Platform Calgary

Sales 101: From Insight to Outreach

Many well-validated ideas still struggle to gain sales traction without a clear approach to outreach.

Founders often lead conversations with a solution before confirming the customer is ready to act, and outreach frequently happens too inconsistently to build a real pipeline.

The founders moving fastest right now are the ones using AI-native strategies to validate, reach, and convert customers—this session gives you that edge.

Sales 101 gives early-stage founders a modernized framework to go from initial customer insight to revenue.

Sales 101 covers the fundamentals of early-stage sales:
- Leveraging AI-driven insights to establish urgency around validated customer problems.
- Building an AI-assisted outreach cadence that drives high-volume, personalized engagement.
- Designing a modern pipeline tracking system built for speed and accountability.

This session is facilitated by Trevor Dietrich, a fractional sales and marketing executive with over 25 years of experience helping early-stage companies build sales systems, sharpen go-to-market strategy, and generate revenue. Trevor has coached more than 50 startups through accelerator programs and brings firsthand founder experience as the co-founder of a mobile startup he built.

📅 September 23 | 6:00–8:30 PM
📍 Platform Innovation Centre

Register now: LINK IN BIO

Discover 101: Is Your Problem Worth Solving?

Success often comes less from the product itself, and more from how well the founder understands the problem they're solving.

Most founders run the idea through their head alone –sketching it on a notepad, pitching it to a friend over coffee, or losing an hour to it before bed instead of sleeping. Many founders say the path to a product-market fit isn't one big idea, but a lot of small conversations and adjustments along the way.

Some are now using AI to help with those early customer conversations, doing market research, and finding it helps them learn what people actually want, in a fraction of time.

Discover 101 is a practical, hands-on workshop that shows you how to use AI context engineering to conduct rigorous market research, build targeted customer interview guides, and synthesize feedback without losing sight of real human pain points.

In two hands-on sessions, you'll:

- Run real customer discovery conversations, then learn to use AI to synthesize your notes, transcripts, quotes, objections into the patterns and signals from your own evidence.
- Turn those patterns into a first-draft Lean(er) Canvas, then stress-test it against what your customers actually told you.
- Walk out with a validated (or reworked) problem statement, built by teaching AI to reason over your organized customer evidence

Click here to register - https://hubs.ly/Q04xG9vS0

This is for you if you are pre-product and want to validate direction; if you’ve already shipped something that isn't getting traction and want to reconnect with your customers; or if you are looking for a structured, evidence-based way to figure out what to build — or fix it.

"Scaling effectively isn't about hiring faster or adding headcount — it's about treating leadership as a deliberate architecture that aligns executive talent with long-term business strategy." — Glenn Lesko, Co-Founder & Partner, Pender & Howe

As founders and leadership teams navigate the transition from launch to expansion, building the right executive capability becomes just as critical as product-market fit.

To help our ecosystem navigate these pivotal talent inflection points, we have partnered with Pender & Howe, a premier boutique executive search firm specializing in executive recruitment and leadership advisory across North America.

Every year, Launch Party puts 10 early-stage startups on the map before the market catches on. Meet the 2026 cohort:
- Agrivanna: Virtual fencing and offline-first hardware built for grazing-based, working ranches.
- Black Owl Systems: Automated lease accounting software that eliminates error-prone spreadsheets.
- Candidly AI: Voice AI that turns hundreds of one-on-one stakeholder conversations into findings leadership can act on.
- Fledge: Research-backed life-skills activities that parents and educators can use with kids right away.
- Leeg: Workforce intelligence powered by an individual app that turns everyday work into proof of what your people can do.
- Nelle by Made It Legal: AI contract redlining running natively inside Microsoft Word.
- Paradigm Inputs: A simplified supply chain delivering lowest-cost crop inputs straight to Canadian farmers, without dealer markups.
- Splice N Connect: Predictive sensors catching failing industrial cables—the cause of over half of all power outages—before blackouts hit.
- Verano.ai: Regulatory engine reading legislation clause-by-clause to cut compliance work by over 90%.
- Waypoint Budget: Personal finance app built for Canadians, automating transaction categorization and flagging hidden subscriptions.

See all 10 founders take the stage at Calgary Innovation Week, Nov 2–5.

Which company are you most excited to watch live? Drop your pick in the comments.
Full 2026 watchlist & event details linked in the Bio!

Every year, Launch Party puts 10 early-stage startups on the map before the market catches on. Meet the 2026 cohort:

- Agrivanna: Virtual fencing and offline-first hardware built for grazing-based, working ranches.
- Black Owl Systems: Automated lease accounting software that eliminates error-prone spreadsheets.
- Candidly AI: Voice AI that turns hundreds of one-on-one stakeholder conversations into findings leadership can act on.
- Fledge: Research-backed life-skills activities that parents and educators can use with kids right away.
- Leeg: Workforce intelligence powered by an individual app that turns everyday work into proof of what your people can do.
- Nelle by Made It Legal: AI contract redlining running natively inside Microsoft Word.
- Paradigm Inputs: A simplified supply chain delivering lowest-cost crop inputs straight to Canadian farmers, without dealer markups.
- Splice N Connect: Predictive sensors catching failing industrial cables—the cause of over half of all power outages—before blackouts hit.
- Verano.ai: Regulatory engine reading legislation clause-by-clause to cut compliance work by over 90%.
- Waypoint Budget: Personal finance app built for Canadians, automating transaction categorization and flagging hidden subscriptions.

