We also had Ethereum be born right around there as well around 2014. I remember the first Ethereum meetups around Queen and Spadina with Vitalik.
But to another posters point. Even though we had the father of deep learning Geoffrey Hinton and lumiaries like Ilya, and Vitalik, we didn't manage to get any real benefit from that.
I’m Canadian and disappointed at how ineffective we are at building successful companies.
(1) Access to size of market even if online being US vs 'foreign' has advantages in political arena/regulatory benefits
(2) Significant tax advantages for US investors vs limited tax advantages for Canada (Angel+VC)
(3) Risk Appetite (impacted by size of market) - compounded by tax disadvantages (why would you take risk if your lining the pockets of the government?)
(4) Bench depth on talent once you really start to scale your company
(5) CAD strength (double edged sword) - talent goes South for better salaries (+ you need to compete), if the company revenue is in USD and employees are paid in CAD
(6) Start-ups paying in equity, early employees taking on that risk actually will get taxed heavily under new cap gains so the incentive to work hard for money is lower.
(7) Network effects of being in the valley - idea percolation, new playbooks, talent, competitiveness, company fitness
I will add that in this very specific AI case there is limited way you are going to find the depth of talent and capital in the country to make that company fly at the scale it needs to be.
but that's not what we see. people build because they still have a chance a making a lot of money.
also, like canada can build successfully tech companies. yes, I realize there should be more canadian tech darlings, but I don't think it has to do with high taxes so much as it has to do with Canadians being comfortable and not feeling the need to sacrifice everything to try and build the biggest thing.
If you look at Canada's most successful tech companies, the founders usually sell and enjoy a more comfortable existence.
Taxs on investors are quite high in Ontario/Canada compared to California. Not only does this minimize the outcome for the investor - it decreases the risk for making larger bets on big outcomes. In terms of exits -- you have a smaller playing field and fewer buyers being based in Canada vs USA. All the things add up to make a smaller opportunity for investors and builders and you work harder to pay more taxes to the government.
In terms for your ambition argument -- that could be an inherent problem in Canadian culture that no one wants to change the status quo - it is definitely a different culture than SV. The largest city is captured by financial industry for the most part which doesn't bode well for innovation.
And the cost of living is going up, which is going to make even more talented Canadians uncomfortable. These days if you ever hope to own a house, you basically can't go the stable 9-to-5 route.
If investors in Canada were throwing hundreds of millions into moonshot startups the way that they do in Silicon Valley, probably most Canadian entrepreneurs would build those companies at home. But the investment landscape is such that the investors who have that much money opt to lever up on real estate instead.
How many money does OpenAI _directly_ pay to CA in taxes? Sure the employees pay a ton in taxes but as an investor if you're going to lose more in taxes by investing into a Canadian company vs a California company then you invest into CA.
Us is so outrageously better than the rest that people fly across oceans to start businesses there. Canada, being next door, doesn't have the distance moat to at least slow down the brain drain
A small crew of people could potentially build the next WhatsApp. On Erlang.
I know people from "first world" countries like Japan and France that are come to work in the US simply because it pays much more.
For many reasons, only some areas succeed whilst the rest fail. In this case, Canada doesn't have silicon valley, nor do they have a high amount of start ups.
I'm spoiled by walkability and quality cycling infrastructure.
Canada is actively hostile towards tech and suffers from crippling salaries and investments. The idea of "business" in this country is buying a house and renting its basement.
Our government's incompetence is comical, we are nothing but more than a tech talent / immigration proxy for United States at this point.
(I'm an American, FWIW.)
and "Hard" Things: The work culture, Cost of living
You might want to blame the government or this or that but I think as a Canadian I've finally come to reckon with the fact that it's just not in the Canadian ethos to do risky things like make startups. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but they are very very rare. Canadian investors don't want to take big risks and the Americans are just next door waiting to gobble up the talent in search of capital.
What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience.
You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 years, 5 is not that much and it’s not like you went bankrupt. Your skillset might even mean you more than make up for lost time.
I don’t understand the talk of “risk” unless you’re Elon Musk betting the farm on your businesses and facing bankruptcy.
Work in your spare time until you have something Angel worthy, then get a modest salary to get to the next level and on you go. Or just bootstrap.
Is it easy? No, it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Is it risky? Not so much.
So why do Canadians and Brits see it as a risky thing to do? I think they don’t. What they see is _uncertainty_ - where will I be in six months? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail and people judge me? They don’t like uncertainty. That is conservative with a small c. Probably it’s a cultural artefact rather than anything remotely rational. The problem is you end up in an equilibrium where the society is conservative (“what you wanna do wasting your time with that”) so the ambitious people just leave and go to somewhere like (parts of) the US where people want to change things, make things, improve the world. And the conservative society gets more conservative until it is ossified.
Startups carry high uncertainty but not high risk.
Or I can fail at a startup and be close to zero five years later, the fact that you aren't homeless and starving and can get another job doesn't mean it wasn't risky, you still wasted a bunch of years compared to slow and steady accumulation.
I've read the majority of millionaires in the US get created like this, working and saving through decades.
You're basically repeating investor kool-aid, because for their model to work, 100 people will fail and 1 succeed, and so they tell you to not worry if you're in the 99.
