With hundreds of daily emails and a growing team at Uberflip focused on what seems like dozens of overlapping daily projects, it’s easy to get trapped and bogged down in the office. But it’s extremely important for me and others on our team to know what’s going on in the rest of the tech and start-up community (outside our happy Uberflip bubble). I’m sure we’ve all heard about the risks of groupthink where through a process of isolating themselves from outside influences, a team can fall into minimizing conflict and settling on decisions without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints. Now don’t let me paint the wrong picture, we challenge each other plenty in our office, but sometimes you’ve got to get out and hear other perspectives.

This is why I’ve decided that our entire management team (now 5 of us) are going to attend GROWtalks Toronto (http://www.growtalks.com/events/toronto/). Unfortunately I did not attend the big GROW event this past summer in Vancouver, but I heard great things and now that it’s in our backyard, attending is a no brainer. GROWtalks is a conference built for startup companies and will take place February 21st at Ryerson. There’s a great list of out of town and local speakers coming out including Brant Cooper (Co-Author, Lean Entrepreneur), Laura Fitton (HubSpot), Dan Martell (Clarity), Kate Rutter (LUXr), Scott Kveton (Urban Airship), Danielle Morrill (Referly), and more.

It’s rare we get this many awesome out of town speakers at one venue and we’ve been told there will be opportunity to not only hear from these speakers, but also to ask them questions and to talk to them throughout the day.

I’m looking forward to our entire management team challenging any potential groupthink tendencies that could creep up out of nowhere and I urge other Startups in Toronto to come out and challenge our thinking too. If you plan to buy tickets, click this link: http://growtalks-toronto-uberflip.eventbrite.com and enter the discount code uberflip to get $50 off. I promise you no kickbacks coming here.

After being fortunate to have been part of the C100’s 48 Hours event late last year, I think that all Canadian start-ups need to make an effort to build an awesome community right here at home. With that in mind you’ll see us getting involved and pushing others to do the same for everything coming our way, as well as organizing some events of our own – like this meet up coordinated by our CEO Yoav http://www.meetup.com/Responsive-Design-Meet-Web-app. Hope to see you all at GROWtalks.

About the Author

As COO, Randy runs around daily between strategy, operations, sales and execution of Uberflip's awesomeness.

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