A Damning Look at the Canadian Tech Sector | Hacker News Reader

A Damning Look at the Canadian Tech Sector

throwww.com

47 pointspurplefruit53 comments

"DoesNotExist" error.

At first I thought it was a joke related to the title, but now I see that it's just a Django error page. Made me chuckle at least.

Here's a cached version in the meantime: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Athrow...

"Quick test - name the sprinter who won the 2008 100m sprint. You probably guessed Usain Bolt - which is correct. Who came second? Exactly.... Want to know why? No-one cares. This is how the world works - in business and in life."

The hugely hyped media coverage of celebrities is not really a good model for anything in the real world. We don't all buy products and services from only the largest business in any given market sector. If I'm buying a car, or cellphone service, or software, I'm certainly going to consider offerings from companies that are not the #1 company in their field.

As a Canadian startup founder, I agree that we need to try to be the best in the world at what we're doing, not just best in our city or best in Canada. And I think we can do that while being our standard nice, even overly-apologetic selves.

As a start, let's all have our Twitter taglines say what our startup is (or will soon be) the best in the world at doing.

Here's what mine was before reading this article (@peterarmstrong):

Co-Founder of Leanpub, the best way in the world to self-publish in-progress ebooks.

Note how qualified that is: co-founder, self-publish, in-progress. That's because I'm Canadian, and I'm trying to be accurate.

If I was in the valley, I'd probably have mine be:

Founder of Leanpub, the best way in the world to publish ebooks.

What's better?

What's yours?

As a Canadian who has lived in NYC for 2 years, and just had to go back to Canada for 2 weeks, this is spot on.

There are tons of smart Canadians due to the great education system, but Canadians in general don't appreciate success in the same way Americans do. When I quit my job to start my own thing in America, all my co-workers and friends were pumped up and excited, while many Canadians were perplexed and asked questions like: "Don't you have a great job? Don't you make enough money? Why would you quit?" They concluded there was something wrong with me for quitting a decent job to do my own thing.

They didn't understand that being as upper-middle class as I could wasn't my goal. My goal was to try and build something out of nothing and hopefully be the best in the world. Americans get that because it's part of the American dream.

If you are talented, entrepreneurial and a good hacker, get down to NYC or SF. I used to be worried about visa issues, but then I realized it didn't matter, you can figure them out as you go along.

The challenge is that as a Canadian it's a lot easier to get a TN-1 or H1-B as an employee than as a founder. So the valley is full of Canadian expat employees, not founders. Hopefully some of those will return to Canada and become startup founders. (That's what I did.)

>>The challenge is that as a Canadian it's a lot easier to get a TN-1 or H1-B as an employee than as a founder.

It's the same in the US. If you're an immigrant, it's incredibly difficult (if not outright impossible) to get a work visa to work at a company you founded. There are a few "founder visa" type bills being discussed in the Congress, but all of them require the company you have founded to have a hefty revenue as well as a handful of employees. In other words, they are only for founders who are already successful.

That's what I meant: the TN-1 and H1-B visas are the US visas that Canadian employees get in the US.

Yep. Need to have x00K in the bank to legally work for my own company.

> Canadians don't appreciate success in the same way Americans do

> My goal was to try and build something out of nothing and hopefully be the best in the world.

Can I counter your personal anecdote about your friends not appreciating success, with your own personal story of founding a business?

I grew up outside of Toronto, and I'm friends with a dozen Canadians that have founded technology companies. I wouldn't say that we "don't appreciate success".

The point isn't that I'm right and you're wrong. The point is that you can't make gross generalizations about an entire country based on your anecdotal life story.

Definitely fair point. There are plenty of Canadian entrepreneurs who absolutely crush it, and definitely appreciate "success".

I could have said "Building something great out of nothing and trying to be the best" is very much embedded into American folklore and culture, but not so much in Canadian.

I had a very long conversation about this with 3 generations of Canadian entrepreneurs (none of them tech mind you) and we all had a good laugh about this very topic. Again, sorry if anecdotal evidence doesn't do it for you.

I think anecdotal evidence is good to a point.. we can only know so much before starting to make larger generalizations.

In all this, there is some sense that we (as Canadians) are fundamentally different than our American friends. I do agree (it's just a feeling) that these perceived differences are holding us back in many ways.

Could this be culture? Could this be our more left-leaning ideologies? Could there be some small thinking involved?

As a Canadian who was invited to partake in the American workforce more than once but decided on staying here - I believe Canada has more to offer than America.

As the founder of taab (http://taab.co), I'd have to mostly disagree. I know that I'll need some help from SF or NYC, but so far, I've received tremendous amounts of support from friends, family, colleagues, and networks here in Toronto and Waterloo.

I'm an American going to school in Canada, studying computer science. Before I started, I was so excited about all the people I was going to meet that would be interested in pursuing tons of computing projects outside of class.

