When Tom Viinikka talks about the best time to start a business, he reaches for an old piece of wisdom about planting trees.
“When’s the best time to plant a tree? Forty years ago. When’s the next best time? Today.”
For the CEO of Edmonton Unlimited, that thinking applies to more than gardening. It shapes how he sees this moment in Edmonton’s history—a moment he believes the business community and entrepreneurs cannot afford to let pass.
Edmonton’s technology and AI ecosystem are moving faster than ever. The University of Alberta is home to one of the world’s leading AI research communities. An innovation district is taking shape downtown and a growing pool of founders are building solutions to real problems, from AI to satellites in space. The pieces are in place. What Viinikka wants now is for more people—entrepreneurs and established businesses alike—to step in and participate.
Viinikka’s path to leading Edmonton Unlimited did not follow a straight line. He has founded, acquired, exited and invested in businesses across technology, construction, retail and energy. That range gave him the ability to, as he calls it, “speak two languages fluently.”
“Having lots of different industry experience helps me speak ‘traditional businesses,’ but I can also speak ‘tech business.’ That is something that’s very important to us, helping the traditional entrepreneurs and business people get involved in tech—whether that’s using technology, becoming customers or becoming investors.”
The turning point came in 2015. Viinikka had joined a tech company early as a co-founder, and the team earned a spot in a Silicon Valley accelerator. What he found there reshaped how he thought about community.
“Up until that point, I’d always had my own traditional businesses. I worked away on my own and did my thing,” he recalls. “Down there I could feel a totally different culture. It was very collaborative.
He also noticed something that had nothing to do with geography.
“It’s not just that tech people do things a certain way. It’s that the whole community thinks a little bit differently. They have this collaborative mindset, and they end up doing these big things.” He came back to Edmonton with a conviction: “We need to do that here.”
Like many founders, he got pulled back into the daily fires of running his own ventures, but the seed was planted. An event at the University of Alberta’s eHub introduced him to the co-founders of vrCAVE, a company he would help build. When the pandemic paused that work, Viinikka was recruited into community building and economic development. That role led to Edmonton Unlimited.
“That’s kind of how I fell in love with the mandate of Edmonton Unlimited,” he says, “which is to help entrepreneurs, specifically tech innovation entrepreneurs, to scale and to create a critical mass of those movers and shakers here in Edmonton.”
Ask most people what they picture when they think of Edmonton’s economy and they’ll say oil and gas. Viinikka has deep roots in that industry and he’s quick to celebrate it, but he wants people to see the rest of the picture – the bigger and more future-leaning picture.
“We have some really amazing assets here. We’re a world-class AI research community at the University of Alberta and Amii,” he says. “There is forming, right now, an innovation district,” he adds, pointing to Amii, Edmonton Unlimited, Enterprise Square, the University of Alberta and a cluster of tech companies nearby. “Really, it’s kind of a hot spot right here.”
The proximity of the burgeoning tech hub is no accident. It’s the physical version of the collaborative culture he first felt in California. Yet, there is a difference here that should be leveraged. Edmonton’s edge, in Viinikka’s view, is the ability to bridge two worlds. Traditional Alberta business and cutting-edge technology don’t have to sit at separate tables. When they work together, both sides win. How? By answering the call: step in, step up, step forward.
Step in is about getting people involved. That might be a researcher at the university, a traditional business owner exploring tech—the path Viinikka himself took—or a first-time founder with an idea and the nerve to chase it.
Step up is a call to the business community.
“We’re asking them to get involved as customers, as investors and as mentors,” he says. This is the lesson he carried home from Silicon Valley. “Those people were all interested and involved in some way. They were willing to be first customers. There were people willing to take a chance as an angel investor, or willing to work for a startup and take a chance from a career perspective.”
Viinikka is careful to point out that “step up” is not charity.
“This is not a purely selfish thing for the entrepreneurs. Those corporates are getting technology that will accelerate their path and make them more competitive.”
He offers Edmonton Unlimited’s Build World Tech program as proof. It pairs corporate customers with founders in building technology, and it has launched roughly 10 pilots in the last six months.
“That accelerated the path for those entrepreneurs, but if there’s no involvement from the community, none of that happens.”
Step forward is about scale—helping companies grow and building the critical mass of successful founders that makes an ecosystem self-sustaining.
For Viinikka, the time is now. Waiting runs against the very nature of entrepreneurship.
“Waiting is not entrepreneurial,” he says plainly. “AI is changing everything. Moments like this are good for all businesses, not just if you want to start an AI or software company. Everyone has to pay attention because everything’s changing and when everything’s in motion, everything becomes available and possible. It’s like musical chairs. Everyone’s standing up right now and there are vacancies everywhere. These are the moments when people can make really big moves.”
