Happy Thursday Fam,

My most sincere Canadian apologies for interrupting your evening zen, but we got some hella important news to drop on you for a sec.

🎉 Some Fun Updates:

• We just locked in Amazon’s Swanky Vancouver Rooftop Space with a basketball court as our venue for the Sept 13th Vancouver Summit (pretty epic eh?) and yes, don’t worry, we’ve emailed Mr Bezos’ EA to see if he can be in attendance, but no promises

• The virtual speaker we hosted last month (Vinod Khosla) just bought the Seattle Seahawks for ~$10 billion. So yeah, maybe don’t skip these virtual firesides we put on. You never know when they may just buy your favourite sports team and toss you a free box ticket. More on the Khosla News here.

• We’re at close to 400 YEYAwards.com nominations and growing. so thanks to all of you legends for spreading the word and calling up your cousins

• 3 days left to nominate a founder or self-apply, so if you know a young founder kicking ass the world should know about, take 2 mins to nominate them. Literally, it takes 2 minutes. We filmed ourselves yesterday. So don’t tell us it takes 1 hour or we’ll call you out.

• Partnership with Baffin.com for Morning Hike (details to follow): this is gonna be the hike of the summer. Creators, Investors, Unicorn founders, limited access on this one so no promises. But let’s just say, you may recognize a few folks from your Instagram algo…

Oh. And one more important thing…. YEYAwards.com Nominees will be getting first access to limited ticket events for our Baffin and Amazon event. So get your founder nomination in ASAP or you may not get a ticket to the event.

Sorry, we don’t make the rules. Well, someone does around here, but we just right the newsletter sharing the updates.

And for the Type A-ers wondering, no, we can’t share the Vancouver event link with you yet. Sorry, fam. That’s for after our award nominations close.

It’s like my Grandma Betsy used to say.

“Too many sweets at once is bad for the tummy.” 🍪

Gotta have some veggies with that. But don’t sweat, more sweets in the next newsletter.

Also, huge thanks to all of our world-class judges who jumped aboard the YEY Train

• Simba Wakatama, 100Flow

• Jonathan Javier, Wonsulting

• Chantel Cassar, CategoryComms

• Catherine, Enactus

• Mell Truong, Toronto Tech Week

• Natalie Riso, WealthSimple

• Adam Assadkhan, Magic Scoop

• James Quinn, Larry's Catch

• Alexey Indeev, Spare

• Andrew Yeung, Fibe

• Jenn Juby, Startup Canada

• David Labistour, Former MEC CEO and Board of Aritzia

• Anne Hunger, Gluxkind

• Ali Ogston, TKS World

Another huge shoutout to Dimitry for designing our YEYAwards.com website and also special thanks to Rachel Wong, Founder of Monday Girl, who is joining as an ambassador and special guest at our Vancouver and Whistler event.

Dimitry is the talented web designer behind our fresh new YEYAwards.com website. As a founder, entrepreneur and design genius, we’re so stoked to partner with him on this. 🪄

When he’s not designing magic, you can catch him starting a sauna business, running up mountains or dabbling in Hyrox circuits.

2026 winners will be flown out to Vancouver in September for 2 days of incredible events, including a VIP dinner in Whistler, a celebration event in Vancouver and personalized awards to recognize all your hard work. A total value worth of over $5000 per winner.

Not too shabby in this recession of an economy we’re in, eh?

Anyways. Go nominate someone today. It literally feels like gifting a friend a box of chocolates when you do it. Try it out. We double dog dare you: www.yeyawards.com

Much love,

The LOI Fam

P.S. Don’t forget about the World Cup game this Sunday… who are you cheering for?