What is Uniting the Prairies (UP)?
Uniting the Prairies (UP) is an annual movement where the top VCs, angels, prairie expats, and tech leaders come together to elevate the prairie tech community.
The second iteration of Uniting the Prairies was set to be hosted on May 7, 2020 at the Delta Bessborough in Saskatoon, before being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But we're impatient and couldn't wait until 2021 to bring you some #prairietech news.
Keep your eyes peeled in the coming weeks for a major UP 2020 announcement...😎
What have the speakers from UP 2020 been doing in the meantime?
Elizabeth Yin
We've kept an eye out on some people who were supposed to speak at the physical version of the conference earlier this year. They've been up to some pretty incredible things.
Elizabeth Yin, General Partner at Hustle Fund, was attending as a speaker, mentor, and investor at this year's conference.
Recently, Elizabeth appeared on E1055 of This Week in Startups podcast with Jason Calacanis to talk about Hustle Fund's unique portfolio strategy. The firm's model is a hybrid between spray & pray high-frequency investing & concentrated traditional VC portfolios. They also write small cheques of $25K with an investment decision made within 1-2 weeks of the first meeting.
Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch, Co-founder of Census, was supposed to be on a panel called "Golden Handcuffs" at UP 2020.
His startup, Census, recently came out of stealth mode as the company announced a $4.3M seed funding in a TechCrunch article. Census builds a layer on top of the data warehouse that makes it easy for the data team to distribute product data where it's needed.
Fun fact #1: Sean's from Saskatoon, SK :)
Max Schmeiser
Max Schmeiser recently started his new position as Head of Data Science at Twitter. Prior to joining Twitter, he was the Head of Data Science at Convoy where he built and lead the data science team of 80+ people that helped transform the $800 billion trucking industry.
Fun fact #2: Max is from Regina, SK.
Jordan Dutchak
Jordan Dutchak, Executive Director of Co.Labs, is the founder and the lead organizer of Uniting the Prairies. He was interviewed on Black Swan #10 of the BetaKit Podcast about UP 2020 not-not happening and what could have been.
How do I keep up with all the Uniting the Prairies goodness?
Sign up for our co-labs.ca/contact or follow our socials (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) so you get all the info!
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