It's unfortunate that our government is becoming increasingly dysfunctional at every level -- federal, state, and local governments are all failing to do their jobs. I'm glad that Canada is introducing some competitive pressure.
Please do. Tarsnap will apply to be part of YC Vancouver if it happens. (I'm assuming that if you create a YC somewhere outside of the US it would be in Vancouver, because really, nowhere else in the world is anywhere near as awesome.)
FWIW, I think there's two "markets" of which you've only mentioned one -- in addition to founders who can't get US visas, I know plenty of talented Canadians and Europeans who don't want to live in the US due to the current political climate.
Startup dollars will go further here and the office will be twice as awesome. Much easier for new people to make friends and the art scene is not priced out. Montreal is undeniably more fun.
And lord, the festivals... Mind you, winter lives here but it is sunny even when it snows. Rain will tends to drive most people in BC a bit wonky.
I would say do Montreal if it is in the summer. Else BC. Or if it is about the quick plane ride to silicon valley, same deal.
You're right that in Montreal, investment dollars will go much further, and it is a more interesting city for a young person. If you are looking for a place to incubate, as a young company, Montreal might be almost perfect. Similarly, it's a great deal for a student.
But then you have to grow up and live there.
The tech talent pool is very thin, the laws are mindbogglingly perverse, and the taxes are very high. The French/English split becomes very difficult when you think about bringing more workers over from a non-francophone country, not to mention their spouses and partners.
Just like foreign students, a YC company that's growing up will probably want to get the hell out of Montreal.
At least in Vancouver you have some kind of chance to hang around, and if you want more techies there's a reasonable local talent pool, and people from the rest of the world don't mind moving here so much.
My kingdom for a fullstack capable graphic designer.
Secondly, it is cheap to hire someone for translation and companies should launch with multiple languages. It just increase the global audience for the product. I am sure YC could develop the capacity to translate the product at little cost.
Peixe Urbano, Baidu ... etc clones eat up the market that VC backed startup could accomodate for.
http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/02/21/against-copycat-debat...
Winter... well try the rain in BC for a winter. Again I have no issue, I am from the Peg (Winnipeg) where it was -58 last year. It is the same weather as NYC and close to Boston (MIT, Harvard)
I know there is alot of development capital floating around.
http://www.investquebec.com/quebec/en/financial-products/smb...
Here is the total precipation over the last 3 months
Vancouver = 103.1 mm < Montreal = 366.4 mm
SRC = http://montreal.weatherstats.ca/charts/precipitation-3months... ( environment canada)
Next your going to try to convince us that poutine > sushi
poutine > sushi ... well not in Vancouver. Poutine is rough out there, all megabites with sesame seed pizza. It is just going to be tougher to bootstrap start ups out there.
Complaining about the cost of office space in Gastown is like complaining about the cost of office space in SOMA. There are many cheaper alternatives if you don't insist on being in a trendy neighbourhood. Office space in Burnaby or Coquitlam is a lot cheaper than Gastown.
You may think Montreal is more fun but I'd disagree. I can't scuba dive in Montreal. I can't walk five minutes and be hiking in a rain forest. Even if I agreed that Montreal is more fun this shouldn't be a consideration for a YC location. YC companies will be busy working.
Saying Montreal does not have the talent is silly. It is in the most populated region of Canada.
1) Mont Royal - Hiking
I don't think scuba might be a silly reason to discount Montreal. Fact is developers will build social ties faster in Montreal. Vancouver is clique driven and most people coming at not are really not prepared for the rain. Almost like Stockholm.
Metropolis real estate with creative spaces and inspire the imagination. McGills, Harvard, MIT, NYU all in the same time zone and a quick flight.
Burnaby or Coquitlam is like any other suburb and prices are already so high any big influx is just going to highten tensions. There is a strong Anarchist movement that surfaces time to time in Vancouver as well as crippling homelessness.
+1. With my current interests and life goals it seems like I'll eventually have head down to Silicon Vally, but the idea of living in the US terrifies me. Ycombinator opening up in Vancouver would probably prevent what would otherwise be inevitable just because of the domino effect it would have. Not to mention attending Ycombinator in Vancouver would be amazing, but that's making large assumptions.
Don't worry, Obama will be gone in '16!
I would definitely apply for YC Vancouver. The tech community here is vibrant and growing.
