Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Eyes Toronto for Its Digital City

My impression is that the tech workforce here is healthy for a few reasons:

1) the presence of tech giants such as IBM in Markham (plus Toronto's fame for multiculturalism and for having high quality of life) means it attracts a lot of Indian, Chinese and eastern Europe talent. There's also a fair amount of ex-IBMers etc spilling over into growing mid-sized companies that need senior level tech workers with large corp experience.

2) there's a relatively healthy startup scene, but investment here is fairly conservative. Startups without profit strategies tend to die quickly, so as a result, startups here tend to be less pie-in-the-sky than SF unicorn wannabes. Because companies grow steadily and conservatively, they often provide high job security environments that encourage long single-company careers. This creates an incentive for experienced tech workers to stay in Toronto, rather than chase higher salaries elsewhere. I know many tech people that have been in a single company for 7+ years (some even 16+ years!)

3) there are some strong tech education options like Waterloo, which often collaborates with big name organizations like Mozilla. Internships to help get new grads get their foot in the door of the industry are also fairly common

I remember reading the below article. Prof. Hinton can probably claim quite a bit of credit for his city's successes. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-adv...

Yann LeCun, the director of AI at Facebook, also did a postdoc at Toronto.

[0] http://learning.cs.toronto.edu:40292/people#Faculty

[1] http://yann.lecun.com/

Toronto has grown up a lot in the pst few years. The canadian dollar is about 20% less than USD, so VC dollars go further - and while competitive, hiring engineers is nothing like the bay. That said, there is a shallow pool of senior SaaS startup folks in Toronto compared to SF or New York.

ATM there is about a 37% difference in CAD-USD. So that is just a bonus.

It is also Canada's biggest city and business capital. The only real cons is the price of real estate and high taxes but Google has all kinds of money so that shouldn't be an obstacle. There is also the an issue of poor transportation infra but since this will be developed downtown that shouldn't be an issue either.

I am sure the Provincial/Federal Gov will throw in quite a few enticements since there is an election coming up and they are desperate for some kind of meaningful employment gains.

It's a nice city to visit but you have to be wealthy to live there. It's Canada's version of NYC (a much, much, much smaller version).

Front 151 was a major hub for North America and allowed co-location and cheap fiber so a lot of DC activity sprang up around it and that in turn led to many start-ups choosing Toronto. The fact that there are two excellent universities nearby (Waterloo and UFT) helped a lot in that it sourced a stream of very capable programmers.

The only thing that stopped Toronto from developing further as a high tech city is the brain drain to the valley were engineers could easily make double of what they could make in Toronto.

http://www.151frontstreet.com/

- The border is a barrier to moving to NYC or SF for a higher paying job. So salaries are lower.

- There are more agencies than product companies. Toronto has always had a lot of ad agencies, but the CAD has been trending down since 2013 without a major bump in salaries. So there are many ad agencies and contract app shops that take advantage of the spread.

So in general the Toronto tech scene is smaller and lower paying than either of those cities. But it's the best in Canada, so it attracts a lot of the local talent.

There's wishful thinking in all of the above, but I think that is concentrated in the wish that such a town could get off the ground at all. But about the only kind of artificial town that I find plausible is when a state wants to build a new capital -- and that will immediately be a gravy train for parasites who want to crank up the costs.

That's certainly more than enough land to build something interesting in. Otherwise, that area would just go to another boring condominium development. But the only autonomous transit is going to be elevators and the inflamed fantasies of journalists who don't check all the primary sources.

Now, if there was a bid for doing something interesting with Ontario Place, that would be a discussion.

Yeah doesn't Silicon Valley and San Francisco have some pretty stringent zoning rules against intensification?

And which regulations, specifically, are holding back innovation at Google? Would their floating city allow me (to use one of your examples) to conduct rocket launches in my backyard?