Context: I'm an Australian living in Western Canada working in the tech sector.
A lot of the points that are raised here are really valid - Canada has a lot going for it culturally and in quality of life.
But the infrastructure to help foster and grow companies simply isn't there. Surprisingly little is computerised - government, banking, even dealing with cellphone and internet companies (who are overpriced) almost always involves finding out that you can't do what you want online, or in any digital format, so you either need to send cheques and forms by mail or sit in an office somewhere while someone does the data entry of your form while you wait.
You don't even have a lot of the b2b services that you can get elsewhere. There's nothing like stripe, devpay, google checkout here, it's difficult/expensive to get your hands on mobile devices for testing, and even existing IT services all have the opaque "call us for pricing" bullshit that you get from services that don't have enough volume to be fair/transparent.
Canada seems to focus on one large tech company darling until it gets run into the ground for whatever reason, but along the way seems to ignore the small businesses that could turn into the next big-ish thing. Flickr, AbeBooks and PhoneGap all pretty much got sold under the radar, and companies that are still in Canada, like HootSuite, seem to be getting equally ignored.
Yeah, Canada's an awesome place to live, but in terms of a place for startups, it seems like it'd be much easier to move somewhere conducive to running your business.
A lot of the points that are raised here are really valid - Canada has a lot going for it culturally and in quality of life.
But the infrastructure to help foster and grow companies simply isn't there. Surprisingly little is computerised - government, banking, even dealing with cellphone and internet companies (who are overpriced) almost always involves finding out that you can't do what you want online, or in any digital format, so you either need to send cheques and forms by mail or sit in an office somewhere while someone does the data entry of your form while you wait.
You don't even have a lot of the b2b services that you can get elsewhere. There's nothing like stripe, devpay, google checkout here, it's difficult/expensive to get your hands on mobile devices for testing, and even existing IT services all have the opaque "call us for pricing" bullshit that you get from services that don't have enough volume to be fair/transparent.
Canada seems to focus on one large tech company darling until it gets run into the ground for whatever reason, but along the way seems to ignore the small businesses that could turn into the next big-ish thing. Flickr, AbeBooks and PhoneGap all pretty much got sold under the radar, and companies that are still in Canada, like HootSuite, seem to be getting equally ignored.
Yeah, Canada's an awesome place to live, but in terms of a place for startups, it seems like it'd be much easier to move somewhere conducive to running your business.
edit: grammar/spelling