the expectation of an early stage investor is that you never see that money again. Um, that fortunately hasn't been the case, which is a crazy upside. But my goal ultimately is to like find people that I can genuinely be helpful to and make them become successful and for things that I that I care about. There's a company in Vancouver um called Help Texts, um, which is like largely outside of like certainly a developer tools, technology, hardcore, like, you know, software nerd type stuff. But they make a world generally a better place because um they help people go through their grief process, right? So it's a service that um often employers buy for their employees as part of their benefits package. When you experience a loss, this service helps, and they've diagnostically and scientifically proven that these messages at these times help these people through that grief process. How do you not support something like that, right? So yeah, financial is one part of it. Any experience that I can share as a consequence of my journey, um, absolutely going to make that that entrepreneur um make myself available to that entrepreneur.
SPEAKER_00I'm curious what you've maybe learned when by taking off the founder, builder, operator hat, and being someone who's helping with funding and maybe mentorship from the local perspective. Is there anything that's surprised you in terms of themes from some of these other builders or or things they've needed to learn to really achieve the type of scale that they've wanted to?
SPEAKER_01It's increasingly better, but typically I find that Canadians um tend to be relatively limited in terms of their ambitions and like the the swing for the fences that they can potentially have. That's gotten unquestionably better because I think the world has just become a lot more accessible. Uh, but typically I think Canadians try to think relatively small as compared to their American counterparts. And so one of the things I do for some of those entrepreneurs is really challenge the thesis and see how you can make it have a bigger impact or have a bigger blast radius.
SPEAKER_00Are there certain prompts or questions that you ask some of these founders that helps them start thinking in that sort of more global or bigger mindset?
SPEAKER_01It's almost a cliche. It's driven by a consequence of like them being afraid to fail. Right. And so people like to kind of play it safe because it reduces the scope and potential impact if if you actually kind of blow up, if things don't actually work out. But that's not the nature of certainly venture capital businesses, right? It's kind of like run the table, like you have to kind of win it all at pretty much any cost. That's very different from like a bootstrap company or a lifestyle company, which is fine. But I think if you want to have big impacts, you have to like, you know, swing for the fences. And it's not easy and it's not fun.
SPEAKER_00I I'm curious if you find there's if there's a disparity or a you mentioned like the American counterparts, their peers basically across the border. If, for example, you're seeing a founder have to wind down an idea, like what does that next step look like for them? Are they do you find that founders who don't succeed the first time around are excited and willing to go at the next idea? Or do you find there's a cultural difference with between Canadians and Americans, with like that, you know, try and try again?
SPEAKER_01I think it's I don't know that that's I think there's definitely a difference between how people uh perceive success and failure, but it's typically not the founder. It's usually people around them.
SPEAKER_00Gotcha.
SPEAKER_01Right. And so like I would say, yeah, the founder, I mean, I don't think any founder likes flaming out American, Canadian, doesn't matter what your nationality is, where you live, like that's a super painful experience. The I think the ecosystem around them, right? I think, you know, broad generalizations, a Canadian kind of conclusion would be like that person sucks. They weren't able to like, you know, uh make it happen. Americans would say, like, well, that was a great learning experience. What are you gonna do next? Right. And so the founder, I think, in both cases has to go through a bit of a journey, uh, I would say, but the ecosystem and like the sentiment that surrounds them in terms of getting them back up and like trying again is uh is definitely something that I I see.
SPEAKER_00Just from a broader sort of zooming out context, who should be hearing this message and what should they be thinking about?
SPEAKER_01One of my closest friends is like is the founder of a very well-known, very successful, like you know, eminently IPO company. Another friend um is like in the earliest stages of like trying to find an idea. Uh, I'm kind of somewhere in the middle. Um, and all of us basically ride the same roller coaster. It's like you always face kind of problems. Um, a founder almost certainly like thinks of them as existential relative to their perspective. It is, you know, I was chatting with him recently. It's like everyone experiences heartburn. It's just part of it. Like suffering is uh suffering is inevitable, like pain is a choice for better or for worse. Like that's just kind of the nature of it, unfortunately. So if you're going through this journey and you're feeling kind of bad about where you are or yourself or whatever, it doesn't matter. It's all that's always the case. Like you in some capacity, I think that's just like part of being successful, which is like you should kind of always be happy, but never satisfied with where you're at with it. So how do you keep pushing forward?
SPEAKER_00I am wondering what your experience has been seeing the growth of more obvious and visible hubs and how here locally and how that has aided founders or like what what are you seeing in the landscape that meaningfully moves the needle for the ecosystem here?
