Today, 10 years after David Tyldesley’s conference production firm joined forces with Kanata startup accelerator L-Spark to host the first SaaS North event in the nation’s capital, AI is becoming as mainstream as hosting data remotely in the cloud was back in 2016.
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When David Tyldesley first started mulling the idea of creating a conference for software entrepreneurs more than a decade ago, artificial intelligence-driven applications were still in their infancy.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was just getting off the ground. In Ottawa, AI trailblazers such as MindBridge Analytics, which uses artificial intelligence to detect fraud and irregularities in financial statements, were still ironing out the kinks in their maiden platforms.
Today, 10 years after Tyldesley’s conference production firm joined forces with Kanata startup accelerator L-Spark to host the first SaaS North event in the nation’s capital, AI is becoming as mainstream as hosting data remotely in the cloud was back in 2016.
“As an entrepreneur, you’ve got to always be evolving, always adapting,” says Tyldesley, the co-founder and senior vice-president of Vancouver-based Cube Business Media. “SaaS is changing.”
In 2015, Cube Business Media was itself a fledgling startup. Seeing demand surge for events catering to software-as-a-service companies in the United States as cloud-based applications became the norm, Tyldesley figured it was time Canada had a major SaaS conference of its own. Why couldn’t his young company be the one to make it a reality?
The veteran trade show executive tapped into his rolodex and soon discovered Leo Lax and his team at L-Spark, another recently founded enterprise catering to SaaS startups. In what Tyldesley describes as a “very Canadian” way of doing business, the organizations decided to put their complementary strengths — Cube’s organizational prowess, L-Spark’s in-depth knowledge of the Canadian SaaS industry — to good use.
“Instead of saying, ‘We’re going to do our thing, you do your thing,’ we said, ‘Let’s do it together,’” Tyldesley explains. “The rest is history.”
The first SaaS North conference in the fall of 2016 drew about 400 attendees from 200 companies. Ten years later, the event attracts in excess of 2,000 entrepreneurs, investors and other industry insiders from more than 500 companies to Rogers Centre Ottawa each November.
As the 10th anniversary of SaaS North draws near, Tyldesley says the conference is continuing to evolve.
In February, for example, SaaS North’s organizers tweaked the event’s name, adding “AI” on the end to reflect a growing emphasis on artificial intelligence.
Tyldesley says this November’s gathering will lean more than ever into AI-related issues such as costing models and the emerging field of “tokenomics” — the study of how to get the most out of “tokens,” the pieces of text or data that AI models read and generate.
Since most AI tools and services measure and bill usage by the number of tokens processed, weighing their costs and benefits is an exercise SaaS companies can’t afford to ignore, Tyldesley says. It’s just one example of an issue that barely registered on anyone’s radar a decade ago, but is now becoming a top priority for tech leaders.
“It’s all changing so rapidly,” he says. “We knew that the conference had to continue to evolve.”
New defence summit
But that’s not the only change attendees at the 11th edition of the conference will notice.
Last week, organizers announced this year’s SaaS North will feature a new one-day summit for businesses “eyeing, entering, or expanding in the defence and dual-use market.”
The event, dubbed Deploy, will take place on Nov. 5, the second day of the conference. It will be hosted by Kanata-based Dominion Dynamics, which is quickly emerging as the leader of a new crop of defence-tech startups looking to capitalize on a wave of military spending in Canada.
Tyldesley got the idea for Deploy after seeing Dominion Dynamics founder and CEO Eliot Pence speak at SaaS North last fall. With Canadian sovereignty suddenly the topic du jour in government circles, Tyldesley sensed an opportunity to use the conference as a chance to get defence-tech founders and funders in the same room to figure out how to build, finance and sell homegrown technology to militaries in Canada and around the world.
“I thought, ‘Geez, this guy (Pence) is a sharp guy. He’s really doing some amazing things,’” Tyldesley recalls.
“It started to make a lot of sense to me that SaaS North was a good spot to help sort of incubate a defence-tech summit. Timing is everything. What’s missing is the road map. How do we help founders understand the opportunities in the (defence and security) space?”
Tyldesley says the entrepreneurs who will walk the halls of the downtown convention hall this November specialize in the very products — think AI-powered applications, communications software, cybersecurity platforms, high-tech sensors and the like — that fighting forces of the 21st century require.
He notes that attendees will hear from “real founders and operators that are already in defence” such as Pence and Sam Witherspoon, the co-founder and CEO of Ottawa-based Anvil Intelligence, the summit’s co-sponsor.
Pence, Witherspoon and other featured speakers will be “telling the truth about how hard it is to cross over” from making technology for commercial use to producing it for military customers, Tyldesley says.
While “dual-use” technologies catering to both commercial and military applications can be highly lucrative, breaking into the defence sector isn’t for the faint of heart, he explains.
“If a bunch of people leave the room after the conference and say, ‘Look, dual-use is not for me,’ that’s success too. This isn’t about promotion. It’s about what opportunities are realistically achievable.”
Tyldesley says defence customers “buy differently” than their counterparts in the civilian world, a point the gathering will emphasize.
“The defence industry, they’re buying specific capabilities. You need to know what those capabilities are and then build around that specifically, versus just building whatever you want and assuming that the market’s going to come and buy it because it’s a little bit better than the competition’s version of it.
“I believe as patriotic Canadians, we want to create another 10 or 20 Dominion Dynamics,” he adds. “How do we help startup founders understand the opportunity and what it’s going to take? We’re going to be sharing the good, the bad and the ugly from the companies that have already been there.”
While Deploy was just announced last week and organizers are still lining up speakers and presenters, the new summit is already generating buzz in industry circles, Tyldesley says.
He expects record crowds at this year’s SaaS North, thanks in no small part to the burgeoning defence-tech boom.
“This is just the beginning,” he says. “I think this one-day summit will grow in the future and there will be more and more content that we can expand into it.”
