The room was already buzzing when I arrived. A couple dozen conversations layered over one another, the clink of wine glasses, a table of snacks half-raided. It was in one of those nondescript Railtown buildings—you could have walked past it a hundred times and never guessed that, on this night, it was hosting some of the country’s most ambitious builders.

One of the first people I bumped into was Marcus Frind. Yes, that Markus Frind—Plenty of Fish founder, now CEO of Cymax and owner of Frind Estate Winery. If you needed a measure of the calibre in the room, that was it. And as more familiar faces emerged from the crowd—investors, operators, founders—you got the sense this wasn’t going to be your standard Vancouver tech mixer.

When Lucy Hargreaves, CEO of Build Canada, sat down with investor Boris Wertz for a fireside chat, the chatter hushed. This was the heart of the evening: a conversation about how Canada could move faster, think bigger, and shake off what Lucy described as entrepreneurs “not fleeing Canada, but fleeing friction.”

Wertz didn’t mince words. “It all starts with housing,” he said, pointing out the crisis that has made affordable options nearly impossible in every Canadian city. From there, he sketched out two other levers: reducing the costs and timelines for building manufacturing plants, and embracing energy abundance. “We have amazing hydro here, we have natural gas, but it’s never been approached with a growth mindset,” he told the room. The subtext was clear: if Canada wants to compete globally—especially in an AI era that devours power—it has to get serious about energy.

The conversation struck a chord. During the Q&A, hands shot up quickly—no filler questions, no long-winded monologues. Just founders, operators, and community members pressing for answers about access to capital, the loss of talent to the U.S., and whether Vancouver could ever create the kind of dense, serendipitous community hubs that define places like San Francisco. It was one of the highest-quality exchanges I’ve seen at a Vancouver tech event: earnest, sharp, and grounded in lived experience.

That’s where Hunter Scharfe comes in. The newly minted Vancouver lead for Build Canada, Scharfe told me later he first reached out to Daniel Debow—the organization’s chair—about an investment in his stealth startup. Instead, the conversation shifted, and by September 1 he’d volunteered to lead Build Canada’s presence here on the West Coast. His mission? To create the kind of physical spaces that Boris kept coming back to: places where entrepreneurs and investors could collide, trade ideas, and spark momentum.

“Canada’s already built world-firsts—our first commercial quantum computer, our foundational AI research,” Scharfe reminded me. “We can’t forget that. Vancouver doesn’t need to think of itself as second-tier to Silicon Valley. We just need to connect people who are building cool things, and give them the capital and community to do it.”

That optimism ran through the evening. Build Canada, after all, was founded on the belief that growth is good, bold beats safe, and Canada can be the most prosperous country in the world. In Railtown, you could feel those principles alive in the air: in the questions, in the nods of agreement, in the sense that maybe, finally, the local ecosystem had stumbled onto something different.

The call to action from Hargreaves was simple: sign up at buildcanada.com, read the memos, join the community. The implicit invitation was bigger—don’t just talk about the future, build it. And judging by the energy in that buzzing room, plenty of Vancouver’s builders are ready to take her up on it.