[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.