# Anuj Rastogi

Anuj Rastogi works with the BackStretch team on hiring and building teams for small and medium-sized businesses. The posts focus on how growing businesses create jobs, how people help companies succeed, and climate and cleantech innovation.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/anuj-rastogi/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujrastogi13
- LinkedIn followers: 3,524
- Topics: startup, recruiting, talent-acquisition, entrepreneurship
- Based on 14 dated posts, latest 2026-09-24

## Summary

Anuj Rastogi is most useful for editorial work on Canadian innovation, small-business hiring, and climate technology.

- Best for: A B2B technology publication commissioning a podcast interview or contributed article.
- Not for: A consumer brand wanting guaranteed sponsored posts and measured audience reach.
- Check first: Confirm whether they accept paid work and can share audience and performance evidence.

### Takeaways

- Job growth will come from small and medium businesses, not big employers.
- People, not funding or luck, decide which companies win.
- Canada's tech scene is bolder than its reputation, and it is worth recording company by company.

## Main ideas

- **Job growth will come from small and medium businesses, not big employers**: This is Rastogi's central argument. Borrowing Chris Anderson's long-tail idea and applying it to employment, they reason that most jobs already sit in small and medium businesses rather than large enterprises, that millions of new businesses start each year, and that matching strong talent to those businesses lets them grow and create more roles deeper in the tail. That, in turn, gives the economy a way to absorb people displaced when large companies cut staff. The post presents this as a mental model that took roughly 18 months to articulate and assigns a role to five audiences: customers should buy from small business, job seekers should look past familiar big names, investors should weigh job-creation impact, founders should tell their hiring story better because their brand is unfamiliar, and government should recognise the SMB load.
- **People, not funding or luck, decide which companies win**: Rastogi takes the standard list of reasons companies succeed—first-mover advantage, deep pockets, macroeconomic timing, technological superiority, supply chain capture, rapid AI adoption, channel partners, charismatic CEOs and luck—and calls them symptoms rather than causes. In this argument, people are the root cause: an organisation adopts AI better than competitors because it has people who can lead that change, maintains cash discipline because its finance leadership knows how, and earns customer loyalty because its brand and product teams listened and adapted. Rastogi grounds the claim in personal experience and in the hiring work done through BackStretch.
- **Canada's tech scene is bolder than its reputation, and it is worth recording company by company**: Across the event posts, Rastogi prioritises showing up, taking notes and naming founders, companies and officials with enough specificity for readers to follow up. Their conclusions about the scene are confident: ambitious Canadian companies exist across sectors, the ecosystem is growing fast, and anyone claiming otherwise is not paying attention. The method is deliberate accumulation of small, concrete observations rather than analysis of any single company.
- **Climate and cleantech founders deserve the same close attention as software startups**: Rastogi treats climate as a serious beat, giving early-stage climate companies the detailed, per-company write-ups usually reserved for software. The attention extends to the physical product and the commercial question behind it; the post closes by linking the beat to the hiring work with impact and cleantech founders.
- **Hiring is a two-sided human act, not just a funnel**: When Rastogi writes about BackStretch's own work, they focus on what a job means to the person taking it and the trust involved on both sides. The post calls small and medium business the lifeblood of the economy, the employment market and the communities it serves, and credits clients, candidates and staff for the recognition rather than presenting it as a purely commercial win.
- **A note on whose views are whose**: In the event write-ups, Rastogi often reports rather than argues, attributing positions to named speakers and organisations. Qureshi's views on market entry, Robinson's on intellectual property, Minhas's on Canadian identity and Siow's on drug design belong to those speakers.

## Work to read

- [A thesis on job growth through small business](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anujrastogi13_futureofjobs-hire-hiring-activity-7431680498176962560-WxZI)
- [Day one of Toronto Tech Week 2026](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anujrastogi13_toronto-tech-week-day-1-dr-seuss-ai-activity-7464762440791175170-y7bb)
- [Three events from Toronto Climate Week](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anujrastogi13_given-how-hot-toronto-tech-week-was-it-activity-7468360393992679424-yYHJ)
- [The case that people, not funding or luck, decide which companies win](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anujrastogi13_company-a-scrapes-byfor-a-while-company-activity-7495518992078385152-r2cC)
- [BackStretch named a 2025 award finalist](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anujrastogi13_canadiansmeawards2025-canadiansmesmallbusinessawards2025-activity-7477392437691297792-a4YJ)
- [A demo day tour at the festival formerly known as ELEVATE](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anujrastogi13_live-from-the-festival-formerly-known-as-activity-7508923174365908992-97-F)

## Brand relationships

- **BackStretch** (employment)
- **CanadianSME Small Business Magazine** (mention)
- **Toronto Tech Week** (mention)
- **Spring** (mention)

## Partnerships

Anuj Rastogi's posts do not mention sponsor packages, rate cards, media kits, or published partnership terms. Their posts cover hiring and job growth, BackStretch's talent work, and Canadian tech and climate innovation, with event and community participation at Toronto Tech Week, Toronto Climate Week, the festival formerly known as ELEVATE, and OneEleven, as well as client-collaboration mentions. These are not disclosed commercial formats. Ask them directly about partnership terms, deliverables, pricing, review requirements, disclosure practices, and turnaround times.

## Alternatives

- Matt Campbell: Choose Matt Campbell when the segment should center on Canada's energy transition and the industrial supply chain behind it—hydrogen, offshore wind, nuclear—and how governments and industry align to build that infrastructure, with a strong Atlantic Canada focus. The posts describe work on a green hydrogen supply chain study with the four Atlantic provinces, ACOA, the Atlantic Hydrogen Alliance, Net Zero Atlantic, and Energy NL; coordinating a public-service panel on government-industry alignment for clean energy infrastructure; mapping domestic clean fuel demand; and preparing for the country's first offshore wind call for bids. For a contributed article on whether Canadian clean-energy projects can actually be built and staffed, this alternative offers project names, partners, and a regional lens beyond the job-growth thesis.
- Reetu Gupta: Choose Reetu Gupta when the publication wants a host who already runs a sustainability conversation and can carry a climate-focused episode without leaning on job-growth framing. The two Green Shoots & Big Shifts episodes show a host-led interview format: one draws out a guest's route into renewable energy, tracing a founder's path from marine biology and public health to turning invasive sargassum into bio-stimulants and renewable diesel; the other covers campus decarbonization and student-led projects with a college sustainability director. Together, the interviews connect environmental science, startup building, and practical action in education and coastal communities, making the show a fit for buyers seeking an established sustainability interview rather than a new thesis on Canadian jobs.
- Erick Ko: Choose Erick Ko when the article focuses on recruiting and talent-acquisition practice: hiring as a sales process, the value of a defined ideal candidate profile and proactive sourcing, the effort spent qualifying rather than disqualifying applicants, and what frontline business-development representatives are actually asked to do. Both posts offer a practitioner position an editor can excerpt and challenge directly, making them a better fit for a how-to recruiting piece than a broad innovation story.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/