Dear Diary: 36 Hours in Saskatoon
Dear Diary,
I did a 36 hour whirlwind trip to Saskatoon. Here’s what I learned:
There are no good flight options to Saskatoon from Edmonton. Whattup with that?
Is driving for 5 hours in the winter, with fog blanketing the highway, and at 12:45am, a sign of dedication to your venture or insanity?
Forgetting a phone charger always sucks and causes anxiety - but I shouldn’t have worried, I was in Saskatoon!
Saskatoon is so welcoming. It has that type of neighbourly friendliness that you typically associate with small towns. It’s the kind of town where you run into the President of the Chambers of Commerce at a café and he offers you some rapid Covid tests.
Jesse’s a vegetarian/pescatarian?? Who knew!
The community is filled with people who are genuinely interested in working together to build out more YXE success stories like Vendasta. 600+ employees, over $160 million in capital raised, and one helluva awesome office location - way to go, Vendasta!
I loved Co.Lab’s intimate, customized approach to building a startup community. All members of their coworking space stay rent-free, and get to be part of the Co.Labs community, receive customized supports, directly from the leadership team and outside professionals, and when they grow too big for the coworking space, they ‘graduate’ to an office down the hall. And even after graduation, they can still join in for the Lunch and Learns. You can apply to be part of their next cohort until Jan 25.
And while it may only have a population of 246,376, the manager of a new VC fund specializing in Ag-tech startups explained how they plan to invest in 30 or more companies at $0.5M a pop, support them with the physical and human resources required to commercialize their technology patiently over the next 5-10 years, and cement Saskatchewan as a global hub for Agri-food innovation with the type of confidence one usually finds in a Valley-based accelerator (the fund is closed, by the way, with international LPs).
Startup TNT is bumping in YXE! Investors, entrepreneurs, and service providers all got together, starting at 5 pm, for casual drinks, banter and – get this! – Medium Rare Hamburgers late into the night. If there’s one way straight to this American’s heart, it’s with juicy, fresh-cut, hand-made burgers cooked to order!
We could all use a little more Saskatoon in our lives.
All in all, it was a wicked 36 hours in Saskatoon. I can’t wait to go back and hang out with more startup peeps!
Goodnight Diary. Goodnight Moon.