April update: Inspiring Builders and Connecting
Builders are building, Socratica kicked off April with a large celebration on builders, a podcast to share early-stage stories, and Devhouse was closed off the month packed!
Bigger events started and ended the month (more below on those) but some other things were also going on.
Builders are building
On the builders’ side, the MondayClub has started experimenting with a podcast series that talks to founders who are starting on their entrepreneurial journey. There are five episodes available now and they are also available on Spotify and Apple.
Some local founder successes that were exciting to learn about this month:
Datacurv has come out YC W24 flying
Symphonic Labs is part of the latest (batch 3) AI Grant cohort
Extensible - Capture regressions in your agents before and after deploying to production is part of the latest Betaworks cohort
Vidyard released an amazing AI tool for generating videos
I certainly missed a few — feel free to drop me an email and I will make sure they are in the next update.
Community Support and Connection
Many helpful founder/builder-focused events happened this month.
Velocity has released its new publication that shares its impact story
Student-created Socratica Energizes the community
April started with a packed Hagey Hall at the University of Waterloo where students shared things they are working on at their Socratica Symposium. The audience included some successful alumni and students from other campuses in the US and Canada that are developing their own Socratica chapters.
The entire event video is here.
8:20 Show Start
10:45 Matchmaking Graph Demo
16:40 Sponsors
20:48 Indie Game Dev - Josiah Plett
27:49 The Home Project - Wilbur Zhang
33:38 Burrow - Brooke Joseph, Elijah Kurien
40:55 SuperStage - Justin Lin
48:58 Behind The Scenes - Max Wentzlaff
55:35 Fadr - Krish Shah, Chinemerem Chigbo
1:03:00 Intermission
1:19:30 Voltra Energy - Alexander Stratmoen, Aryan Afrouzi
1:29:48 Giang's Art Journey - Giang Tran
1:38:49 Miniblox - Victor Wei
1:45:10 Breadboard Computer - Yashashwin Karthikeyan
1:51:43 Wygo - Jocelyne Murphy
2:00:40 Grid Security - Anson Yu
2:11:10 Hacksmith Industries Shoutout
2:12:20 Intermission
2:14:15 Socratica Symposium Closing Recap
DevHouse was a full house
The re-booted DevHouse Waterloo had a packed room interested in sharing things they have working on and meeting new people. Pre-covid DevHouse was a smaller event of 20-40 people sharing technical projects. Now, it’s 100+ people sharing their technical projects!
The audience is a mix of people new to the region and some of the old-timers coming back out. Looking forward to the next one at the end of May. If you are working on something (anything) and want to share, this is the place to do it!
About The Barn
The Barn is a collective of builders in the community who look for ways to connect, grow, and support the community. This newsletter is designed to provide a regular update on tech-related things in the Waterloo Region and highlight the work founders/builders are doing.
Posts are currently once a month and might be bi-weekly when needed. If you would like to see more stuff featured — send me an email!