SPEAKER_01For sure. I think there's multiple layers to it, right? So purely as a founder, I think having a group of peers that you can kind of like, I just talked about, right? One on one end of the spectrum is like eminently in the IPO versus the other end, like we can all help each other, right? So having that peer group is like it's very lonely if you're by yourself, irrespective of what your role is. If you choose a role where you're like you only get to work on the hardest problems that you don't have a choice in, like having a peer group to like talk about that is a big change over the last, I would say like 10, 15 years for sure. There's lots of folks that you can have those conversations with. I think there's a lot more like just infrastructure. I think there's, you know, there's co-working spaces, there's large tenants like AWS who like host get togethers and meetups. Like there's just a lot more activity and activation um from, you know, even just from everything from physical space to financing to um just acceptance that, like, yeah, most probably this thing isn't gonna work out, but we want to take a bet on it. And we're gonna be reasonable in terms of like what the expectation is from a financing perspective. So all of these things kind of like mature as the ecosystem matures, which I think um is just a feedback cycle. Being able to complain as a founder to other founders and be like, oh, this is what my experience is like, being able to like go and meet other people because there's now a center of gravity around this kind of in Vancouver is something that is like it's all additive.
SPEAKER_00It seems those really um folks should be leaning in, like they should be paying attention and leaning in where these opportunities arise. I'm curious how you've seen the up-and-comers. Uh, are they do you see them leaning in?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Yeah. More so than ever before. I would say I think there's just a lot more excitement because there's a lot more to talk about. So on Thursday, as an example, we have this thing called Founders Day. Um, there's a gentleman here named Chris Newman who puts it together. Chris has been an incredible community organizer, right? And so he gets folks from that whole spectrum from like pre kind of idea phase all the way to like eminently IPO or and anywhere in between. And yeah, there's a handful of topics that are are discussed, but just like every conference, it's not the topics, it's the people that you meet there, right? So yeah, I think it's it's fantastic where they we have that that center of gravity again, that mass.
SPEAKER_00Tell me a bit about what you've seen with the growth of some of these bigger box, the companies that have taken over a lot of space, starting with one, you know, employee to over 3,000 employees as an example. What does that mean for a city like ours?
SPEAKER_01It was interesting. I remember at the time um when AWS opened their their office here that I got a lot of like kind of flack and kind of back channel, like, oh, you know, it's bad for the ecosystem and any number of detractors. Um I never fully internalized why that, how people could kind of come to that conclusion. I think in almost every capacity, it's actually really good for the ecosystem because what it does is it continues to build that center of gravity, right? So you have 3,000 people here. People at some point say, Hey, I want to go work on something else. They've developed a bunch of skills that they've learned at these companies, and now they have those skills that are portable to other companies that are in that ecosystem. Right. So purely from a talent development perspective, you know, a lot of those large tenants bring people from all over the world, those people work for three, four, five, seven years, whatever it is, really up-level the skills, have kind of gotten comfortable in kind of this ecosystem and say, like, I want to actually go back to an earlier stage company or to another opportunity where I can be accretive to that ecosystem again. And like we see that just repeatedly over and over and over. Like out of the, I think it's yeah, three and a half or four thousand people who work there now, uh, certainly at Amazon. I don't know, even if like 10 or 20% of those people leave over the next year or the next couple of years, that's like hundreds and hundreds of people who are now funneling into these other technology companies and improving the probability of them being successful. How's that like to me? That's like not even debatable.
SPEAKER_00So I'd love to know how that's impacted you and your business.
SPEAKER_01Oh, we don't hire anyone from AWS. I'm just kidding. No, we do. I mean, that's the thing, right? Like we we I planted this seed, you know, years and years ago, and like now we harvest the crop, right? So folks who are like, hey, I've done this really cool stuff here, I've seen really hard technical problems, I've you know, learned a whole bunch of things, and I actually just want to go and work at a small company that's maybe building stuff that's like more cutting edge, or I'm I'm more interested in working at a smaller team or whatever it is. I can think of like probably a third ish of our team now has worked, a third, yeah, I would say about a third of our engineering team has worked at kind of these big box places. Yeah. Right. And so it's not something that's theoretical, it's something that like we Literally experience every single day.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So why don't you tell me a little bit more about Unblocked? And I'd love to hear about what it is that you do as a company through language that the senior leader of some organization who's not necessarily a technical might understand.