I get your point though. I'm an evil capitalist who doesn't want to fund Americans because they are unwilling to give up 7% equity, or something like that. Maybe you think that Sergey Brin and Paul Graham stole their jobs from some hard working, native born Americans.
That's the problem with zero-sum thinking. You believe that in order for a foreigner to get ahead, an American must be pushed back.
I have the opposite view. I believe that much of America's success is rooted in having an open and inclusive culture that attracts smart, ambitious, and determined people from around the world who come here and pursue their dreams. And that when they succeed, we all benefit. To me, anti-immigrant is anti-American, both economically and ideologically.
I think that this can be alleviated without being anti-immigrant though. For example, make it easier for H1Bs to move between jobs and/or start their own businesses so that they don't have to feel so tied to the employer that they don't want to risk 'rocking the boat' too much. Or make it so that switching jobs doesn't 'reset the counter' on building up towards citizenship (or is it just a green card, I forget).
I agree that H1B transfer restrictions are bad though. If people are good enough to let into the country, then they should be free to switch jobs just like anyone else.
I'm not stating the "more people" == "less pay". I'm stating that foreign workers are willing get paid less money, regardless of what the job pool is. They have fewer options available to them, so they accept "worse" pay for what maybe essentially the same job.
Also, the amount of jobs that are available at any point in time is fixed. Jobs are created when a company has a need to fill. Jobs aren't created just because there is an excess supply of unemployed people. They don't spring into existence out of nowhere.
Do companies create more positions just to accommodate the influx of foreign workers? Or do the amount of jobs stay the same regardless?
edit: Wikipedia say that (e.g.) H1Bs are capped at 65k/year. Spread across the US, I'm curious how much this affects job creation? I could see an argument if they were concentrated in one place though.
Agreed that this is the case in a lot of industries, but the problem in Silicon Valley and the tech industry generally isn't the cost of workers, it's finding enough highly-skilled workers to allow companies to grow and achieve their visions.
Straw man. Sergey Brin didn't immigrate to the US, his parents did and he came along for the ride as a child.
Nobody begrudges the success of children of immigrants to the US (which by definition is everyone but the native Americans), but middle aged, unemployed American programmers may well resent companies that claim there is a shortage of programmers whilst stuffing their IT departments with foreign visa workers who won't rock the boat or ask for a raise because their continued residency in the US depends on employer sponsorship.
Uhh, you do know Native Americans aren't actually native, right? They're from Africa like the rest of us.
And frankly, I do believe that Google -- and yes, YC too, viewing YC as somewhat of an umbrella organization of the companies it has incubated -- bear a certain responsibility to Americans that importing foreign workers has helped you sidestep. There's plenty of engineers here who can't / don't want to make large life sacrifices to live in the bay area. Where is your (or Google, or YCs) leadership on things like: community problems in the bay area (housing, transportation), education, engineering pipelines, etc. Google and YC's diversity numbers are pathetic [1], and that lack of diversity represents lots of potential employees that are already here.
Given the way you defend your proposed changes is to claim opposing them means you think foreigners are stealing jobs or some such stupidity, I think it clarifies our positions.
If certain groups of non-whites are not receiving the education required to contribute in SV, that isn't the responsibility of SV to fix. That's the job of the government and the schools. And it's on the communities where those underrepresented minorities grow up to change their toxic cultures so they don't look down on being educated as "acting white."
This is a discussion that needs to be had, because the current immigration system is tilted, like so much else about USAian government right now, towards "give the capitalists whatever they need and if everyone else survives that's good".
For instance, as I proposed upthread, if the H1B system was really about bringing in high-skill workers to fill shortages, visa allocation would go by auction, with the bids being proposed salaries. For N visas, the N proposed jobs for immigrants with the highest salaries get the visas, and the salaries are then legally binding.
This design is absolutely nothing like the current H1-B system, which is why most of the top users of H1-B visas are Indian outsourcing firms.
Because I'm not favoring big corporations. I'm favoring workers.
Agreed. But who decides who fits that criteria [smart, ambitious, and determined people]?
Today - it's money and tomorrow it'll be the same.
You see that now in Europe. UKIP isn't complaining only about muslim immigrants (though they complain about them loudest), but also about continental-European immigrants, especially eastern Europeans. I suspect something similar would happen in the U.S. if there were a large influx of European immigrants.
