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Comment by venturebros | Hacker News Reader

I have been looking at relocating to Vancouver in the future. It seems like a nice place to live but has a horrible tech/startup community. I don't get why that is.

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It's a nice place to live. Period. Can't go further than that.

Life is about series of choices:

- Work hard vs enjoy life

- Spend time writing unit-tests vs hack and go home by 5 PM

- Come in early 8.30 and build relationship/culture vs come in at 10 and make yourself a cup of coffee.

- Today is snowing, take a day off and go to Whistler vs stuck at the office along with colleagues and have a great time not just working, but share stories (again, build culture).

- Discipline vs "It's 4PM on Friday afternoon, let it go"

Generally this is true. That said, there are founders who've chosen the "work hard" over "enjoy life" choices here. It's just a question of getting connected into that community.

I started a company in Vancouver this year. It's going great, we're profitable, and I'm quite enjoying the tech community. I think the culture in Vancouver lends itself to creating sustainable and enjoyable businesses.

However, if your goal is to get rich by betting VCs' money, Vancouver isn't a good place to be. If you want to hire great people and bootstrap a company though, it's great.

A lot of it is centered in video games, as is the history of tech and startups in Vancouver. That ecosystem seems to be doing well.

There are small game-dev shops around here and they seem to do okay, not terribly successful.

Let's recap:

- EA Burnaby/Vancouver laid off twice in 2 years

- Disney Propaganda laid off 100-200 people recently

- Nexon (or something) close the door in 2009, 90 ppl gone.

- Radical, 2008, laid-off 100 people, 2010, laid-off 90+.

- Nokia, mid-2009, closed its vancouver game studio, 100 ppl.

That's a lot of "technical" workers for such a small city like Vancouver.

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