Funding & Talent Dominate Twitter Talk Around Techvibes

To scale a tech startup, companies need to manage a complex set of variables: Finding product-market fit, getting funded, finding customers, hiring, being better than the competition, and a slew of little things in between that need to be managed to keep a company out of the deadpool.

To determine what’s currently on the minds of Canadian tech entrepreneurs, we looked at conversation and social media activity around one of the country’s most established tech publications, Techvibes.

A close look at the social media data shows employment (“help” & “hiring”) and funding (“million”) conversations standing out prominently.

Those two topics aren’t a coincidence. For most startups, money and people are the same problem seen from two sides: a funding round is usually spent mostly on salaries, and the ability to hire good people is often what investors are betting on. When a community’s conversation centres on “hiring” and “million”, it’s a sign that companies are past the idea stage and trying to grow.

Jobs/Talent

Techvibes hosts a semi-annual event called Techfest, which underscores the importance of hiring. The networking event attracts more than 1,000 attendees and culminates in a series of 2-minute pitches by CEOs, founders and tech executives meant to attract the best employees.

Five Tech Companies Making Waves at Techfest This Month https://t.co/2Jf3HHrEMU pic.twitter.com/PeEA2om60a #vancouver

— Techvibes (@techvibes) May 15, 2016

The next event takes place May 25 in Vancouver and some of the companies pitching for talent include Clio, BroadbandTV, and Unbounce.

Flipping the usual pitch around is what made the format stand out. At most startup events, founders pitch to investors. At Techfest, companies pitched to job seekers, which says a lot about how competitive hiring for experienced tech staff had become in cities like Vancouver.

The three companies named have taken different paths since. Unbounce, the landing page software company, was founded in Vancouver in 2009 by CEO Rick Perreault and five co-founders, and opened an office in Berlin in 2016, the year of this article, according to Wikipedia. BroadbandTV, now known as BBTV, went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in October 2020 at C$16.00 a share. In January 2024 insiders including CEO Shahrzad Rafati took it private again at C$0.375 a share, a 98% drop from the IPO price, according to Wikipedia’s summary.

The hiring and jobs discussion around Techvibes is also being fuelled by this article by Kerri-Lynn McAllister:

How to Hire for a Startup via @techvibes https://t.co/2g5x9a5BpQ pic.twitter.com/eauHyXzB9G

— BCIC (@bcic) May 15, 2016

McAllister’s top 5 tips for hiring:

1. Don’t neglect the job description
2. Tailor recruiting to the role
3. Institute task-based testing
4. Add purpose to the personality interview
5. Hire slowly, fire quickly

For more about the importance of skill sets among startup teams, read our report on the “leadership gap.”

Why Those Hiring Tips Still Work

McAllister’s list holds up because each tip tackles a common startup mistake. A vague job description attracts the wrong applicants and wastes everyone’s time. Recruiting the same way for a developer and a salesperson ignores where each actually looks for work. Task-based testing, giving a candidate a short, realistic piece of work, shows what someone can do rather than how well they interview.

The last tip, “hire slowly, fire quickly,” is the one founders most often get backwards. Under pressure to grow, it’s tempting to fill a seat fast and then hope a poor fit improves. In a team of ten, one wrong hire is a tenth of the company, so the cost of getting it wrong is much higher than at a large firm.

Funding

Startups follow the money. They also tweet about it. Among the most retweeted articles from Techvibes in the last 90 days:

500 Startups Launches $30 Million Micro-fund in Canada called #500CAN https://t.co/Iuk7naSvsT @500Canada #cdntech pic.twitter.com/UCVHT6e4hN

— Techvibes (@techvibes) March 31, 2016

500 Startups has since renamed itself 500 Global. The firm, founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai, reported $2.3 billion in assets under management as of March 2024, according to Wikipedia.

Venture capital gets more Twitter love, as data shows VC is at its highest level in more than a decade:

VC in Canada = $1.4 billion & #EquityCrowdfunding can bring same $$ https://t.co/koVULvxgxe @Techvibes #CCS2016 pic.twitter.com/wo8w4HXgVK

— SeedUps Capital (@SeedUpsCanada) February 25, 2016

The top 5 hashtags most often used alongside Techvibes’ articles:

• #fintech
• #startups
• #tech
• #IoT
• #Toronto

How Canadian Venture Capital Looks Now

The $1.4 billion figure in that 2016 tweet looks small next to recent years. In 2025, CAD $8.0 billion was invested across 571 Canadian venture capital deals, according to the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA). Data providers count deals differently, so the two numbers aren’t an exact comparison, but the scale of the change is plain.

The CVCA’s numbers also show the market getting harder in some ways. Capital deployed in 2025 fell 6% from 2024, deal count fell 12%, and investment at the Series A to D stages stayed below 2024 levels. Venture debt reached its highest recorded annual level at CAD $1.40 billion, and the report counted just 29 venture-backed exits with no IPOs. “In Canada, that shows up as slower progression from company formation to scale and liquidity, even when quarterly figures improve,” said David Kornacki, the CVCA’s director of data and product.

What It Means for Founders

A decade on, the two themes in the 2016 conversation are still the two that matter. There’s more venture money in Canada than there was, but it’s going into fewer deals, and investors are spending more time on companies that have already shown they can grow. That makes the hiring side of the equation even more important: a startup that hires carefully, as McAllister advised, spends its funding further and has more to show at the next round.