Western Canada’s largest cloud technology and business transformation conference hit Vancouver today.
Celebrating its seventh year, TractionForce’s 2019 edition is tagged The Collective Why and promises to share how leading organizations like Salesforce and Lyft invest in their people, process and technology to achieve success.
Fashioned after Salesforce’s DreamForce mega-conference in San Francisco, Traction on Demand’s TractionForce borrows from their successful conference formula with indoor and outdoor spaces at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
The event kicked off with an inspiring purpose-focused keynote from Traction on Demand founder Greg Malpass who shared what occupied his mind and mission over the last year.
Next up was Aaron Zifkin, Lyft’s Managing Director for Canada. An interesting choice considering Lyft and its ride-sharing competitors have been shut out of the Vancouver market to date.
Not surprisingly, Zifkin’s talk focused on Lyft’s mission of building cities around people, not cars,
A veteran of the shared economy space with a recent stint at Airbnb, Zifkin shared how Lyft is changing the way people drive, commute, interact and share in an expanding peer-to-peer economy.
Startling the audience with boggling stats like the fact that 76% of car drivers do their commute alone, 95% of the time cars sit unused, and Vancouver’s downtown core has 400 parking lots, Zifkin argued that cities have been designed around cars, not people.
Zifkin couldn’t avoid the elephant in the theatre and acknowledged Vancouver’s transportation issues with a series of hypothetical questions, “Let’s just say you were living in one of North America’s largest cities without ride-sharing.”
Zifkin continued, “The Ministry of Transportation is trying to impose a Class 4 licensing system, which is a commercial grade licensing system, which will not allow for true ride-sharing to actually happen. It is only going to exasperate the lack of supply that you currently experience today with taxis”.
Promising to continue to fight for Canada’s largest unserved ride-sharing market, Zifkin pledged to make it happen. “There is only one reason and it must be pandering to the taxi industry here and we’re going to continue having those conversations at all levels of governance to insure that we can bring ride-sharing to Vancouver.”
Be sure to tune into the TractionForce livestream this afternoon to hear a keynote from Alex Honnold, Professional Rock Climber & Star of the Academy Award-Winning Documentary “Free Solo”.
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