

A Damning Look at the Canadian Tech Sector - purplefruit
http://throwww.com/a/1fa

======
Permit
"DoesNotExist" error.

At first I thought it was a joke related to the title, but now I see that it's
just a Django error page. Made me chuckle at least.

Here's a cached version in the meantime:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Athrow...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Athrowww.com%2Fa%2F1fa&sugexp=chrome,mod=14&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

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greenyoda
"Quick test - name the sprinter who won the 2008 100m sprint. You probably
guessed Usain Bolt - which is correct. Who came second? Exactly.... Want to
know why? No-one cares. This is how the world works - in business and in
life."

The hugely hyped media coverage of celebrities is not really a good model for
anything in the real world. We don't all buy products and services from only
the largest business in any given market sector. If I'm buying a car, or
cellphone service, or software, I'm certainly going to consider offerings from
companies that are not the #1 company in their field.

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peterarmstrong
As a Canadian startup founder, I agree that we need to try to be the best in
the world at what we're doing, not just best in our city or best in Canada.
And I think we can do that while being our standard nice, even overly-
apologetic selves.

As a start, let's all have our Twitter taglines say what our startup is (or
will soon be) the best in the world at doing.

Here's what mine was before reading this article (@peterarmstrong):

Co-Founder of Leanpub, the best way in the world to self-publish in-progress
ebooks.

Note how qualified that is: co-founder, self-publish, in-progress. That's
because I'm Canadian, and I'm trying to be accurate.

If I was in the valley, I'd probably have mine be:

Founder of Leanpub, the best way in the world to publish ebooks.

What's better?

What's yours?

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zmitri
As a Canadian who has lived in NYC for 2 years, and just had to go back to
Canada for 2 weeks, this is spot on.

There are tons of smart Canadians due to the great education system, but
Canadians in general don't appreciate success in the same way Americans do.
When I quit my job to start my own thing in America, all my co-workers and
friends were pumped up and excited, while many Canadians were perplexed and
asked questions like: "Don't you have a great job? Don't you make enough
money? Why would you quit?" They concluded there was something wrong with me
for quitting a decent job to do my own thing.

They didn't understand that being as upper-middle class as I could wasn't my
goal. My goal was to try and build something out of nothing and hopefully be
the best in the world. Americans get that because it's part of the American
dream.

If you are talented, entrepreneurial and a good hacker, get down to NYC or SF.
I used to be worried about visa issues, but then I realized it didn't matter,
you can figure them out as you go along.

~~~
peterarmstrong
The challenge is that as a Canadian it's a lot easier to get a TN-1 or H1-B as
an employee than as a founder. So the valley is full of Canadian expat
employees, not founders. Hopefully some of those will return to Canada and
become startup founders. (That's what I did.)

~~~
enraged_camel
>>The challenge is that as a Canadian it's a lot easier to get a TN-1 or H1-B
as an employee than as a founder.

It's the same in the US. If you're an immigrant, it's incredibly difficult (if
not outright impossible) to get a work visa to work at a company you founded.
There are a few "founder visa" type bills being discussed in the Congress, but
all of them require the company you have founded to have a hefty revenue as
well as a handful of employees. In other words, they are only for founders who
are already successful.

~~~
peterarmstrong
That's what I meant: the TN-1 and H1-B visas are the US visas that Canadian
employees get in the US.

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purplefruit
I don't know wtf happened... here it is again. <http://throwww.com/a/1ft>

~~~
ckevinc
I'd love to know how the author made the text larger/bold .. looks like a
header tag <h1> but Throwww doesn't appear to accept that.

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dholowiski
The author left out one point that is too often ignored.we just font have
enough people.why don't we have amazon prime? Because Canada is just so
huge,and our population is spread so thinly.the population is so much smaller
than the USA that its so much harder to launch and support a country wide
service.

Plus,we don't have LLC or a proper equivalent.

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
How do you do when compared to other small population nations like Switzerland
or Israel, or others?

~~~
notaddicted
It isn't just the total number of people, it's that they're smeared across our
ample coasts and the longest border in the world[0].

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_bo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_border)

~~~
alex_c
That's only true for things requiring a physical infrastructure though.

For example, Toronto has a reputation for being a hotspot for mobile
development, and there are probably as many talented developers as in any
other tech hub. But they all work for agencies. Where are all the Canadian
"Angry Birds" success stories?

~~~
redthrowaway
We have a few, but in general it's large foreign firms and government
agencies. Looking for internships through the school co-op offices is near-
pointless here in BC; I had to reach out myself to Grow Lab to find anything
interesting (although I ended up doing another semester of school, instead).

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peterb
LOL. I think the error message appropriately describes the Canadian tech
sector. BTW, I am Canadian.

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run4yourlives
> article = Article.objects.get(pk=int(article_id,36))

You (assuming op is the maintainer of the site) should really handle any
django "get" with a try/except block.

That, and you should also set debug to False on a production server.

Once the article exists again, it might be worth reading.

