What I Learned Working At Canada’s Largest Tech Festival At 16

Sohail Sayed

6 min readOct 9, 2019

20,000 + Attended Elevate Tech Fest in Toronto This September

Last year in 2018 I was given a ticket to attend Canada’s largest tech festival, Elevate.

I’ll Never Forget The Feeling

That uneasy, empty feeling that I had in my stomach every time I was pushed out of my comfort zone was a good one.

Way back, I’d think I was absolutely crazy to not like being in my comfort zone. BUT, Elevate 2018 happened.

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What Is Elevate Tech Fest?

Elevate is one of Canada’s largest tech festivals, started in 2017. In just a few years, it’s skyrocketed to becoming a world-class event. It’s held in Toronto for a week during September every year.

Guess what the following people all have in common:

Michelle Obama, Al Gore, Vinod Khosla, Chris Hadfield, Martha Stewart and Eric Schmidt.

They’re all exceptional people. AND also all previous speakers at Elevate

I can talk about how much fun nights were during Elevate King West socials, or how good the lunch at Elevate’s tech jam was. But here’s the Elevate website instead.

Working At Elevate 2019

Enter July 2019. The first day of work, I walked into the Elevate office, with a similar uneasy, empty feeling in my stomach. I was pumped to start working at an office for the first time — with the people who were behind one of my favourite memories of the year prior. But still nervous:

Much like the tech fest in 2018, that uncomfortable feeling turned into a great one. After three months of working, I don’t think I could capture even 1% of the growth I had at Elevate in this article.

I’ll try though, bear with me 😎

🔑 Lessons Learnt Working At Elevate

There’s a pretty big difference in the way you learn about something, and how much of an impact it has on your growth.

Here’s the way I’d learnt about things for most of my life:

Hear about it, memorize it, write it on a test, then probably forget about it.

Guess how many internalizations I had? Not many.

But working in the real world was a whole different ballpark. No powerpoint lessons or kahoots. This wasn’t a Coursera course, or a khan academy series. Failure was a good thing, as long as I learnt from it. Succeeding was a great thing, but there was no grade to compliment it. My growth was entirely dependant on how intentional I chose to be about it.

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1. Getting a “No” Is As Good As Getting A “Yes”

This one took me a while to get, I’ll be honest.

When I first arrived at the office, our programming team was still very much on the speaker hunt. That day, one of my colleagues in the team received an email back from a high profile potential speaker we’d been pursuing.

“We got an email back from the team. They said no”

I expected tears. Screams. Maybe even a sad violin. I heard none of that. Here’s what I heard instead: “It’s alright! A no is as good as a yes.” It was Razor Suleman, our CEO.

Huh? I was pretty confused. Wouldn’t a no be worse than a yes?

Nope.

Here’s what I learnt from that experience. A no is just as good as a yes. Why? Because they’re both definitive answers. Which means you can make solid next steps from it.

You don’t have 100% control on whether someone says yes or no. So there really shouldn’t be a reason you should fear rejection or sorrow over judgements that have already passed.

2. Scope It Out

My second learning came when I first started getting assigned big tasks. With tonnes of excitement fueling me through, I took on any task that came at me. Felt great 😎 Until I’d taken too many tasks and wasn’t finishing them on time.

That was the day that my boss Josh Lilien — head of Event Tech and a Next 36 Alum — took me to a Starbucks to drop some knowledge.

“Scope it out”.

Before starting any project and getting my hands dirty, I was told to take a few minutes to create a little project scope. Estimate how long it would take (always overestimate), which people I’d be dependent on, checkpoints and feedback loops on the project. The concept was not that convoluted. But it made the process so much easier and cleaner.

3. Goal Management > Goal Setting

It’s so easy to set goals. Setting up an effective plan to get there is harder. Managing yourself/a team to make sure you're on track is even harder.

If you’re like me, you probably have a bad habit of constantly setting up ambitious goals but only getting halfway there. Or maybe noway there.

*“I’ll be benching 2 plates in 2 months! Just watch”*

Turns out just setting an empty goal doesn’t do much, other than make you feel a bit better for the few days you’re on track for it.

Managing yourself to make sure you’ll hit the goal is much more important than just setting a goal.

At Elevate, every team had their own scorecards with ambitious goals to achieve by festival + monthly checkpoints and metrics to determine success.

I’m really glad and grateful that I’ve been able to internalize the importance of goal planning + management. Here’s the simplified format of goal setting I picked up while working:

Pretty Simple (and Effective) Goal Setting Format

Set ambitious — or/and attainable— goals using normal human language.
Provide metrics which establish success.
Set milestones.

Instead of just setting goals, I’ve started managing my goals. I do this through spreadsheet and notion.so, or my whiteboard — and keep others/myself on track through daily updates.

I’m Grateful To Have Worked At Elevate

In all honesty, I had no idea where my internship would take me when I first started. My experience working at Elevate topped all expectations I had for it, and more.

I feel really privileged to have worked with such talented team members in such a warm, welcoming and growth-focused environment.

Shoutout to Elevate CEO Razor Suleman and Jen Brown from The Knowledge Society for putting this opportunity together, and shoutout to Josh Lillien and Usha Srinivasan from our Partnerships team for 10x-ing my growth at Elevate.

Wish I could give shoutouts to all the people that made the experience so good this summer. Here’s a photo of our entire team at Elevate King West this year. Shoutout to everyone in that photo: