On the TechVancouver stage ×1
First seen on the TechVancouver stage in 2019. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Sonali ↗
In their words
I remember coming out of a personal development day, and it inspired me so much it gave me the courage to go to my boss and say: I love all of you, but I'm going to move on and take a chance at becoming an entrepreneur.
In about five months I put the event together — built the sponsorship packages, the marketing, assembled a marketing team, got an investor to cover the venue. I sold the event out, closed all the sponsors and the vendors, and it was featured on three radio stations, two magazines and one TV spot. All of that on $0.
I don't think the right answer is to quit. Sometimes you just need to tweak, and pay attention to where you might be trying to do too much yourself.
Around the web ×2
Quick answers
Who is Sonali Giovino?
A Vancouver marketer and event producer who moved into crypto in 2017 and is now global head of ecosystem at De.Fi, where she runs partnerships with blockchains and their DeFi protocols. She produced the Web3 Security Conference, which debuted in Milan in 2023, and Vancouver's first blockchain yacht conference.
What was her TechVancouver talk about?
The cost of the leap. She described quitting a director-of-marketing job, putting most of her savings into options trading and losing about 80 per cent of it, then being taken in by a fellow entrepreneur while she built The Awakened Man — an event on healthy masculinity she assembled in five months and sold out on no budget.
What company was she with at the time?
TechTO's listing for the talk names Veme, a blockchain social-media project she has elsewhere been described as running business development for. She does not mention it on stage — the talk is about the events and agency businesses she built before crypto — and no page is published here for Veme, because its public record could not be sourced beyond listings.
What was Service Angels?
The company she started a month after The Awakened Man, after concluding she had tried to do the entire event herself. She assembled an international remote team covering web, graphics and media in about two weeks, took six clients in the first three weeks, broke even in the first month, and ran it for several years until crypto took over.