LinkedIn Local Toronto Meetup - Cutting Edge Technology to Change the Game

Do you get excited about the latest tech innovations?

Technology moves at an extremely rapid pace these days. New software, software stacks, hardware, and ideas are born and made ready so fast many businesses cannot keep up. As soon as the cloud was developed, cloud-native deployments became all the rage. The moment containers caught on, Kubernetes came into being.

Cutting edge technology means 'new technology'. That is to say, recently released stuff (hardware, software, tools, whatever). The advantage is that it tends to be more powerful ... the disadvantage is that it tends to be more buggy (because nothing finds bugs like actually being used for years.)

But it's great to innovate and talk about the latest trends and challenges

The 20th Toronto LinkedIn Local Meetup is focused on getting you away from 'Laptop LinkedIn' and in person again, along with meeting some awesome speakers, attendees and sharing knowledge on cutting edge tech.

Date: Oct 20th 2022

Time: 6:00 pm -9:00 pm

Location: Xero Software (Canada) Inc event space - 250 University Ave, Toronto, ON M5H 3E5, on the 4th floor

During this LinkedIn Local event, you will gain insights from workplace experts, senior business leaders and executive-level professionals from across the world who will share their insights on building meaningful relationship, managing both working from home and working in the office, and more. We will arm you with ideas you can bring back to your own organization.

We will also have an Open Mic session for you to share your story, ask a question, and offer a tip.

This event is ideal for you if you’re:

• An ambitious team member within your organization and are interested in taking the next steps to advance your career or business

• Looking to build a valuable like minded network consisting of leaders from renowned organizations

• A passionate advocate for inclusive workplaces and are looking to access experts in the field to learn key insights from

SUJALA BALAJI: CEO, Rainfed Foods | Engineer | Scientist | Entrepreneur Obsessed with Alternative Proteins and Millets

AARON LABBÉ: CTO & Co-founder at LUCID, Inventor, Artist, Mental Health Advocate

PAT CHAISANG: Founder & CEO at Isempower | Hire international students ??

MICHAEL PERROW: Nightshift CEO

BOBBY UMAR: CEO of DYPB - Discover Your Personal Brand and the Thought Leadership Branding Club | 5x TEDx Speaker, Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, Author of Best-Seller 'How to Network Anytime, Anywhere, with Anyone'

SWISH GOSWAMI: CEO & Co-Founder, Surf | Co-Founder of the #LinkedInLocal movement

YOU: At our Open Mic session - share your experience of going through the pandemic and missing live in-person events.

Some Hors d'oeuvres and drinks will be provided during this event - First come first serve. You’ll also have the chance to win some great prizes throughout the evening!

Save an additional 40% off your tickets with an Early Bird ticket.

Save even more with a group of 4! Bring your colleagues or team along get over 50% off of four tickets!

6:00pm: Registration and Networking - get warmed up again in-person!

6:45pm: Welcome by Bobby Umar

6:55pm: FEATURED PANEL: Sujala Balaji, Aaron Labbe, Pat Chaisang, Michael Perron, Swish Goswami (Moderator)

7:45pm: Networking Interactive Activity then Mini-Break (15 min) - Bobby Umar will help you shake off any rust when it comes to building meaningful relationships

8:10pm: Short Featured Talk 8-min (TBC)

8:20pm: OPEN MIC session - this is a chance for YOU to shine. Share a tip, ask a question, tell us something you're grateful. You have 2 minutes. First come, first serve!

8:45pm: Closing thoughts by Swish Goswami (sponsor)

8:50pm: Group photo

9:00pm: Event ends and exits

9:30pm: After party at The Duke of Cornwall, 400 University Ave, Toronto, ON M5G 1S5

HASHTAGS: #LinkedInLocal #LinkedInLocalTO

Toronto LinkedIn Local Meetups were first hosted and organized in 2017 by Swish Goswami, Bobby Umar and DYPB. To date we have run 19 events for over 2,500 people. Topics have included Women Breaking Barriers, Diversity in the Senior Ranks, Transitioning Your Career or Business, Resilience, Gratitude/Reflection/Planning, Side Hustles, Burnout/Life-Balance, and many more.

is the only organization in the world that is dedicated to using our personal branding expertise to change the world. We achieve this through our signature training programs, high-profile events, helpful online resources and in-depth consulting. DYPB develops your employees’ individual strengths and values to serve your organizational mission and vision.

