Jordan Christensen

See below an exciting initiative for life-long learning and capacity building across the workforce. KnowMeQ is highlighted by the Vector Institute (the leading AI authority in Canada comprised of minds like Geoffrey Hinton). In healthcare we talk very much about longevity. We also need to be looking holistically at what it means to keep adults meaningfully engaged in the workforce throughout longer lifespans. The topic isn’t just about “the future of work”. It is also a public health question. Below is a report on the epidemic of loneliness and isolation in the US and the catastrophic effects on health. Meaningful work is a vital aspect of social connection. https://lnkd.in/gJYvRcB3 It’s estimated that 56% percent of people in the US over age 50 experience layoffs or deteriorating work conditions that cause them to leave. That has astounding public health implications. Clearly, new economic models are needed.

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Did we already know this? I just recently fielded a survey comparing how US and Canadian AI and tech founders build companies. Great responses. Overwhelmed by the interest & almost 50 | 50 Can | US responses (thank you to everyone who took the time to share their thinking). The patterns were unmistakable - matching the other thousands of comments and insights I have gathered being a Silicon Valley | Canada bridge for founders. The difference is not talent. Not ambition. Not geography. It is how founders are conditioned to think about risk, capital, and speed. Canadian founders are thoughtful, capital efficient, and grounded. US founders are conviction driven, aggressive, and comfortable being wrong on the way to being big. One US founder described themselves as: “balls to the wall, extreme, delusional, aggressive” That word “delusional” gets a bad rap. In scaling, it is often the feature, not the bug. The biggest differences… Risk Posture Canadian founders optimize for survivability. US founders optimize for dominance. Capital Usage Canadian founders treat capital as something to conserve. US founders treat capital as something to weaponize for scale. Ambition Framing The Canadian approach is often prove it locally, then expand. The US approach is build globally from day one. None of this is accidental. Founders adapt rationally to the systems around them. Canada rewards prudence, efficiency, and credibility. The US rewards speed, conviction, and market capture. That is why Canada produces great companies. And why the US produces category leaders faster. The takeaway is again - clear. Canada is not short on founders. What Canada needs is national growth infrastructure that gives founders the expertise, capital, and permission to take bigger swings earlier. If we do not build this, we will continue to train world class AI and tech founders for someone else’s ecosystem. I would love your perspective. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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“The Future is here”. I can’t believe it’s already been over a month since The Mantis Group hosted our B2AI2AI2C Toronto Tech Week panel. Karla Congson 🇨🇦’s call to get AI-literate today because “this is not a Q4 problem” was one of the best quotes from our panel at the Shangri-La Group. Karla then generously shared some resources for everyone to leverage: 1. Browse AI tools for any task: https://lnkd.in/gra9uAnN 2. Watch this - An AI first organization: https://lnkd.in/gJn84di6 3. Agentic 101 course: https://lnkd.in/g8au8jRk Video taken by Eddy Yang Speakers: Ekaterina Dobrokhotova, Macy Siu, Lakshmi Baskaran. Mantis team: Lexy Khoo, Guybrush Taylor, Laura Kim, Kevin Jung, Faraz Ahmadi, Jason Phan, Jia Shin Khoo, Jade Liu #AI #Data #futureofwork #marketing

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Ever been part of a team that’s "testing everything" but not seeing real progress? I’ve seen it across the board, from the scrappiest startups to Google Canada during our rapid growth years. The energy is there: new campaigns, channel experiments, endless headline tweaks. And yet, growth flatlines. Most teams don’t have a map for how growth actually happens in their business. So they experiment everywhere, hoping something works - activity for activity’s sake. Early in my career, I was taught a better way. A mentor called it the "growth map,” a deceptively simple system for charting every gear in your growth engine, from first touch to revenue. The trick? Your system only runs as fast as its slowest gear. There’s always a bottleneck or a rate limiter. Maybe your leads are stalling in qualification. Maybe your campaigns are getting stuck waiting on data. Maybe engineering can’t keep up with marketer requests. Whatever it is, find that one limiter or bottleneck. Run your next experiment there. When you fix the primary blocker, you unlock compounding progress. And when the limiter moves (it always does - solving one will uncover another), your map adapts and focus shifts. If you’ve never thought about growth in this way, here’s what I tell overwhelmed teams: 1. Draw your growth map from start to finish 2. Identify the slowest gear 3. Run one focused experiment to free it Structured experimentation isn’t less creative, it’s just far more impactful.

