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I'd have to imagine that the burn rate in Canada is going to be much lower than in San Francisco in terms of cost of living, paying people, etc. Not that it tot

I'd have to imagine that the burn rate in Canada is going to be much lower than in San Francisco in terms of cost of living, paying people, etc. Not that it totally negates SF's advantage of course.

TheHydroImpulse 12y ago
I'll go through what I've experienced having worked at a few Canadian startups based in Edmonton. Yes, the burn rate can be significantly less. Salaries are much less than in SF (average is ~60K-75K for software developers and sales people typically made this much at the last startup I worked at, although not all salary based). Cost of living where they were located (Edmonton) is pretty average. It's not super cheap nor insanely expensive. From some quick research, rent is on average 30% that of New York. Even with all this considered, I still wouldn't base a company here -- ever. Hiring the best of the best is simply not possible. I've only seen a couple times a company being able to hire someone from elsewhere (SF go figure) because the position was super specific and needed someone with lots of experience. Every other time you're dealing with a junior developer or someone straight out of university because finding senior developers and employees in general is hard. Edmonton has a few startups here, but it's pretty much a circlejerk to be honest. The earlier startup copies everything what a startup further along them does, and that continues up the chain. This doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it was quite the extreme in this case. Startup A - "We wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to build a salesforce integration." Startup B - "Ok, we'll just build our own fully custom CRM, that'll be sooo much cheaper and easier" Needless to say, it was more expensive in time and money and they're going to end up moving to Salesforce anyways. Startup A - "We instituted a new sick day policy of 96 hours because people took advantage of the lenient system" Startup B - "That's sounds good, we'll do that too" The saying "Hire slowly and fire quickly" just doesn't work out well when you have a hard time hiring excellent candidates. From what I've experienced, they couldn't hire people they really wanted, they had to hire people they needed. So the whole culture thing didn't exist. So I think the main reason, after hiring, is having those model companies. There are none in the area I lived in, so they're all just screwing up together. This is only what I've experienced in a single city in Canada, however.

I'd have to imagine that the burn rate in Canada is going to be much lower than in San Francisco in terms of cost of living, paying people, etc. Not that it totally negates SF's advantage of course.

TheHydroImpulse 12y ago

I'll go through what I've experienced having worked at a few Canadian startups based in Edmonton. Yes, the burn rate can be significantly less. Salaries are much less than in SF (average is ~60K-75K for software developers and sales people typically made this much at the last startup I worked at, although not all salary based). Cost of living where they were located (Edmonton) is pretty average. It's not super cheap nor insanely expensive. From some quick research, rent is on average 30% that of New York. Even with all this considered, I still wouldn't base a company here -- ever. Hiring the best of the best is simply not possible. I've only seen a couple times a company being able to hire someone from elsewhere (SF go figure) because the position was super specific and needed someone with lots of experience. Every other time you're dealing with a junior developer or someone straight out of university because finding senior developers and employees in general is hard. Edmonton has a few startups here, but it's pretty much a circlejerk to be honest. The earlier startup copies everything what a startup further along them does, and that continues up the chain. This doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it was quite the extreme in this case. Startup A - "We wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to build a salesforce integration." Startup B - "Ok, we'll just build our own fully custom CRM, that'll be sooo much cheaper and easier" Needless to say, it was more expensive in time and money and they're going to end up moving to Salesforce anyways. Startup A - "We instituted a new sick day policy of 96 hours because people took advantage of the lenient system" Startup B - "That's sounds good, we'll do that too" The saying "Hire slowly and fire quickly" just doesn't work out well when you have a hard time hiring excellent candidates. From what I've experienced, they couldn't hire people they really wanted, they had to hire people they needed. So the whole culture thing didn't exist. So I think the main reason, after hiring, is having those model companies. There are none in the area I lived in, so they're all just screwing up together. This is only what I've experienced in a single city in Canada, however.