Canada needs to be more competent
it's time to build - pmarca - moughees
I moved to Canada a little over a year ago to work for a startup all the way from Pakistan. The reason I picked Canada was faster immigration and close proximity to Silicon Valley.
I read (and observed) about how Toronto was quietly attracting a lot of big tech offices as well as top research labs at UofT/Waterloo/MILA. While a lot of that is still true, the ecosystem should be doing much better.
Canadian tech seems to have the right mix of everything: healthy immigration, excellent schools with a history of strong outcomes, ease of access to Silicon Valley and a fairly high standard of living. Yet somehow those outcomes have not translated into very big outcomes. Shopify remains the only well-known company with a market cap of 50 billion+.
My personal experience:
As an immigrant, you are naturally more optimistic about your new country as you look to build your life from scratch. My optimism has only grown given the opportunities I see ahead BUT as I met founders building companies here - that optimism wasn’t as widespread as I thought.
I was surprised by how pessimistic many founders are about the country and can’t wait to decamp. A lot of the reasons are genuine: investors too conservative, ease of business, and so on. Yet somehow I don’t see anyone rallying to fix these issues and build a lasting ecosystem.
When most of the world tries to replicate the magic of Silicon Valley - their biggest problem is attracting talent. Canada has an extreme abundance of talent. In fact, Canadians have had an outsized impact in SV. From Ethereum to Slack to Shopify to 1Password and so on.
Why has Canada failed to retain it’s top talent?
Firstly, if you have a Canadian passport, it’s a lot easier to go and build a company in the US and play in the big leagues. The brain drain has hollowed out the ecosystem with no incentive to really stay and build an ecosystem.
Secondly, despite being a huge hub for ML research, we have failed to build on that advantage. ImageNet happened at UofT. The famous transformers paper was co-authored by Aidan Gomez, UofT grad, now founder of Cohere.
Andrej Karpathy and Ilya Sutskever - earliest employees of OpenAI - both moved from Canada.
Garry Tan, current president of Y-Combinator was born in Canada, who coincidentally recently tweeted about Canada being the #1 destination for founders. I think it’s only partially true.
It’s quite frustrating to see us squander this advantage but I am an optimist at heart and I want to make a difference.
The Path Forward:
Luckily, all hope is not lost. I want to move our ecosystem forward and make Canada the #1 spot to innovate. Canada’s tech ecosystem is still an upstart and like any early stage company - we need to hire the best people, be scrappy, and put a definitive path forward.
Bring people who want to stay here:
I am a big believer in Hirschman’s framework of Exit, Voice and Loyalty. We cannot force people to stay here. Ambition people are voting with their feet. We need to build a convincing alternative.
Canada’s PR is still a hugely popular program and we should have a special allocation to bring the world’s smartest people here - similar to an EB1 green card in the US.
Canadian PRs don’t qualify for TN visas and there is a strong incentive to stay here and get your citizenship before moving on. We should use that as our anchor: There is no downside to moving to Canada, worst case, you end up with a strong passport and a backdoor to Silicon Valley. I think many will find it pretty attractive.
We should be targeting people that are massively overlooked and are just waiting to get their chance. Head to head, we will always lose top/recognized people to SV. Thiel Fellowship like programs will go a long way. Making it easier for international students to start companies will certainly help. Get as many shots on goal as possible.
America’s dysfunctional immigration policy has helped Canada but that is not going to last forever. Someday in the near future, they will streamline high skilled immigration. There is bipartisan consensus on skilled immigration even if that doesn’t show publicly. That is an existential risk to our flow of talent unless we jumpstart our industry.
Definite Optimists:
As far as I can tell - Canada’s policy to innovation is akin to putting a lot of smart people in a room and hope it works out. That policy has had mixed results and it’s about time we made a portfolio of bets on the future. What is our vision for the coming decades?
I believe we should outline areas where we need to double down:
Nuclear: America has numerous companies working on Nuclear Fusion. Canada has none. It’s almost nearly impossible for a foreigner to get clearance to work on these technologies in America. Let’s build fusion here in Canada. Canadian Nuclear Society put forth a proposal that deserves a lot more attention.
We have a huge budget allocated for Small Nuclear Reactor (SMR) research, let’s attract top nuclear engineers!
Canada is the 2nd largest producer & 4th exporter of uranium in the world. Why is this not plastered everywhere? Ontario is probably one of the best places to build nuclear infrastructure.
Y-Combinator is literally funding both fusion and SMR companies. Why don’t we build a YC for Nuclear startups?
Biotech: We should be putting out a bat signal for all the diseases we want to cure. We want to cure cancer, we want to push longevity, we want to cure Alzheimer's.
Montreal (MILA) seems to be doing a really good job thus far of building out the right mix of talent.
Make it really easy to spin-out companies from research labs. Don’t take massive chunks in these companies.
Space: A Canadian is part of the next mission to Moon, powered by Space X and NASA. It’s almost impossible to work for space companies in the US unless you’re a citizen. Let’s attract all the space talent we can.
We should be building the most affordable, 3D printed rockets. Relativity Space almost reached orbit on the first try. China is building it’s own Space Station.
UAE and India are landing rovers on Mars. Where is Canada?
Material Science: We just convinced VW to build a battery plant in Ontario. Great. Let’s convince Tesla next. Let’s build the next-gen batteries, supplied by local raw materials. InvestCanada has a good description about this. What has been done about it?
Semiconductors: Noah Smith, an American, is literally making our case to build fabs in Canada. Let’s convince TSMC to build one here instead of Arizona. Let’s make permitting reform a priority. NVIDIA and Intel already have offices here. How do we expand their presence?
The list goes on and on…
Lack of leadership:
Of all tech ecosystems in the world, Canada has the worst set of incentives. Smart people don’t want to stick around. Local investors want naming rights to your first child. Canada’s tech scene seems to be really lacking cohesion. It’s easy to cross the border and join the big leagues.
We need a YC level organization - finding gems from around the globe, relocating them here, connecting them to top investors, building out a narrative, raising our collective ambition. It can’t be a [Big Bank] Venture thing where the eventual bureaucracy just kills everything. We want people who are hungry for more.
We need to also re-engage people who left for SV. Make a convincing case of why Canada is the future. I am sure many will want to give back in different ways.
I strongly believe Canada is an amazing country and could be a world leader in many domains but we have to do the work to get there. This decade is Canada’s to lose.