SPEAKER_01That's totally fine. Yeah, yeah. We we'll keep it, we'll try to keep the nerdyisms out of it or what have you. Yeah, totally fine. In my career, I've seen a handful of these kind of technological waves. Um we've seen the transition from on-premise computing to cloud, right? Everyone, you know, moves their workloads from data centers that they own and operate to like, oh, I'm going to use um AWS as an example. We've seen this transition from um, well, the introduction of mobile, right? Which fundamentally changed the way that people build and consume software, right? Um, I challenge you to drive by a bus stop where at least 95% of the people aren't on their phone. Other topic for conversation for another day. And this next technological way that we see right now is obviously AI. Um, and so it's rapidly kind of becoming defined. Um, but one of the things that's very clear is the way it works is general purpose um models like anthropic or open AI. They understand everything about how the world works in general, but nothing about how an organization works. Right. So when you work at any company and you ask one of those agents to do something, it doesn't have any visibility into how your business does it and why it's done that way. It's very, very skilled, but it's it's first day on the job. You can be very, very proficient, but if you don't understand all the history and context behind it, you're probably going to struggle to do your job effectively. And so what Unblock does is basically take all the organizational context and give it to those AI agents so they can be efficient in the in their tasks. That's that's what it does at the highest level, right? It's like we take the years of experience that um most people accrue as they work in that company, and we distill it down to something an agent can use um milliseconds after it starts uh starts execution.
SPEAKER_00How are you observing companies in general trying to integrate systems, say before they come to you and use your product? Like what has the experience looked like as organizations are trying to figure this all out? Like what what are any horror stories as an English?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, endless, endless horror stories. Yeah. I mean, it just like any anything in the early days, right? Like I love looking at like these historical photos of of Vancouver, any city, whatever, right? You're just like, oh my goodness, they used to have like dirt roads with like, you know, tracks of for the horses and wagons, whatever. It's it was just it's an absolute nightmare, right? And then as you know, things advance and technology kind of comes into fruition, we have the sky train and so on and so forth. So AI is in its most nascent stages. So all the things that people are trying are really kind of like rudimentary. They kind of almost solve the problem, but the technology is moving at such a rate that the solutions that you put into place almost immediately become kind of out of date. We, I think, have a unique perspective in the way that we actually solve this problem, where we're seeing as people kind of go through this, what I would call an AI maturity life cycle, right? They're like, oh, I'm gonna try this. Oh, that kind of worked, but it didn't get me there. Then I'm gonna try this. Ah, that didn't quite work. It kind of got me a little bit more. We are kind of like the solution that you need to ultimately get to. And we've been doing it for years. Uh, and so we've kind of had a head start. Yeah. Um, and so inevitably, people, once they discover unblocked, are like, oh, this is absolutely amazing. This is kind of the solution that we need and is durable as as the as the landscape evolves.
SPEAKER_00Are you able to give me a general sense of the range of your type of customer?
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, my entire career has been building software for developers, right? For engineers. So all of our customers are very technical by nature. Um, they're inherently skeptical and kind of think they can do everything themselves. They don't need any any other tools or any other products to help them do their jobs. Our customers tend to be organizations that have a lot of history, like their legacy. Um, so we have companies who have typically hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of engineers who are building software. And that's just the proxy by which, like how old the code base is, how much institutional knowledge sits in their systems of record. Um, if you're familiar with Slack, or if you use Google Docs or any of these types of things where you have conversations and you document things, when you get to an organization of any like tenure or size, very quickly you see that like the information is hard to find and it often contradicts each other. And so our customers are the ones who have these legacy code bases, have these monstrosities of like effectively different documents kind of stored in different different places. And we help make sense of it all.
SPEAKER_00I can't help but ask, and maybe there's no important answer to this question, but I'm assuming that your customers are global or international, like all over. Do you have any data or even anecdotes around how you see Canadian organizations adopting tools or innovative systems that could help them? Is do you see any sort of disconnect with um how Canadian companies move in that way?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I think of that on two dimensions. It's a great question. The American, like unquestionably, the heart of the tech ecosystem is San Francisco. So they are going to be like the trendsetter. They're the center of it. They're like typically quite ahead of kind of everyone else or what have you. Um so I don't think that's even kind of remotely debatable. It was interesting. I went, I had this kind of similar thought exercise a couple of months ago where we traveled to London to speak to a at a conference. And I was like, oh, I suspect, you know, the other side of the water, you're going to be a little bit further delayed in terms of like adopting some of these approaches or technologies or tools. Blown away, like much, much further along. Canada, um, there's pockets, I would say, like there's a handful of companies who I think are very, very early on, but typically that would say they're a little bit um risk adverse.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Right. And so sometimes they are um less comfortable adopting um some of these technologies. They inevitably catch up, but I think it doesn't do the broader ecosystem um the same level of uh of service if if you were to just be like, we gotta try this, right? Like the predisposition, I would say certainly San Francisco is like try everything as quickly as you possibly can, let the best, best solution survive. Here I think Canada's like, well, let's just see what the the solution will be and maybe we'll give it a shot.
