Frontier Collective to bring Vancouver delegation to SXSW conference

There’s no doubt that Vancouver hosts a vibrant startup ecosystem — but despite its growing prominence, many local companies face challenges with visibility on the global stage. One powerful way to elevate these emerging businesses, as the B.C. government points out, is by attending high-profile conferences. And while Web Summit has been dominating Vancouver headlines for the past few months, it’s not the only renowned expo where tech founders can connect with big players in their industry. 

The Frontier Collective — which bills itself as a coalition of leaders in tech, culture, and community with the goal of developing and supporting frontier technology companies — has announced that it will once again run its Frontiers of Innovation day at South By Southwest (SXSW) conference, and that it’s bringing a new batch of startups down to the Austin, Texas showcase.

“Right now we’re putting together our program,” Dan Burgar, CEO of the Frontier Collective, said of the Vancouver delegation the organization is leading. “We usually cover the ticket, and sometimes we’re able to cover part of the travel. Then we set up a full program of meetings [for the startups], and they’re part of the VIP programming and a lot of our partner programming as well.

“We’re really looking to broaden capital opportunities and partnership opportunities for them,” he continues. “Most of the issues with the ecosystem here, I think, are due to lack of risk capital, and that's been a big problem for startups to continue to grow. We essentially try to facilitate meetings with potential investors and partners so that Vancouver companies can scale. We know that our dollar is not doing so well right now, [...] and the U.S. is the place to be for startups that want to raise capital.”

Successful applicants to the program, Burgar says, aren’t always the ones with the most promising numbers, as many of the city’s most interesting companies are pre-revenue. More important is their teams’ diversity, and ensuring that the delegation doesn’t just spotlight white men: the most prominent demographic among tech founders. The Frontier Collective is looking for businesses who are focused on fundraising and which have built an innovative solution to a problem in their industry. Burgar highlights that last year, the organization brought some e-commerce companies like Blanka to showcase their products, and emphasizes that the delegation is open to a broad set of technologies as long as their offerings have the opportunity to scale and market.

The model has already proven successful. Burgar points to Urbanlogiq, which has built an AI-driven platform that harnesses government data and automates many of its processes with strengthened analytics, as an example of what the SXSW delegation can achieve.

“Frontier Collective was the single biggest reason that Urbanlogiq had a breakthrough year in 2024,” says the company’s CEO Mark Masongsong in a video interview. “It brought Urbanlogiq to SXSW, brought a global audience, and gave us the opportunity to showcase ourselves on the world stage. Literally coming right offstage until recently, we’ve been in a number of negotiations with some of these companies. And it led to not only the largest deal in Urbanlogiq’s history, but a deal that is going to generate more revenue and growth for Urbanlogiq than all of our previous years combined. So it really was a transformative event.”

Local governments falling short

Part of the Frontier Collective’s motivation for bringing Vancouver delegations abroad is its thesis that the B.C. government is failing its startups. Burgar points out that Alberta Innovates — a crown corporation created to support local businesses — gets $250 million in funding, while Innovate BC, its British Columbia counterpart, gets $5 million to $6 million. Alberta, he says, is putting significant resources into shifting from an oil and gas province into an innovation hotspot, and Ontario and Quebec have always had more capital to “do bigger things out there,” in a large part due to hosting most corporate head offices. Those figures, he suggests, might account for the recent numbers of Vancouver individuals considering moving east.  

“I think this is a bipartisan, multi-decade issue,” Burgar says. “[The B.C.] government just hasn't been thinking forward in terms of, ‘What does the next five to 10 years look like?’ So there hasn't been support for that ecosystem infrastructure at the ground level, to be able to help the startups take that leap from idea to to funding. And because of that, we continue in this holding pattern, and chasing our tails to be able to build up an innovation ecosystem. So we're seeing a lot of startups move away.”

Conferences closer to home

One area where the provincial, municipal, and federal governments have committed to bolstering Vancouver’s tech ecosystem is by supporting Web Summit’s new presence in the city. Widely known as the world’s premier tech conference and “the Olympics of Tech,” Web Summit currently runs five events in Lisbon, Rio, Qatar, Asia, and Toronto. Vancouver will succeed Toronto’s edition, Collision, and will be rebranded — drawing an estimated 35,000 attendees, including tech leaders, startups, investors, policymakers, and media. The deal was made possible by a consortium and all levels of government pledging $14.8 million in funding.

Brenda Bailey — the previous minister of jobs, economic development, and innovation, and now minister of finance — believes that Web Summit will help fuel serious growth in Vancouver.

“We're not well-known internationally, and we don't attract the level of investment that you would expect for the quality of companies we have in B.C.,” she said in a June 2023 interview with Vancouver Tech Journal. “So how do we solve that? [Web Summit], to me, is a component to solving for that.”

When asked why the province has long struggled to attract more investment, Bailey highlighted that it’s a complex question, but shared a couple of reasons. With the province being a small open market of over five million people next to the U.S., the largest economy in the world, the city’s promising tech tends to get bought “very quickly.”

“Having an exit event can be very positive for the ecosystem and certainly for the entrepreneurs who built that company,” Bailey said. “But we have less of a culture in B.C. of having our tech companies become mature tech companies [...] What we also want to see is companies stay and grow,” adding that it’s one of the reasons why the government started its $500 million strategic investment fund, InBC.

Burgar, whose Frontier Collective helped develop the bid to bring Web Summit to the city, agrees that global exposure is a big reason to bring the conference west, but believes it’s just one component in helping grow B.C.’s ecosystem.

“It's going to bring more corporates here to possibly expand,” he said. “It's going to give our startups more access. That really is what it was envisioned to be. It wasn't envisioned to be the solution. It wasn't supposed to be the fix-all that I think that the government of B.C. and some of the stakeholders involved see this as.

“With a global entity like Web Summit, and [their] series of other events — this is what they eat and sleep,” he continues. “So if we can't get our act together as a region, it doesn't really matter, because Web Summit is going to throw a kickass event anyways. [What matters is that] our region and our tech ecosystem will reap the benefits of a conference being in our backyard.”

Plans for the future

Despite working in a Vancouver setting that he says can sometimes be similar to “crabs in a bucket,” Burgar remains hopeful that he can help realize the Frontier Collective's vision of the city becoming one of the world’s most successful innovation ecosystems — and that startups will stop moving away.

“We need to see more Slacks built,” he says of the Vancouver-founded, now-Silicon Valley-headquartered behemoth, “but have them stay here and exit at the right time, or go public at the right time. Once they sell] that goes back into the investment landscape, because those founders and those the people that had equity in that company become investors. We don't have that homegrown cycle, and that's what Silicon Valley is all about. That's how investors become risk capital investors.”

The founder also hasn’t given up on his dream of building physical infrastructure that will house a central place for Vancouver startups to collaborate, similar to New York’s Newlab or Paris’ Station F. 

“I'd like to see us really leaning into getting our 150,000 square foot Innovation Hub off the ground and to make that a reality, because I do think that will solve a lot of the problems of this ecosystem being so fragmented,” he said. “It will help us play more on the global stage, and be able to help commercialize a lot of the technologies to help solve some of the world's biggest problems. That's really what we're passionate about, and really helping startups locally expand and grow.”

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