Three centimeters of fresh snow buried downtown Toronto on the afternoon of Monday 29 Jan 2018, but that didn’t stop hundreds of young web professionals from gathering at WeWork at 240 Richmond St W for the monthly HackerNest that evening.
From 8pm to 11 the networking had many tech rock stars; below is Ethereum co creator Vitalik Buterin at the bar. The atmosphere in the basement of this co-working space was electric as everyone realized this was a special occasion.
The inclement weather all across Southern Ontario did prevent some of the allotted sponsors from attending the event. Their empty tables went unnoticed and the open surfaces soon became handy winter coat depositories.
HackerNest is an international non-profit that produces social events around technology and that includes ‘hackathons’, and other projects that advance technology, humanity, and economic prosperity.
Volunteering at Hackernest are half a dozen volunteers with their eyes on something other than money; they’re networking, manning the HackerNest booth and bar, kibitzing their way in the door at digital agencies and IT centers across the city. Volunteering is a great way to penetrate the tech community and make ground-level friends today which are important later in life.
Hiding among the volunteers was Raymi Lauren, who blogs as Raymi Toronto and works for Fullstack Resources re purposing unemployed coders, programmers and web developers. Raymi was busy all night explaining to the rest of us what it means to be an IT solutions provider and not simply an IT staffing provider. Raymi worked the bar with style from 9-10 pm and used the pulpit to meet and network with most of the room.
AutoServe1 came to Hackernest looking for talent. They printed business cards with the words ‘Full Stack Dev Careers’ all in caps across the front, and below that Apply at autoserve1.com/hackernest which is excellent messaging in a room full of young professionals with short attention spans. What’s more remarkable is how the president Jamie Cuthbert tailored his speech to be relevant to these young people, most of whom do not own cars. He began by describing the agony of dental work, which we can all relate to, and then applied this malaise to the murky world of automotive repair. In this way he positioned the trust-worthy reports sent directly to smart phones by autoserve1 as the remedy for a painful problem. People in the room who wanted to be part of this solution were welcome to apply to him directly, and a great many young people did stop by his table.
Hover gave away dress socks and free domains.
The well established and highly reputable Internet domain name registration service, Hover is a division of Tu cows Incorporated, which used to be the second largest ICANN accredited domain registrar in the world, behind GoDaddy but who knows where they stand now. We do know their market position is expanding with Hover, which is setup to make it easy to buy, manage and use domain names and email addresses. With smart, usable tools, step-by-step tutorials and helpful staff, they’ve grown to become the domain registrar and email solutions provider of choice for web savvy professionals with nimble organizations.
The marketing people at Hover were super clever. Not only did they get there early (beating the snowstorm) and snag the best booth, but they also tailored their table to meets the needs of the entrepreneurs at Hackernest by offering free domains and dress socks. That’s a great idea because it instantly builds a trusting partner-relationship that could be very profitable for both parties down the road.
Among the crowds were black t-shirted executives from Jaxx.io a cryptocurrency wallet technology. Jaxx bills itself as the best wallet for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and dozens of other cryptocurrencies.
Jaxx is a multi-token, blockchain interface that provides a unified experience across nine platforms and devices.
There are at least 56 different block chain tokens available in Jaxx today.
Jaxx was created in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Anthony Diiorio, and much to everyone’s surprise this founder was in the room (he came with Vitalik Buterin), and took the stage (he stood on a chair at the back of the room) to share some empowering words about Jaxx and how it can help us ordinary folks better control our finances. Specifically, with Jaxx.io as our passport to the digital economy we can live free of banks, their fees and federal interest rate manipulations.
Anthony Diiorio’s short speech at HackerNest on the evening of 29 Jan 2018 evidenced an holistic thought-leadership in the field of decentralized technologies. Born and raised in Toronto, Diiorio is the former Chief Digital Officer of the TMX Group and Toronto Stock Exchange, and today he’s the CEO of Decentral, blockchain technologies. Needless to say, once unmasked after the speeches, he was very popular and gave a lot of time and advice to many entrepreneurs in a group huddle close to the speaking chair at the front of the room. Later he tweeted this picture,
The good people at HackerNest themselves were also among the exhibitors proudly promoting their next big event, Fishhackathon Toronto.
