Dan Sadler

Canada has something Silicon Valley doesn't. A pan-Canadian community of 3,200+ senior tech leaders. Volunteer-led. Unsponsored. No agenda but helping each other execute faster. We don't optimize for eyeballs. We optimize for trust. The result? Real-time signal on what actually works. Peer-tested frameworks. The kind of collective intelligence that only emerges when status signaling is off the table. Communities don't scale by adding more people. They scale by deepening trust per node. When senior operators can ask the hardest questions without pretense, the entire ecosystem moves faster. That's the Canadian advantage. Not louder. Deeper.

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The CRA just posted an RFP asking for a local solution to generate Java code. Canada is finally waking up to what we should have been building all along. We spend $50B+ annually on R&D. Less than 2% of that IP gets commercialized. Over half gets assigned to foreign companies. The gap isn't invention. It's translation. Vision to execution. Idea to Production-Ready code that stays here. When a federal agency asks for local AI tooling to build software, it's a signal. Not just procurement. Recognition that exportable IP and sovereign capability matter. This is the bottleneck I've been watching for years. Brilliant innovators who can't build alone. Risk-averse capital that won't fund pre-revenue deep tech. A translation layer that costs $400k or doesn't exist at all. The RFP is small. The shift it represents is not.

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Product leaders from across Canada met today for PLX Lean Coffee for a discussion of hot topics from the trenches! We took on two burning issues: HOW TO PRIORITIZE - CUSTOMER REQUESTS, LONG TERM VISION, ETC. - We discussed the high stress environment of competing priorities and how to allocate scarce resources among so many priorities. - Key to our discussion was that this was a very early stage start up (3 co-founders) in a very competitive and fast-moving market. - "What do you need to do to raise your next round of funding" became the key question. From that, clarity came quickly. - The company needs to turn four beta customers into long term contracts. We discussed what that would take, and how the success of the trials was being measured and communicated to the customers. - The co-founders must be completely aligned. There is no room for pulling in different directions. - The product leader decided her most important next action was to come up with better metrics for the trials, communicate progress against those metrics consistently with those customers, and let those metrics drive the decisions on product priorities. WHAT IS THE PLACE OF PRDs IN A WORLD OF VIBE-CODING AND NEED FOR SPEED? - A product leader shared he was questioning the value of the PRDs he is currently expected to deliver. - There were not many fans of PRDs in the group. PRDs require a lot of time to research and write and require lengthy sign-offs. They assume all requirements can be known up front. - The preference was for multiple flexible documents, most which live in Jira and Figma, that are more useful to developers and designers. Vibe-coded prototypes can be used very effectively to communicate requirements. These are the "what" and "how" parts. - Some parts of the PRD are still needed - the "why" parts - product strategy, link to business goals, success metrics. This is done for the product leader's own thinking and to communicate up. It does not have to be a PRD. With participation from Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto, Lean Coffee keeps growing and getting better. If you are a product leader (CPO, VP, Director) and want a great place to bounce questions and ideas off your peers from across Canada, join us for our next one.

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Palantir Technologies just posted a Rule of 40 of 127 per cent. They SMASHED earnings. Let that sink in for a second. The Rule of 40 exists to answer a simple question. Are you growing fast and doing it profitably? Most public software companies are happy to clear 40. Strong ones might hit 60 or 70 in exceptional years. 127 is not a rounding error. It is an outlier. Revenue up 70 per cent US commercial up 137 per cent Adj EBIT up 114 per cent Margins north of 55 per cent At public scale. The uncomfortable truth is that there are very few public companies growing anywhere near this fast while also throwing off real operating leverage. If you look across public markets today, the list of companies with growth above 40-50 per cent, meaningful profitability, and clear enterprise or government moats is extremely short. Most high-growth names are still burning cash. Most profitable names are growing in the teens. Very few do both. This is why Rule of 40 matters. It cuts through narrative and asks one brutal question. Is the business structurally strong or just temporarily exciting? Palantir is telling the market something very clearly. This is no longer a story stock. It is an operating machine. Curious how many public companies you think genuinely belong in this bucket today. The only other company growing at this rate and at this scale is Databricks, which was recently valued at $134bn and plans to go public later this year.

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At a Canadian startup I worked for (RIP), we chased big growth with fancy algorithms. But 80% of our purchasing challenges were solved by one thing , simple seasonal trends from past purchases. Often, the simplest data holds the real answers.

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🧠 Tech leaders: Let’s be honest. AI is already reshaping how we build, lead, and work - and that changes the job market in Tech as well. Shopify's CEO Tobi Lütke told Shopify's leads what now VCs are telling startups: “No new hires unless AI can’t do the job.”  The effects of that are significant:  🔹 Entry-level roles? Vanishing as senior staff can now cover them with AI assistance. 🔹 Career paths? Collapsing as a consequence. 🔹 Companies? Scaling with smaller teams. The job market seems to be shrinking in Tech. ❓️ So what’s the best places to be at in terms of job perspective?  ‼️ It’s for sure the ones where you learn and build up your AI knowledge! There are a few options: 1️⃣ Obviously the big AI companies like OpenAI, Mistral or others. But there are only so many of them...  2️⃣ Companies leveraging AI - for their products or their processes. Not the big techs, but nearly all other industries! If you can help them leveling up their AI game, you have good job perspectives. 3️⃣ Yourself! Thanks to AI, starting your own business has become easier than ever. So go invent some new products or disrupt existing businesses. 👉 This is your edge. 📰 If you want to go deeper on this topic, the latest issue of my newsletter "The Tech Impact Uplift" is for you. You can access the newsletter from my profile or directly go to the issue from the comments.

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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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Scaling isn't just about size - it’s about shifts. We’re deep in conversation at #CTOCraftCon: Toronto with an incredible panel of tech leaders in “From Startups to Scale-ups: Unique Challenges for Tech Leaders.” Moderated by the ever-insightful Neeha Curtis, the panel features voices from Sportlogiq, Databricks, Medium, and CanadaHelps - each with a different lens on how to scale without losing your soul (or your sanity). Key themes emerging: • Culture doesn’t scale by accident - it takes intentional design. • Speed can be a strength - or a trap - if you don’t balance it with structure. • Growth-stage leadership is a constant recalibration of what your team, product, and customers really need. From local traction to global scale, this one’s packed with hard-won wisdom. Mehrsan Javan, Robin Sutara, Shakti Sinha

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