Vantage Points: Scott Langille says the next generation of BC tech needs help

Scott Langille isn’t the only young person in Vancouver tech looking for something more. But at the BetaKit Town Hall: Vancouver, a passion for empowering his generation was on full display.  

“I want to make Vancouver a place where young people can build a future,” he said during the Vantage Points panel.

The young entrepreneur has spent enough time away from home, from working at Tesla in Palo Alto to representing Canada as a Cansbridge fellow in Singapore. He returned from his travels with an acute sense of what Vancouver was missing: a strong community that supports young entrepreneurs. 

During the panel, Langille was loud about the disconnect between tech’s established players and the next generation, a notion shared by Vancouver.dev’s Toki Hossain and echoed by Socratica’s Jocelyne Murphy at the BetaKit Town Hall in May. “I show up to a networking event as a young person, and if I have ‘student’ on my badge, no one wants to talk to me,” he said.

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He described a three-pronged solution for supporting young people: capital, mentorship, and belief.

Langille used the example of BlackBerry—née Research in Motion, Canada’s prior largest tech company before handing the title to Shopify—attributing part of its success to building across from the University of Waterloo campus as a tool to draw young talent into the company. He said Vancouver is missing those types of opportunities. 

Though he argued that a culture of reinvestment is needed to make Vancouver a place to build, Langille isn’t waiting for capital to fall from the sky. Instead, he’s setting the table to connect Vancouver builders and creatives himself. 

Langille is the founder of Atelier, a weekly initiative for young people to co-work on passion projects—which can be just about anything. “I’ve seen everything from mind-controlling cockroaches by implanting electrodes in them to my friend making drones that detect landmines,” Langille said.