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I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small.. We're 40M people (compared to what, 350M in the US, and 900M in the EU), and we're
by sbarre 9mo ago
I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small.. We're 40M people (compared to what, 350M in the US, and 900M in the EU), and we're directly next door to the largest startup economy in the world.
So not only do we have fewer customers, we're competing against an economic juggernaut that shares our broad business rules, our culture and language (with one exception) and can market to us through all our media channels with very little friction.
So unless you're in health care or some other regulated field that a US startup can't just expand into easily, it's a tough go.
- garbawarb 9mo agoIsrael, like the parent poster said, is even smaller. I don't think an Israeli founder would have trouble moving to the US if they wanted to.
- sbarre 9mo agoYeah but Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US. All that US-centric stuff overshadows us constantly. And it's not just in the startup landscape. We literally have laws on the books [0] that force our media companies to maintain a certain amount of Canadian content on TV/radio/streaming/etc so we're not only consuming US content. This isn't a comment on whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact, and it has a real impact on our society at all levels. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content
- alephnerd 9mo ago> Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US Have you been to Israel?!? NBA and NFL is everywhere, the Israeli dream before tech began booming in the 2010s was "immigrate to Boston, Brooklyn, or Miami", and Jewish Americans like Seth Klarman, Sheldon Adelson, Ronald Lauder, and Bill Ackman have had an outsized stake in media and entertainment ownership before the Mizrahi cultural boom in the 2010s. Literally the only reason Canada fell behind was because the political leadership in countries like Israel decided to work on building a domestic tech VC ecosystem in the 1990s-2000s while their Canadian equivalents during that era had no economic vision aside from resource extraction. Additionally, the Canadian equivalents of Shlomo Kramer (Checkpoint, Palo Alto Network, Imperva, Cato Networks, Cyberstarts), Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks, Cyberstarts), and Gili Rannan (Sequoia, Wiz, Cyberstarts) - David Cheriton (Google, Arista), Chamath Palihapitiya (Facebook, Slack, Groq), Joseph Tsai (Alibaba), Changpeng Zhao (Binance), Chip Wilson (Lululemon), and Ryan Cohen (Chewy) - are all hard MAGA. Heck, even Big 5 banks like Scotiabank are pro-Trump [0] because their LatAm business benefits from Trump power projection in the region. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-06/scotiabank-ceo-sees-trump-doctrine-as-positive-for-growth https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-06/scotiaban...
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoThere are a lot of "odd" things that happen to non-US citizens businesses that no one likes to talk about in public. Indeed, if you are a Canadian Business getting market traction: the common scenario is acquisition by a US firm, or utter destruction by policy shifts and replacement by an opportunistic competitor. =3
- garbawarb 9mo agoWhy are those more common for noncitizens?
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoIt is still illegal to steal IP from fellow citizens. =3