[otoburb]

For this crowd it may be an odd way of going about identifying entrepreneurs to give visas to. However, this is the (Canadian) government, and like most governments they typically wouldn't have the in-house expertise to identify this talent themselves. So they need to rely on high-status signals; the next best thing they can see are early-stage VC firms who are active in the space.

(1) Given the abysmal failure of the previous 'entrepreneur' visa category, I believe that they would probably go with at least a 12mo runway, although the VC firms and startup team would probably have to justify (via paper projection - ha!) a reasonable 2yr runway.

(2) The example in the article provided was the case of Summify, which was acquired by Twitter[1]. That seems to be the spark (among others) to bring more attention to the issue of a lack of strong Canadian anchor companies[2]. Again, using the previous 'entrepreneur' visa category which supposedly was being used as a loophole, the government is trying to respond by focusing on previous examples and a growing chorus of media and startup community attention around keeping and growing Canadian startup talent.

(3) Assuming that an "entire" startup team might consist of 2-5 people (I wish I had a statistic to back this up somehow other than anecdotal reading), that's not a far stretch. If the founder(s) want to hire foreign workers, then that may be more difficult because Canada would sure want to encourage them to try attracting and keeping Canadian technical talent first.

[1]http://startupvisa.ca/summify-inspiration-by-startup-visa-ca...

[2]http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/ca...