91–100 of 165 posts
It's extremely frustrating when you see a punt like Element AI get 20 million from the government, despite not having any product direction or seemingly any idea what to do with that money. It feels like people are rewarded for navigating the bureaucracy rather than actual startup success.
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It's not Canadian companies that are 'keeping salaries' low, it's Valley Companies (and to some extent, American companies) that are paying a lot. Also - the USD varies at 1 to 1.5 CDN that has tremendous comparable effects. The 'reason' is that a vastly disproportionate amount of the surpluses go to the winners. '2cnd place is for chumps' - at least in the context of 'winner takes all' games. Everywhere outside of t…
>Who can blame anyone with 'no ties' to Canada moving on for 2x salary? Does that salary increase make up for the lost gov benefits (free healthcate etc?)
It's like the old bait-and-switch swindle.
As someone who has worked in the Canadian tech scene for 25 years, and rode two startups all the way to exit (i.e. acquisition by US companies), in my opinion the problem has nothing to do with exit mindset, good angels, bad angels or SRED. It is all about talent retention. Up until early 2000, Canadian tech salaries at least somewhat kept pace with US salaries, albeit 20-30% lower. After the dot com crash, however,…
>Now that Amazon, Microsoft and Google are setting up shop right here in Canada, the talent drain away from Canadian companies is only accelerating. Maybe. Canada is bringing 400,000+ new immigrants per year until 2023 for permanent residence status, most of which are skilled workers of some kind. Probably a safe bet between that those three are setting up shop here in part because they can bring in international tal…
Canada is adding > 1% of its population in immigrants every year? I am curious if that is sustainable politically and economically. I suspect this will only drive down tech wages even further and put pressure on local housing markets, utilities, healthcare and social programs.
One thing this article seems to miss is that the tech scene in Canada isn't the same as the tech scene in America because Canadian capitalism and ideals are vastly different than Americas. I'm a 6th generation Canadian who left and went to NYC to build tech companies, much to the dismay of my parents who continually asked "why are you so interested in getting above everyone else?". While I agree with a lot of what th…
You write that like it's a bad thing.
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You didn’t go over the possibility that Canadians may prefer to live in Canada compared to the United States. Last time I checked there wasn’t a race war and a group of belligerents storming the capitol in Canada.
The primary difference between Canada and the US was that Canada was small/smart/lucky enough to enact some social nets before the world became too easy to manipulate by media and the internet.
I would say it would it comes down to a much healthier government with more churn and not two different flavours of the same political party. I only found out this year that in certain states the ballots contain options "Vote all Democrat" or "Vote all Republican". Enshrining political parties like that into an electoral process reminds of the Soviet Union.
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>Now that Amazon, Microsoft and Google are setting up shop right here in Canada, the talent drain away from Canadian companies is only accelerating. Maybe. Canada is bringing 400,000+ new immigrants per year until 2023 for permanent residence status, most of which are skilled workers of some kind. Probably a safe bet between that those three are setting up shop here in part because they can bring in international tal…
> Canada is bringing 400,000+ new immigrants per year until 2023 for permanent residence status Canada is adding > 1% of its population in immigrants every year? I am curious if that is sustainable politically and economically. I suspect this will only drive down tech wages even further and put pressure on local housing markets, utilities, healthcare and social programs.
Too bad Canada treats most of them like they came in a dinghy from some weird 3rd world country and leaves some of them in survival jobs (especially in a certain big eastern province)
So glad to read this. The author wrote a story some months ago about the reason SV angel works is because it's part of the social signalling for wealthy people. You make money, you show you can do it again, and that's what makes you a player. In Toronto, it's different.There are excellent global tech companies in Canada (Ubisoft, EcoBee, Shopify, Pornhub, etc.), but like everywhere, excellence is exceptional.
It's the "why is this weird? Oh, because they had to write around this condition of their granting agency." The US has tons of public funding as well, but much of it is defence driven, which has more general reusable business applicability than say, "culture," driven. Not sure what the solutions are, but something we should put words to as that weirdness has been a ceiling on growth and opportunity here for a couple of decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Now that Amazon, Microsoft and Google are setting up shop right here in Canada, the talent drain away from Canadian companies is only accelerating. Maybe. Canada is bringing 400,000+ new immigrants per year until 2023 for permanent residence status, most of which are skilled workers of some kind. Probably a safe bet between that those three are setting up shop here in part because they can bring in international tal…
> Canada is bringing 400,000+ new immigrants per year until 2023 for permanent residence status Canada is adding > 1% of its population in immigrants every year? I am curious if that is sustainable politically and economically. I suspect this will only drive down tech wages even further and put pressure on local housing markets, utilities, healthcare and social programs.
Sounds nice...