The Canadian IT Business Syndrome

Some questions...

-What the hell is UOIT? No offense, but I live in Toronto and have a degree in CS, have interviewed candidates from almost every program in Canada, and haven't heard of this school.

-Canada's companies try to 'prove themselves to their big brother'? Let's look at RIM, OpenText, NCR and many other companies that have been innovative and dominated a global market.

- 'Stop putting maple leafs on every little thing you do. It just makes our society look like more of a joke because we have to constantly remind ourselves that we are in Canada.' National pride is not a joke.

-'The Blackberry Perl is a modest shot in the dark to get consumers hooked on the crack, but it is getting devoured by iPhone and other consumer oriented devices. RIM can compete because it works in an industry that is void of taste, and more often than not, substance.' All I can say is you know nothing about the industry. The Pearl is a great device (in both tastes and substance), and is selling exceedingly well. The iPhone goes after a different type of customer, and isn't even available in Canada.

Your comparison between Brightspark and YC is really off base too, they are not the same type of company. Both fund early stage startups, but they take a vastly different approach.

Sorry, Canada's innovation is no joke. This article makes you look like a joke by showing how little you know about the local business environment.

These are generalizations based on my 20 years of growing up and living in Canada.

Canadians are too bound up in credentialism - they want to see degrees, preferably from schools that are prestigious. They want to see a degree that maps to what you do (e.g. medieval music to Java programmer does not have the credibility of BA Business to Marketing Dept.) .

Uber-hacker jwz would not have been hired by a Canadian company, for example.

Canadians want safe money. They are more than happy to trade the safe valuations of more staid companies instead of adding more risk in doing something, well, riskier.

The original article accused Canadians of being too concerned with "proving themselves to their big brother." I would just like to point to the following blog post: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/digg-heat-map.html to show why we do that. The article basically makes the assertion that most digg users are American, because most of the signups happen during times where Americans are at work. Not like there is another country sharing those same timezones.

He also forgot about flickr (though he has a flickr photo stream) and stumbleupon - 2 Canadian companies that had successful exits.