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Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

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Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#121

Post by pjc50 »

throwup238 wrote: post #70

This whole move is about corporate governance. The US makes it really easy to start or manage corporations and the courts are (mostly) streamlined and predictable, especially the chancery courts in Delaware. Cayman Islands adopted much of Delaware's legal approach to corporations in 2016 to make the island more business friendly rather than just a tax haven, and they've got a foot in the Latin American market. Singap…

Many, many years ago I was the first non-founder employee at a UK startup. That meant hearing quite a lot (but not all) of the corporate discussions about finance, company structure etc. Fairly early on in the fundraising process we settled on "Delaware parent company, 100% owner of UK private limited company". This meant that US investors could invest in the Delaware entity happily, while the tax and employment aspects were handled locally in the UK. Stock grants were made from the US entity (under US law), but also eligible for UK tax relief (since the options were being assigned to UK residents).

While I think this was obviously more complicated than a single entity and probably required two sets of specialists rather than just one, it certainly worked and I would expect something similar is possible with Canada?

The founders were not required to move to the US, but ended up doing so anyway.

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#122

Post by garbawarb »

Roscius wrote: post #84
garbawarb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lifestyle difference is real but the income difference is enough to sway most people to the US. If Canada can close the gap on that I'd say it can become an even more attractive place for global tech talent than the US because of its overall better livability.

Live in Canada and work remotely into the US. Been doing it for the last 6 years...

Can you still earn the same salary as you would in the US though?

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#123

Post by garbawarb »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #111
sbarre wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small.. We're 40M people (compared to what, 350M in the US, and 900M in the EU), and we're directly next door to the largest startup economy in the world. So not only do we have fewer customers, we're competing against an economic juggernaut that shares our broad business rules, our culture and language (with one exception) and can market to us thro…

There are a lot of "odd" things that happen to non-US citizens businesses that no one likes to talk about in public. Indeed, if you are a Canadian Business getting market traction: the common scenario is acquisition by a US firm, or utter destruction by policy shifts and replacement by an opportunistic competitor. =3

Why are those more common for noncitizens?

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#124

Post by Sanzig »

motohagiography wrote: post #73
Yeroc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the trivial changes Canada could make if it wanted to be serious about startups?

briefly: cap gains reductions. at will employment. competitive top line corporate rates that attract HQ's and IP the way Ireland did. reduce the public sector talent tarpit, tariff goods from countries that use slave labor. abolish the dairy, wheat, and syrup boards and other agriculture cartels. enforce money laundering laws against retail businesses to normalize commercial rents. reduce immigration to levels where…

All Canadian jurisdictions, as far as I am aware, are at-will employment. Unionized environments are an exception because they have layoff procedures in their collective agreements, but that's the same in the US.

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#125

Post by Joel_Mckay »

garbawarb wrote: post #123
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of "odd" things that happen to non-US citizens businesses that no one likes to talk about in public. Indeed, if you are a Canadian Business getting market traction: the common scenario is acquisition by a US firm, or utter destruction by policy shifts and replacement by an opportunistic competitor. =3

Why are those more common for noncitizens?

It is still illegal to steal IP from fellow citizens. =3

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#126

Post by sbarre »

garbawarb wrote: post #44
sbarre wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small.. We're 40M people (compared to what, 350M in the US, and 900M in the EU), and we're directly next door to the largest startup economy in the world. So not only do we have fewer customers, we're competing against an economic juggernaut that shares our broad business rules, our culture and language (with one exception) and can market to us thro…

Israel, like the parent poster said, is even smaller. I don't think an Israeli founder would have trouble moving to the US if they wanted to.

Yeah but Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US.

All that US-centric stuff overshadows us constantly. And it's not just in the startup landscape.

We literally have laws on the books [0] that force our media companies to maintain a certain amount of Canadian content on TV/radio/streaming/etc so we're not only consuming US content.

This isn't a comment on whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact, and it has a real impact on our society at all levels.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#127

Post by sbarre »

jleyank wrote: post #51
sbarre wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is also, of course, no health insurance benefits to worry about. Uhh, we don't have universal coverage for everything health up here, we still have private benefits that our employers pay for as part of our compensation plans. Life insurance, dental, vision, prescriptions, physio, mental health, critical illness etc.. It might be less than in the US, but it's not "no health insurance benefits to worry about".

