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Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

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Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#71

Post by davidu »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #7

One of the worst things about tech in Canada is that the salaries are ridiculously low compared to the US. I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York. But really, I want to say this: as a Canadian, I find that image of poutine extremely offensive. What is that yellow stuff on top, Curry? Are those even proper cheese curds? They're not mel…

Our compensation doesn't differ widely between our YVR and SFO offices. YVR rents and housing is very expensive. More than SFO in many areas.

The comp rebate is nice, but not why we are in YVR.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#72

Post by Tiktaalik »

oalders wrote: post #44
brennanm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What works in practice wouldn't be held up in an audit. Depending on the mood of your approving agent they can deny the whole application if you mention specific interface words. You'd be better off creating and Irap project to cover UI and business logic items. IRAP is out of the same government fund but pays slightly less for a project as you go, not one lump at the end of the year. IRAP and SRED are mutually exclu…

I had to go through the whole SRED song and dance at my previous $work. The company writing up the proposal was really eager to get the numbers high, but the when the government agent came down to the office to go over the expenses the whole experience was so painful that the owners of company decide to pass on even applying for SRED in subsequent years.

Similarly at a small startup I worked at were surprised at how rough the auditors were with us. We certainly thought we were 100% in the clear and doing genuinely innovative work but they really pressed us on it. Getting SRED is not easy as some say.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#73

Post by porterhaney »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #7

One of the worst things about tech in Canada is that the salaries are ridiculously low compared to the US. I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York. But really, I want to say this: as a Canadian, I find that image of poutine extremely offensive. What is that yellow stuff on top, Curry? Are those even proper cheese curds? They're not mel…

That is the most offensive representation of poutine I've ever seen.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#74

Post by fredophile »

davidu wrote: post #71
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #7

One of the worst things about tech in Canada is that the salaries are ridiculously low compared to the US. I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York. But really, I want to say this: as a Canadian, I find that image of poutine extremely offensive. What is that yellow stuff on top, Curry? Are those even proper cheese curds? They're not mel…

Our compensation doesn't differ widely between our YVR and SFO offices. YVR rents and housing is very expensive. More than SFO in many areas. The comp rebate is nice, but not why we are in YVR.

I moved from YVR to SFO a couple years ago. Buying a house in either city is expensive. However, my rent doubled when I moved. If I had chosen to live in San Francisco itself my rent would have been even higher. Parts of Vancouver are more expensive than parts of San Francisco but if you compare similar neighborhoods Vancouver will almost always end up cheaper.

Transportation costs in the Bay Area are also much higher than the GVRD. Parking in San Francisco costs a fortune and public transit is a mess. You can get a three zone bus pass in Vancouver for far less than I spent each month on BART and the Caltrain. Because there's only one transit company that bus pass is good everywhere. In SFO you need passes for each service. BART doesn't do monthly passes and if you need to go to Oakland bring cash. Your clipper card isn't good there.

If I was looking at equal compensation there is no way I'd choose to live in SFO.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#75

Post by slajax »

My co-founder was one of the first 3 people accepted to Canada from the US via the Startup Visa program (I'm Canadian, made him move) - We're fully realizing the benefits of operating in Canada as a CCPC. This article doesn't even touch on how much is actually going on here. Not only was the cover photo offensive, I question if they even researched the topic because they barely touched on IRAP which is just as beneficial as SRED.

Talk to any founder from Canada and you'll likely get more reliable info then was in this article. The compelling reasons to start a company here are many and they are no secret.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#76

Post by MichaelGG »

sk5t wrote: post #37
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x of silicon valley and then bonus on top, but that required moving into finance. It also helped that my previous employer was Apple, it opened many doors when it came time to interview. The fact of the matter is that other industries are starved for talent. If you can keep up in silicon valley, where all anyone talks about is technology, you will be godly in a different marketplace with more capital flow. Finance i…

Do you mean they're self-satisfied enough to write themselves a framework, but too myopic to see that writing it is a massively misguided waste of time?

