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With nearly 3 million in population and an energy in the air not unlike New York City, Toronto should be more of a startup scene than it is. This is the first
by dangliar 12y ago
With nearly 3 million in population and an energy in the air not unlike New York City, Toronto should be more of a startup scene than it is.
This is the first T.O. startup I've read about for as long as I can remember.
- psobot 12y agoThere's a ton of established (and YC) startups in the city: Shopify, Upverter, 500px, Chango, Wattpad, XMG, Uken Games, and PagerDuty are all based here or have offices here, just to name a few.
- chriswoodford 12y agoDoes Shopify have a Toronto office now? FreshBooks is a Toronto staple as well
- Oculus 12y agoYes Shopify has a Toronto office after their acquisition of Jet Cooper: http://www.jetcooper.com/ http://www.jetcooper.com/
- Oculus 12y agoDon't forget about the MaRS Discovery District and all the awesome startups there! http://www.marsdd.com/ http://www.marsdd.com/
- graeme 12y agoI wonder why it isn't. I'm in Montreal, and startups are definitely in the air. The advantages Montreal has I can think of are: * It's very cheap; good for getting started * A VERY high number of students per capita. At least five major universities, plus many CEGEPs * It's not near Waterloo. I imagine much Toronto talents gets sucked down to Kitchner-Waterloo. * It's the center for French talent. English talent in Toronto has other places to go, if it wants.
- nchlswu 12y ago> I imagine much Toronto talents gets sucked down to Kitchener-Waterloo. I'm not sure about the actual numbers, I don't think movement is in any one direction where a reliable conclusion like that can be made. While a lot of talent is attracted and bred there, I'm not sure about the actual retention of talent. A bunch stay, but a lot leave for the US and there's an interesting dynamic between Waterloo and Toronto given that they're so close to each other.
- acangiano 12y agoCapital is virtually non-existent compared to Silicon Valley or even New York City. That's the #1 issue faced by startups in Canada.
- Scoundreller 12y agoDoes this mean an astute VC could set-up shop in Toronto (or elsewhere in Canada) and make a killing? Or is there some other structural barrier?
- acangiano 12y agoThere are some investment "bridges", usually ran by Canadians who made money in the States and are now helping out. I'm not well versed enough in the legality of US-entities investing in Canada, but in principle yes, the opportunity is there.
- zmitri 12y agoIn Waterloo I think it's possible with a seed fund that puts in 100-150k at 2 to 3M valuations before the good ones get picked up by YC. A lot of Canadians move down to the states anyway because developer salaries are like 2-3x higher.