Hacker News Reader

Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Aye, I like to think of entrepreneurs as extreme investors. They are investing their time and effort in the expectation that there will be significant returns in the market.

The Canadian entrepreneur problem is the TSX problem: it's a struggle to convince oneself to invest in Canada, because generally the returns are lackluster. Rail, Banks, Oil and Gas are the consistent winners, all well-connected and deeply rooted, and rare is the startup that becomes a star on the TSX.

It's not that there isn't enough starving and unemployed talent, it's that there's something about Canada that suffocates and debilitates small and medium companies.

View on HN

> it's that there's something about Canada that suffocates and debilitates small and medium companies.

On the face of it, Canada should be a hotbed of entrepreneurship. The country has full access to the US market, has a good standard of living, has capitalism with good social nets, has great rule of law, well educated residents, allows qualified immigrants...

Every major economy is aging. Surely this cannot be the answer why entrepreurship in Canada is down.

Also, I object to the metric of entrepreneurs as a percentage of population used in the article. It is about how many successful companies are being born. You could have a very high entrepreurship rate with a high failure rate or you could have a low entrepreneurship rate with a high success rate. At the end it is the product of the two i.e. sustainable, successful businesses born per year that is a better metric. We also need to take future profitability and future-impact into account. Giving birth to one OpenAI per year is arguably better than getting 100 new dry-cleaner businesses per-year.

The article could have been better.

Speaking as a Canadian who moved to the US for work, I think a huge reason is that if you’re an ambitious Canadian it’s a lot easier to move to the US than trying to make it in Canada.

I can’t speak to the other external factors, but I think brain drain to the US is quite significant.

Yes but, thinking about this:

Canada sells and sees itself as the good boys. The conformists. The least likely to rock the boat. The opposite of that Apple ad essentially

You can see that by how often they will go with proprietary solution, even for their startups/SMEs. "Oh why don't we do this in .NET" even when there are plenty of other solutions

They will only risk the water only when they see other people way down. I'd say even Europe is not that bad in that sense.

I wasn’t aware .NET was any more proprietary than anything else these days. Care to elaborate?

>"Oh why don't we do this in .NET" even when there are plenty of other solutions

That's an interesting idea for a metric: how many programming languages has Canada created relative to similarly sized countries?

Canada and Canadians are doing well here. You can start with Rust, PHP, and Java.

This is about Canada, not Canadians. Rust and Java were created in the USA down the road from each other in California, by people working for US companies.

Nobody is claiming there's some sort of genetic difference that causes different levels of entrepreneurship, it's clearly all cultural. Take the Canadian out of Canada, make them report to American bosses and clearly they can create popular new software, no different to Europeans or Indians or Chinese ... the differences therefore must be related to government policy and culture.

>it's clearly all cultural. Take the Canadian out of Canada, make them report to American bosses and clearly they can create popular new software, no different to Europeans or Indians or Chinese ... the differences therefore must be related to government policy and culture.

By default, most of the top-of-field Canadians work in the US because it's at least 50% more profitable (among other reasons).

I agree with the premise about culture generally but you can't attribute all of it to culture. A great deal can be attributed to money and "ecosystems" around certain industries.

Rust was originally created in Canada, but your point is taken.

> well educated residents

Well schooled residents, at least. Canadians have more schooling than anywhere else in the world according to the OECD. How well they are educated is questionable, however. Canada lacks the markers of an educated society – incomes are low and stagnant, very little political engagement, etc.

> Giving birth to one OpenAI per year is arguably better than getting 100 new dry-cleaner businesses per-year.

The article is written through the eyes of BDC. Is one OpenAI actually better for them than 100 dry cleaning businesses? Would an OpenAI-like business even seek funding through BDC when they can just as easily secure a payday from Microsoft?

>full access to the US market

As an Old Worlder I would like to know what this means. If you have a website or a SaaS and are located in Canada, do you mean you can sell freely, wothout restriction, and without regulatory burden, the same as if you were operating within the US?

>It is about how many successful companies are being born

What per capita metrics should be used for this?

?Rail, Banks, Oil and Gas are the consistent winners, all well-connected and deeply rooted, and rare is the startup that becomes a star on the TSX

Do you reckon there is room for innovation here?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com