Well, it's fully possible to be self-insuring in these areas. Prescription assistance is probably the one significant benefit as physio, mental health and the like can be of limited reimbursement (judging from what I've seen). The key issue is that the core of one's health insurance is not dependent on the employer or even being full-time employed. This provides tremendous flexibility. And I suspect not having things…

You are correct but I think you missed the point of the post I was responding to, which was claiming that employers don't need to worry about paying for health insurance for employees in Canada, which is inaccurate.

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#128

Post by Sanzig »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #74
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some things could make your work far easier than mine, but in my case there are a lot of hoops to jump through. I initially wanted to bootstrap myself in my garage, but discovered over time that this is essentially illegal and I'm required to operate out of a business address. This is also virtually forced on me because there are a variety of compounds I can't order without a registered business and accompany…

Thanks for your comment. I have in my mind to start a hardware focused business in Ontario. I am a little afraid now, but hopefully, I have better luck than you. Can you expand a bit more on how difficult it is to deliver hardware product orders to other countries? Whichever countries you have experience in.

Hardware should be much easier, especially if you get your boards fabbed and assembled at a CM (which you probably should, very few companies have a good reason to move assembly in-house).

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#129

Post by compiledkoala »

am3141 wrote: post #117
compiledkoala wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. Canadian common law has some very odd implications for corporate governance. Much higher risk of governance deadlock due to recent rulings. VCs are not going to know that when evaluating a company. YC as the incubator and the first check in has an obligation to vet the situation for future investors. The easiest way for them to do that at scale is to ensure they are experts in a very small number of jur…

This is simply not true. Canadian founders lose massive Canadian tax benefits by incorporating in the US. The only way out of further tax complications (and it’s not because of Canada, it’s just how international tax laws work) the founders have to permanently move to the US. Source: I have founded both Delaware and Canada federal co.

I understand how SR&D works - I've filed for it several times.

My hot take: given the 1 year delay on receipt of funds and the fact that it has the biggest impact on small teams, if you are going to scale a VC backed startup as fast as you need to - SR&D won't be the reason you succeed. If you are not scaling fast enough to make it - SR&D won't save you.

If you stay in Canada and raise from Canadian VC's you'll get half the cash at half the valuation. The government makes that up to you in SR&D a year later.

Found in Canada because it's your home and you love it. That's the only real reason. And it's a good one.

Re: Y Combinator website no longer lists Canada as a country it invests in

#130

Post by alephnerd »

sbarre wrote: post #126
garbawarb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel, like the parent poster said, is even smaller. I don't think an Israeli founder would have trouble moving to the US if they wanted to.

Yeah but Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US. All that US-centric stuff overshadows us constantly. And it's not just in the startup landscape. We literally have laws on the books [0] that force our media companies to maintain a certain amount of Canadian content on TV/radio/streaming/etc so we're not only consuming US content. This isn't a commen…

> Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US

Have you been to Israel?!?

NBA and NFL is everywhere, the Israeli dream before tech began booming in the 2010s was "immigrate to Boston, Brooklyn, or Miami", and Jewish Americans like Seth Klarman, Sheldon Adelson, Ronald Lauder, and Bill Ackman have had an outsized stake in media and entertainment ownership before the Mizrahi cultural boom in the 2010s.

Literally the only reason Canada fell behind was because the political leadership in countries like Israel decided to work on building a domestic tech VC ecosystem in the 1990s-2000s while their Canadian equivalents during that era had no economic vision aside from resource extraction.

Additionally, the Canadian equivalents of Shlomo Kramer (Checkpoint, Palo Alto Network, Imperva, Cato Networks, Cyberstarts), Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks, Cyberstarts), and Gili Rannan (Sequoia, Wiz, Cyberstarts) - David Cheriton (Google, Arista), Chamath Palihapitiya (Facebook, Slack, Groq), Joseph Tsai (Alibaba), Changpeng Zhao (Binance), Chip Wilson (Lululemon), and Ryan Cohen (Chewy) - are all hard MAGA. Heck, even Big 5 banks like Scotiabank are pro-Trump [0] because their LatAm business benefits from Trump power projection in the region.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-06/scotiaban...

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