Event category: Plenary

The playbook for exiting a tech company has fundamentally changed. The era of getting premium multiples just for being a “solid, profitable company with reasonable growth” is over. Today, AI has sucked all the oxygen and valuation premiums out of the room, leaving founders of standard SaaS and tech businesses asking a urgent question: Now what?

In this provocative keynote, Michael Hyatt dismantles the outdated exit playbooks and delivers a blunt assessment of what buyers and investors actually care about right now. When the tide goes out and capital consolidates into a few massive hype cycles, doing everything “right” isn’t enough to trigger a lucrative exit—you need strategic re-positioning.

Session Focus:

• Why “Good” Isn’t Enough: How the multiple gap widened between standard tech and AI-narrative companies, and what it takes to bridge it.
• Reframing Your Narrative: How non-AI and traditional tech companies can position their core defensibility, proprietary data, and workflows to command strategic premiums.
• The New Buyer Psychology: What private equity and strategic acquirers are secretly underwriting today versus what they tell the market.
• Tactical Action Plan: Specific moves founders must make 12 to 24 months before a liquidity event when capital markets contract.

CoolIT Systems engineered the liquid cooling backbone powering some of the world’s most demanding AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, culminating in one of Alberta’s most significant technology exits. But the final valuation is only the last chapter of a much longer story.

This fireside chat explores the strategic decisions, turning points, and moments of resilience that shaped CoolIT’s journey over more than a decade. From building for a market that had yet to emerge, to navigating changing investors, protecting critical intellectual property, and resisting opportunities to exit too early, this is a conversation about what it truly takes to build enduring enterprise value.

Hear directly from the leaders who helped guide the company through its evolution as they discuss three defining themes:

• Protecting the Competitive Advantage – Why defending intellectual property through lengthy and costly litigation became a defining strategic investment.
• Financing Through Multiple Chapters – How successive investors, strategic partners, and capital providers each played distinct roles in helping the company survive, scale, and ultimately achieve an extraordinary outcome.
• Knowing When to Hold—and When to Exit – The decisions, discipline, and market timing that transformed years of patient execution into one of Canada’s landmark technology exits.

The deal that lands on the front page is only the beginning of the story. To close the day, two founders who recently sold their companies get honest about what never makes it into the press release — the parts of an exit that only make sense in hindsight. Bryn Jones sold PartnerStack to AppDirect and stayed on to build inside a fast-moving roll-up, arguing he sold not because the market was tough but because it was the biggest partnership he could build. Kazi Ahmed sold Carbon6 to SPS Commerce in one of Canada’s largest software exits — then, engineered a buy-back of what he had built a year later at a fraction of the price—two very different realities on the other side. This candid conversation digs into when to sell and when to hold, what actually changes the day after you sign, and how founders think about building something enduring rather than merely sellable.

Session Focus:

• Building to sell vs building to last
• What actually changes the day after you sign
• Staying, leaving, and the founder second act

Founders often view an acquisition as the final destination, but for corporate buyers and private equity firms, the closing bell is just day one. To successfully negotiate a premium exit, you must understand the post-merger playbook that acquirers use to justify the transaction to their own boards. This session pulls back the curtain on the mechanics of corporate development. Top acquirers and M&A strategists unpack how they evaluate targets, how they model synergies, and what they expect from leadership teams during the critical post-deal integration phase.

Session Focus:

• How buyers model synergies and set price
• What acquirers audit in your team
• How post-merger integration decisions get made
• What justifies a premium to their board

AI is fundamentally reshaping software economics, customer expectations, and competitive advantage. Rather than debating whether SaaS is “dead,” this discussion explores how founders are adapting their businesses, rebuilding moats, and creating durable enterprise value in an AI-native world.

Session Focus:

• How AI reshapes software economics
• Rebuilding defensibility and moats
• Emerging AI-native business models
• What investors now expect