Other than the opportunity for a misplaced pun on the term “spiral”, why would you take an otherwise linear-in-time graph and make it radial? Why would age 0 to 50 be somehow cyclical?
The author is displeased with the sort of discussions present on networks built on a couple different technologies. Unclear how the third technology magically makes them “happy.”
"In short: this author is endorsing a funding model focused on low initial investment and faster profitability."
-> so basically, Canadian "venture" capital. They don't even want to talk to you unless profitability is there or within a few months. So, basically, it distills to a barely riskier than usual bank loan, except you pay the loan with equity.
A cause or symptom (I'm not sure about causality here) is that the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) directly funds most private Canadian VCs. VCs now have public money as part of their LP base, with some strings attached. Most of these strings (eg. don't waste taxpayer money doing anything unethical or overly negligent) will nudge VCs to be more conservative. Plus, the VCs are guaranteed 20%+ of their 2% carry from BDC taking up that much of every fund and don't need to swing for the fences to make a good income.
I live in Montreal and intend to do a consumer oriented software startup. I would like to better understand what I would be getting into starting up here, vs. applying to YC. Can you suggest resources for understanding Canadian startup landscape, funding etc.?
Perceived Pros:
- Many STEM grads
- Gaming and AI industry, 2+ top AI schools
- Relatively little competition for engineering talent compared to SV
- Many engineers who are barred entry to US based on country of origin
- Easier work visas (to be confirmed)
- Free healthcare and other social services, and less violence
Perceived Cons:
- Cultural lack of ambition, entrepreneurial dreaming.
- Excessive reliance on government subsidy (the government is the customer)
- Risk averse VC
- Shallow bench of experienced operators to mentor, invest,
and manage
Remember in the SV costs are astronomical, so there's a kind of buy-in threshold necessary which won't make sense for most companies.
Shopify is a perfect company for Canada - they are not making 'tech for other techies' and don't require all the best devs in the world. It took a while to get going, so costs needed to be lower. They can make some income early on, thus 'proving the model'.
There is a reason that the nations top social network started at Harvard, which has an elite status among young people. There's a reason that Snap was started by an attractive young man from Cali, from a the top school in Cali. Glossier, a 'makeup company' is actually, truly a 'social network', and there's a reason it was founded by an ex-model/reality TV star with deep connections in LA/NYC.
On the technical side, there's a reason that certain companies really need to be in the Valley as well.
So if your business needs to be in the Valley, it might make sense to do that, but if it's a 2cnd-tier kind of thing, not something the FAANGS would ever look at, and doesn't require the best technical talent in the world, than you can do it other places.
Montreal a tier 2 cities, Ottawa/Vancouver, not really tier 2, Toronto is probably a solid tier 2. FYI that is actually not bad considering tons of American cities are not tier 2 either. Chicago, Toronto's 'twin' really might not even be Tier 2, there is a weird lack of entrepreneurial activity there for its relative size and power.
Montreal has cheap prices, decent AI grads, stable economy, supportive government, weak VC but the top could of firms are fine places to go for smaller up to round A, and if your business fits well into Quebec's strategy, following rounds can be supported by Desjardins and nationalist players.
The Canadian model for business isn't all that great.
It doesn't do a great job of serving the country's social needs, and it also doesn't do a great job of producing competitive businesses.
There's a fair number of public funds that get funneled into unproductive firms through things like innovation grants, and there's a lot of protectionism for incompetent incumbents. All of this seems to enrich a small class of elites, at the expense of the public purse. Most Canadians just shrug their shoulders at all this, and move on with life.
Can you share more on how this applies to Ballard Power? It's a name that just came up on my radar this weekend and I was planning on doing research on them, so thought I'd ask in case you have something specific to share
Ballard's been getting government grants and subsidies for over 20 years, and produced very little in terms of saleable product on the other end. They make fuel cells and related products, but their business model seems to be mostly taking government and investor money, and using it to produce units which they 'sell' at below-cost to companies trying to look green by 'testing' alternative fuels.
One of the worse offenders is North which is previously thalmic labs; Not a single product has reached the market with any revenue to show but remains a poster child for a successful organization.
Canadian banks are incredibly risk averse, and programs like CSBFP have so many strings attached that make it almost useless for certain sectors. Trying to fund infrastructure (rural FTTH) has been an exercise in futility with most Canadian banks. 75-85% loan to value ratio on fibre builds makes no sense considering the assets have 30+ years of life after being paid off in 3-4 years. But hey, we love real estate!
As a Vancouver-side Canadian I must say that the support for tech up here is pretty poor in a large part due to the labour laws being gutted by EA. Providing information on OT policies and OT compensation is one of the first rounds of questions you can expect to receive during hiring.
On the other hand - Canadian business expenses are still quite high, but quite a bit lower than US business expenses. Healthcare and cost of living are huge factors in labour costs.
> public funds that get funneled into unproductive firms
If they were productive firms, they wouldn't need government money. This is why free markets work better, because free markets allocate resources to the most productive uses.
This is the furthest thing from the truth. That a human has a certain capability does not in the slightest imply that “DNA”, at least as commonly understood, encodes that capability, at all.
A bunch of molecular recipes encoded in a few gigs of nucleotides with some crude feedback loops do not a human make.
Quite apart from epigenetics as it’s commonly presented (methylation, and all sorts of histone antics), you might recall that DNA itself doesn’t magically grow up: you do need a cell.
It’s somewhat (and only poorly) analogous to being handed the source code to a C compiler written in C, without knowing C. Does the C code really encode C? Well, not without the compiler it doesn’t....
There’s then a very interesting discussion around how it’s even possible for a mammalian nervous system to bootstrap itself. Figuring out walking seems perhaps emergent: it’s a learnable technique based on not falling. But how do dog breeds retain intrinsic high-level behaviours even if they’ve never observed them? What makes a Shepherd so concerned when his assumed flock becomes dispersed?
We are a tremendously long way from answering these questions, but I would caution anyone who thinks it just “in the DNA”.
Toronto’s tech talent is keen... but relatively green. Since few companies have had to deal with scaling networks, users and data to the same magnitude as is common with Valley companies, it’s almost impossible to find senior engineers worthy of the title. Plenty of options for junior and intermediate, though.
Yeah. I'm struggling to find really solid engineers in the city. I need really experienced people and I can't find anyone. Even the most sr consultants and contractors have a lot of gaps and don't understand the real edge cases that appear in systems.
I was lucky enough to learn from a team as we went through a google acquisition and watch and learn as the technology was scaled in both the context of a startup, and later inside Google. I was the whitebelt in the back of the room but that experience of working in that team was the most valuable experience I could have ever hoped for and I still regularly mail the people that I absorbed from to let them know how grateful I am to have taken me along on that journey. It's not a common experience but that completely humbled me and fixed my dunning-kruger arrogant ass.