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Booking a restaurant in Canada just got a whole lot easier! 🇨🇦🍽️ Google just rolled out new agentic capabilities for AI Mode in Search, allowing Canadian users to go from a dinner craving to a confirmed reservation in just a few steps. Instead of jumping between different apps to find a table, you can now give AI Mode a specific prompt—like "Find me a vegan-friendly spot in downtown Toronto with a table for two tonight." The AI will search across platforms like OpenTable and Libro for real-time availability and provide you with curated links to finalize the booking. It’s exciting to see AI taking over the logistical "busywork" of everyday life so we can spend less time scrolling and more time enjoying the food. Check out the full update from Google here: https://lnkd.in/dJ4H5idK #GoogleAI #TechNews #Canada #AI #Innovation #FutureOfSearch #RestaurantTech

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Worth a read. We're hearing more about Canada's AI sovereignty or data sovereignty. We might be getting started in the right direction but Joshua van Es that if we're simply holding data here and the company's decisionmaking authority still resides in a different country, we've got a problem. #aisovereignty

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In 2025, Float stopped being a product companies tried, and became the infrastructure they run on. Float now serves 6,000+ Canadian businesses across 20+ industries. We processed $3B in payment volume, grew our customer base over 60%, and saw multi-product adoption grow from 0% to 30% in 18 months. What made this possible? We built trust at scale. We invested heavily in world-class risk, compliance and fraud capabilities in-house. Today, most customers activate in under 24 hours and can access up to $100K in credit in less than a day. Our customer base grew, and our customers grew with us. This year proved that modern financial infrastructure isn't only for companies that look like typical disruptors. - it's universal. Construction, healthcare, hospitality and manufacturing are now among our fastest-growing verticals. I’ve included my full year in review below, which goes deeper on what we learned building a multi-product platform and why we believe 2026 is an inflection point. We're building Float for the long term, and we're just getting started.

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One insight from last night’s Scalpels & Spreadsheets event last night that stuck with me: Dominate one vertical. De-risk through horizontal expansion. Huge thanks to Aman Desai and Vijesh Vijayan for hosting, and to Shafiq Vallani (Head of Canada at Redesign Health) and Tim Clarke for sharing very candid lessons on building in healthcare. Healthcare problems often look different on the surface: • hospital → home transitions • clinic → home referrals • community care coordination But the deeper you get into the system, the more you realize something: The underlying problem is often the same: fragmented data and fragmented coordination. That’s something we’re seeing while building Amicare. Our current focus is institutional care transitions, starting with clinic-to-home care, because it provides faster validation cycles and clearer operational feedback. But the infrastructure challenge extends far beyond that single entry point. Different transitions. Same systemic bottleneck. One of the biggest lessons from healthcare innovation: solve the infrastructure layer well once, and multiple workflows start to unlock. Great conversations and an inspiring community of builders tackling some of healthcare’s toughest problems. #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #StartupLessons #HealthcareInnovation #TorontoStartups

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Really excited to share this one. We tested LLMBoost against vLLM on the same hardware, same models, and same workloads, and saw a pretty dramatic difference in latency: 🚀 DeepSeek V3.2: up to 416x lower TTFT latency 🚀 Qwen3-Next-80B: up to 51.7x lower TTFT latency All on 4x #AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs running on #TensorWave. Watch the side-by-side demo: https://lnkd.in/gxD4QNsb

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"Canada is already the 51st state; digitally speaking." This headline should wake up every founder, CTO, and policymaker in the country. OpenAI's leaders came to Ottawa. They offered no solutions. They left. Because they can. Because Canada has built its digital infrastructure on rented land — and landlords don't negotiate with tenants. Here's what this means for enterprises: Your AI strategy is a sovereignty strategy. At Neural Machines Inc., we don't think the answer is more cloud. It's less. - Smarter algorithms, not bigger data centers - Local deployment, not API dependence - Specialized models on your hardware, not general-purpose giants on someone else's The convergence is already here: algorithms are getting leaner, hardware is getting tinier. Robots, drones, autonomous systems — they need intelligence that works at the edge, with zero latency, full privacy, and zero vendor lock-in. Canada and Europe are reasserting digital sovereignty. Québec's Law 25 makes cross-border data processing a legal minefield. China has already built its own stack. The wind is shifting. The question isn't whether you can afford to move away from centralized AI. It's whether you can afford not to. We're helping enterprises make that transition. Right-sized AI. Local-first. Fully sovereign. If the 51st state narrative bothers you, let's talk. https://neuralmachines.ai/

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If you haven’t heard about OpenClaw (Clawdbot), then you must be living under a rock. I just attended my first OpenClaw meetup in Montreal at NEXT AI. It was great to hear about what people actually enjoy about OpenClaw. Here are my top 3 picks: 1. Robust memory management system 2. Remote control on mobile 3. Local first and enhanced privacy As someone who is using AI agents everyday, nothing really surprises me. However, OpenClaw definitely showed the potential of multi-agent systems. Thank to Antonio S. for organizing the event! #OpenClaw #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #TechMeetup #AIAgent #Innovation #Montreal #Clawdbot

