Ask Philippe Burns what he does and he’ll shrug: “I run an events company.”
The truth is, Tech Thursday, has become one of the most consistent and unexpected communities in Canadian tech, a weekly gathering now spanning Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Edmonton.
In its first year as a standalone company, Tech Thursday earned Phil the Avenue Calgary Innovator of the Year award, proof that what began as a side project at Neo Financial has already grown into something much bigger.
Every Thursday, more than 100 founders, builders, and operators in each city show up to talk about what’s next: AI, scaling culture, raising capital, and everything in between. They’re not there for swag or optics, they’re there for unfiltered conversations with people who understand the wins, setbacks, and quirks of building in Canada. The result is a community that feels grassroots and ambitious, grounded and high-energy. A mirror of Canada’s ecosystem itself.
There was a defining moment that brought Phil to tech. In 2015, his older brother already working in San Francisco, signed Phil up for Hack the North in Waterloo. He joined a team, “barely contributed,” and somehow ended up pitching to Sam Altman. “It was cool, but honestly, I wasn’t that helpful.”
His brother kept nudging him forward. Soon after, he lined up an interview for Phil as a junior developer at SkipTheDishes in his hometown, Winnipeg. In Phil’s words, it was a disaster. “They asked me what an API was. I had no idea. They were like, ok, cool, thanks for coming.”
A month later, one of the founders called him back. No spot on the engineering team, but they offered him a role in operations. So at 17, still in high school, Phil was running live ops for cities across Canada. Back then, the competition wasn’t Uber Eats. It was pizza chains and Chinese takeout.
That’s when he got hooked. “Everyone around me was 22 or 23, and I loved working with them. It felt like we were building something new every single day.”
If he could give his younger self advice? He laughs and jokes, “Don’t go to university.” Six months after he left for school, Skip was acquired and he missed out on the payout. But the real lesson wasn’t about money. “High-growth organizations are messy. Learn everything you can, have fun with it. You’re exactly where you should be.”
The biggest challenge that shaped Phil’s approach was learning to operate with small budgets inside scaling organizations. Every project forced him to ask the hard questions: Why are we doing this? Does it matter? What’s the bare minimum to get started? If we had more, how would we use it?
That discipline stuck. It’s why he thinks about events in first principles. “People don’t come out for gimmicks. They come for panels, sessions, and workshops that actually help them. You have to be clear about the why, who you’re working with, how money is being spent, and whether it’s delivering real value.”
Unlike many founders, Phil has never been goal-oriented. In fact, he calls himself “anti-goal.” Instead, he orients around values: curiosity, empathy, authenticity, and determination. They’ve become his compass, guiding where he puts his energy and how Tech Thursday operates.
That philosophy explains Tech Thursday’s consistency. Curiosity drives the conversations, authenticity keeps them real, empathy makes the community welcoming and diverse, and determination ensures the cadence never slips. Week after week, those values keep the momentum going.
Phil grew into his groove at Neo. Still, anxiety lingered. “When you work for someone else in a high growth organization, you’re constantly asking, am I doing enough? I’d get jealous of people having more impact, and I was super critical of myself.” Asked if that was the founder in him trying to crawl out, he smirked: “Maybe. Or maybe just anxiety.”
At Neo, he scaled the CX team from 3 to 50, rode the 2021 Series C, and endured the peaks and valleys along the way. That rollercoaster forced him to ask: "What am I working on, is it mission critical, does it matter?". Those same questions carried into Tech Thursday, which he eventually spun out from Neo. “I could see the value it was creating for the community, and it made sense to spin it out.”
Asked to describe his leadership style in 3 words, Phil laughs. “Bad. I feel like I’m a bad leader… no, that’s not true.” It’s classic Phil, joking first, then reflective. After a pause, he lands on three words: question, act, imperfection. “I question everything. I just do things. Nothing’s ever perfect."
If Phil could invent one piece of tech tomorrow, it would be simple: AR glasses with just one function. “All I want is for them to tell me if I’ve met someone, when I met them, and then pull up their LinkedIn. That’s it. None of the other stuff. Just give me that, and I’d be set.”
I remind him of James McInnes’ startup, Prompty, which already does almost exactly this. I first met James at one of Phil’s events, like so many people I’ve come to know in Calgary tech. Phil laughed: “Yes, exactly. I need Prompty in AR glasses.”
When it comes to bigger shifts, he points to AI’s impact on technical moats. “The coolest thing right now is seeing companies sell products before they’ve even built them, then deliver in a month, reinvest the revenue, and scale. That’s the future.”
He sees this as a wave of leaner, bootstrapped companies built by small teams focused on distribution over capital. “We’re going to see more billion-dollar companies, or really great $20M companies, built by just a couple of friends. You don’t need massive exits or piles of VC money.”
This fall, Tech Thursday is hosting the Season 3 launch of Thin Air Labs’ Founders Mindset podcast and celebrating the Toast x BetaKit Top 25 Women in Tech Gala.
This summer, the team ran Founder Poker nights, “vibe coding” sessions, and on the horizon is a hackathon pairing junior and senior developers to spark innovation and mentorship in action.
For Phil, the format is almost beside the point. The through-line is always the same: authentic connections, real conversations, and a belief that Canadian tech is at its best when people come together.
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