Ray Walia on the Traction Conference in Vancouver

0:19let's start by talking a little bit about launch Academy what is your focus as an innovation lab in Vancouver and what kind of companies are you working with right now yes launch Academy has been around since 2012 and since then we've incubated well over 700 companies and as you can imagine over the years the type of companies that we've helped have changed but primarily they'll

0:40always been tech companies so mobile web SAS and more recently we're focusing on kind of emerging tech sectors blockchain obviously being one of them VRA our cybersecurity machine learning AI quantum computing it's a lot of the more transformational technology stacks because we do tend to work with more the entrepreneurs and the founders where we're not a real big proponent of how

1:09do we transform the world with the tech it's more about how do we transform the world through entrepreneurship and through companies and startups that's amazing right and it really is about the team behind this and it sounds like you guys have been doing this for a while and I know that later this year in August launch academy and boast are presenting the traction conference in

1:30here in Vancouver BC you know how long is the traction conference been running and what is new and different about this year's conference yeah so this would be our seventh actual conference we've been running them since 2014 originally in Banff Alberta and then we did the ones at Vancouver we have held them in San Francisco but more or less it's it's an anchor event here based in

1:54Vancouver every summer this year it's just I honestly say it's been getting better and better every year we are waiting on the top 10 in North America by incan Forbes and it's a destination event primarily for people in Silicon Valley as well because the caliber speakers that we have the subject matter and just the overall vibe of being in Vancouver has been received really well

2:19by all of our audiences and so what we have going on this year is again trying to make it bigger better every year is a two-day conference and it's two full days now whereas the past we used to do half days on the first day and evening parties this year we actually have dedicated summits so we have a product summit we have a growth summit and then we have our private it might only see

2:40excel summit followed up by the opening reception and so it's a full day of events and activities and then the next day is the mainstage one room thousand people up at the Parc Convention Center and overall theme is always around traction how do you acquire customers how do you retain your customers and more importantly how you monetize them and then the summit's now allow us to

3:07kind of do a deep dive on specific areas like product on growth whereas the state main stage on the second day is the top c-level executives coming in and really doing rapid-fire talks 15 20 minutes max getting up there and just talking about how can they give you information and knowledge that you can turn around and apply your business the very next day wow that sounds like quite

3:32the conference and congratulations on making Forbes an Inc sounds like a major achievement you touched on the caliber of the speakers a little bit there what does the lineup of speakers look like this year and on the main stage on the second day what are the major major speakers that we will see take to the main stage yeah again it's kind of the who's who of Silicon Valley and actually

3:53goes beyond so the valley that now but the caliber is typically you are either a unicorn company billion dollar valuation or you are on your fast-tracked awards that we just did a little bit of a presser today so henrique do Blue Grass who's the CEO Breck's fastest youngest company hey unicorn status he's a 22 year old founder that

4:22started a fin tech company that just raised a hundred million dollars at two point six billion dollar value way just announced this week so he'll be on our main stage talking about his five tips of how he grew his unicorn company very impressive progress it's so fast growth trajectory there you don't have an aim you Pressman's a co-founder of Medallia she was number seven on Forbes

4:45top 100 private companies you've got CTO red hat red hat apparently obviously just acquired by IBM for thirty four billion dollars let's see we got read from my list here so yeah Katherine Petrelli a co-founder a cabbage forms wondering most powerful women cabbage is it's red hot and the valley in the Bay Area being in Vancouver talking to a lot

5:13of people they are familiar with the cabbage name but that's kind of a whole point of traction is we're opening up people's eyes and ears to what's really moving the needle especially in the Bay Area so if in valley as we know is kind of that the center of tech and innovation and people need to know what's what's moving the needle there because it's going to come down the

5:31pipeline to Vancouver the next 12 to 24 months yeah the list goes on and on the CEO of mark sheets again four point three billion dollar market cap CEO gitlab CEOs a PA CTO WordPress engine CEO rubric had a product for confluence at Atlassian Zendesk box MailChimp duolingo yeah list goes on and on so it's just really

5:59people that really know their stuff when it comes to building and growing tech companies and it's a lineup that will resonate well with people familiar with these big names would also open up people's eyes and ears to hey I never heard of cabbage what are they and how did they get to where they are oh wow that's a press story and I can see how that's gonna be really relevant to other

6:25industries moving for that sounds like an amazing line-up of speakers and to have those on the main stage speaking to the audience I could see many tech founders and startups that will be there looking for that valuable information so I'm very much looking forward to main stage there now can you talk a little bit about the main sponsors of the event the launch academy and boast

6:46have been presenting this for quite a while but who are the main sponsors primarily yet so this year we've got quite a number of sponsors of again traction being based here in Vancouver and Canada it's unique that most of our sponsors are actually coming from the US and they're typically SAS companies they're focused on again traction growth and the reason why they're coming up

7:13here to sponsor is one day they want exposure to the Canadian market but be it's it's the caliber of speakers and the audience that's attractive because not only do we have this in-person conference but we do a lot of online activity we do webinars leading up to the conference and post conference we have our videos that are shared online afterwards and so for them it's it's

7:35really being associated with the subject matter and the type of speakers and so in terms of who's sponsoring so we've got pendo again big SAS company gain site intercom we should know all these by now that's quite a few that are lined up this year but scaled inference as an AI company Royal Bank of Canada RBC has stepped up on the Canadian side to get

8:03involved and then we've got Smythe CPAs Canadian company lime spot later calm a great local success story giving back to the community and jumping in as a sponsor activecampaign it's a really cool other type of partners like travel perk is a group of the area they help with the obviously managing travel for