He acknowledges the uncertainty of the current climate, but reframes it as raw material.
“Uncertainty presents a ton of opportunities. If we do the same thing we’ve always been doing, we go to the same place we’ve always been. There is more opportunity now than there ever has been that can get us to different, to better, places.”
The stakes, he argues, reach well beyond any single company.
“I think it’s an important time for us as a country, as a province, even as a city to use that opportunity to establish ourselves as a leader. AI is highly likely to have a significant impact over the next 20 years. If we have the chance to get out ahead and be a leader in that, that’s very important.”
There’s a popular belief that AI has made starting a business easy. Viinikka offers a more honest perspective.
“Technology, especially AI, might lower the barriers to some extent. Some costs are going down. You can iterate, you can mock up stuff faster and easier,” he says. “But the underlying problem of understanding your customer and delivering value to them is still the major hurdle and requires a human touch. That’s where everyone gets tripped up.”
It’s the single lesson he passes on most often.
“You have to understand your customer and what they need, and deliver something that provides value in that context. It seems simple, but it’s surprising how hard it can be. Your idea doesn’t mean anything until someone gives you money for it—and you can do that repeatedly.”
That, he adds, is precisely where Edmonton Unlimited helps—by connecting founders with experienced entrepreneurs and investors who have solved that puzzle before and by building programming that helps founders iterate.
“We want people to understand that you can take the risk. There are people around you to support you, encourage you and guide you. That being said, we need people to take the risk and lead us to where we are going.”
Edmonton Unlimited, he says, exists to open doors and speed up the learning curve. What it cannot do is remove the risk. He sees the process as a flywheel.
“Entrepreneurs enter the flywheel, they make an attempt and their capabilities increase. That makes them give more attempts, and more quality attempts. You fill that flywheel with resources and it grows,” he explains. “Eventually there are thousands of entrepreneurs making attempts. Our biggest challenge right now is getting that flywheel turning in a really cohesive way.”
Cohesion, it turns out, cannot be forced. Viinikka reaches for an unexpected comparison.
“I equate it to falling in love. I can’t tell two people to fall in love, but I can invite 300 people to the space, turn the music up and the lights down. By the end of the night, someone falls in love. I bring people together and make connections. All of those things I cannot force to happen, but I can set the stage where they’re likely to happen.”
Edmonton Unlimited won’t start an event without a founder standing up to pitch.
“We’ve seen some cool things happen from that,” he says. Founders get hired. They find customers. They meet the collaborator who changes everything. The results are showing up in the numbers, too—founder and entrepreneur attendance at events has climbed from around 10 per cent to 40 per cent since the organization put founders at the centre of its strategy two years ago.
Risk may sound like a scary word, especially now in a time where things change daily – sometimes minute to minute. But without risk, as the saying goes, there truly is no reward. And when everything is up in the air, anything can happen. So, why not reach for the tools to sway things in your favour as an investor, entrepreneur or established corporate leader?
Viinikka is proof of what taking a risk can do. He keeps a photo on his phone that explains it. It’s a selfie taken on a couch in Toulouse, France.
“I’d just finished pitching the executive committee of Airbus,” he says. For a year, he had worked his way up through the ranks of the global aerospace giant. Then the call came. “They said, ‘We’re buying it. We want to buy your product. When can you come and install it?’ I took the picture of myself because I thought, this is it. This is the moment. We invented something, our founding team put it together, we put it in front of them and they liked what we made. It does something for them. It feels so freaking good.”
That feeling, he says, is the fuel.
“Whatever the next step is you have to take, think about that moment when someone validates what you made and says, ‘What you invented is cool and I want that.’ There is no better feeling than that validation.”
The selfie is the image he’d show any first-time founder standing on the edge of a decision. The uncertainty is real. The setbacks are guaranteed. The breakthrough—the moment someone recognizes your work and wants it—is worth every step.
His message to Edmonton’s business community is this, “There’s opportunity here. There’s security in terms of protecting yourself against change by adapting to change, and there’s a ton of fun to be had. Edmonton is a young, cool community, and you get to see people doing really amazing things, be involved with them and maybe even invest in them or have them as customers.”
The ways to get involved are practical. Become a startup’s first customer. Write an angel cheque. Mentor a founder. Bring a problem your business needs solved to one of Edmonton Unlimited’s events.
“We have entrepreneurs and innovators who are eager to solve these puzzles,” he says. “If we can get visibility to those problems, we’ve got people who are hungry to try. Bring your problems. Bring your challenges. Bring your needs. Bring your ideas; and especially if you want to start a business, bring your incorporation documents. Let’s go.”
Edmonton has the talent, the assets and the ecosystem to lead in established and emerging technology. The flywheel is turning. The support is here, and as Viinikka would be the first to remind you, the best time to step in was yesterday—the next best time is right now.