Jan Gunash

Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of experiencing both sides of Canada’s tech ecosystem – as a founder and as someone supporting founders. That dual perspective has made one truth crystal clear: tech is, at its core, a trust-based ecosystem. And right now, we’re trying to build our tech communities the wrong way.

The Problem With Traditional Networking

Let’s be honest: the standard playbook of “get people in a room and hope for magic” rarely works. It’s like trying to find your life partner at a bar – loud, chaotic, and often superficial.

Founders don’t need more random handshakes; they need deeper, repeated touchpoints where trust and familiarity can grow.

And here’s some data to back it up: a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report found that nearly 95% of professionals believe face-to-face meetings are essential for building long-term business relationships. But the real difference isn’t just showing up once, it’s the meaningful, recurring interactions that allow trust to grow.

The Shift in Behaviour

Ecosystems everywhere are struggling with a new reality: people aren’t showing up in person as much as they used to.

And let’s be real, your relationships aren’t being built in 20-minute Zoom calls. Virtual meetings are transactional. You log in, you get what you need, you log out. That’s logistics, not connection.

Trust is built in the margins: over coffee, in the hallway between sessions, while waiting for the elevator. It’s the laughs, the silences, and the unscripted moments that create bonds.

Shared Experience Is the Glue

Getting people in the same room is a start, but it’s not enough. The real glue is shared experience.

That could mean a hackathon where people solve problems side by side, a small-group workshop that sparks candid conversation, volunteering together on a cause bigger than ourselves, or even something as simple as a recurring coffee meet-up.

These shared experiences create the foundation for real trust, because they give people something deeper than a LinkedIn connection – they give them a story together.

The Long Game

Here’s the truth no one can shortcut: relationships take time.

Trust isn’t built at a single event or in a Slack DM. It compounds over years through consistent interaction, shared experiences, and showing up again and again.

This isn’t just founder-to-founder. It’s investors, talent, customers, and ecosystem builders. Every layer of tech runs on human trust.

If we want our tech ecosystems to truly thrive, we need to stop treating connection as a numbers game and start treating it as a practice of trust. That means building spaces where depth matters more than breadth, where people come together not just once but over time, and where shared experiences create stories that bind us closer than a LinkedIn connection ever could. Trust grows slowly, but when it does, it compounds in ways that unlock opportunities no single event or introduction ever could.

So the next time we think about “networking,” we should ask ourselves whether we’re building transactions or building trust. Because in the end, tech isn’t just about code, capital, or customers. It’s about people. And when we invest in people, when we design ecosystems that prioritize trust over transactions, we don’t just build companies. We build communities that can thrive for decades to come.

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