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I sat down with Sameer Dhar from NiaHealth ahead of his fireside chat at TechTO’s Together Toronto + Rocketships Demo Day next Monday. Sameer is one of those rare founders who brings honesty, humility, and big vision - and he doesn’t hold back. His talk will unpack lessons on: -How Next36 changed his trajectory - from consultant track to tech founder -Building for the masses - and the discipline it takes to stay accessible -Best practices (and hard truths) about building Canadian health tech companies -His 4-year journey to finding the next idea after a successful exit -How he created FOMO and oversubscribed his funding round 🎥 In this short clip, Sameer shares what it’s really like to start again as a second-time founder - and why it can be even harder than the first time. It’s raw, real, and packed with insight. 📍 Don’t miss his fireside hosted by Alex Norman and bring your toughest questions. 🎟️ Tickets are still available here: https://lnkd.in/g-5d2Stu #TechTO #TogetherToronto #Rocketships #HealthTech #FoundersJourney #CanadianTech Cc: Candy Lee, Phoenix Ho, Jason Goldlist, Megha Kandoi, Alexandra Reilly NEXT Canada

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30 Bold Predictions for AI in 2026 by Canadian founders, VCs, experts, and critics 🤔 🚀 “By 2026, customers won’t judge companies only on speed or convenience. They’ll judge whether the AI operating on their behalf is trustworthy. That trust will surface in visible ways: ‘responsible AI’ indicators on websites, vendor contracts designed for auditability, and CX metrics that include explainability, transparency, and human override.” — Jeff Fettes, CEO of Laivly Read more: https://lnkd.in/gwv9CY2g

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Shopify or Not? The Alternative Path My post last week on Shopify’s fall in the AI age sparked a good debate. Some raised similar concerns, while others avidly defended Shopify. In the debate, I missed the nuance. As someone who’s used Shopify, worked with devs, and spoken with hundreds of merchants, I’ll say this: Shopify can be a hit or a miss. It all depends on the situation. For B2C brands with simple catalogs and no devs, Shopify is a good choice. Convenient to set up. Nice templates. WYSIWYG editor. I get it. But it usually falls short with more complex business models and workflows, such as B2B setups, advanced B2C product logic, marketplaces, etc. In those cases, Shopify is stretched beyond its design. Devs patch workarounds instead of building new features; slowing time-to-market and driving up costs. All of this happens while GMV fees, app fees, and platform fees compound. For businesses facing these challenges, the real strategic question becomes: Do we keep building inside someone else’s box—or define our own? With AI tooling and better open-source options, the barrier to platform ownership is lower than ever, opening up an alternative path for merchants. It’s no surprise that more teams are now questioning the high GMV fees and vendor lock-in associated with SaaS platforms like Shopify. I probably would not care much if I were selling five T-shirts in five colors. But as complexity grows, so does the need for control. For those complex cases, platform ownership is a more viable path than ever.

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Excellent op ed piece on how (and why) Canadian companies should prioritize buying Canadian tech. And a nice dovetail to the recent launch of J’adopte Québec Tech https://lnkd.in/gJRsFS6q

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Mid-level AI PMs at Canada's top product companies are now landing CA$180K–CA$280K total comp. At Shopify (L6 PM), median total comp sits at CA$231K. At Borealis AI it's CA$181K, with packages reaching CA$367K. Layer 6 AI averages CA$178K–$259K. That puts AI-focused PMs at or above the top of the senior PM band in Canada — Glassdoor's broader Senior PM AI/ML data shows a typical $114K–$172K across the wider market. I pulled this from 10+ sources — Levels.fyi Canada bands, Glassdoor 2026 data, Statistics Canada's January 2026 AI employment trends study, Artemis Canada's 2025 product leadership salary guide, and Toronto/Vancouver recruiter benchmarks. The compensation number turned out to be the least interesting thing in the data. The real story is what the job has become. In ~18 months, the AI PM role in Canada has restructured around four shifts most PMs haven't internalized yet: → Discovery moved from quarterly to weekly. The teams shipping AI features fastest are running customer conversations every week, not every planning cycle. → PRDs got cheap to produce — which made vague PRDs career-limiting. If a spec could be written by anyone with Claude open, it doesn't count as PM work anymore. → Prototyping moved into the JD. Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal postings now expect PMs to ship working prototypes, not just wireframes. Technical depth stopped being optional. → Output stopped being a seniority signal. Judgment is. Volume is free now. Picking the right thing to build — and killing the wrong things fast — is what separates senior from mid. One question for PMs reading this: which of the four shifts is your team still pretending isn't real? #AIProductManagement #ProductManagement #CanadianTech #ProductLeadership #FractionalCPO

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