Wealthsimple is an online investment management service based in Toronto, Canada. The company provides a range of financial services for investors, including custom portfolio development and regulated crypto trading, but it also provides a tax filing service open to all users. This means that every year come tax season, Wealthsimple does enough business to warrant hiring an entire cohort of remote workers.
At the beginning of 2023, Wealthsimple was looking for a vendor. The company needed a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) partner to service about a hundred new staffers working on Windows systems. A team met with Google to source some candidates, and Google suggested C2C partner Workspot, a cloud-native VDI technology provider specializing in delivering virtual apps and desktops to end users.
Wealthsimple initially considered three other vendors in addition to Workspot. Its main priority was logistics: shipping laptops to remote workers just for tax season, a contract that might last only a few months, could involve numerous headaches. Workspot's modern VDI solution was a natural workaround. Wealthsimple was interested, but before committing, the team decided to attend the C2C Cloud Adoption Summit in Toronto, where the Workspot team would also be onsite. The experience made all the difference.
"We're all very personable people, so that really helped, meeting in person and getting that face-to-face connection, hanging out a little bit. That really sealed the deal for us from a human side of things," says Wealthsimple Infrastructure Project Coordinator Jessica Boyle. "We decided that Workspot was going to be our solution, and we've been running with it ever since."
Workspot, meanwhile, had maintained a presence in Toronto for some time. "We make a joke about Rob [Scola, Director Sales, Workspot] (
"That face-to-face connection really sealed the deal for us from a human side of things."
Wealthsimple and Workspot eventually joined C2C's October 3 2Gather in Toronto to give a joint presentation on using Workspot's modern, cloud-native VDI solution for hybrid and remote work. Wealthsimple IT Specialist Bruno Ramos was initially very nervous about speaking onstage. "I was shaking," he says. Having been connected with Workspot for the better part of the year, though, helped alleviate that tension. "It seemed like we were really good buddies, everyone on stage, really easy conversation, really easy talk - it felt like family."
The presentation also led to a huge influx of interest in Workspot's product and the solution they had created for Wealthsimple. "At the end, I spoke to probably seventy people. So many questions that they had in terms of how Workspot is, why did we choose Workspot specifically, our use case, so many questions, and I know for a fact that other companies inquired about Workspot, and specifically they spoke to Rob," Bruno says. Bogdan confirms this account: "Indeed, we had two or three companies reach out to us afterwards like, 'Hey, we'd like to explore this and see if it matches what we're looking into.'"
The team attributes this success to two things: the tight-knit nature of the tech community in Toronto, and the community atmosphere of C2C's events. "Everybody knows someone that knows someone, so we do talk a lot throughout several events," Bruno says of the city. "There is a really tight community, and we do speak about everything that we do and then compare to other companies, what they do."
"The community piece really sticks out too in C2C," Jessica adds. "It's very comfortable, and you can really feel that sense of community with people. It's not scary - some tech events are a little bit more daunting, and you don't talk as much to other people, but C2C gives that environment where you're comfortable to do that."
Extra Credit:
