Seconded on risk aversion. Toronto is just not sexy. When you go to pitch a client in a top tier city and you are from one, the client assumes that if you can survive in SF/NY/DC/LON etc, that they should hear you out.

In Toronto, it's like you can't type 'hello world," without some cringeworthy reporter going on about how it's by a sparky _canadian_ startup taking on the big bad world with their local blend of quirky charm and _moxie_.

I'm sure that's warm and fuzzy to people who live on grant money, but to the rest of the world it means "derivative and subsidized."

Toronto is a good place for dev shops, but innovation needs to be in places where it is valued by people who actually pay for it. If you are doing enterprise dev, it's great.

But nobody here is going to Mars, except maybe a scrappy group of girl engineers who take no guff, and are writing codes with a critical take on whether colonizing other planets is problematic in the face of our own colonial history and need for healing and reparations...