See all 10 founders take the stage at Calgary Innovation Week, Nov 2–5.

Which company are you most excited to watch live? Drop your pick in the comments.

Full 2026 watchlist & event details: https://hubs.ly/Q04xvgHV0

Startup 101: Your First Step Towards Entrepreneurship

Every great tech success story begins long before lines of code are written or venture checks are signed. It starts with curiosity, a problem noticed, a bold idea, or a simple desire to be part of what’s next.

As a new entrepreneur and early-stage founder, turning a raw concept into a viable business comes with uncertainty. Startup 101 gives you a practical framework—and an instant local network—to turn that uncertainty into actionable progress.

In this 3-hour virtual workshop, you'll gain a competitive edge by learning to use AI early—not just as a productivity tool, but as a hypothesis pressure-testing partner from the moment your idea takes shape.

What you’ll do in 3 Hours:

- Move from an "idea-first" to a "problem-first" approach using AI context frameworks.
- Craft and iterate on your elevator pitch through context engineering, Understanding what an MVP actually is, startup lifecycle stages (Formation, Validation, Growth), and building the team.
- Navigate funding basics (bootstrapping vs. dilutive capital) and connecting directly into Calgary’s tech community.

Walk away with a AI-assisted first-draft elevator pitch, a structured problem statement baseline, and low-barrier connections to Calgary’s startup community.

You don't need a polished pitch or a technical background; you'll learn how to leverage AI to refine your idea, pressure-test your thinking, and navigate the early founder journey with clarity.

📅 September 16, 2026 | 5:00–8:00 PM
📍 Virtual/Online

Register Now:
https://hubs.ly/Q04xtCHz0

Is Edmonton Startup Week 2026 in your calendar?

From Edmonton Launch Party to the Startup Crawl, and everything in between, this week is all about spotlighting the people, projects, and ideas shaping Edmonton’s tech and innovation scene.
Community event applications are still open!

We’re proud to support ’s incredible innovation scene, and we’d love to see more of you stepping in to host something special this year.

If you’ve got an idea for an event that could bring people together, now’s your moment to step in. Whether it’s a panel, workshop, meetup, or something totally unexpected.
Submit your event idea today - https://hubs.ly/Q04x58GF0).

More info: https://hubs.ly/Q04x58J70)https://hubs.ly/Q04x58BS0

Nearly every organization is using AI. Far fewer have figured out how to turn it into an advantage. The difference is rarely access to better technology. It is whether the organization can redesign work around it.

- Can a promising experiment become part of everyday operations?
- Can teams change how they make decisions and deliver work?
- Can organizations capture AI’s upside without simply layering new tools onto old processes?

That is the focus of our next Tech Talent Tuesdays: AI at Work, From Adoption to Competitive Advantage.

We’re bringing together two leaders with very different perspectives on building and scaling technology:
🔹 Matthew Buhler , Data Engineer at TC Energy, works inside a major enterprise transformation spanning data, integrations, and core business systems. He’s particularly interested in how AI is changing knowledge work and bringing business and technology roles closer together.

🔹 Minaoar Tanzil, Software Development Manager at Krux Analytics, brings nearly 20 years of global technology leadership experience. He previously led a 150 person FinTech organization responsible for a banking platform processing over $2 billion per month and serving 100 million people.

Together, we’ll explore:
🔹 Why some AI initiatives scale while others remain pilots
🔹 How AI is changing team structure and role design
🔹 Where organizations are seeing real business value
🔹 What leaders need to rethink as AI becomes part of normal work.

The next phase of AI adoption will not be defined by who experiments the most. It will be defined by who can turn those experiments into a better way of operating.

📍 Platform Calgary
🕓 Tuesday, September 15 | 4:30 to 7:00 p.m.
🎟 Register: https://hubs.ly/Q04x92Y80

Tech Talent Tuesdays is presented in partnership with Platform Calgary, Calgary Economic Development, and Careers In Technology and Innovation (CITI), with support through Alberta's Labour Market Partnership program.

Life Sciences Week is Alberta’s flagship event dedicated to celebrating and advancing the life sciences sector.

Join us for on September 23 for a full day showcasing the people, ideas and partnerships advancing Calgary’s life sciences sector.'

Dive into a full day of dynamic sessions exploring commercialization, investment readiness and the bold ideas taking shape across Calgary’s life sciences ecosystem. Then, trade the lab coats for cowboy hats and cap off the day at our inaugural YYC After Party 🤠

🗓️ Wednesday, September 23
🧬 YYC Spotlight Day + YYC After Party | All day

Explore the current lineup and start building your schedule: https://hubs.ly/Q04x5k2c0