The Lazaridis Scale-Up Institute, founded by BlackBerry’s Mike Lazaridis, launched a new accelerator program to support Canada’s most promising tech companies. Their mission was ambitious: help founders build the next generation of Canadian unicorns.
Initially, the Institute asked us for a simple highlight reel of their six-week course. But beneath the surface, there was a much bigger opportunity: to capture not just moments from the program, but the expertise, credibility, and nationwide energy fueling Canada’s tech ecosystem.
From week one, we saw that a highlight reel alone wouldn’t do the program justice. Instead, we reimagined the project around thought leadership and storytelling.
• Leveraging access to world-class speakers: We pulled aside VCs, industry leaders, and seasoned founders to capture their perspectives in addition to documenting live sessions.
• Expanding the narrative: Rather than just cover Waterloo, we traveled across Canada—Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary—and even to New York and Silicon Valley. This allowed us to showcase the full breadth of the Canadian tech ecosystem, as well as international perspectives.
• Thematic storytelling: Each weekend of the course had a focus—marketing, financial systems, design—and we built tailored content libraries aligned to those growth pillars.
This shift reframed the accelerator’s communications strategy. Instead of one polished recap, they suddenly had an ecosystem of evergreen assets that spotlighted both the program and the people behind it.
Over the course of the program, we:
• Produced a library of assets (short films, interviews, social media cutdowns, and web-ready clips) rather than a single sizzle reel.
• Captured thought leadership content from industry experts, boosting the program’s credibility by association.
• Documented the journey of individual founders, giving them professional-grade assets they could use to grow their own brands and companies.
• Tailored content for multiple channels: websites, social media, ads, internal communications, and PR.
Our teams worked nationwide, coordinating multi-camera shoots, activating local crews, and following participants into real-world environments—boardrooms, incubators, pitch sessions, and Silicon Valley meetings.
While the original ask was small, the impact was transformational:
• The Institute reshaped its entire communications strategy after seeing the potential of what we created.
• Founders gained confidence and visibility by having their stories told professionally—an asset they couldn’t have afforded on their own.
• The content library provided long-term value, fueling recruitment, media coverage, and future program cohorts.
• Most importantly, the storytelling helped position the Lazaridis Scale-Up Program as one of Canada’s most prestigious accelerators, recognized for both its outcomes and the credibility of the ecosystem around it.
