Terminal Tech Talks

What is modern day product management? What is it like building a product for product managers while scaling rapidly? What’s the differences between managing B2B and B2C products? We explore these questions and more in our next Terminal Tech Talk.

This talk features Latif Nanji, the co-founder and CEO of Roadmunk, one of the fastest growing tech companies in North America. Roadmunk is a powerful SaaS platform for product strategy and roadmapping with over 100 employees Toronto and Waterloo Region.

Moderating this fireside chat will be Sam Legge, Product Manager and Consumer Experiences Lead at North, the makers of the world’s first everyday smart glasses. North has raised approximately $200 million dollars to develop a world’s first consumer product, Focals by North.

During this tech talk, we will explore a number of topics including:

1] Product Design and Minimum Saleable Products

2] Products Role in the Modern Tech to Drive Growth

3] Minimizing Cognitive Load In Product Design

4] Retention and Reforge as Drivers

Do you love product design? Are you a product designer? Our next Terminal Tech Talk features Matt Rae who will walk us through how design teams can leverage other teams to change design culture. He will cover how designers should collaborate, evangelize and equip teams internally. He also covers how to listen to your teams to create great products and a strong design culture. Matt is a design ambassador, outdoor enthusiast and founder.

Matt Rae is also a product designer at Zenreach. Zenreach is a technology company based in San Francisco, California. Zenreach also has offices in Scottsdale, Arizona as well as Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Zenreach produces a SaaS marketing platform used by businesses with physical locations. They are presently hiring across all three offices.

We will explore a number of topics including:

1\ Collaboration: effective design through team collaborate.

2\ Evangelism: showing the success of design initiatives to the team.

3\ Equipping: equipping teams with the tools to engage with design.

4\ Listening: for feedback on product, design teams need to listen

We love bringing CTOs to you and we have another awesome CTO coming to Terminal from Palo Alto! Ramaneek Khanna is the Chief Technology Officer at Earnin which the New York Times said is part of the ‘Next Wave of Unicorn Startups.’ Earnin has raised over $190M in venture funding from some of the best technology investors in the world including Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and Spark Capital, just to name a few.

In this Tech Talk, we will explore a number of topics including:

1. Building a data infrastructure that works for everyone and doesn’t bring down production!
   
2. Evolution of security – Navigating the tradeoffs of open access and security best practices
   
3. The challenging road going from a monolithic architecture to micro services
   
4. Organizational growth – structure and specialization
   

We’re proud to bring you a Forbes 30 Under 30 CTO who built production-grade deep learning systems while going from zero to $100M USD in sales. How can you take an engineering first approach to developing impactful business strategies? How do software leaders evolve from technologists to CTOs while simultaneously building teams during hypergrowth? How do AI thought leaders think about deep learning, natural language processing, and machine learning applications today?

Leading a company from zero to $100M runrate in under three years while balancing and building world-class technical teams is a humbling experience. That’s exactly what Toronto-based SnapTravel has done, aside from adding the greatest shooter in NBA history to their team.

In this Terminal Tech Talk we bring you Henry Shi, co-founder and CTO of SnapTravel, in conversation with Mohammed Ridwanul, Product Manager at Dessa where Mohammed’s team has built an AI platform that helps the world’s largest and most complex organizations build real-world value with advanced AI.

“No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it.” –Paul Graham on The Ronco Principle

SV Angel is a San Francisco-based investment firm that is widely regarded as one of the most successful angel investing firms of all time. Kartik Talwar joined SV Angel in 2014 as an Insight Engineer while studying Astrophysics at the University of Waterloo. At SV Angel, Kartik ultimately built internal tools to track all investments, deals, financing, requests and relationships across 500 investments made and thousands considered ever year.

How did they evaluate thousands of the top investment opportunities? How did they invest in the earliest rounds of Google, PayPal, Airbnb, Pinterest, Twitter, SnapChat, Square and other titans?

What’s it take to launch a global engineering and education initiative like Hack The North and ETHGlobal? How are great teams and ideas brought to life? What does engineering excellence and the world’s top talent look like in the heart of American tech culture?

Kartik Talwar, now a General Partner at A.Capital and Advisor at SV Angel, will walk us through these questions and more in our next Terminal Tech Talk.

Should we be worried about mental health in tech? What does AI at scale and maturity look like? What makes a thriving tech ecosystem and does location matter? Interested in an investor’s and founder’s perspective on global talent and diversity?

500 Startups is a venture capital firm on a mission to discover and back the world’s most talented entrepreneurs, help them create successful companies at scale and build thriving global ecosystems. As one of the most active venture capital firms in the world, 500 Startups is based in Silicon Valley and has over 2200 investments to date.

In this Terminal Tech Talk we bring you two exceptional leaders, Neha Khera, Partner at 500 Startups in conversation with Marylin Ma, Co-founder of Quali AI. They will discuss these questions and more.

In the hyper-competitive tech space getting your product to market quickly and having the ability to iterate fast is a strong competitive advantage. The tech you choose matters a lot and APIs are a fundamental piece of your tech stack they connect everything together.

Wonder what it’s like building a startup in San Francisco? Curious about building product, testing rapidly and iterating quickly? Interested in building world-class and decentralized teams while maintaining a strong company culture?

In this Terminal Tech Talk we examine current trends that are significantly impacting organizations, how organizations are adapting to these changes, and what the future looks like.

Stergios Anastasiadis has learned what it takes to build, manage, and grow world-class engineering teams through decades of experience solving tough problems that lead to explosive growth at companies like Shopify, Google, and Ross Intelligence. In this Tech Talk, he’ll share his insights.

How can you create impactful businesses? What does it mean to be an impactreneur? It’s about choosing an innovative business venture that can make a positive, long-lasting impact on the world. From healthcare to personal finance to wellness, Hamed Shahbazi has made a formidable career out of creating successful companies that do good.

How do you grow a company to an international success? In this Tech Talk, SSIMWAVE President and technology entrepreneur Steven McCartney and award-winning marketing scholar Nicole Coviello explore what companies of all sizes need to do to build locally and scale globally.

The road to the top of the technical leadership ladder is full of twists and turns and once you are there, the job doesn’t always look the way you might expect. Nobody understands what the role entails and how to get there better than Alex Millar, Marcelo Cortes, and Mike Kirkup. Between them, the three technical leaders bring decades of experience at companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Blackberry, Square, and most recently, as CTOs helping to scale startups from scratch.

Veteran entrepreneurs Roham Gharegozlou and Scott Larson understand what it takes to build successful startups. In this Tech Talk, the two entrepreneurs share the lessons they have learned through building tech-focused companies, discuss decentralization, and interact with an audience armed with questions ranging from deep space operations to the validity of Blockchain.

Vikram Rangnekar walks the Terminal community through the critical decisions, experiments, pitfalls, and hard-earned lessons from his 5+ years at LinkedIn where he contributed to one of the greatest success stories in the history of Silicon Valley.

Alan Cannistraro walks a packed audience through his thoughts on the future of media, lessons learned at both Apple and Facebook, management techniques, and discusses why modern startup founders shouldn’t base their teams in Silicon Valley.

Liam discusses Ethereum Scaling, Layer 2, State Channels and more.

University of Waterloo professor and Problem Lab founder Larry Smith speaks to entrepreneurship and the trends he’s seen in the tech industry over his 35+ year teaching career.