[jpzeni]

I love Canada, I love Toronto and I love entrepreneurship. I run a small startup in Toronto and I must admit that comparing Toronto to Silicon Valley is a joke. Toronto isn't even the best place in Canada to work on a startup and maybe not in the top 3.

It's nice that the community is tight knit and there is some good talent here but what is missing is really some of the most important stuff: 1. VC and Angel Money, 2. Connections and 3. A deep pool of startup oriented hackers

[baham]

hi, I am considering moving to Canada from the Washington DC area. Where would you consider the most startup-friendly areas in Canada be?

[cal5k]

Waterloo, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto. Probably in that order.

[cmer]

If it matters, there's currently A LOT of money in Montreal. VC funds are full and they're desperately looking for deals. If you have a decent team with a decent idea, they'll just throw money your way.

[jefe78]

Any specific funds? We're on the cusp of that next step and the info would be great to have.

[cmer]

Real Ventures holds a big bag of money right now... http://realventures.com/

If you're ever in Montreal, let me know, I might be able to help.

[jefe78]

We're actually in Ottawa right now, but we're anticipating a move to Montreal real soon! Whats the best way to contact you?

[kerryfalk]

Waterloo?

I admit I'm really sheltered from the rest of the Canadian scene from Winnipeg as the startup scene is scarce but I haven't heard much from Waterloo out here. If I had to name the top three I would have said the same in that order with the exception of Waterloo, as it wouldn't even be on my radar screen.

What am I missing for it to be first on your list?

[potatolicious]

Cheap interns. A ocean full of them. All hungry and desperate and more than willing to do a bang-up job for a good co-op rating.

Affordable office space right next door to Google, RIM, IBM, SyBase, etc, along with a bunch of other startups.

Being plugged directly into the artery of Canada's indisputably most prolific source of CS and engineering education.

And I'm not even in Waterloo :P

[kerryfalk]

Hmmm. Interesting, thanks. All news to me, unfortunately.

We need a more connected nationally distributed network of startup founders, methinks. We're spread out in Canada and even the larger urban centres aren't _rich_ with tech activity (More so than here, but still doesn't seem anywhere near the US communities from my PoV - SV, NYC, etc.).

[potatolicious]

IMHO the problem here is that there isn't much of a software scene in Canada to begin with - at least, not compared to just about any major US city.

I've moved from Canada to Seattle, and the cultural difference is pretty immense. You have giants like Boeing, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon constantly feeding fresh talent into the city, and a number of these people will spin off startups. You have a large number of extremely talented people, working on hard problems, who can hop out of big-co life and work on a startup. Or you can crash and burn and hop right back to working at big-co. This sort of possibility doesn't really exist in Canada.

The Canadian software scene leans closer to enterprise IT than it does innovative cutting-edge work. There isn't a sufficiently sized pool of eager hackers - too many salarymen, not enough trailblazers. Without innovative, big companies feeding the flywheel a vibrant startup scene simply cannot exist in any appreciable scale.

It doesn't help that every keen software engineer I know from Canada is like myself - having moved to the US to pursue greater opportunities, more challenging and rewarding work, and let's be honest, about double the pay that any Canadian company is willing to offer.

[iuygthn]

The nice thing about being a startup in Vancouver is you have really motivated staff

We keep an office in Toronto to send all the failures to - that really motivates people to succeed!