The result?

Leaders have more clarity and purpose. Teams are more collaborative and motivated. Organizations have greater retention, loyalty, productivity and growth.

To learn more about DYPB - Discover Your Personal Brand: https://www.dypb.ca/

This event is not sponsored, endorsed, or operated by LinkedIn. TY to our key sponsors Surf and Xero.

Sujala is an engineer and food scientist turned entrepreneur with 2 decades of experience in the food and dairy industry leading innovation and product commercialization in companies of all sizes. Deeply passionate about addressing climate change through the creation of biodiverse and regenerative food systems, she co-founded Rainfed Foods in 2020. Rainfed is the world's first foodtech startup focused on transforming underutilized climate-resilient crops like millets into alternative proteins using a proprietary technology. Sujala is an active thought leader in the emerging alternative protein sector and is an honoree of "Women Building the Future of Food".

Aaron Labbé is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of LUCID, an AI digital music therapy startup. LUCID is working to revolutionize mental health through the power of music and machine learning. Their mission is to transform music into medicine, and create a more empathetic approach to mental health care through personalized music-based interventions.

After facing severe mental health battles in his youth, Aaron developed the initial concept for LUCID during his thesis in New Media and Computational Art at Ryerson University. He is the recipient of several Canada Council awards. He has guest lectured at Ryerson University, and spoken at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Dutch Design Week, Toronto Interior Design Show, and Wallifornia Music Tech.

Aaron has authored three patents, including the Affective Music Recommendation System (AMRS) which is the core of LUCID’s therapeutic music technology. AMRS is a deep reinforcement learning system that predicts and generates playlists to help users move towards their target mood state.

Pat is a Founder & CEO of Isempower, Canada’s first job search platform for international students.

Having moved from Thailand to Canada for her bachelor’s degree, Pat realized how difficult it is for international students to build a successful career and professional network in a new country from the ground up. Her lived experience of being an international student herself, combined with her passion for building community inspired her to found Isempower with a sole purpose to help international students jump-start their careers in a new country and stop settling for less. As a founder of Isempower, she is on a mission to help international students build meaningful careers through connecting them with employers who want to hire them and working with organizations to support their diversity & inclusion goals.

Professionally, Pat has experience in product management, digital marketing, eCommerce, and program management, working with top technology brands and retailers. Previously, she was a Product Manager at TELUS, managing content strategy for the Optik TV platform, focusing on viewership personalization strategy and advocating for best-in-class customer experience. Prior to TELUS, she was a Business Specialist at Best Buy Canada, overseeing business operations of the advertising & eCommerce programs. Her early career was spent at SAP as a Digital Marketing Specialist, building a community of SAP advocates & evangelists around the world.

Outside of work, she is an avid espresso-lover and a mom to a 4-year-old Australian Shepherd.

Perrow has experienced success in leadership roles at early-stage tech and crypto companies for over a decade. He helped bring the first Canadian crypto company public in 2018 and signed a popstar’s first platinum record in 2016. Perrow manages a roster of Nightshift’s artists with over 1B+ streams and a Grammy nomination. He utilizes his passion for design and progressive technology to prove Nightshift is one of the top brand agencies in the world.

About Nightshift

A multi-disciplinary creative agency, Nightshift is driven by a mutual obsession with design, music, entertainment, and technology. Nightshift collaborates with global brands on design and innovative projects while simultaneously overseeing commercially successful recording artists' careers and strategies. With offices in Toronto and Seattle, Nightshift lives at the intersection of entertainment, technology, art, and design.

Bobby Umar is one of the most prolific heart-based leaders in North America. Inc. Magazine named him one of the Top 100 Leadership Speakers, named alongside such noteworthy giants as Richard Branson, Brene Brown, John Maxwell and Robin Sharma. Bobby is a 5x TEDx speaker and one of the top influencers in the world, with over 500,000 followers. He has been named the 2nd best business coach to follow on Twitter and the 4th best leadership influencer according to Kred. Bobby is an international author of two books, including an Amazon #1 best-seller, and is a Huffington Post contributor. He hosted a weekly tweetchat called “The Power of Connection” that reached over 65 million impressions weekly. To date, his social media influence has garnered over a billion impressions. Bobby was also named a “2015 Speaker to Watch” and one of the Top 7 Networking gurus to follow.

