David Crow

There are some people who excel at networking. They sit at the epicentre of connections and are the glue within a community. 

David Crow connected a community in Toronto by launching the first BarCamp (TorCamp) in Toronto and many further DemoCamp events thereafter in 2005. After returning from Austin I’m sure David saw startups starting to flourish in Toronto and wanted to start something to connect them all. 

Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist and so monitoring the progress companies were making in Toronto was more about the physical space. The software startup community seemed disparate and David was about to supercharge it. 

We met on a weekend at the Teehan+Lax offices and in the nascent BarCamp unconference format people brimming with ideas posted their topics and breakout discussions commenced. There was a tremendous energy that David had found and brought together. It would spark many smaller DemoCamp events and other BarCamp events for years. Each growing larger than the previous one.

I know that as these events grew it became harder and harder for David to find venues to hold the hundreds of people from the tech community that wanted to see what their fellow entrepreneurs, developers, and designers were working on. As platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn grew and we grew older with more family responsibilities the need and the magic or the events also started to wear off.

I was lucky to briefly have David work with our firm RadiantCore on business development. Sadly, I think David’s passion to start things and energy to keep moving and connecting people were a major reason he wasn’t going to stay long. I was always impressed by David’s energy and drive to connect with people and his unfailing ability to let his opinions be known. 

David continues to leverage what comes naturally to him and maintains multiple projects in business development, investing, and software community evangelism. I can always look to David for inspiration to keep my ideas flowing, my energy high, but most importantly, that the power to connect with people is one of the most valuable skills you can bring to your career and life. That’s why David is part of #My52.

LinkedIn: /davidcrow

Twitter: @davidcrow