Top of Mind in Tech: Why Sacha Gera believes Ottawa is entering a new ‘golden age in tech’

Whether in his current role as CEO of Jatom Systems (JSI) or in his time as a tech advocate, Sacha Gera maintains a leadership position in the Ottawa tech community. Now, he says, Ottawa is ushering in a new “golden age in tech” — if the city can only “have a little swagger.” Gera is the co-founder of Kandy.io and a director on the boards of Quantropi, CENGN and the Ottawa Board of Trade. Gera joined JSI last summer after more than doubling his department's revenues at Calian Group. The Carleton University alumnus began his career at Nortel in the 1990s and has spent the years since working to encourage collaboration, innovation and leadership in Ottawa tech. While he has held leadership roles in companies such as Calian and BlackBerry, at the end of the day he says advocacy for the tech community is “what it’s all about.” Gera said he is passionate about bringing the community together and that now is the time to execute on some big ideas. In this instalment of Top of Mind in Tech, Gera discusses pushing the Canadian government to re-examine its procurement practices, leveraging tech’s newfound “radical collaboration,” and “marketing the crap” out of Ottawa’s opportunities for tech startups. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Advocating for a shift in Canadian government procurement practices

There's a real opportunity for the Canadian government to support Canadian technology, especially around procurement practices. There's a little bit of this risk-aversion in the government, where many executives and the government feel safer to buy from larger multinationals, which are often not Canadian companies. When you think about the challenges right now, there's a real opportunity for the Canadian government, not only to solve their own issues around cost effectiveness, but also this productivity challenge by helping to support and buy Canadian. Canada is great at producing a lot of startups, but not so good at creating unicorns that scale past a billion dollars and stay in Canada. I think, in general, the way our procurement system works is not always favourable to smaller Canadian entities, but I'll boil it down to the fact that most Canadian decision-makers, whether it's been procurement or within the departments, are risk-averse. At a recent panel with many Canadian government agencies, there was a saying that you can't get fired for buying IBM or some other big company, but there is a risk-aversion around taking a chance on a Canadian company. Oftentimes, your first clientele is possibly government. And you get some wind behind your sails and then you start to scale globally. And the Canadian flag is so strong globally, but I can tell you, most Ottawa or Canadian companies have an easier time doing business outside of Canada when it comes to the government than in Ottawa. I think this culture of risk-aversion is not being proudly Canadian, whereas in America, they're very proud to buy American; I think there's a real challenge there. And so there's an opportunity to improve upon that. Ottawa is home to 1,800 tech companies, many of which are startups and scale-ups, and billions of dollars are spent in our own backyard every single year on third-party products, software and various technologies. And, disproportionately, those dollars are spent with companies that are not local or not Canadian. When it comes to finding your first clientele or finding a secure, predictable contract, which governments often award, it's hard to get there, but once you get there, it gives you this period of continuity. That's often the security that many companies need to fund their expansion, to get their next round of funding to go global, which is generally a path for everybody's roadmap as you scale up. I think there are probably cases where folks start companies and they think, “Hey, the government's in my backyard. I should be able to leverage this.” The reality is sometimes it is met with disappointment and, in other cases, I think people gave up on it a long time ago. I think you can find that this is a common ground among not just Ottawa companies, but across Canada, that it is extraordinarily difficult to break into the Canadian government and do business with them despite how much money they spend with others. And again, it's an opportunity. I think it's an opportunity with potential austerity coming in with the productivity challenges. We need more tech companies in Canada, more Shopifys, and this is part of the recipe to support the scaling-up so that these companies can get more capital and scale globally.

Take advantage of community’s ‘radical collaboration’

