Toronto Startup Expert: What Toronto's got that the Valley Can't Provide
port25.ca
port25.ca
I also think the effective corporate tax rate is higher too so that can causes issues.
If you're a founder you're likely minimizing your "income" to almost zero to avoid as much tax as you can anyway.
Bandwidth caps?
blah, blah, blah microsoft ad.
I had the good fortune of meeting a high profile VC in the Valley in November and when I told him we were in Toronto, he said "OK, here's my first piece of advice. Move to the Valley."
I wish that wasn't the case because Toronto is awesome, but you can't compare it to SV when it comes to volume of activity, talent density or the echo-chamber that can hype your picture-sharing app up.
It's nice that the community is tight knit and there is some good talent here but what is missing is really some of the most important stuff: 1. VC and Angel Money, 2. Connections and 3. A deep pool of startup oriented hackers
If you're ever in Montreal, let me know, I might be able to help.
I admit I'm really sheltered from the rest of the Canadian scene from Winnipeg as the startup scene is scarce but I haven't heard much from Waterloo out here. If I had to name the top three I would have said the same in that order with the exception of Waterloo, as it wouldn't even be on my radar screen.
What am I missing for it to be first on your list?
Affordable office space right next door to Google, RIM, IBM, SyBase, etc, along with a bunch of other startups.
Being plugged directly into the artery of Canada's indisputably most prolific source of CS and engineering education.
And I'm not even in Waterloo :P
We need a more connected nationally distributed network of startup founders, methinks. We're spread out in Canada and even the larger urban centres aren't _rich_ with tech activity (More so than here, but still doesn't seem anywhere near the US communities from my PoV - SV, NYC, etc.).
I've moved from Canada to Seattle, and the cultural difference is pretty immense. You have giants like Boeing, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon constantly feeding fresh talent into the city, and a number of these people will spin off startups. You have a large number of extremely talented people, working on hard problems, who can hop out of big-co life and work on a startup. Or you can crash and burn and hop right back to working at big-co. This sort of possibility doesn't really exist in Canada.
The Canadian software scene leans closer to enterprise IT than it does innovative cutting-edge work. There isn't a sufficiently sized pool of eager hackers - too many salarymen, not enough trailblazers. Without innovative, big companies feeding the flywheel a vibrant startup scene simply cannot exist in any appreciable scale.
It doesn't help that every keen software engineer I know from Canada is like myself - having moved to the US to pursue greater opportunities, more challenging and rewarding work, and let's be honest, about double the pay that any Canadian company is willing to offer.
We keep an office in Toronto to send all the failures to - that really motivates people to succeed!
Am I to old for HN now?