We would be more "selective"? How would we select?
We use "skilled migration" as a proxy for what we really want, which is people with good genes. If you have skills and good genes then you'll enrich the country not only in this generation but in all future generations to come.
So an ideal immigration policy would involve some combination of testing for intelligence, physical fitness and (dare I say it) good looks.
If you think "good genes" is correlated with race, then I'd suggest that you are the one who is racist.
Besides, "talent" can mean many things. Is the Mexican mother who can't speak English and doesn't have a college degree (maybe not even high school), but can make BAD ASS food and is capable of raising a family of 5 talented?
Unfortunately, the US doesn't ensure anything at all for its own citizens, other than their God-given right to accumulate capital in unlimited amounts.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/10/dear-congressman-gutierrez-...
Startup visas have nothing to do with diversity. It has to do with enriching the US economy. Nothing wrong with that. I support the startup visa moment, but not at the expense of other visas. We should be giving more visas - not less or the same amount reclassified.
True, but you should also be doing more to exclude the people who don't have visas, which is the main reason the US immigration system is currently broken.
I lived in the US for a few years, did everything legally, queued up at embassies, paid endless fees, and saw that everywhere I went I was surrounded by people who had entered the country illegally and the US government wasn't doing a fucking thing about it.
Eventually I decided "Fuck it", because if the US government is more interested in letting in a gazillion unskilled, non-English-speaking manual labourers who have already shown a complete disregard for its laws than it is in letting in me, then the US isn't a country that deserves me.
If he wanted to come into this country illegally, I personally would have no problem with it. Maybe then though, he'd see that those people don't have it easy since they obviously won't be getting high-end engineering jobs like that and will realize they are no threat to anyone whatsoever.
It's like if you went to a supermarket and paid for your groceries and saw that you were the only person paying. Everyone else was just walking in, shoplifting, and walking straight out, and the managers weren't doing anything to stop it. That's not a supermarket I'd choose to keep going to.
Ask Syria, Iraq or South Sudan, how they are enjoying their open borders. Meanwhile, Iceland, Japan and other countries are doing fine. Arguably, they could be richer if they allowed in more immigrants, but I'll take the rule of law over the chaos of uncontrolled borders.
And now that immigration is increasing in these places the amount of racism being exposed is shocking, even when compared to the USA where racism has been front-and-center for decades. Hell, just look at HN threads whenever Muslim immigration to Sweden/Norway comes up, it's like Stormfront on steroids.
Your argument has been levied against just about every immigrant population that's made its way into the US. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, all of whom were subject to enormous racist and xenophobic backlash, much of it under the guise of some vague notion of cultural integrity.
All of the above populations have integrated into American society and in fact the US would be markedly poorer - economically and culturally - without them now.
There's a small amount of schadenfruede I feel when I look at the struggles going on right now in previously-closed countries as they experience large-scale immigration for the first time. For years they tsk'ed tsk'ed at the US (and Canada) for their social upheaval, as people came to grips with living in a heterogeneous society, and criticized us for the many examples of blatant racism and xenophobia. Now that they're going through the same thing it makes me sad to see people from these very countries spouting the same justifications and views as Jim Crow-era America, as if they've learned literally nothing for themselves while observing us in judgment this whole time.
Even Native Americans were immigrants as they crossed the Bering land bridge ;)
Of course, much has changed since then -- with finite resources like fresh water and land in good climates being consumed in many attractive countries.
(Plus, philosophically, I don't really support more H1B-type programs. If immigration is to be expanded, it should be proper immigration, not tied to employers, with a reasonable path to citizenship.)
As for a specific replacement, I'd support a Canada-style non-sponsorship-based points system. Although I think there is something to be said for just randomness as well, such as expanding the Green Card lottery. Many of the immigrants who made large contributions to U.S. society/economy did not come in already highly educated/skilled, so I'm not sure it's a long-term advantage to restrict immigration to primarily people with strong pre-immigration skills/credentials. Short-term yes, since it fills shortages in areas of the economy, and I think a points system is a good way of handling that without the unsavory employer-tied aspect. But longer-term the "American dream" idea is that people should be able to gain those skills after immigrating; you can come in without already being the kind of person who can command six-figure job offers, and work your way up. Historically that's where a lot of the benefits of immigration have come from.