who am i?
q: hi shawn. what do you do?
I run AI community events in Vancouver — hackathons, demo nights, coworking sessions. Over the past couple weeks I organized the Build Canada Cursor Hackathon and OpenClaw Demo nights.
(im still recovering, it was a lot of work lol)
q: why??
cause there aren't enough. when I visited SF, I realized what "good" looks like.
tons of events, vibrant ecosystem, and free food.
sooo this newsletter will help you find out what's going our city's tech / ai scene.
btw - I'm still figuring this out as I go. i'm sure you've noticed that i'm not some corporate robot. i make lots of mistakes.
but i truly love this city where i was born and raised and i wanna help make it awesome.
thx for being here
shawn 🫶
🚀 Codex Community Meetup: Vancouver
We're hosting an OpenAI Codex meetup in Downtown Vancouver!
📅 Friday, April 10 · 6:00–9:00 PM
📍 RSVP to see the location
Free food, demos from Codex users, and a chance to meet other builders. We'll also have swag to give away.
Want to demo? Submit your idea here or contact us directly.
⚠️ Note: there is no Wi-Fi at the venue, so please plan accordingly.
📅 Schedule:
- 6:00 PM — Doors Open / Pizza
- 6:15 PM — Demos
- 7:00–8:00 PM — Networking
Venue sponsored by Global Relay, space curated by Launch Academy HQ.
This Week
Althra x Mae: Late Night Coworking
📅 Tuesday, April 8 · 6:30 PM–12:00 AM
📍 Vancouver (address shared after approval)
Althra is a Canadian accelerator that writes cheques alongside its program — their mentors have collectively raised $625M+. They co-organized our Cursor Hackathon last month. This is an after-hours coworking session for founders, engineers, and operators. Snacks included.
Later in April
Northeastern University Vancouver — Student Research Showcase
📅 Sunday, April 20 · 4:00–6:00 PM
📍 410 W Georgia St, 14th Floor (Northeastern Vancouver Campus)
Capstone projects from their CS, Data Science, and Data Analytics grad programs. The interesting stuff here is the AI/VR/XR work their students are building. Light refreshments, casual networking with faculty and students. Free and open to the community.
What we just did in March
In case you're wondering who's behind this newsletter — here's what we organized last month:
🏆 Cursor Hackathon Vancouver (March 22) — 124 hackers at FUNK. Coffee Bar. Theme was "Build Canada." The winning team ($1K in Cursor credits) built a Chrome extension that flags which Amazon products are actually Canadian-made, with Canadian import market sizes so we can increase 🇨🇦 independence. Co-organized with Althra, Taylor, and Jacky Zhong.
🦞 OpenClaw Community Night (March 23) — 84 builders at 206 Cambie. Live demos of OpenClaw use cases including AI customer support, lowering inference costs, and... cow farming. More on that below. Sponsored by Vancouver-Made RentAHuman.ai.
Local Builder Spotlight: Sigrid Jin 🦞
The repo hit 50,000 GitHub stars in 2 hours.
Sigrid Jin (Vancouver Local) woke up at 4AM when Claude Code's source accidentally leaked via npm. His girlfriend was worried he'd get sued just for having the code. So he rewrote the entire thing in Python from scratch. Before sunrise.
It’s now the fastest growing GitHub repo of all time and Sigrid is speaking at our next Codex meetup 🙂
Local Builder Spotlight: Oleksandr 🐮
The tweet blew up on X.
Oleksandr — who previously worked on Uber's self-driving vehicles — showed up to OpenClaw Night and demoed an agent that automates Canadian cow farms with THOUSANDS of cows.
Farmers now chat with OpenClaw on WhatsApp to manage their herds. More revenue for farmers, happier cows, everyone wins.
Job Board
I’m currently at Composio — we build infrastructure that lets AI agents connect to tools like Github, Gmail, Notion, and Salesforce. We raised a $25M Series A from Lightspeed with angels like Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot CTO). If any of these roles interest you, reach out to me directly on LinkedIn.
Composio — Agent-to-tool infrastructure · $25M Series A · SF-based
- Member of Technical Staff (Platform Eng, Product Eng, Enterprise) — SF & Bangalore
- Research Engineer — SF
- Growth Engineer / Growth Marketing / Partnerships — SF
Gumloop — AI automation platform · $50M Series B · SF + Vancouver
- Full Stack Engineer, Senior Full Stack Engineer, Senior Infra Engineer — SF / Vancouver
- Brand Designer, Staff Product Designer — SF / Vancouver
- SDR, Enterprise AE, Head of Marketing — SF / Vancouver
Want to add your company here? Reach out at [email protected]
What's Next
We're planning more events for April and May:
- 🖥️ Codex Hackathon
- 💻 Another Cursor Hackathon
- 🦞 More OpenClaw events
Details coming soon.
FAQ
q: can you help sponsor my event with credits or swag?
yes! if you're want to organize a thoughtful event for the community — reach out to me on X or LinkedIn. we typically don't provide monetary funding, but we can help with food, swag, and Cursor/Codex credits for the right type of audience.
just include:
- 📅 date
- 📍 venue
- 💬 short description
- 👥 estimated attendees
- 🎁 what you need (AI credits, food, swag, etc.)
Community Ask
✋🏽 Volunteers — Want to lend a hand? We are looking for people who want to help run events, or just help us takedown/setup chairs from time to time.
🏢 Venues — Know a space that could host 50-100+ people? We're always looking.
💬 Feedback — What do you want to see more of? Reply to this email. I read everything.
🤝 Collaborate — Want to co-organize an event? Let's talk.
💰 Sponsors — And today's platinum sponsor slot is… NOBODY! If your company wants to get in front of Vancouver's AI builder community, reach out at [email protected].
till next time
shawn