Back in 2010 some friends of mine in Montreal were organizing their second startup focused conference named The International Startup Festival. As I planned my trip to attend I kept mentioning it to other folks here in Guelph and the surrounding area. As the group of people attending grew, I started contemplating how we could optimize the travel. The travel to, and from, conferences always felt like a wasted opportunity to me.

That idea built to the point where I chartered us our car with VIA Rail and filled it about 50 local startups and entrepreneurs and The Ontario Startup Train was born. Since that first year, we’ve expanded and have run our soldout train every summer.

While the train was born here at ThreeFortyNine and we ran it for many years, the team at Highline Beta has taken our train under it’s wing for the past few years.