~~~
mattwdelong
I would recommend that get_object_or_404, with the 404 page enabled, would be
better suited for this application. Very similar methods, but this way just
handles all the heavy lifting.

[https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/shortcuts/...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/shortcuts/#get-
object-or-404)

~~~
run4yourlives
Good point, that would be better.

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jarek
Personally, as a Canadian in the consumer-and-internet-software sector ("tech
sector" to HN), the constant comparisons to the equivalent U.S. sector appear
far more annoying than the state of our sector. Nobody else does it with as
much frequency as we seem to. Much of the discussion simply consists of
pointing out and explaining in depth differences between the two sectors. It
feels worse than the constant internet handwringing in the U.S. about their
health care. I am getting attention fatigue. It is what it is. If you're
unhappy with the current state and wish to change it, stop talking and start
doing. Another post explaining that Canada doesn't have the VC scene or
salaries or that Canadians are "nice" and happy with second best won't change
these things.

~~~
pyre
Well, part of discussing is determining where best to put resources. I.e.
"What is necessary to change things?" If you can nail down places that are
lacking, then you can actually attempt do something. That said, I understand
you point, as none of these discussions ever really achieve much.

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msie
How can you compare Canada to the unique place that is Silicon Valley?

Edit:

How about a damning look at Canada's film industry (hint: it's not Hollywood)?

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SohKai
Maybe part of the problem is that a lot of our tech talent ends up going down
to where the money is instead of staying in Canada?

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dezwald
It would be interesting to see how many students from Waterloo and UofT alone,
leave Canada to go work in the tech industry in the US.

~~~
SohKai
I bring it up because it appears to be quite a lot from my experience as a
student at Waterloo. The prevailing thought is that you haven't "made it"
unless you go down south when you look for tech jobs.

Most of the people in my year have gone down when they can for co-op.

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jschem
To me Canada's tech sector isn't damned; just dwarfed when it is compared to
our much larger southern neighbour. The economy of Canada isn't really based
around innovation and technology but rather primary industries like
oil/gas/lumber/etc... so it makes sense that our business focus’ on our unique
advantage. To me is seems that starting and growing a business is harder to do
in Canada then in the States. Just as an example the rate of return for VC
firms is roughly about -5% in Canada while in the States it is roughly %10.
See:
[http://www.bdc.ca/EN/Documents/other/VC_Industry_Review_EN.p...](http://www.bdc.ca/EN/Documents/other/VC_Industry_Review_EN.pdf).
I am not sure why our companies have difficulty competing internationally but
alot of the reasons in the article (Lack of Acquisition of Knowledge, Second
Place is Good Enough and We Suck at PR) seem like symptoms rather than causes.

~~~
adambard
> primary industries like oil/gas/lubber/etc.

You're missing an m or a b there.

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albumedia
Entertaining but I disagree with most of the article. It's about time we stop
comparing Canada to America. Canada is about the size of California in terms
of population. This is like comparing a small tech company to Apple.

Canada is great, but easier access to capital in America.

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manishsharan
The Canadian tech sector has been getting hammered for quite a while. First
there was the Nortel collapse, then ATI was acquired by AMD, RIM is slowly but
surely sliding towards oblivion. Shopify is the only bright spot in Canadian
Tech.

~~~
slantyyz
There have been plenty of successes, although they have mostly been swallowed
by multinationals. Many, however, still maintain a physical presence in
Canada:

Cognos (IBM), Changepoint (Compuware), Workbrain (Infor), Flickr (Yahoo!),
Dundas (Microsoft), Opalis (Microsoft), Kobo (Rakuten), Alias (Autodesk)...
etc, etc.

And then there's also the likes of 500px, Cirba, etc.

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sthomps
finally - a "realistic" look at canada's tech sector. there is a lot of work
to be done.

~~~
mhurron
Stop moving to the US because you can make more money there. There, it's
fixed.

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dezwald
This is a great article! I myself am Canadian and agree with many of articles
points.

Living in Toronto it's noticeable to recognize it's the financial industry
runs this city, then comes marketing and advertising. Tech here in Toronto
primarily just service these industries.

Now when it comes to getting people to invest in tech startups, is not a lack
of money - it's the investors who have money and lack of knowledge in the tech
industry. (Most of them having financial backgrounds)

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bitwize
I got this:

    
    
        A server error occurred.  Please contact the administrator.
    

That's pretty damning of the Canadian tech sector, all right.

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faramarz
This post is great! It gets the juices going. It describes everything wrong
and everything right about Canada's tech market and i'm so glad you wrote
this. It's the Manifesto we needed.

I'm already excited about the opportunities ahead. I'm in. I'll do my part,
starting Today!

Aside: I think I finally found a use for my domain torontotech.org -
colleagues and collaborators wanting to take part, get in touch