It's three years later now, and I've found a total of two guys that share the same interest in creating something from nothing, and putting it out there for the world to see. People aren't totally floored by the idea of a good idea, they just do their classwork, get good grades, maybe do some internships, but that's about it.

Now, this is a somewhat sweeping statement, based solely on a small amount of anecdotal evidence. Maybe it's due to the fact that I go to UBC and not Stanford, maybe some ideas are just too ambitious or overwhelming, maybe I haven't run into all the right people, but those are my observations, and my frustrations parallel those discussed by the OP.

Almost any comp sci program, on either side of the border, is going to have a lot of dead-weight students who just want to put in the classroom hours and would never dream of programming on the side.

These are the kids who never really learn how to program (there aren't nearly enough classroom hours in a 4 year degree to turn you into a competent coder; building your own side projects is a necessity). These are the kids who give rise to all the complaints about Why Johnny Can't Code, and why academia doesn't prepare people for industry. These are the kids who make up the bulk of the anecdotes about people interviewing 10 candidates for a programming position and finding out that only 1 of them could actually program at even a novice level.

It doesn't really have anything to do with being in Canada.

Good (well, not really) that this how it works down in the states. It's hard to gauge these things, because it's always entirely anecdotal evidence.

So yes, my frustration is not with Canadian students, but with students in general.

I think you're misunderstanding risk aversion as not appreciating success.

Risk aversion "why are you quitting when you have a great job" is an individual personalty trait, not one of a whole unrelated group of people. You can find plenty of Americans who would say the same thing.

On top of that, you can't appreciate success that isn't there. You quit your job to start something, that's not succeeding so they weren't appreciating success. Odds are that you would fail miserably.

No, my bet is that what your seeing here is your friends are happy you're trying something you've probably been talking about doing for a while. They're probably your friends because they share some of these same interests, so in addition to seeing a friend do something they want they have the same drive to do it and understand why you would take that risk. Others around you that are not so close are making a risk assessment based on if they were in your shoes what would they think. If starting a business wasn't their interest, that's a huge risk to take for little/no reward. None of it has to do with Americans or Canadians.

Actually, you're a part of why Canada has a struggling tech sector. You moved to the US to start a business. Probably for the same reason doctors do, if you make money, you'll make a shitton more in the US. Other than money, there is no real reason to move to the US from Canada to start a business.

I upvoted this the first time I read this for your point on risk aversion.

The thing that I disagree with is that people move to the US to make more money. I had a job that paid very well in the US and there's a very good chance I would have made much more doing that than starting my own company.

The US is often years ahead in design, advertising, the latest tech trends, etc. American brands are more likely to try new things out/it's easier to reach larger scale adoption more easily. Through out my life I have always waited for American products/chains/innovations (no matter how novel -- Easy Mac, Yogurt Tubes, MTV, Old Navy) to make it up to Canada. In my opinion those are definitely reasons to move to the US.

So much of starting/running your own thing is dealing with mental blocks. When you are around more people who are breaking through those blocks, or have done so before you, it's quite advantageous.

Regarding visa issues: Do you mean to suggest that Canadians should just move to SF and then figure out how to get a visa later?

I am not a lawyer so my obviously it depends on what you are like. If you are someone who can get shit done, have enough money to last a year on your own, and don't have a wife or kids there's not much stopping you.

I just didn't think it was worth waiting for a greencard. I was on an H1B for a year, and realized I'd have to wait 5 more years for a greencard.

Now I look back and just think it was a mental road block (a big one albeit it).

I don't know wtf happened... here it is again. http://throwww.com/a/1ft

you should change the link in the title as well. it points to 1fa

I'd love to know how the author made the text larger/bold .. looks like a header tag <h1> but Throwww doesn't appear to accept that.

Oh.. I see.. Markdown.. Here's a test of the stuff.. nice http://throwww.com/a/1hd

The author left out one point that is too often ignored.we just font have enough people.why don't we have amazon prime? Because Canada is just so huge,and our population is spread so thinly.the population is so much smaller than the USA that its so much harder to launch and support a country wide service.

Plus,we don't have LLC or a proper equivalent.

How do you do when compared to other small population nations like Switzerland or Israel, or others?

It isn't just the total number of people, it's that they're smeared across our ample coasts and the longest border in the world[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_bo...

That's only true for things requiring a physical infrastructure though.

For example, Toronto has a reputation for being a hotspot for mobile development, and there are probably as many talented developers as in any other tech hub. But they all work for agencies. Where are all the Canadian "Angry Birds" success stories?

We have a few, but in general it's large foreign firms and government agencies. Looking for internships through the school co-op offices is near-pointless here in BC; I had to reach out myself to Grow Lab to find anything interesting (although I ended up doing another semester of school, instead).

Canada has almost the same land mass as the US (9,984,670 sq km vs 9,826,675 sq km) but only about 11% as many people (34,917,000 vs 314,362,000).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States

In BC, setting up a proper BC company is easy. I started by going to http://incorporate.ca/ and then had everything redone when I had the cash for a real lawyer.