SPEAKER_00Besides just the shift in mindset, besides just saying it would be good to, you know, start playing around and and trying things sooner, are there any other is there anything else you're thinking about to help Canadian companies kind of be more comfortable and confident taking what they might see as more risk?
SPEAKER_01I think spending time in those ecosystems is actually probably pretty helpful. Okay. Right? Surrounding yourself by peop with people who kind of ask the question, like, well, why not? Right. As opposed to give you reasons for why, why not? Yeah, yeah. Right. There's a big difference between the intonation of those two, those two words. I think spending time in those ecosystems does change your frame of reference and change your perspective on um maybe the risk tolerance that you that you might have.
SPEAKER_00That does bring me back to the idea around even for yourself as a founder, for example, and your company unblocked as an example. The almost the trust that might be needed for companies to take a chance on a company. But even if we zoom out and think more about funding, um, if we zoom out and think about partnerships, any way that any part of the environment can engage with, say, a company, a product, or a founder, this kind of being more visible as a founder, being more um understood and trusted, I guess, as someone that's built a company or what the company ethos is and what they've done and sort of that like proof that's out there that can start shining the light more on the people, the builders, the companies, and how we can like differentiate some of the companies that we could work with here as an example. I'd love to know a little bit about your thinking behind maybe your own evolution, even as someone that maybe wasn't as front and center, perhaps, or public-facing as a founder and maybe now becoming more so. What are you thinking about with that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think um, again, broad generalizations, right? Not always the case. I can think of like counterexamples even within our company. But I think in general, I think the way we think about it is if we have an opportunity to like be supportive to another Canadian company, we take that opportunity. We we invest more time and energy to help that company become successful. So if we have a business need and there is an option to solve that need with a Canadian technology provider, we will absolutely explore that. I've been disappointed by the lack of that same commitment by other technological leaders in the country where they say those things but don't actually do them. And I've witnessed it many times. It's it's definitely disappointing. I don't know what motivates that behavior, um, but it's not the way that we we like to work for sure. I can think of unblocked has been around for several years now. The version of the the product that we shipped three years ago versus where we are now is very, very different. We've had a couple of like significant Canadian companies take bets on us and have, you know, their CTOs, like you should be charging us more. Right. Like continued feedback even to this day, which is the value that you've created as time has progressed. Um, we knew it wouldn't be like obvious on day one, but we want to be there as a partner for you uh and support you. And now obviously that value curve has exceeded what you're charging us. Right. Right. So like here's more feedback for you. Right. Right. And so and we do the same thing, right? In the same way that those folks have taken a bet on us. We try to do the same thing for for other technology companies. I think that's something that like there should be a kind of almost fast track process to be like, oh, you're part of this ecosystem and you know it's a real problem and it sounds like you have a solution for it. We're just gonna like double down and explore that in a more rapid way because I think it helps everyone become successful. Um, and it's sometimes very disappointing to see when people choose the like an anti-pattern to that.
SPEAKER_00I think I have to ask how you're seeing things and feeling just generally with how the technology with AI is moving so quickly and how I think that's inviting a lot of new builders in many ways, which is great, I assume. Um, I would also assume that makes the landscape noisier. How do you differentiate between a good idea, something that's sustainable, whether it's you as a potential investor or you just thinking about the health of the tech ecosystem here? How are you thinking about how things are changing so quickly? What's top of mind?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think we're at this like interesting inflection point where it's never been cheaper to build software. And so you've dramatically reduced the cost. Um, and so that dramatically introduces more software. And so, like the software part of it, certainly from my perspective, is a challenge that will basically kind of go to zero. That's not the hardest part of building a business, I would say. You kind of need to have the software, certainly if you're if you're a software company, right? How do you maintain it? How do you operate it? How do you, how do you sell it, how do you market it? There's all these other business functions that need to be in place that AI doesn't have a snap-your-finger solution for. Typically, I think what a lot of people are experiencing right now is they can like ask an AI to go and solve a very kind of fun problem for them. And it's remarkable how quickly it gets like that very first version of that thing up there. And you can kind of iterate on it. But it's typically just a little toy. It's not something that's like a line of business critical piece of infrastructure, right? Like, I don't think you're using one of these tools to build the back end for a major banking system. Right. Right. Would you want to trust that? Probably not, right? Like so, and like understandably, a lot of financial institutions are very careful in how they use and adopt these tools. I think overall, it's like an absolutely um, it's a good thing when you reduce the friction in building software because more software actually does go get built. Now it's just a matter of like, how do you up-level the core software, like adjacent functions that need to exist? I was like giving this example, which is like, I've never built or framed a house. I could go to Home Depot and get a nail gun, but would you want me framing your dream house? Right? Like, how do you know that the marble is going to stay where you place it at the end, as opposed to like it, you know, the framing so bad that it rolls to the end of the room? Just because I have the tool doesn't mean I have the skills.
