TKS Moonshot Presentations
The Moonshot Presentations showcase was hosted a couple of weeks ago at The Pioneer in downtown Calgary, where the popular Tech Thursday event is also held. This was the showcase where all the moonshot groups in Calgary got to pitch their moonshot companies to a panel of judges specializing in the tech/innovaton scene in Calgary. It was a great opportunity to get advice and feedback from the experts that came to share their knowledge and listen to our moonshots.
We started the event with an innovation panel. On the panel, there was:
Philippe Burns - Host of Tech Thursday event + Moderator
Shahoon Khan - Founding Director at Front Row Ventures, a university-focused venture capital fund
Derek Armstrong - Director of the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund at Calgary Economic Development
Kartavi Shah - Alberta Lead at the South-Asian Venture Capital Association of Canada (SAVCA)Kelly Brown - Manager for Innovation and Collaboration with the City of Calgary
During the innovation panel, each of the panellists had something unique to bring in regards to the topic on innovating in Calgary and how young minds like those presenting at the moonshots that day are able to get resources and get their foot in the door for active innovation in Calgary.
I had a few huge takeaways in general from the panel, and I want to share those with you here.
Something that really stood out to me in the panel was how much they all agreed that having a strong network/connections is really important to get opportunities and advance yourself. What is really unique about Calgary is that it’s one of the places where everyone is used to having “coffee dates” to pick each other’s brains and learn from each other. Calgary is a very collaborative environment where getting to know people and learn from them is the best way to grow, get better with your projects, and find opportunities to advance.
The panellists also shared actual places/companies that work to help provide Calgary innovators the opportunities to grow and advance their startups. One place known to many is Platform Calgary, which is a great start to finding different mentors and opportunities to work on your startup and get some traction and progress. Other places that are great for finding resources to advance your startup are Innovate Calgary and their different hubs/startup incubators. There are specific hubs like the Central Innovation Hub and the Social Innovation Hub, which are focused on entrepreneurship and collaboration. Innovate Calgary also provides funding opportunities and support for different startups, as well, and it’s a great starting point if you’re starting out from university.
My last main takeaway from the panel was about the tech and innovation space in Calgary. Besides the great collaborative environment Calgary offers, which differs from other cities, Calgary is also a city that stands out for rapid tech and innovation growth. Calgary is one of the top places to begin your startup or start innovating and progressing your ideas. It’s because Calgary not only has that wanted community, but there are so many different support programs and opportunities like the ones I showed earlier that make innovating and trying new things safer and more encouraged. While it is risky to be an entrepreneur, you can take risks knowing that your success or failure won’t affect your reputation in a negative light. People want to see you trying to build startups or innovating because it shows you’re daring, problem-solving, and can take initiative. And whether you succeed or fail, it doesn't matter, because you still earn so much experience from it. That aspect of innovating in Calgary alone makes it a great place for people to start building.
After the panel, we then got straight into presentations. We got to see so many great moonshot ideas, from different ways to clean up macro and microplastics in the ocean, to documenting dark matter in space, as well as different dementia treatments. There were so many ideas that were all across the board. Every moonshot was unique, even if the problems were similar.
Sophia Dhami, Arissai Filleul, and I got to pitch our moonshot to the judges as well. Our moonshot company is called ClotGuard, a wearable patch that delivers freeze-dried platelets, with the help of nanobots, directly to hemorrhage sites to slow down excessive blood loss and buy time for paramedics to arrive in time. Roughly 80% of DOW (died of wound) deaths on the battlefield occurred due to severe hemorrhage and blood loss. The problem wasn’t that there weren’t many treatments for hemorrhage, but the problem was actually that the time it took for paramedics to reach blood loss victims was too long, and the bleeding would have already become deadly by the time help did arrive. With ClotGuard, we wanted to create more time for paramedics by creating a temporary solution that slows down excessive bleeding, limiting blood loss and preventing it from becoming deadly so fast.
To learn more about ClotGuard and our mission, take a look at:
We got really great feedback from the judges. They really liked how we went about presenting our moonshot in a way that showed that we knew what we were talking about, but were able to convey the technology and the severity of the problem in a powerful and simple way. One thing we could have improved on was maybe stressing the fact of how safe our technology actually is. We did touch on this a little bit in our pitch, but it could have been brought up more. They thought ClotGuard was a real moonshot idea, and our group is really inspired to try and make this a reality. After hearing about everything Calgary has to offer, we are motivated to make ClotGuard a real startup and work on this. Hopefully, we can make a difference with what we’ve developed.
There was also an online moonshots presentation showcase, where our group, ClotGuard, was selected to present at. We got to present our moonshot to someone who actually works at the Moonshot Factory. That was a really great opportunity because we got to hear feedback from someone who has experience working with actual moonshot ideas and see how ours stands compared to those and where we need to improve.
After both of the events, we learned that we got first place at the virtual showcase and second place at the in-person showcase. The moonshot project was probably my favourite big event we have had in TKS by far, and I’m really excited to see how we go about developing ClotGuard and turning our moonshot into a reality.