For me risk is “could go horribly wrong” but the worst case for most startup founders is … get a job?
Yes, you might waste five years (in your words) of income. But that is not a "risk".
A "risk" for me is "this could all go badly wrong". Not having an extra five years of savings is just a fairly straightforward consequence. It's predictably going to happen, I can decide if I want it.
Real risk is "something can go catastrophically wrong". If say you've taken out a huge bank loan to fund the business and you have to declare bankruptcy if it fails, now _that_ is a risk. But nearly every founder I've ever met has taken nothing like that risk.
That's my point, startups are not risky in that sense, for most people, most of the time. It's kinda strange that so many people think they are.
Also failures aren't considered the same in every job market.
My latest annoyance is all the moaning and groaning about the latest capital gains tax increase. People complaining on one hand about how the Canadian economy lacks productivity, and then screaming to high heaven about tax policy that mostly only impacts people making quick speculative cash.
Investment takes no risks in this country because they don't have to. They just dump money into real estate or oil & gas instead and then hang at the lake in the Muskokas.
No evidence that SRED has done anything ever for actual R&D. I've seen people get SRED for making web pages in JavaScript&HTML. When I had to fill in the SRED stuff it was ridiculous. Someone doing actual innovation would throw their hands up in the air.
No new startups are getting it.
It's also like pulling teeth trying to explain to people that if we don't offer compensation commensurate with what they get in the US people will just leave for the US.
There is some form of brain damage where even people who know how to code assume that because you can get a crud developer for $80k a year you should get an AI researcher for $150,000. It's nearly double after all.
It might not be a year after uni, might not be 10, but eventually they will move because the pay in the US is just so much better than anywhere else.
That's if you're stuck in tech support. When you start doing actual ground breaking work it starts at x10 and goes up significantly.
In Canada you'd be lucky to get USD 180k total comp.
It really is x5 to x10 for seniour programmers.
NB some actual Canadians in this thread have voiced this possibility.
The idea is precisely that not having SV types around _improves_ the country, i.e. makes it closer to the preferences of Canadians.
And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture. There is very little process in Canada to make life difficult for the former style of company, and plenty of process to make operations difficult for the latter.
If not having SV folk improves Canada for Canadians, and hqving SV folks improves America for Americans, then this is just mutually beneficial trade. Efforts to try and stop brain drain still makes sense: it's even better if you can convince the citizens you trained to engage in the economic activity you actually want instead of economic activity that you find undesirable, but if you're unable to convince most of them, letting them go is still better than having them stay and engage in their undesirable behavior anyway.
Compare: if a large minority of Icelanders wanted to work for the Baby (which Iceland doesn't have), theb stopping the brain drain (convincing them to work in the Merchant Fleet) is the best outcome, but funneling them out (training them in merchant navigation and watching them join the Danish Navy) would still be preferable to them engaging in their desired behavior anyway (form their own pirate gang preying on the very Merchant Fleet you're trying to advantage).
Immigrants coming into countries start companies at a disproportionate rate compared to natives.
Other than unquantifiable statements about what "Canadians want" everything you mentioned so far to justify this idea of "canada doesnt care if tech graduates leave" is falsifiable by data.
You're welcome to present data falsifying the actual claim if you think you have it (instead of the "Canada doesn't care" straw man or misunderstanding that you repeat above, noting that so far you have not even refuted your own straw man by presenting any data).
This is your claim that I engaged with. If your claim is true it literally means that Canadians do not care if those people leave, in fact they would prefer it. My argument is that you're wrong and Canada and it's people would rather have more tech workers and more tech companies.
I don't believe I'm misunderstanding so I think we should probably both give up at this point.
There is a reason why there are not many startups in Europe - if you can have a decent life, secure job and a nice social security - no worth playing risky games. I would not be surprised if just sheer layoffs in USA led to more startups than in the whole Europe.
But I agree that we should probably disengage, so (barring exceptional new insights on my end) will leave this as my last post in the thread. Thanks for the chat.
I read this as if you'd be concerned of Canadians using their tech skills run malware groups, if Canada wouldn't let them leave and join SV companies.
It's not perfect, but neither is anything else I couls.come up with. Take the following:
- Persia would prefer many trained accountants so that PersianAccountants, the shah's preferred supplier of accounting technology, can hire cheaply from a large talent pool.
- Ambitious, trained accountants leave for the U.S. to work on DisruptiveAccounting.io, earning big bucks and disrupting the U.S. accounting sector.
- If Persia changes the kingdom's procedures and incentives, the same accountants would stay and found DisruptiveAccounting East, instead of working for PersianAccountants. This would be strictly worse for the shah than letting them leave.
The problem is, if I were to use this metaphor, people would get hung up on the difference between democracy and monarchy (preferences of one autocrat vs. that of the majority) and most Americans just straught up do not understand why anybody, much less the majority, would prefer not disrupting the accounting sector.
I.e. if they don't understand what I'm saying about Canada not liking the third option, the metaphor falls flat: they also won't see why the shah doesn't like the third option.
So I had to look for a metaphor where the obvious alternative is undesirable to most Americans. Hence piracy. The problem is that there's another reading now (the software engineers will become criminals).
Do you have a metaphor that would avoid both issues? I'd love to hear it!
Canada's skilled immigration policy is a train wreck, but that's another issue.