| I’m 10 years into my career and been in Toronto the entire time. I often feel like I’m slowly wasting my talent here that would be better utilized somewhere else. Maybe Shenzen or the West coast. I work days at a job and nights and weekends on my business. The business is doing good, it’s slowly scaling, just a long slog. In the last 10 years I worked at around 15 different places as a contractor. I met a lot of developers and tech people in general. I get the sense that people here just don’t have the motivation or ambition for business. Maybe because house prices have shot up the last few years, or because it’s the financial capital of Canada. People just want to make money (again the house, living costs, and taxes are high) or move up the ladder. Or maybe because life is comfortable so everything moves at a slower pace. On the technology front, growing up learning about Nortel and RIM/Blackberry, I just feel like the Innovation Ecosystem is just not here compared to
other places. Maybe it’s partially because Toronto Is just too conservative (eg. East Coast vs. West Coast mentality). There’s a lot of Fintech, Marketplace (Shopify), and SaaS Apps. Pretty much safe bets in terms of Businesses. I think as a tech Founder part of your goal is to try to balance money generation with innovative ideation. Companies here adhere to money generation before innovative ideation, which results in “meh” businesses. Being Asian I also feel disadvantaged. It’s like if I moved to Shenzen I would have an advantage because I’m westernized people there would value me more. But the grass is greener on the other side (aka. 996). I think the Government protects businesses too much vs in the States. Seeing how there’s so many monopolies it’s hard for the small startups to rise up. Look at the telco monopolies and how verizon gets blocked into coming to Canada. Or how the marijuana LPs get a huge head start before the micro craft growers can enter, and you still need a bunch of license to grow and distribute. It’s a comfortable life here though. I’m mainly here because of family. My last point is that there is a big problem with startups being acquired by US companies. Tim Hortons got bought out by BK, North got bought out by Google. When I first started, this notable design company behind Medium, Teehan+Lax got bought out by Facebook. Also, I think North got propped up by the tech media here even though their product was never good. v2 showed promise though, maybe they just burned too much VC/Angel/Grant money so they had to sell to Google. |
Basically this. US tech companies are sitting on such stacks of cash seeking for avenues to expand in line with the others that most Canadian or European companies that might make it big and join them just get bought out. The alternative is not selling out and making that money in the long term which doesn't seem likely when instead of buying in that big company just forces itself into the market with it's cash and clout to destroy your margins. Oh and then there's the success-stories that don't get bought out but just move to san francisco for the infrastructure or money and partnerships like gitlab, etc Without some kind of protectionism on this front it won't change either.