‘Canada is having a moment’: Shopify brings its tech extravaganza home
BNN Bloomberg, May 4, 2018 • Shopify is coming home. After holding its annual partner and developers’ conference in San Francisco for the past two years, the Canadian ecommerce company is bringing the event back north to Toronto permanently.
Following the lead of some other tech giants’ annual conferences – such as Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Google I/O and Facebook F8 – Shopify Unite serves as an unveiling of the company’s roadmap for the year ahead. The three-day event, this year held from May 7 to 9 at Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works, draws thousands of developers and ecommerce experts from around the world.
“Shopify is growing quite a lot and we wanted to bring something back to Canada,” said Arati Sharma, Shopify’s director of product marketing who helped launch Unite three years ago, in a phone interview with BNN Bloomberg.
“We’re from Canada … and so why not bring it back to where we’ve grown our company? It felt like the right time for it.”
It may be the right time not only because of its rapidly-growing Toronto office – and the headaches of transporting its flock of employees down south – but also as Shopify and its CEO Tobi Lütke have become the face of Canada’s tech scene.
“Canada is having a moment,” Sharma said. “[Toronto] is really being tech forward and it’s been supportive of us moving the conference here.”
April Fong 
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