Last year, I wrote an op-ed: Innovation, leadership and collaboration needed to reclaim Ottawa's tech glory. What was keeping me up a lot last year was the fact that we had so many disparate voices around technology in Ottawa and we didn't seem to be singing off the same song sheet. But this is a bit of a good news story. From my perspective, what I see going on is actually a moment in time where we're getting this radical collaboration. We have a set of stakeholders and leadership across Invest Ottawa, the Ottawa Board of Trade, Ottawa Tourism, the City of Ottawa, as well as KNBA in Kanata, where we realize we have limited resources and that if we stick in our swim lanes but work collaboratively together we can get some big things done. I feel like there's been a lot of momentum. There's still a lot of work to do. So, great, we've got the camaraderie. We've got a great setup of leadership now. What do we do with that? It is starting to lead to some great ideation and some real traction but there's a lot more work to do. So, for example, this call to action has resulted in this collaboration or helped propel it and now we're seeing ideas like this concept of Innovation Week, where we want to showcase the best of Ottawa tech that's going to be led by Invest Ottawa on the backs of one of our major trade shows. We're starting to see some of these ideations come together and this radical collaboration come together. So, in one way, I'm super excited because I'm not kept up at night anymore thinking, “Wow, our tech scene is really falling apart, disparate and fragmented.” I'm really encouraged by the collaboration. On the flip side, we have these ideas, now it's time to execute our amazing ideas from these multiple stakeholders. I think we can really start to showcase, be louder and prouder about all the amazing tech work that's happening in Ottawa. So it's on my mind that we need to get these things done and I'm starting to see leadership in the collaboration, which is a great news story. There are also goals around having strong data to drive not only marketing, but economic policy, to advocate for the right things and the right funding for government. I think there's more that can be done to be intellectually honest about where we stand around startups and scale-ups and the healthiness of our overall tech sector. We're meeting new people that we don't normally get exposed to in Canada and some of the interconnections and just dialogue is amazing. That's what Ottawa has in spades: there's a tighter community of tech wanting to help each other, whereas not to diminish what's going on in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, but it's just so disparate and fragmented. I think this interconnectedness and this collaboration that we had many years ago has come back and that is going to propel that forward.

Marketing the capital advantage

Historically and culturally, Ottawa, Gatineau and the National Capital Region tend to be a little less loud and proud. We have a lot of success stories here and we're in this golden era of immigration. In this hybrid work environment, it's less about how many buildings and headquarters logos you have here. Ottawa is No. 1 in North America for tech concentration, which most people are surprised with. We may not have as many headquarters here anymore, but this is no longer a race to track more headquarters and buildings and logos. It is very much about this golden age of immigration, because it's no secret that most startups are founded by immigrants. We all know there's a lot of immigration going on and, yes, it comes with challenges like the housing crisis. But we're growing faster than we've ever grown before and it's largely driven by immigration. We have to ask ourselves, “What's going to keep an immigrant who is founding their next company here?” Some of the branding and marketing in Ottawa is negative. Historically, we tend to have a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Ottawa is boring, Ottawa is small.” “There's not enough opportunity here.” “It's a government town.” But the reality is this, it's not true anymore. We're a thriving metropolis. There's more cranes on the horizon than there ever has been in the city. We have to do ourselves a favour and shift the story to what it really is, which is we're one of the fastest-growing cities in all of North America right now. We have a thriving tech sector but, most importantly, this is where we need to amplify. Why are we different from every other city? When you can choose to start off anywhere right now or immigrate to any city, we have the best quality of life of any city, in my opinion, in North America. It's partly why I moved back here with my family 14 years ago from Toronto. There's no other city that offers you big-city amenities, the waterways, the museums, the access to this kind of tech talent, the interconnectedness of this collaboration, and the quality of life here. In this post-COVID world, it's about getting more than your fair share of the immigrants you want here. They're going to start these startups and fuel them. I think we have this in spades and we’ve got to market the crap out of it. It's an opportunity for us, if we can come together and paint that story. I'm not saying it's all from immigrants, but I think a large proportion are and any immigrant has the opportunity today to decide where they want to live and a lot of times it's influenced by marketing and branding. In Ottawa, we need to change the dialogue. Ottawa is not boring. It's fun. And long term, the quality of life here is going to continue to be better than other cities. I think we're making the right decisions and this radical collaboration is working. We have got to change the narrative and we’ve got to get out of our own way and do a better job of marketing everything. As leaders and CEOs in Ottawa, it's partly our responsibility to be ambassadors and spread the word at these networking events. Be self-promoting, have a little swagger, be loud and proud. I think it's really important, because that positivity is contagious. We’ve got to trump the negativity, because I think it's BS, to be honest. A year ago, downtown was in this crisis mode and there's been so much around downtown revitalization. There was a moment in time where tech was also in crisis mode. But our radical collaboration is working and there's now work to do to make some of these ideas come to fruition. That's what's top of mind. I think all the ingredients are there for a new golden age of tech in Ottawa. It’s just about execution at this point.