A social media influencer, who champions authentic connection and heart-based leadership, Bobby has appeared on dozens of podcasts, TV & radio shows. With a background in brand marketing (Kraft & Unilever), engineering (Bombardier) and the performing arts (Second City), Bobby has led Raeallan for almost a decade and is now a recognized thought leader in Networking, Social Media and Personal Branding. He founded DYPB via the Discover Your Personal Brand conference, the largest event in North America dedicated solely to personal branding, featuring 60 experts and over 300 delegates. DYPB now runs personal branding programs, events, courses and consulting to help leaders and organizations achieve greater alignment, focus and impact in the workplace. 300,000+ people from across the world have experienced Bobby’s high-energy keynotes, interactive teambuilding activities, and engaging workshops.

Bobby is also a fiercely proud and committed dad and is passionate about diversity, gender equality, entrepreneurship and youth. He has worked with thousands of professionals to become thought leaders in 2 ways – help professionals ramp up their careers or businesses with focus, clarity and mindset and help ‘lost leaders’ transition to find their authentic path of passion and purpose.

FOLLOW ON: LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube

Swish Goswami is the CEO of Surf, a tech company providing brands a better way to engage and understand consumers while compensating consumers for their data. Swish has given three TEDx talks and is the bestselling author of “The Young Entrepreneur”, a book encouraging and teaching students to build a business while in school. Through his angel fund AGEX, Swish is an investor/advisor in popular social companies like FaZe Clan, Wombo, and Upstream. Swish has close to 140,000 followers on LinkedIn and he enjoys speaking around the world on topics like mental health, personal branding and entrepreneurship. For his achievements, Swish was recognized as LinkedIn’s Top Voice and Startup Canada's Young Entrepreneur of the Year and awarded the United Nation’s Outstanding Youth Leadership award.

Xero is a cloud-based accounting software platform for small businesses with over 2.7 million subscribers globally. Through Xero, small business owners and their advisors have access to real-time financial data any time, anywhere and on any device. Xero offers an ecosystem of over 1,000 third-party apps and 300 plus connections to banks and other financial partners. In 2020 and 2021, Xero was included in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index and in 2020, Xero was recognised by IDC MarketScape as a leader in its worldwide SaaS and cloud-enabled small business finance and accounting applications vendor assessment.

Surf is a Toronto based tech company putting the power of personal data back into people’s hands. Surf’s browser extension lets users earn from the data they already share everyday. Surf recently crossed the 125,000 user mark. Surf has made two acquisitions, raised over $5M to date (from several NBA players and venture firms) and has customers like Sony Music, Netflix, NBA, Electronic Arts, and a plethora of small to medium sized businesses.

is the only organization in the world that is dedicated to using our personal branding expertise to change the world. We achieve this through our signature training programs, high-profile events, helpful online resources and in-depth consulting. DYPB develops your employees’ individual strengths and values to serve your organizational mission and vision.

The result?

Leaders have more clarity and purpose. Teams are more collaborative and motivated. Organizations have greater retention, loyalty, productivity and growth.

To learn more about DYPB - Discover Your Personal Brand: https://www.dypb.ca/

Terms and conditions

By registering for this virtual event, you are sharing your registration information with DYPB and the event’s corporate sponsors. Upon registration you acknowledge that you have read and agreed to the terms and conditions. By submitting your personal information, you are agreeing that DYPB and certain permitted associated corporate sponsors/partners may contact you.

By registering for this event, you are opting into DYPB email updates and those from possible sponsors and partners. These updates will notify you about relevant news, as well as announcements about DYPB events and services. You can opt out of DYPB email updates at any time.

Refund Policy: Due to limited availability, DYPB cannot offer refunds once your tickets are purchased. If you cannot make the event due to unforeseen circumstances, you may transfer your ticket(s). Thank you.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Xero, 250 University Avenue, Toronto, Canada