Honour to wear the Communitech Maple Leaf everyday over my heart for 4 years!

Always meet your heroes, a love letter to Canada.

Owning the Podium for innovation

Grammy winner, Walter Ostanek with Chris Albinson

“Leave the party when you’re still having fun” taking Walter Ostanek’s advise is always a great idea! Albinson to step down as CEO of Communitech at the end of the year

It is with great pride in our team and what they have accomplished that I will be stepping down at the end of the year. Being the CEO of Communitech, has been a role of a lifetime! It was both a tremendous privilege and a challenge to support Canada’s founders for the last four years.

Recently stepping out into the alley from DTK’s awesome Speakeasy, SugarRun, it was the end of my fourth Techtoberfest. It was a very brisk fall evening. Especially when wearing lederhosen! The energy, laughter, founders sharing stories and another round of jager shots was hard to step away from, but I knew it was time.

“Leaving the party while you’re still having fun!” was the best advice Walter gave me that night, and it applies to social events and passion projects equally.

It was time. I remember similar feelings stepping away from being a founding co-chair of C100 after three years. It is a real heart ache, but you also know it is the right thing to do for the organization. I learned long ago that communities that strive to serve ambitious founders must stay dynamic, ambitious, and their leadership should be a shared & evolving endeavours.

Communitech is having its best year! Looking back on the last 4 years, the team working with founders have pushed hard to make Canada the best place to start, scale, and succeed. We didn’t always get it right, but we worked our tails off and are justifiably proud of the impact we have had.

Since joining in 2021, the team has put North America’s largest innovation hub on an ambitious path to sustainability by streamlining its programs for Canadian founders looking to start, scale, and succeed — increasing the founders we serve by 32%, revenue to its highest level up by 38%, and raising significant long term funding.

Launching a shared national ambition, brand, & strategy that tries to meet the aspirations of the founders we serve are all in place — a strategy rooted in data and ambition True North Strategy — inspired by the blueprint of Own The Podium. Communitech is now the largest North American organization in TECNA measured by the founders’ served and revenue. Communitech uniquely shares the ambition of Canada’s founders. It was a personal thrill to partner with Cathy Priestner, architect of Own The Podium to design the True North Strategy.

The Waterloo Region community has registered a compound growth rate of more than 20 percent, breaking into the top 20, at #18 largest North American tech hubs. Waterloo’s impressive growth and strong tech ecosystem continue to set it apart from much larger markets. With a 46% tech job growth rate over the past three years, Waterloo ranks 3rd in North America for tech job growth — surpassing major tech hubs like New York, Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Our accomplishments working with founders also include launching the flagship Team True North program, helping to shape the Canadian H1B Visa, the Canadian Entrepreneur Incentive, procurement legislation for founders, the creation of a new pan-Canadian True North Fund, launching GoodAI an extension of our Tech4Good partnership with Rideau Hall, and setting the stage for Hub 4.0 Communitech’s new event and collision space coming in 2025.

Since co-founding the C100 15 years ago, it is awesome to see just how far Canada’s tech scene had come . It was 11 years ago working with Pearl Sullivan, Dean of Engineering at University of Waterloo, we brought Jack Dorsey to Communitech. Not to talk about being CEO of Square and Twitter, but the kid from St Louis who just wanted to build big things and why Waterloo is the best place in the world to do it from (crazy to watch the video clip from that trip)! This ambition to build big, is what makes Waterloo Region so special. It is why he came, and why I joined as CEO of Communitech almost 4 years ago.

Some worry about the fiery debate about ambition in Canada’s tech community right now, I don’t!

I haven’t felt that way since being in Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympics with my dad; the celebratory feeling of pride in Canada winning the women’s (best hockey game I have ever seen in my life) , and the emptiness of what “could have/should have” happened in Canadian skip Kevin Martin’s loss to Norway in the gold medal curling game. It was that feeling of winning seven gold medals, but knowing the Winter Games were “ours” and that we could have done better. This burning frustration with Canada not doing better — led directly to Own The Podium being founded.

