Comment by pkaler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkaler | Hacker News Reader

I live in Vancouver and just started a game studio. http://smartfulstudios.com

Bureaucracy is not a problem. I'm not sure what you mean by that.

There is tons of government help with SRED, IRAP, the Renaissance Fund, and Telefilm New Media Fund. http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/taxcredit/sred/menu-e.html http://irap-pari.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/ http://www.cse.gov.bc.ca/ProgramsAndServices/BusinessService... http://www.telefilm.gc.ca/03/311.asp?fond_id=3

With UBC and SFU, there is a lot of tech and business talent. Vancouver Film School and Emily Carr add to the art talent.

Since we have universal health insurance, and a fairly decent social safety net, it is actually cheaper to provide benefits to your employees in a lot of cases.

Vancouver is an expensive city to live in. But definitely not as expensive as the valley.

The infrastructure is good. I can get a 50Mbps internet connection in my apartment.

The women are gorgeous and fit. Skiing, sailing, golfing, climbing, hiking amenities are close by.

Yeah, it drizzles for 4 months of the year. But you get used to it.

The VCs are very approachable. Send any of them an email with the subject header, "30 Minute, no harm, no foul meeting" and they will hear you out.

If you're trying to get from zero to fundable, check out my friends over at Bootup Labs. http://bootuplabs.com/

Thanks for the plug Parveen (I'm one of the guys behind Bootup Labs)

To elaborate on SRED and IRAP: These are programs that will either offset tax on revenue, or provide direct grants for original research and development. Talking with one of the local CTOs up here, he said use of these two programs basically cut his development costs by 70 to 80% versus Silicon Valley. Basically, there's a fair amount of free government money to be had to get you going, or stretch your funding further.

I actually just returned here from Silicon Valley (lived in Mountain View for four years). There's a couple reasons I did, mostly because Silicon Valley is an echo chamber that confuses motion with progress, but also because Vancouver has a lot to offer:

1) Diverse population ethnicity: if you're thinking about going into China, India, or Europe, it helps to have a lot of local knowledge of those cultures.

2) Lots of local talent: For one, the largest Electronics Arts development center in the world. For a second, a number of "Silicon Valley" companies and thought leaders - Tim Bray (creator of XML), Flock (has a team of 20 devs on Vancouver Island), Lloyd Budd (Automattic), many others.

3) Healthy life: I lost 15 pounds in two months when I returned to Vancouver, without really changing much. The city is a walking city, so we have only used a single tank of gas in th past four months. There's lots of cheap transit.

4) Close to Silicon Valley: YVR is actually the largest airport on the west coast (not LAX). You can be in Silicon Valley in two hours. I often joked with my valley friends that I could fly to Vancouver and drive to Whistler faster than they could get to Lake Tahoe. ;-)

As for living expense - overall, it's about the same as Silicon Valley. Some stuff costs more, some stuff less. The stuff that does cost more, you usually get a lot more bang for your buck. $800K will get you a shack in Mountain View, or a brand new modern apartment in downtown Vancouver in the heart of the action.

> 3) Healthy life: I lost 15 pounds in two months when I returned to Vancouver, without really changing much.

I actually gained 15 kilos in a year after moving here from another country.

> The city is a walking city,

No, of course it's not. Except for some parts of the Downtown and a couple of other (smallish) areas. But restricting your life to just these areas is not really an option on average.

> so we have only used a single tank of gas in th past four months.

I am filling up every few days even though I telecommute and don't drive to/from work every day. The city of course is not a huge metropolis, there's a bit over 1 mil people here. But only a very small fraction of population can actually live comfortably without a car, and even between these people this lifestyle choice still does not really appeal to that many.

> There's lots of cheap transit.

$5 a pop hardly qualifies as a cheap transit.

I can echo what pkaler said.

I personally received a handful of unsolicited phone calls from local VCs (including Growthworks and Ventures West - the one with Paul Kedrosky) asking for a meeting. All based on a couple of posts in high-profile blogs.

It does drizzle in a winter, but (a) that's actually helpful if you need to work :) (b) Whistler is just an hour away. There's also Okanagan Valley 400 km to the east, which is our smaller version of Napa Valley.

What's completely out of whack here is a real estate market. 500 sqft condo in downtown may easily cost 700k and CAD:USD is now 1:1. The correction of the market has already started, sales are slumping, inventory is spiking, but it would probably take at least a year for prices to start really falling. I'm mentioning this because this causes certain problem with rentals availability and this problem may actually worsen. Especially in Downtown. Make sure to research this subject prior to making a decision.

Another note is regarding the labor laws. BC actually has a funny law saying that if an employee owns a company share or is on an stock purchase plan - they are considered co-owners of the company and therefore are not eligible for an overtime pay. Allegedly this law was passed specifically to stimulate high-tech industry.

Lastly, if you haven't visited Vancouver before, I would strongly recommend a surveying visit. This is not a megapolis, it's not fast paced nor is it expansive. This may require adapting to.

There is also another part of the the labour laws that 'high technology professionals' are exempt from a good chunk of the employment act (like overtime and stat-holiday pay) in BC.

http://www.coop.uvic.ca/assets/pdf/engrcoop/engr_prep_highte...

"The women are gorgeous and fit."

Way to enforce the stereo type, bro

If you need me to elaborate, I can point you at statistics. Vancouver has one of the lowest rates of smoking and obesity and one of the highest life expectancies. Surely, that correlates with gorgeous and fit.

Having visited Vancouver I can echo, as an outside, that the women are great :-)

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