Canada's untapped talent: the remote hiring opportunity you're missing

I have one reason. There is a massive chasm between the initative taking and risk tolerance of Canadians vs Americans. We are extremely risk averse and passive people and it caught one of my current/past employers (depending on how you count acquisitions).

My current employer department is mostly Canadian on account of an acquisition and a few years back, the acquired company was the market leader in its space. How did it end up being sold for a fraction of its American competitor’s valuation (that was founded a year later)?

The American firm happily shipped even if a feature wasn’t solid or key info was missing. Canadian firm would wait months on legal to sign off on NDAs and licensing agreements we needed to develop, as there was always one more thing to check. And key features would sit for weeks or months, waiting for everyone in the org to sign off on them. So even with a massive lead, we were behind on features within about 18 months.

Before this current employer, I worked for a startup that has no commitment to an idea but instead generated things and then asked the government to fund them. The idea was tried until the government money ran out and then we moved onto the next idea. No amount of traction was worth either dilutive financing or committing the company’s own money. We could have paying customers, but they wanted bootstrapped from the beginning but with only employees.

And this permeates our economy. Businesses here invest the least in employee productivity. People join entrepreneurship accelerators to get something on their resume to work for RBC.

That’s not congruent with a lot of the tech world.