8:34tech companies and they're stepping in to help us with all of our speakers and VC's and then press that are coming in flying in town one other thing to kind of highlight and point out is traction conference is actually a fundraiser for launch cabin so launch Academy itself is a nonprofit and traction conference is position as a fun way to raise money to help bring other

8:58activities and resources back into the tech community starting in Vancouver but we do CXO dinners and other events in seattle san francisco and we're expanding that to Los Angeles New York and Boston in Toronto this coming year and so traction as a fundraiser we don't pay for our speakers we don't pay any speaker fees so all these CEOs all these big names that are coming to our stage

9:23and coming to Vancouver are flying in on their own time and putting themselves up and hotels and whatnot and the trial brick has come aboard to help us facilitate that with the logistics on that's amazing ray it's great to see a large amount of American companies coming up to Vancouver it's really putting traction seems to be really putting than Coover on the map here for

9:47the tech and it's great to see the nonprofit initiatives as well that you guys are putting this towards and to show that it's going to a good cause now with all of these sponsors who are they really targeting for this conference is the event mainly for tech startups that are looking for traction as you say or is it also for large organizations or maybe just people that are looking to

10:09learn more about the tech industry traction itself is for anybody everybody like one of the things that we try to ensure is that all the speakers that are coming on stage they're there again I'm only talking for 15-20 minutes so it's a it's a short amount of time so for them to come up on stage they don't really have the luxury of talking about their

10:30company and boasting a bottle two big successes they have we have some strict guidelines that hey you need to make sure that the content that you're putting out there is relevant to the audience and really take that rule of thumb the doesn't matter the size of the company they should be able to turn turn around and take that information to apply to their own business the very

10:46next day so yes these are billion dollar companies that are coming on stage but they're not talking about processes that are unattainable for smaller companies and again when it comes to the sponsors they're really looking at the subject matter of being associated with us something about how do customers how to retain the money monetize taking your company global

11:09doing business on exponential scale and again a lot of the sponsors are SAS companies or like in terms of RBC like they want to help companies grow and these SAS companies are providing tools to help these companies grow and so the audience is really about companies that want to move the needle and so that could be a small company two-person shop to another billion come it's a funny

11:32thing is I've seen time and time again the CEOs and other speakers sitting in the audience watching the other talks because there's lots to learn and then again we've got that reputation in the valley of Attraction being one of the top destinations for these speakers again because I love Vancouver but it's the caliber of talks and subject matter that's neither resonates with them as

11:54well it's very interesting and you know that all of these billion-dollar companies at one point may have just been a two-person job in the garage so really just getting to that point everyone starts at the very beginning so it's interesting to see how quickly some of them have grown and that the large CEOs are also always learning and it's always day one in you know for many

12:15founders it's always day one you can always learn something from somebody even if they have a small company or a large company so it's really interesting to point that out now you touched a little bit on your nonprofit initiatives with launch academy but do you have any quantitative or qualitative goals that you have for launch Academy for you know the completion of traction

12:36conference in terms of traction conference itself again it's it's such a large scale and it does hit a wide variety of stages of companies and also geographic location again it's becoming a destination we get people flying in from Europe and from Asia to attend so it's hard for us to quantify what the exact results are on a impact for attendees but in terms of numbers I it's

13:04a thousand person conference it we've got speakers from all over the US and Canada coming in it also becomes a catalyst like again the summits that we have start to produce other types of results in terms engagement between the speakers and the audience again at the main stage it's hard to have an interaction with the speaker that's on stage but when you're

13:29at the summit these are smaller rooms and there are more workshop styles so you have a chance to really dive in deep with the speaker that's on stage and then understanding what tools are using or what techniques are trying to convey to you of how to scale your product or build your product so it adds global scale and then on top of that we have our private cxo events where it

13:53really is more of a networking and collaborative opportunity with the VCS and CEOs and locally and in town for the conference that are moving the needle but also that's now sparked off our CXO Summit series that we do in Seattle San Francisco we just have one in Toronto and Calgary as well and as I mentioned earlier we're expanding that into LA to New York to Boston and so traction has

14:22been the catalyst help fuel that and that's really about connecting Canadian CEOs and VC's with counterparts in these different markets and cross-promoting that's amazing ray thank you so much for your time today can you please remind the viewers when and where is the traction conference how can they learn more about it and also how can they learn more about launch Academy yeah

14:44it's a traction conference is August 7th and 8th here in Vancouver you can go online traction coffee Oso traction CO and F dot IO and lots of information there are the speaker lineup you can access tickets to that site as well and information about the agenda should be coming out soon hopefully by the end of this month we're constantly adding some more speakers and finalizing that INRI

15:09for the summit and if you want to learn more about launch academy its launch academy dot CA a big push that we're doing now with launch county is our maple program as we all know it's getting harder and harder to you build international businesses headquartered out of the US and so what we're trying to do is help international entrepreneurs that are trying to break

15:31into the North American market get through Canada and so we're a designated startup visa provider for the Canadian government where global skills referral partner and so our maple program was really designed to help this international entrepreneurs from around the world to get situated in Canada and build a strong foundation that they can then build international business need

15:54to go with America amazing I'll leave those links in the description box down below and thank you so much for your time rate all the best at traction conference and I'll see you there yeah no definitely its traction coffee at i/o and Bloch Academy CA love to connect with anybody that's interested in building great tech companies thank you thanks for time Ashley