Event category: Plenary

A successful tech exit is not a single transaction; it is the direct result of deliberate operational hygiene practiced years in advance. In this session, Narbe Alexandrian shares the unvarnished operational and governance frameworks that separate smooth, high-value exits from broken deals. While traditional advice focuses heavily on pitch decks and investment bankers, this keynote digs into the corporate plumbing that sophisticated institutional buyers actually audit. Learn how to transform your daily operations, corporate governance, and data infrastructure into a competitive advantage that builds immense leverage long before you ever initiate a sale process.

Session Focus:

• Governance that signals maturity to buyers
• Revenue quality buyers can verify
• A continuous, transaction-ready data room
• Fixing cap table, IP and contracts early

Drawing on his experience building 10KC, David Wilkin shares the strategic decisions, pivots, and lessons learned from creating long-term enterprise value in an environment where there is rarely a “perfect” exit. Through a keynote followed by a fireside conversation with Ali Asaria, this session explores how founders can build enterprise value and keep multiple paths open, positioning the company to attract and close the right strategic and PE term sheets rather than waiting for ideal market conditions.

Session Focus:

• Creating enterprise value before liquidity exists
• Building optionality through concrete decisions
• Why you don’t wait for a perfect exit

The tech ecosystem is adjusting to a structural shift in how companies are valued and funded. The era of growth at all costs has been replaced by a strict focus on capital efficiency, sustainable unit economics, and proven paths to liquidity. In this panel, leading investors, private equity firms and M&A advisors break down the current state of Canadian tech M&A, venture debt, and equity financing. They will strip away the headlines to reveal where capital is actually flowing, what today’s investors and acquirers are willing to pay a premium for right now, and how founders should position their balance sheets to maximize optionality going into 2027.

Session Focus:

• Where 2026 valuations have landed
• What today’s investors and acquirers reward now
• Alternative liquidity paths: debt and secondaries
• Positioning your balance sheet for 2027

You spend years chasing the outcome. Then the papers are signed, the money lands, and the thing that defined you is no longer yours, and almost no one talks honestly about what happens next. In this closing conversation, two founders who took very different roads to very different exits reflect on what the deal actually changed, and what it did not. One built a venture-backed category leader in transportation tech and sold to a global strategic; the other built a people-powered company from the ground up and became one of the most recognized founders in the country. Both know what it feels like the morning after, the identity shift, the second-guessing, the unexpected questions, and the freedom, and neither will give you the polished version.

A candid, human end to the day, from two people who have stood where every founder in the room is trying to get to.

Session Focus:

• What actually changes the day after the deal closes 

• The identity shift when the company is no longer yours 

• What the outcome solved, and what it didn’t 

• The parts of the journey they would do differently 

• Life, purpose, and the second act after an exit 

• What they wish someone had told them before they signed 

Founders are constantly balancing competing opportunities. Raise capital? Sell? Acquire? Expand? Wait? This session explores when keeping options open creates value—and when it creates distraction.

Session Focus:

• When keeping your options open creates value — and when it just creates distraction  

• Raise, sell, acquire, or wait: how founders actually decide, and what they weigh  

• The real cost of raising capital you don’t need yet  

• Knowing when it’s time to commit instead of staying flexible