It was appropriate to have breakfast with Gerry Pond on the morning of Invest Atlantic last week, for it was during the same event a year earlier that I first heard him speak about the need for a regional entrepreneurial community.

So, just after sunrise on Wednesday, I met with Pond, the head of East Valley Ventures, and his COO Jeff White, to discuss where we are and where we’re going, with the regional ecosystem for entrepreneurship, innovation or whatever you want to call it.

A year earlier, Pond had been the Chair of Invest Atlantic, having been invited after his portfolio company Radian6 was bought by Salesforce.com for $370 million. Pond predicted during last year’s conference that there would be more exits, and sure enough weeks later IBM bought Q1 Labs—another company Pond backed—for reportedly upward of $500 million.

What I remember about Pond’s speech that day was his strident call for a regional approach to developing entrepreneurship in Atlantic Canada, citing what he called his “Six Cities Strategy” for building up the region. Basically, the four provinces are too small to market technology properly and have to work together in tech development. The lead, he thinks, has to come from the private sector because government is too worried about courting voters on their own turf. “Most of the people we meet are not parochial,” says Pond, “and we realized we are not big enough to build what we want on our own.”

Pond courted controversy in his home province when he said that the sale of Radian6 was not so much a New Brunswick victory as a Maritime victory, but he’s never stepped back from that statement. He maintains that Radian6 could never have found the talent it needed to build a world-class company in its hometown of Fredericton alone. Instead, it expanded to Saint John and Halifax, and found the talent it needed. That, according to Pond, is the lesson for the region.

Pond looks at Atlantic Canada not as four provinces of less than a million people each, but as one region with a population of 2.5 million.

If he has made one concession in the last year, it’s that he no longer talks about six cities—realizing someone would be excluded—and now refers to the “Greater Atlantic Area.” Pond recognizes that there have been great strides made in the past 12 months in regionalizing the ecosystem, such as the move by the Propel ICT accelerator, which he chairs, to work beyond New Brunswick’s borders. There’s also been the development of Invest Atlantic and MentorCamp, but Pond wants more.

One key piece that’s missing is international marketing for tech companies, which Pond says is “a Canadian problem but particularly acute in Atlantic Canada.” A single sale in China could be as large as the entire Canadian market, he says. And, he adds, there is no one in Atlantic Canada with expertise in selling software in China.

The region’s universities have spoken about initiating international marketing classes, but Pond wants more speed. He says one solution could be to form an Atlantic Canadian training program in international sales and marketing. In fact, Pond and White are planning to hire a new executive at East Valley Ventures to help companies in the region recruit people with special expertise, including international marketing.

One point that Pond is unyielding on is that we should all think of ourselves as Atlantic Canadians or Maritimers rather than residents of a particular province. He says he doesn’t like to see a company described in the media as being based in a certain city because it highlights that it’s from a particular province. (Entrevestor will continue to identify the home-town of companies, because it’s a standard practice in journalism.) But, overall, both he and White encourage people not to have their address on their business cards. Instead, we’re all just Atlantic Canadians.