SPEAKER_00That does sort of speak to that problem I think you mentioned, that you notice in Canadian organizations as an example, this sort of delay in adopting things or choosing the product. And now I can just imagine it feels almost harder because there is like you're so, so when you're an organization that's trying to figure out what system or suite of products or what sort of support you need to mature your organization, bring it into the next generation. Like, is there one key thing that you would encourage that organization to ask itself, like so it can take the next step?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think there's I don't know where we are. I've kind of like taken a moratorium on predicting timelines. Of course. But because it's just like it's almost impossible at this point. But I think we're kind of at the end of this. I need to use AI because I need to use AI, right? Like everyone's doing it. I need to do it. I feel like I'm gonna be left behind. I think people are kind of recognizing that, like, well, if you're using this tool, it should be towards an outcome. You know, there's this mania around using this technological wave, but you really should think, like, well, what problem am I trying to solve? And what solution is gonna get me to that problem in kind of the most effective way? It's a cost or time or what have you. Um, I think people are starting to take a more balanced uh view of that. Um, we certainly see in the market, you know, vendors who rolled out hundreds of thousands of dollars of software in these organizations to their CIO, CTO, you know, exec level folks who feel this pressure from the board or the media or whatever it is. And a year after that software has been rolled out, they're like, wow, utilization is like actually very, very small. That's costing us a ton of money. And how did it move these business metrics? Right. So people are starting to clue in to say, like, now, what's the rate at where that happens? Hard to predict. But um, we're definitely seeing that in the market. And I think that's I think that's just a very mature way of evaluating any solution that you're working with.
SPEAKER_00I'd love to know if you were thinking 10 years out. And as you said, like we can't predict how fast things are going to change. We can assume they're gonna change pretty quickly. But if you were thinking about particularly the Canadian tech ecosystem and maybe even with an emphasis here in Vancouver, what would you like to see that feels realistic for our hub here in 10 years? What does a good and realistic version of our city from that angle look like to you?
SPEAKER_01It's a good question. I mean, I think this kind of this wave of computing, it will be like I've lived through a bunch of them at this point. This one will definitely have an impact. I don't think people have fully completely uh appreciated. Um, it is, we are very much in the earliest stages of it. And there's lots and lots of applications of this technology that will um change how how business is done. We, you know, Canada in general, if you look, take a look at a lot of the leaders, thought leaders and technologists, um, academics who are prominent in AI, they're Canadian. Right. And so what I'd love to see is those folks have the opportunity to like do their thing in Canada. Um, I have a slight preference for Vancouver, just because you know Vancouver versus Toronto always. Um shout out to all my Toronto friends. Um, but yeah, I think giving those people the opportunity to be competitive uh in a Canadian uh ecosystem is what I'd love to see. I give them the opportunity to either start or join companies um to keep that IP uh and keep that experience in Canada, I think is um where we need to be in 10 years.
SPEAKER_00Without unpacking a whole Pandora's box on that, is there one thing that you see that is a game changer to allow that to really happen?
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_01In short form? No. Is there one thing? No, I I don't think so. I mean, I think it's always gonna be uh there's so many factors to that, right? I think there's lots of really good people who are doing lots of good work to like make that a reality, but I don't think it's a single thing that you can do. I think awareness that the opportunity exists is probably the thing that like we need to have a stronger voice for.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah. Well, I really like that message, and that's part of why I'm doing Canada now here is to share the stories of business leaders, innovators, builders, and founders and their experiences, what they're seeing, and maybe demystifying a little bit of what what what it looks like to have success as um as a builder here. So uh Dennis, I really appreciate this conversation. I feel like we could dive into so many more things, but I want to make sure that anyone listening or watching has a way to find you or connect with you. I will put links to the company and perhaps your LinkedIn bio in the show notes. Is there anywhere else people should look to to learn more about you?
SPEAKER_01That's probably the best. Yeah. LinkedIn, hit at the company. You can always just email Dennis atgetomblock.com. Happy to chat.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Well, all right, everyone. I hope uh you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. If you're tuning in on audio, please subscribe. If you're watching on YouTube, please hit that subscribe button as well. And uh I'm really excited for the rest of Canada Now season two. Until next time, have a great day.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.