I had a corporation. Just wait until the end of the year when you have to pay the accountant bill!

LOL. I think the error message appropriately describes the Canadian tech sector. BTW, I am Canadian.

> article = Article.objects.get(pk=int(article_id,36))

You (assuming op is the maintainer of the site) should really handle any django "get" with a try/except block.

That, and you should also set debug to False on a production server.

Once the article exists again, it might be worth reading.

I would recommend that get_object_or_404, with the 404 page enabled, would be better suited for this application. Very similar methods, but this way just handles all the heavy lifting.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/shortcuts/...

Good point, that would be better.

Personally, as a Canadian in the consumer-and-internet-software sector ("tech sector" to HN), the constant comparisons to the equivalent U.S. sector appear far more annoying than the state of our sector. Nobody else does it with as much frequency as we seem to. Much of the discussion simply consists of pointing out and explaining in depth differences between the two sectors. It feels worse than the constant internet handwringing in the U.S. about their health care. I am getting attention fatigue. It is what it is. If you're unhappy with the current state and wish to change it, stop talking and start doing. Another post explaining that Canada doesn't have the VC scene or salaries or that Canadians are "nice" and happy with second best won't change these things.

Well, part of discussing is determining where best to put resources. I.e. "What is necessary to change things?" If you can nail down places that are lacking, then you can actually attempt do something. That said, I understand you point, as none of these discussions ever really achieve much.

How can you compare Canada to the unique place that is Silicon Valley?

Edit:

How about a damning look at Canada's film industry (hint: it's not Hollywood)?

Maybe part of the problem is that a lot of our tech talent ends up going down to where the money is instead of staying in Canada?

More accurately, the 'problem' is that it seems there is no overarching wish to have a Canadian internet consumer software sector. People are just fine going to do that in California, and there haven't been waves coming back. Nothing wrong with that, maybe Canadians as a whole are content doing other types of technology work. You don't hear a lot about mechanical engineers going to work in the U.S.

It would be interesting to see how many students from Waterloo and UofT alone, leave Canada to go work in the tech industry in the US.

I bring it up because it appears to be quite a lot from my experience as a student at Waterloo. The prevailing thought is that you haven't "made it" unless you go down south when you look for tech jobs.

Most of the people in my year have gone down when they can for co-op.

To me Canada's tech sector isn't damned; just dwarfed when it is compared to our much larger southern neighbour. The economy of Canada isn't really based around innovation and technology but rather primary industries like oil/gas/lumber/etc... so it makes sense that our business focus’ on our unique advantage. To me is seems that starting and growing a business is harder to do in Canada then in the States. Just as an example the rate of return for VC firms is roughly about -5% in Canada while in the States it is roughly %10. See: http://www.bdc.ca/EN/Documents/other/VC_Industry_Review_EN.p.... I am not sure why our companies have difficulty competing internationally but alot of the reasons in the article (Lack of Acquisition of Knowledge, Second Place is Good Enough and We Suck at PR) seem like symptoms rather than causes.

> primary industries like oil/gas/lubber/etc.

You're missing an m or a b there.

Entertaining but I disagree with most of the article. It's about time we stop comparing Canada to America. Canada is about the size of California in terms of population. This is like comparing a small tech company to Apple.

Canada is great, but easier access to capital in America.

The Canadian tech sector has been getting hammered for quite a while. First there was the Nortel collapse, then ATI was acquired by AMD, RIM is slowly but surely sliding towards oblivion. Shopify is the only bright spot in Canadian Tech.

An amusing illustration of the last heading in the post.

There have been plenty of successes, although they have mostly been swallowed by multinationals. Many, however, still maintain a physical presence in Canada:

Cognos (IBM), Changepoint (Compuware), Workbrain (Infor), Flickr (Yahoo!), Dundas (Microsoft), Opalis (Microsoft), Kobo (Rakuten), Alias (Autodesk)... etc, etc.

And then there's also the likes of 500px, Cirba, etc.

finally - a "realistic" look at canada's tech sector. there is a lot of work to be done.

Stop moving to the US because you can make more money there. There, it's fixed.

This is a great article! I myself am Canadian and agree with many of articles points.

Living in Toronto it's noticeable to recognize it's the financial industry runs this city, then comes marketing and advertising. Tech here in Toronto primarily just service these industries.

Now when it comes to getting people to invest in tech startups, is not a lack of money - it's the investors who have money and lack of knowledge in the tech industry. (Most of them having financial backgrounds)

I got this:

    A server error occurred.  Please contact the administrator.

That's pretty damning of the Canadian tech sector, all right.

This post is great! It gets the juices going. It describes everything wrong and everything right about Canada's tech market and i'm so glad you wrote this. It's the Manifesto we needed.

I'm already excited about the opportunities ahead. I'm in. I'll do my part, starting Today!

Aside: I think I finally found a use for my domain torontotech.org - colleagues and collaborators wanting to take part, get in touch

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