culture ©

september 11, 2002 the other press

Interview With

Kerry Evans
OP Contributor

Interview with Mike Swartz, President of www.techvibes.com

How did Techvibes get started?

As a SFU project, called Geekrave. (www.geekrave.org). Lindsay Smith is now the CEO who runs
Techvibes. She was one of the SFU students involved in the geekrave project. It started off in the class-
room as a brainstorming session as a marketing concept. One guy suggested putting on a rave for geeks
and they ran with it. That project had five big events, all tech crowds, every 4-5 months. It wrapped
up about 18 months ago during the “tech bust.”

Over the past few months you have gotten a lot of high profile guests attending your event, such as
Gordon Campbell and Alan Rock. How do you get those types of attendees?

It’s all sales: Cold calling, contacts, following up, and networking . We have also been making key con-
tacts in the government and with high profile organizations.

Why are people networking more so now, than in the past?

I don’t necessarily think that people are networking more than before. There has always been a need
to network, even when the DotCom world was big and everyone had money, people were still net-
working. I don’t think that it takes a downward economy to get people to realize that they need to be
networking. It’s always there, I think it’s just a matter of sales and marketing, how you get the word
out, how you target the tech market, and how to make the events exciting enough that they want to
come back. If you come up with that conclusion for any industry, there is always a need to socialize.

 

 

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