It's amazing how most of these articles just talk about the difficulties of raising money. As if that's the only important thing missing in Canada for startups. What about the difficulty of finding out what users want (when your customers are all in the US), the lack of a concentrated talent pool of people in your sector (hard to network let alone hire), lack of sector-specific mentors. All much harder to do in Canada at the moment.
I can attest to the lack of talent in my area (Alberta).
Our company spent over a year looking for a junior PHP developer. Literally couldn't find one anywhere (the few bites we did get had no clue how to actually program in any language). And on a personal level - I've never been able to find a decent mentor anywhere. Local user groups are anemic and tend to be filled with nothing but MBA's and "idea guys" looking for dev talent, so networking is a total bust.
While this situation is great for a contractor/young developer with talent (in demand, loads of bargaining power) - it's frustrating as all heck once you buy into a company and want to take it to the next level.
Our province is bursting with resource money - yet very little of it is being directed at creating a sustainable economic sector based on something other then crap that can be pulled out of the ground.
I'll throw my support behind this point as well. I'm just finishing up a medical degree after working as a software developer for years, and I still have contact with a company I founded in Alberta years ago. We've been trying to find developer talent (Ruby) for literally years, and there is consistently no one available - we've taken to grabbing folks out of uni and training them up instead.
One of many reasons I'm not seriously considering coming back to Alberta (even though I loved living there) - in my experience, even most of Australia, where I'm living currently, has a much deeper talent pool and access to gov't VC funding.
The lack of PHP/Rails developers in Alberta is unfortunate, but the cause is that enterprise development dominates the industry, with .net and Java projects taking up nearly all the market share and the rest existing in very niche markets. Software development exists here primarily to facilitate stuff being pulled from the ground.
Have you considered using .net for your startup? There is the obvious drawback of having to license the Microsoft stack, but ASP MVC is now mature enough to being a solid backend platform for a startup, and your odds at finding a talented .net developer in Alberta are magnitudes greater than the platforms hyped in Silicon Valley. The BizSpark program also gives you a 3 year free run at MS licensing.
As an experienced contractor in the Calgary area, I'd go as far as saying the Oil & Gas has created a large surplus of .net developers especially in the last 3 years, which explains the booming IT headhunting sector here, and hiring capable developers seems to take only a handful of days from start to finish.
If there's a lot of Java devs there, the poster might also consider using a JVM-based language. No licensing with MS required, and it should be a relatively painless transition for Java devs.
My uncle started a serious games company in Edmonton, and that's what I hear from him all the time: no talent. He's thinking of relocating here to Vancouver just so he can hire competent C++ devs. Pretty depressing, really.
What is the name of your Uncle's company? Tell him to fire me an email, I'd be happy to do what I can to help him find someone. There are quite a few good devs in Edmonton and specific to gaming BioWare attracts a large number of talented people to town, and leaks out some very good people at times depending on their development cycle.
cam.linke@gmail.com
But seriously, who wants to live in Edmonton? I know a bunch of people at BioWare, and the company is the only reason they're in Edmonton. They complain about the weather constantly.
> What about the difficulty of finding out what users want (when your customers are all in the US)
That's absolutely not the issue. In fact, Canada's national past time is to psycho analyse Americans. If anything we understand them better then they themselves.
Also there is tons of money available. The issue is smart money. We raised all our money in New York City.
Hey Tobi. Ah as usual I forgot to preface with the fact that I can only speak regarding my personal experience.
In our case, it was about talking to users outside of the Blackberry bubble. After we moved down to the Valley, we started seeing more and more people use Fitbit and other quantified self devices, as well as all the cool new fitness tracking apps on Android and iOS. That helped drive our feature set for Pebble.
> What about the difficulty of finding out what users want (when your customers are all in the US)
This seems like a false premise. I would guess people who live in the valley are just as disconnected from the rest of the states as people who live in Canada. Perhaps more so.