This is the fire needed to be the best in the world.

In the years between 2002 and the 2010 Vancouver Games, we saw the ambition, vision, and focused resources that Team Canada put together in Own The Podium program led directly to a remarkable results: the most gold medals at a single Winter Olympics, and one of the most successful host nation performances in Olympic history. It continues today, with Canada having its best summer Olympics in Paris — 22 years later.

Deciding to be the best in the world is a choice. A choice Canada’s tech community can still make.

All the ingredients exist for Canada to own the podium again — but this time, in the world of technology and innovation

Chris Albinson & Cathy Priestner Communitech, 2022

We were lucky to partner the team that led to the success of the Vancouver Games, and we were struck by two things. First, that the movement was led by the athletes themselves — echoing how Canadian tech founders today are taking on the mantle of global leadership and becoming increasingly sophisticated about their goals. The second was how the Own The Podium program was intentionally driven by data applied to focus resources where the probability of global — specifically, the visionary efforts of Cathy Priestner and her team.

Five years ago, I wrote a post about Canada’s potential to lead the world’s innovation economy. Over the last 15 years, the Canadian community has come together to support our founders in a dramatic way, leading to global leaders like Shopify, Verafin, D2L, InstaCart, and Lightspeed bursting onto the global stage. The C100’s impact study reported that Canadian founders led 30 percent ($162 billion worth) of all global tech IPOs. Right behind them, founders of Team True North leading global companies based in Canada like Arctic Wolf, ApplyBoard, Clio, Faire, OnePassword, eSentire, Hopper, Mindbridge, PurposeMed, Point Click Care, Truscore, and Vidyard are poised to become globally dominant players. Canada has also developed some of the most impactful foundational technologies of our generation, leading in sectors like artificial intelligence in ways that will dramatically change every major world industry, from agriculture and automotive to finance and retail.

It feels like all the ingredients for success are there, but something is still holding us back. Canadian founders are having their “Salt Lake moment”. It will be their collective ambition that will dictate what lies ahead for Canada. Own The Podium — was not obvious or easy. It was driven by collective ambition to be the best in the world and doing what it took to get there.

Dr. Orna Berry, Dr. Kevin Teur, Chris Albinson, 2023 Israel

The similarities are clear to me between Cathy’s meticulous planning and the work of Orna Berry’s Start-Up Nation plan for Israel. Canada has the raw potential, and it knows how to craft a vision. We just have to decide to go for it.

Always meet your heroes, and if you are lucky work & become friends with them — thank you for your passion and support Cathy Priestner, Orna Berry, Martin Bashiri, Tom Jenkins, Michael Litt, Jay Shaw, Bruce Latco, Salim Teja, Dave Caputo, Kim Furlong, John Ruffolo, Steve Woods, Shez Samji, Marcelo Cortes, Joseph Fung, Tim Jackson, Solon Angel, Chris Arsenault, Jim Estill, Mary Wells, Vivek Goel, CTN leaders, Communitech team & board, and so many more founders across Canada. Thank you!

I will always deeply admire and champion Communitech’s team and its work to support Canadian founders. Founded by founders for founders, the culture and people of Communitech make it a truly unique place.

There is no question that Communitech and Waterloo Region are the cornerstone of the Canadian innovation community and was the perfect place to inspire the fire to launch a new Own The Podium plan — one tailored to support Canada becoming the dominant player in global innovation.

Driving productivity growth and technology adoption are going to be essential to Canada’s place in the world. It is a massive task that will mean all of us working together, but collaboration is in Communitech’s DNA!

It was an honour of a lifetime to return home to help both Communitech and Canada drive an economic resurgence rooted in innovation.

As I have for 25+ years, I will continue to champion and support Canadian founders via the True North Fund community, C100, and support the awesome builders of Waterloo.

Keep being ambitious and finding ways to support the change makers, the builders, and the true practitioners of Tech4Good.

They are Canada’s future.