We're a global employer, and just employing people in different jurisdictions is kind of a nightmare (totally worth it, though). I can't imagine how much of a pain it must be to try to manage investment stakes in foreign corporations.
I worked at a place that expanded into Calgary and picked up a bunch of ML engineers with oil-and-gas backgrounds (who were eager for something outside the energy sector) and the government picked up half of the payroll tab for several years. There is also, of course, no health insurance benefits to worry about.
Other comments in this thread make it sound like an absolute nightmare. So which is it?
It's only a nightmare if you hate all taxes and labour rights. So, you know, YC
Uhh, we don't have universal coverage for everything health up here, we still have private benefits that our employers pay for as part of our compensation plans.
Life insurance, dental, vision, prescriptions, physio, mental health, critical illness etc..
It might be less than in the US, but it's not "no health insurance benefits to worry about".
Canadian pride isn't enough to keep a company in Canada. There are real and significant economic incentives to move elsewhere. That said, it's disappointing that YC no longer supports Canadian companies.
Fairly senior dev, US citizen here (20 years experience).
After what I've seen this past year, but more the past month, I will work for peanuts for a path to citizenship in Canada. US in 5 years is not a place I want to be, looking into all options and very serious.
It's safe to assume YC will continue to fund Canadian founders, but they'll now require them to incorporate in Delaware, Singapore, or the Cayman Islands - none of which is significantly difficult for a founder. You could literally make a US Corp via Firstbase in a couple of minutes [0]
It's very hard to run a very small business here.
The people who have capital in Canada are uninterested in funding Canadian GPs - they mostly end up choosing American asset classes because of high returns.
Institutional investors like the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and CDQP tend to target asset classes outside of Canada due to their returns requirements being in the double digits range.
Edit: Can't reply
> TBF, the OTPP has a huge home bias - they’ve got more Canadian investments than they do US investments despite the market being less than a tenth the size
Huge by institutional investor standards but not in aggregate.
The majority of OTPP's assets are not in real estate [0] - out of $209B AUM, only $29.4B is invested in real estate globally.
Most of their Canadian assets are fixed income investments.
[0] - https://www.otpp.com/content/dam/otpp/documents/reports/2024...
TBF, the OTPP has a huge home bias - they’ve got more Canadian investments than they do US investments despite the market being less than a tenth the size.
They couldn’t target a higher proportion of Canadian assets while remaining reasonably diversified.
Pretty much.
Israel [0], China [1], and increasingly India [2][3] worked on resolving this issue by establishing funds of funds that partnered with private sector players by matching dollar-to-dollar with them to help build a VC ecosystem.
It's the same problem in the EU as well despite ECB proclamations. Heck, Norway's (ik not EU, it's EFTA) PIF has been conspicuously absent from any sort of statment of solidarity for Greenland unlike their Swedish, Finnish, and Danish peers because 25% of Norway's budget is dependent on the PIF maintaining double digit performance.
Edit: can't reply
> I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small [...]
Israel is even smaller than Canada - 9 million people versus 40 million - and the median Israeli remains poorer [4] than the median Canada [5]. That didn't stop Israel.
Size of home country doesn't matter. The only difference is vision (and moreso lack thereof amongst Canadian and European decisionmakers).
> I don't think an Israeli founder would have trouble moving to the US if they wanted to.
They don't. In fact, Israel had an India-style brain drain to the US until the 2010s.
Heck, a little over a decade ago I had acquaintances of mine in TLV seriously considering moving their entire family to Sunnyvale for a $150k base salary job instead of earning $90k. They ended up deciding to become founders instead.
[0] - https://www.yozmagroup.com/overview
[1] - https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202512/26/content_WS694e4e56...
[2] - https://idtalliance.org/
[3] - https://rdifund.anrf.gov.in/
[4] - https://www.ynet.co.il/economy/article/bjn8ppfz2
[5] - https://www.statcan.gc.ca/hub-carrefour/quality-life-qualite...
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.
Also, being foreign in the US is a concern at the moment. Hell, being native in the US is a concern at the moment...
That doesn't strike me as "not at all" when the TN status is 1/ effectively a work visa, whether you like the strings attached or not, and 2/ a foot in the door that lets you move to a more permissive status down the line. A Waterloo or UofT grad can go from applying to a US job to their first day in a few weeks, and the only interaction they'll have with the immigration system will be getting asked for paperwork at the border. Compare that to a British or Japanese new grad, for whom there is essentially very few options unless they have excellent connections or that they display enough extraordinary abilities to be eligible for O-1.