Maybe it's because I don't know Java, but the complete separation of interface for "ImmutableBagFactory" and an implementation "ImmutableBagFactoryImpl", and the fact you need a factory for an "ImmutableBag" in the first place... seems like very poor design. Even if it is common in Java (?).

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#77

Post by doctorwho »

brennanm wrote: post #23

A lot of the talk is on SRED credits. SRED is a large part of the credit program for startups in Canada. Though it's not as simple as "Canada pays 80% of your salaries" You can get up to (off the top of my head) 75% of salaries paid back on hours worked "advancing technology". That means it's only for true R&D. That means UI, business logic, API, App anything, expenses, costs, etc... don't count. It's only for when y…

As someone who has actually used the SR&ED program for many years, I have to say that you've got it a bit wrong...

SR&ED will cover a percentage of capital expenditures essential to the work and a percentage of $ paid to contractors so it's salary plus SOME eligible expenses. Salaries make up the biggest part though. I got about 65% back, using the proxy method - a simpler way of calculating SR&ED overhead on eligible salary expenses.

The R&D effort does not have to advance "the world's" state of technology, just your company's.

It can't be obvious or routine engineering BUT work that is required to complete the R&D work (but not directly R&D) IS eligible and you can claim it.

The 3 core requirements of SR&ED eligibility (for software anyway) are (1) there has to be technical uncertainty, (2) you must use a systematic approach and keep records a notes and (3) you must achieve a technological advancement.

The 3rd item catches people because it doesn't require a successful outcome. You can fail and still claim the project. If you knew in advance (or it was obvious to anyone in the field) that it would fail (or succeed) then there was no uncertainty and it would not qualify.

SR&ED is really not that difficult to navigate. Consultants can help, but they'll take a big chunk of your claim. Most of them work for a percentage that runs anywhere from 15% to 35%. That's big money for very little value. I wrote my own claims for many years and they were all successful.

When I started there was no limit on the write ups, now they put some severe character count limits on the writes ups. That makes them harder for us but less confusing for the reviewers. You really have to be able to distill things down to just the essentials.

Any Canadian software company that doesn't at least look at SR&ED is just throwing money out the window.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#78

Post by doctorwho »

eigenvector wrote: post #21
oldspiceman wrote: post #16

1. Is it this? http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/menu-eng.html 2. If I were to start a new company, can I use this rebate when paying myself?

1. Yes 2. Yes, but only for the portion of your time that was SR&ED activities, which if you're the only employee couldn't conceivably be anywhere near 100%.

If you are an owner in the company you only can claim a maximum of 75% of your salary. So if 100% of your time was eligible work and you made $100K you could only claim $75K of that and you'd get a percentage of that $75K back, not the whole thing.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#79

Post by general_failure »

I don't understand why all countries require startups to have investment. For one, most tech start ups don't need significant investment and can be boostrap. The average 30 year old has enough saving to get by for a year or two without any investment. I feel require investment is really a cruft of the past and shouldn't be a necessity for visas.

Re: Canada's Pitch to Tech Entrepreneur: We'll Pay 80% of Your Salaries

#80

Post by nl »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #12
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made 2-3x as much by moving to California and then another integer coefficient greater than one when I moved to New York. Another 2x? 3x? 4x? Why make us guess? It's valuable info that helps inform people's decisions for the future. Thank you for the datapoints.

2x of silicon valley and then bonus on top, but that required moving into finance. It also helped that my previous employer was Apple, it opened many doors when it came time to interview. The fact of the matter is that other industries are starved for talent. If you can keep up in silicon valley, where all anyone talks about is technology, you will be godly in a different marketplace with more capital flow. Finance i…

Finance in particular has way too many people who think things like this are a good idea and The Right Thing To Do: https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-collections .

I think that's a pretty unfair criticism.

Firstly, it isn't clear exactly what you don't like about it. That it is Java? That it exists?

You need to put its existence into historical context. When it came out, it was before Google's Guava collections libraries were open source, so there were no decent collections libraries that did more than what the JDK libraries did.

That's the context GS Collections were built for.

(Disclaimer: I've never used them, but I do remember when they were released)

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