A New Normal

For this episode of StartWell’s A New Normal series we are joined in Studio A by Neil Martin, a co-founder of the Toronto coworking brand Project Spaces. Neil relates his company’s history, community profile and we discuss the importance of the places which coworking operators provide for developing communities in our urban contexts.

Ali, one of 3 co-founders of Toronto based video startup Rally, joins StartWell’s CEO Qasim Virjee in our Hybrid Event Studio for a chat about how his company is trying to make online video more social.

Over the past 15 years David has grown what was originally a small recording studio into the world's premiere marketplace for voice-over talent - voices.com. In this session we hear about the company's foundation, their fundraising history and recent insights from working through lockdown.

Aliya Ramji is the co-founder of MT Ventures, a program at Canadian law firm McCarthy Tétrault which is focused on helping startups scale through leveraging client and partner relationships in tandem with the firm’s wealth of legal perspective.

As foresight becomes a more important tool for corporations to guide decision making through uncertain times we thought it useful to spend some time with Nikolas Badminton - a world-renowned keynote speaker, consultant, and media producer now based in Toronto Canada and resident at StartWell.

In this discussion with our CEO Qasim Virjee, Nik breaks down what it means to be a Futurist, relates personal experiences from working through the pandemic and much more.

The session was recorded live from our event venue on King Street West in downtown Toronto - the same space which played host to Nik's 2019 edition of Dark Futures, a series he explains towards the end of this episode.

BEworks is the world’s first commercial consulting team dedicated to the application of Behavioural Economics to real-world challenges. Recently the firm developed a Work From Home Diagnostic Tool – we caught up with Kelly Peters, BEwork’s CEO and CoFounder, to hear more about what inspired the Tool’s development and how they work with clients to apply its principles.

*To watch a recording of their recent Webinar ‘Identifying and Overcoming Barriers for Returning to Work using Behavioral Science’ you can get in touch with the BEworks team using this link.

In this episode of A New Normal, the three cofounders of Toronto-based firm Yenza3 join us by video-link for a conversation that touches on a few topics – including how the pandemic has accelerated the need for companies to develop remote working plans and promote a new corporate culture that understands how people come together to work online.

In this conversation recorded for our A New Normal series, we caught up with Shez Samji, the Managing Director of Private Equity Services at Silicon Valley Bank Canada.

The discussion covers a range of topics - from how important team work in person is to giving people a sense of purpose to why this point in time may be advantageous to companies who can not only survive but prepare for the long-term.

For the 5th episode of A New Normal we called up Nav Sangha – the Founder of Ambassador, a Toronto based startup helping brick and mortar retail businesses go digital with a turn-key integrated online ordering/eCommerce and customer support chatbot offering that can plug into any website infrastructure.

Nav’s rich entrepreneurial experience has seen him run Toronto’s most respected shop for DJ vinyl on Yonge St decades ago before founding live music venues at the forefront of new scenes emerging 10-15 years ago in the city’s edgy Parkdale neighbourhood. Since then he’s launched restaurant ventures (Otto’s Bierhalle, Miss Thing’s & Soso Food Club) and cofounded Turnstyle Solutions – a location based marketing solutions provider which sold to Yelp in 2017.

With so many restaurants facing closure in Toronto it was refreshing to catch up with Nav to hear why he’s so excited to offer local businesses a digital edge that can help them improve relationships with their customers and save margins through direct ordering/sales and payment solutions.

His take on working through the pandemic – “This is a real crucial moment… This is where the decisions you make, and the planning you do, and the new technologies that you adopt are really going to have an impact upon how things transpire when this is all over. You gotta equip yourself with a new set of tools to kinda weather a very new marketplace – new needs, new customer behaviour…”

Motivbase’s CEO Ujwal Arkalgud is an Author, Entrepreneur and Cultural Anthropologist who joins us to relate some consumer trends he’s seeing at the moment and offer his take on how companies might use this time as an opportunity to innovate.