alt Hacker News> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
Off-topic but I suspect it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes. Canadian investors are risk adverse because they can be. That and there's a colonial-descended cultural bias towards credentials and established players.
But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings, and would love to get investment to build a startup off of it, but every time I sniff around the Canadian "investor" scene it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me.
Replies
>> But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings,
Probably not relevant to thus thread, and hopefully redundant to you, but writing the code is the easy part.
If you have not already done so figure out your market and start marketing to them. Get deposits, build a mailing list of interested parties, build a presence where your customers hang out.
Marketing is the hard part. Get that done first before writing code. Most ideas fail not because of bad product but because there's no market, it's too hard to reach the market, or you're solving a problem no one will spend money on.
Before depleting all your savings, learn from all the threads in the "ask" section. Code counts for nothing without hod marketing. And marketing is the hard part, the code part is easy.
As an aside, the startup which has a market and marketing sorted out is a lot more attractive to investors.
Canada definitely has a "first buyer problem" which makes it hard to get liftoff. A great many Canadian startups end up going to the US to get funding to get around this issue.
> it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes
Partially. The money made in ONG and Construction is then re-invested in American equities. And even provincial pension like Ontario Teachers and La Caisse funds prefer investing in American equities instead because their only incentive is pension solvency.
The issue is Canada is simply a tiny country with an extremely loose confederation in a world that is returning to a "winner takes all" mindset dependent on hard unification.
More tactically, using a Yozma-style approach to subsidize Canadian VC would help sow the seeds for a truly self sustaining ecosystem.
> it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me
Because they don't and never will. Anyone who has potential gets frustrated and leaves (ofc I've poached a couple as well).
I have a (admittedly unevidenced) hypothesis that the US took off from other economies after ‘08 because real estate became a spectacularly shit investment overnight and investors had to invest in productive things for returns. Investors in Canada kept passing the same pieces of land between each other for no benefit to society. My pipe dream is that Canada grows the balls to annhilate property values