Don Mattrick was on the receiving end of laughter when he walked into a bank in the 1980s looking to borrow money for his video game company.
Vancouver-founded Distinctive Software, Inc. (DSI) had about $1-million’s worth of royalties coming in the next 90 days but the bank manager wasn’t interested in financing the acquisition of new computers and talent.
Instead, he was told to “‘come back if you have a fishing boat,’” recalled Mattrick, whose company was bought out by Electronic Arts in the early 1990s to form EA Canada.
“We’ve come a long way in a short period of time,” he said.
When an estimated 2,700 people descend upon the B.C. Tech Summit January 18-19 at the Vancouver Convention Centre, Mattrick is counting on attendees having a better understanding of how the tech sector will impact the province over the next decade than that bank manager.
“(There’s) a shift from thinking of B.C. as a place with timber, mining and fishing,” said Mattrick, who’s serving as the summit’s industry chairman after working stateside as an executive at Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and CEO of social gaming company Zynga.
“B.C should be a place in the world where people are our No. 1 resource.”
Commodity prices have fallen dramatically over the past year as demand from China and other world markets have slowed.
This has caused resource-dependent industries to cool down, while the federal Liberals pledged during the fall election campaign to focus more on the knowledge-based economy.
The B.C. Tech Summit will feature innovation showcases from startups and universities, pitch competitions and venture capital presentations.
Keynote speakers include futurist and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) engineering director Ray Kurzweil, GE Canada CEO Elyse Allan and Microsoft corporate vice-president TK Rengarajan.
The B.C. Innovation Council (BCIC), a provincial Crown corporation, is hosting the two-day conference.
BCIC CEO Greg Caws told Business In Vancouver in November the goal was to help industry leaders understand that the province’s tech sector is “not just all about downtown Vancouver.”
“We’re going to bring the whole province together, all technology — technologies that support traditional industries and make them more competitive such as in mining, oil and gas, and forestry,” he said.
Meanwhile, Victoria is expected to unveil it’s full technology strategy after announcing in December it was creating a $100-million tech fund to help finance startups.
Don Mattrick, industry chairman of B.C. Tech Summit
The fund is expected to launch later this year and it will not be managed by a provincial civil servant.
Instead, the government is in the midst of hiring a fund manager from the private sector with a managing partner based in B.C.
The province expects a portion of the $100 million will be covered by returns it expects to gain from it after 2023. A spokeswoman from the Ministry of Technology, Innovation & Citizens' Services told BIV the fund will last no longer than 15 years.
