Toronto, the Quietly Booming Tech Town

This article doesn't mention political differences and other intangibles but it should.

There are plenty of places like Miami with low taxes, and Toronto would be making a mistake in taking part in a race to the bottom. It's more effective for Toronto to differentiate itself by other jurisdictions by fundamentally offering different things and being a place that people want to move to because it isn't like the other places.

I doubt this is true. One of my pet peeves is that people in Toronto (where I am from) occasionally claim that it is the 3rd largest city in "North America", but it depends entirely on the optimistic provisioning of political boundaries (and requires you to ignore Mexico in your definition of North America -- another pet peeve). For example: it's possible that Toronto beats Seattle if you count Bellevue separately, or LA if you split off "Silicon Beach" and Irvine, but I doubt that what people actually mean by "Toronto" beats the aggregated areas people mean when they say "Seattle" and "LA".

But this isn't the saddest part. The article seems to frame success as attracting large US-based tech companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta). This was always the case in Toronto -- there is no shortage of satellite offices attracted by lower local wages. But what is lacking is local technology companies that compete globally: Canada has Shopify, but little else. In general, entrepreneurs and risk takers head south for better fund raising and more risk tolerance and that's where the real value creation happens. Before Toronto (or anywhere else in Canada) can be a real tech town, they need cultural change to grow a real ecosystem with companies that can grow to global competitors. I think this kind of self-congratulatory article is actively harmful because it lulls people into thinking policymakers have done a great job at "attracting tech". Meanwhile, all the Canadians I know that have founded companies and been wildly successful have moved from Canada to the US at some point in their journey.

> Investment in new Toronto companies is still tiny compared with Silicon Valley. In 2021 and 2022, investors pumped $132 billion into Silicon Valley tech start-ups, according to the research firm Tracxn. In Toronto, that figure was $5.4 billion. But ultimately, it is tech talent that drives a tech hub, said Mr. Volpi, a Bay Area venture capitalist who also invested in Cohere.

> “The money will follow the talent,” he said.

Toronto has had the talent for decades. The money doesn't automatically follow, and there are lots of reasons it's not there.