Startup North

"Of the people I graduated university with the people who are still in Canada are the minority, a notion that still boggles the mind."

^ This has been my experience as well.

Screw this new start-up visa -- what we should really be doing is providing subsidies to companies as an incentive to hire junior developers and/or paying Canadian developers of all levels what they're actually worth. The problem with Canada's start-up culture isn't that we're low on talent. We generate plenty of talent. Canada's problem is a problem of retention.

Freshly minted Canadian C.S. grad here. I'm passionate about my craft, did well in school and I've done several very cool (I think) "for fun" personal projects. I've even successfully shipped one. For what it's worth, this is my perspective on the current climate.

As it stands, we do have a bit of a start-up culture up here (see http://startupnorth.ca/). However, there are some major problems which desperately need to be addressed before any real growth can happen here:

1) Probably about 90% of the "startupy", or relatively interesting, coding gigs are located in Ontario. Not situated in, or interested in moving to, Toronto/Waterloo? Guess you're SOL. Oh, what's that? You are interested in relocating? Well, there's plenty of cheap talent here in Ontario from UT and/or UW that won't cost us anything in terms of relocation. We're probably just going to go with them instead. Thanks for applying, though.

2) Junior developer positions are…

SEEKING WORK: (Remote|USA|CANADA) [Will travel] [Canadian Citizen, Can Provide W-8]

Highlights:

* Co-founded Verelo.com
* 21 Linked-in recommendations for Software Development
* Made Toronto's 2012 Hot List - http://startupnorth.ca/2012/05/31/hot-sht-list-2012/
* Nominated for the Bell Technology Award – for distributed computing software for search engine
* Created Canada’s first distributed computing Search engine – interviewed by Globe and Mail – article titled “Seeking Cyberspace Supremacy”
* Interviewed for Front Page Story, Expositor - “Seeking Cyberspace Supremacy”
* Interviewed, and written about in "Hacking the Xbox", a book by Andrew Huang, Xenatara Press - A introductory book to Reverse Engineering
* Interviewed for an article in the Globe and Mail titled “Techies Challenge Microsoft”. Two time special guest on CBC TV News World, and frequent guest on CBC Radio 1

If you'd like to see examples of my work, check out the start-up I helped build: Verelo.com

I'm a Senior Developer/DevOps with AWS, Rackspace, Jenkins, CI Experience. I Also Code in C/C++/Java/PHP/Python.

Linked-in: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikecurry

The proximity to US market means many of the "best and brightest" workers + companies end up migrating south of the border, resulting in an overall lackluster tech environment when compared to any of the major US cities.

If you look at many SF and NYC startups, as well as Facebook, Yahoo, and Google's rosters, you will find many Canadian tech entrepreneurs - maybe even moreso than within Canada itself :)

There was also historically issues with Canadian startups getting foreign investment / selling to a foreign company, although that situation is now changing.

For general info about the Canadian startup scene check out http://www.startupnorth.ca/

This story is completely mis-leading. They certainly had users before 15 days ago [1]. The product was developed in an incubator in the Winter 2009 class [2]. They have relaunched and revamped it, but to start from a clean slate and say you had zero users with no disclosure or information about your past makes this story blatantly false. It's a shame because it still would have been a good story without the reset.

[1] http://www.startupnorth.ca/2010/11/03/has-kik-finally-arrived/

[2] http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/alumni/kik-at-blackberry-devcon