Success isn't determined by where you are born, where you start your business but how far your ambition takes you. Great reminder about encouraging entrepreneurs to support each other around communities :-)
After weeks of doom and gloom in the Canadian startup ecosystem. Harley Finkelstein’s enthusiasm on the BetaKit podcast was needed medicine 💊 . My thoughts and favourite bits: “Using Canada as an excuse for why you didn't get funding, you didn't get to hire the right person. And well, I think that's bullshit. I think that ultimately if you have a great business and you have great ambition and you have a great team and you have a great company, people are going to want to work for you and people are going to want to invest in you.” Too many folks blame Canada for their lack of progress, but for most software businesses, nothing stops you from also seeking better opportunities abroad. Foreign investors and customers don’t care that you’re in Canada if you are providing true value. If investors in the Canadian ecosystem frustrate you, find others who can deliver and prove your point. In my time at Rewind, our most direct competitors were based in Poland and India, not the US. Did our customers care that we were Canadian? No! They wanted the best solutions for their needs. Another nugget I loved: “Stop comparing ourselves to the U S.... We are a different country. We make different choices. Let's just be Canadian, own that. There's so many good things that come from that.” It’s hard to not compare ourselves directly to our neighbours to the south. They dominate so much of the media and startup culture both in Canada and globally. There are advantages to being right next door, in a tighter-knit ecosystem, with unique strengths, languages, and an outsider perspective while working in a shared North American (and global!) market Don’t let the comparison to the big US market be your limitation. We can still win on a global scale - many businesses have and many more will
If what you are saying is true than Californians and New Yorkers just work harder than everyone else and that's why they get the money. It's ridiculous - the risk factors in NY/Cali are unlike anywhere else. There they give you money to build stuff, in Canada you build a company and then get investment.
I hope Dan never stops making videos. He explains things so well and cuts through hype like a hot knife through butter. I always feel informed after watching his videos, not just convinced.
I feel like Dan's process is metaphorically an anti-gold prospector during the gold rush. Crouching by the shallow shore of the muddy river. Occasionally tossing a bunch of sediments from a metal pan. Only to stand up after months and tell us not only that all of that was 99% fools gold, but the shovel sellers have formed a cartel and purposely sell shoddy shovels. And as the gold rush sort of collapses on itself (I wonder why?) he just wonders off and crouches near another river
Tobi proposes at the end the German style of corporatism…except that hasn’t driven much more entrepreneurism in that country. But given that Canada has half the GDP of California, I guess it’s worth trying.
he says about only 2.4% gdp growth for last 8 years, I am wondering if he actually means 2013-2014 before gdp flopped a lot. Because for last 8 years gdp per capita has definitely been growing more than 2.4% unless my source is wrong
I think most of us would feel ok about paying this increase in taxes if we had any confidence that the money was being spent effectively to create outcomes
Marc's manifesto is self-contadictory because it cites Hayek's armchair theorizing about an alleged "knowledge problem" as a permanent limit on man's abilities. Marc is just carving out a probably contingent exception to his wish list of science-fictional ambitions, when that just shows he has read a lot of libertarian propaganda without thinking about it critically.
hold on, who still trusts coinbase these days? dude, they're swimming in lawsuits from all over the world and they call themselves compliant? gotta wonder what canada was thinking approving them at this point lol.
Who in Canada will use Coinbase though? Their system bogs down every time the market is moving too fast and its in the expense of your users. Looots of people lost their money already because of their incompetency. 🙄
I always appreciate Dan's backround in theology and history. The bit about people labelling others on the internet as sin eaters they can use and abuse is very eye opening. Humans are incredibly good at thinking better technology fundamentally changes who humans are, but that is such a falsehood. Sin eaters were used in towns as a way to clear people of their sins so they could go to heaven if they died unexpectedly. The fact that people can kind of use them in a similar way to get all of their frustrations out, and then maybe go about their days without a thought that another real person read that vitrol is fascinatingly sad to me.
Canada is way too comfortable being in the shadow of the US. Also, Canadian policymakers are stuck in a different era - there is global competition and this country is steadily becoming less attractive on a daily basis but instead of implementing changes that are necessary for this country to thrive we are stuck with the the same old.
