{"id":18724,"date":"2016-05-13T00:28:20","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T07:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=18724"},"modified":"2016-05-11T10:24:16","modified_gmt":"2016-05-11T17:24:16","slug":"jfsa-lunch-raises-266k","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2016\/05\/13\/jfsa-lunch-raises-266k\/","title":{"rendered":"JFSA lunch raises $266K"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hootsuite\u2019s Ryan Holmes speaks to an attendee at the Innovators Lunch on May 4. (photo by Sandra Steier)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

More than 550 people at the Jewish Family Service Agency\u2019s Innovators Lunch on May 4 raised more than $266,000 for the important services JFSA provides.<\/p>\n

Starting the event at the Hyatt Regency, featuring Hoosuite founder and chief executive officer Ryan Holmes, was Beth Israel Rabbi Jonathan Infeld who, before the motzi, said a few words about volunteer Elayne Shapray, whose funeral had been that morning. Incoming JFSA board chair Karen James also spoke about Shapray\u2019s contributions, noting that she had been \u201chonored with the highest volunteer award from JFSA, the Paula Lenga Award, for her quiet strength and years of support.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo
Innovators Lunch committee members, left to right, Shannon Ezekiel, Hillary Cooper and committee chair Sherri Wise with keynote speaker Ryan Holmes, CEO and founder of Hootsuite. (photo by Sandra Steier)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When event chair Dr. Sherri Wise took to the podium, she thanked everyone involved in making the lunch possible, including her co-chairs, Shannon Ezekiel and Hillary Cooper. Richard Fruchter, senior management consultant at JFSA, added his thanks and, after a video about JFSA\u2019s impact, introduced Dr. Neil Pollock who, with his wife Michelle, matched all new and increased donations to the lunch up to $20,000.<\/p>\n

Pollock spoke about his family\u2019s involvement with JFSA. In particular, he spoke about Dorita Flasker, who came to Vancouver from South America as a senior, having had all her wealth expropriated by her home country\u2019s government. In the years since JFSA connected them, she and the Pollocks have become family, and they all recently celebrated her 80th birthday together.<\/p>\n

Shay Keil of Keil Investment Group of ScotiaMcLeod, one of the lunch\u2019s co-presenting sponsors, introduced the keynote speaker. Holmes founded Hootsuite in 2008, said Keil, taking the company from a small startup \u201cto a global leader in social media with over 13 million users, including 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents were both teachers \u2013 they left teaching in the \u201970s to get back to the land, to become farmers,\u201d said Holmes. \u201cThey bought a hobby farm. I grew up with goats, chickens \u2026 kerosene lamps, a water well in the Okanagan Valley.\u201d<\/p>\n

He discovered computers \u2013 \u201cmagical things\u201d \u2013 at the library. The librarian noticed his enthusiasm and suggested he enter a schoolwide programming contest. Two months later, he won the contest \u2013 the prize, an Apple IIc computer, which had to be connected to the family car\u2019s battery, as their home had no electricity.<\/p>\n

His first business was a paintball company he started in high school. He went to university to study business, but dropped out and opened a pizza place, which he ran for a couple of years. After selling the restaurant, he moved to Vancouver, bought a computer and started learning how to build HTML websites. He got a job at a dot-com that crashed about six months later, so founded his own agency, Invoke. He continued to learn his craft and eventually hired employees. They had customers to whom they would provide computing services and they built a number of products, such as product-management and e-commerce systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cAround 2008, we started to do marketing on social media for our customers,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we realized very quickly was that there weren\u2019t very many tools out there to manage social media\u2026. We needed a tool to help manage multiple team members and multiple social networks all from one place, and that was the aha moment for Hootsuite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon thereafter, Hootsuite was launched. Investors were found about a year later \u2013 \u201cRemember, this was at a point when people were asking, \u2018Is Twitter just a fad?\u2019 \u2018Is Facebook just the next MySpace or the next Friendster, is it going to be obsolete in a year?\u2019 People didn\u2019t know if social media was relevant and was here to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hootsuite \u2013 which has about 800 employees \u2013 is headquartered in Vancouver, but has offices around the world. \u201cWe send 28 million messages a week and these messages reach three billion users across the planet every week.\u201d Among those users have been the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements, and the White House.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in an era of unimagined disruption,\u201d he said, pointing to three trends driving it: social (sharing videos, for example, which can go viral), a more collaborative economy (businesses like Uber) and mobile.<\/p>\n

\u201cSixty percent of people who complain on Twitter expect a response within one hour,\u201d said Holmes. \u201cSo, if you\u2019re a brand, if you\u2019re a business, and you\u2019re not there \u2026 it\u2019s like you don\u2019t have a website, like you don\u2019t have a telephone\u2026. The thing about social is there is an implied contract: you\u2019re naked and transparent\u2026.\u201d If customers do not get a response, \u201cthey\u2019re going to talk about it over and over again and, so, you\u2019re going to be brought into the open as a business.\u201d<\/p>\n

Holmes compared various communications technologies. \u201cThe telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users, radio 38, television 13, LinkedIn six-and-a-half, Twitter four, Facebook three, Instagram 1.7. Adoption is happening quicker and quicker.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then talked a bit about Snapchat, and showed the audience how to use it.<\/p>\n

About the next big thing, he hopes that, like \u201cthe PayPal mafia\u201d \u2013 \u201ca group of alum \u2026 [who are] driving a lot of the innovation that\u2019s happening in Silicon Valley\u201d \u2013 there will be a \u201cmaple syrup mafia.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI would love to see the alum of Hootsuite go on to create the next 10 Hootsuites within Vancouver and more within Canada,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Already, the B.C. technology sector employs more people than the mining, oil and gas, and forestry sectors combined. To create an even better ecosystem for innovation, he said, there are three key requirements: capital (money to build companies), environment (places for people to live and work) and talent (education and immigration, as there currently is a lack of supply).<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is huge opportunity for people who want to head into this industry,\u201d he said, predicting an increasing demand for these types of jobs.<\/p>\n

During the question-and-answer period, Holmes responded to concerns about privacy \u2013 he believes the good aspects of technology outweigh the bad; housing \u2013 a problem for every business, he said, putting the onus on the government to increase supply, create more diverse product (not just 500-square-foot living spaces) and implement policies to control demand; and corporate responsibility, which he thinks will become more of an issue. To him, the lack of what once were basic skills \u2013 such as writing \u2013 is simply the evolution of language, the next steps being the keyboard and more voice-activated technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hootsuite\u2019s Ryan Holmes speaks to an attendee at the Innovators Lunch on May 4. (photo by Sandra Steier) More than 550 people at the Jewish Family Service Agency\u2019s Innovators Lunch on May 4 raised more than $266,000 for the important services JFSA provides. Starting the event at the Hyatt Regency, featuring Hoosuite founder and chief […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5799,3715,1026,1184,5801,5800,1959],"class_list":["post-18724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-hootsuite","tag-innovators-lunch","tag-jewish-family-service-agency","tag-jfsa","tag-ryan-holmes","tag-snapchat","tag-tikkun-olam"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}