I Had My Intern Count All 610 Toronto Tech Week Events
Spreadsheets and feelings.
Last week, at the end of the Origination and Acceleration piece, I promised you a Toronto Tech Week write-up. The question I left dangling was whether a week with no center, just hundreds of independent events scattered across a city, produces real serendipity or a pile of disconnected calendar invites.
Here’s what happened instead. I started doing the analysis and the analysis became the story.
The thing about a decentralized week is that nobody programs the whole thing. There’s no committee deciding the shape of it. Six hundred and ten different people and organizations each independently decided what was worth getting a room for, in the same city, in the same week, and that turns the calendar into something more interesting than a schedule. It’s an accidental census, a bottom-up signal of what an ecosystem is actually thinking about right now, uncoordinated and therefore honest. Which is exactly why I had my intern… let’s call him Clod…. tag all 610 events by format, topic, and function. Here’s the spreadsheet if you want to poke at it yourself, though I’d treat it as a curio rather than a primary source since keyword-tagging 610 event titles is an imperfect science and some of these calls are genuinely judgment calls.
What came back was not the AI story I expected.
Some interesting insights:
Almost half the week, 49%, was talks, panels, fireside chats, and sessions.
Only 7% was hands-on building: hackathons, workshops, build labs.
Another 24% was meals, parties, and networking… Proximity basically.
In the origination versus acceleration frame I wrote about last week, this week was almost entirely origination, the messy, uncoordinated, bottom-up kind. AI appeared in 151 event titles, the costume of the year, the thing you put in the title to get registrations, but strip it out and the skeleton is surprisingly old-fashioned. People gathering, listening, eating, talking, being in rooms - the most un-AI thing possible. For all the founder mythology about building and shipping and moving fast, the dominant activity of a builder’s week was not building… It was showing up.
The underlying point worth naming is that builder culture runs almost entirely on social infrastructure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what anyone says out loud because it seems obvious.
Which is where Toronto gets interesting, and it's because of the genericness, not in spite of it. New York, SF, London, and Portugal all run a version of the same week. The format is a standard container. So the question isn't whether Toronto invented it - it didn't - it's what pours into a standard container when Toronto is the one filling it. A borrowed format is almost a blank test. Whatever shows up is the part that's actually local.
What I noticed, and I'll flag this as a feeling more than a finding, is how much of the week carried some kind of identity or global lens. Muslim founders, Persian founders, Africa-Canada, Mexico, Czech, Swedish, Asian founders, women-led communities. Around 9.5% of events by Clod's count, though I won't pretend I know whether that's higher than New York or London, or whether we just put it in the title more. What I can say is that it didn't read as a side track. It was on the main calendar, unremarkably, next to the AI panels and the investor breakfasts and the pickleball tournaments.
Adding to the heterogeneity, you had ALL IN Talks on Thursday (I should note I’m an event partner and have been remunerated by them in the past, make of that what you will), with a room full of enterprises trying to wrap their arms and brains around AI and where it fits in their business. That’s a completely different register than the scrappy founder energy everywhere else that week. At the same time, a friend of mine got acquihired to cofound an AI vibrator startup with US cofounders, which is either the most 2026 sentence I’ve written or the most Toronto one, I’m genuinely not sure. The week was messy, multilingual, uneven, and real in a way a programmed conference can’t manufacture.
Big, organized conferences say: look who came here. Toronto Tech Week says: look who was already here.
Toronto Tech Week isn't interesting because it invented something. It's interesting because Toronto is finally dense enough that a borrowed format, run from the bottom up, shows you something true about the place. The ecosystem is becoming visible to itself, and a census nobody planned is one of the better ways to see it.
What’s your take?