Why Toronto might be the next Silicon Valley
When you think of well-funded and hyper-scaling tech startups with cracked engineers, the automatic assumption is that they're located in San Francisco, or sometimes even New York. But I had the privilege to visit and chat with Owen Gretzinger, Founding Engineer at Boardy (who raised $11 Million USD) in Toronto, Canada, not SF. Startups like Boardy are the answer to the question: "what if the next generation of builders in Canada didn’t have to leave?"
Is the Canadian Tech Job Market Cooked?
Unlike the stories you hear about a 13-year old Startup founder or an 11-year old Shopify (Cohere, and Wealthsimple) intern , you don't need to be a prodigy to succeed in Tech, even in Canada.
Owen just completed his Bachelors of Science (BSc) in Computer Science at McMaster University. A degree that currently has one of the highest unemployment rates. While this might be scary to some, in Owen's opinion, the job market is not "cooked"; and to illustrate this, we will follow how Owen joined Boardy as a Founding Engineer.
Owen learned the most about technology outside of the classroom. He explored full-stack development by building websites for fun, or game development by working on small Unity games. However the biggest catalyst for Owen was when he discovered hackathons, and how it shaped his future as a builder.
“During hackathons, failure is not an option. You have to ship no matter what… whatever roadblocks come up, you either power through them or find some workaround.”
He participated in hackathon after hackathon, and he posted the demos online even when they didn’t win. One of those demos; a scrappy 3D AI meeting assistant which he hacked together with what he calls a “super jank solution” completely changed the course of his career.
That post caught the attention of the Boardy team, who brought him on as a contractor. Within months, they offered him a full-time role and soon after he was leading the entire tech team as a new grad. In his words:
“If someone builds something useful, records a demo, and sends it to me… I’m going to consider that person.”
Boardy is a rapidly growing Canadian AI-startup, based out of Toronto, co-founded by Andrew D’Souza (former CEO of Clearco), Matt Stein, Shen Sivananthan, and brothers Ankur Boyed and Abhinav Boyed. They describe Boardy as an AI superconnector. Boardy democratizes networking by enabling everyone to get in touch with the right people. As a testimony, Owen shared:
“Boardy (even) introduced a founder to Marc Andreessen (co-founder of a16z)… and got them in front of him.”
Now, Owen is spearheading the development of Super Boardy, an internal AI tool that enables Boardy to be its own project manager- defining gaps in its capabilities and even going as far as writing features or bug fixes and implementing them autonomously. He stressed:
“You don’t even need to go to school. Just learn the skills, build cool stuff, and bring value.”
It's easy to dismiss his story as a lucky break, but Owen didn’t just break-in with a lucky résumé screening, or his parent's connections for that matter. His philosophy is both simple and radical: Build relentlessly. Share your work. Talk to strangers. A formula that provided him the opportunity to work on one of Canada's fastest growing startups. According to him:
"In tech you can be rewarded for exactly how much value you’re bringing.”
The "T" in Toronto Stands for Technology
There's a popular joke about The University of Waterloo being a feeder school for Y Combinator, the biggest and most prestigious Startup Accelerator in the world (giving birth to companies like AirBnB, Dropbox and Reddit among others). With such a close proximity to Toronto, our startup industry should be booming thanks to the density of talent in Waterloo, but instead we face brain drain as higher salaries in San Francisco seduce our talent away from Toronto.
The tides are beginning to change however, with Canadian-born companies like Shopify, Wealthsimple, and Cohere paying interns comparably to firms South of the border; we are seeing a dramatic change in the Toronto tech sphere. There is a chicken-and-egg dilemma with any Tech ecosystem. It takes talent to attract investors, and it takes capital to retain talent. However this assumes that your talent and investors are rational, but Canadian startups like Boardy and Venture Capital firms like Michael Katchen's (CEO of Wealthsimple) Simple Ventures are becoming increasingly irrational in where they choose to build.
“Canadians are becoming more patriotic about building here… it’s actually possible to start something in Toronto now.”
For years, Canada struggled to participate in that cycle. But today it feels different. With the success of the inaugural Toronto Tech Week, the rise of communities like TechTO, and academic partnerships like Shopify's Dev Degree and York University or Carleton University, and IBM's Digital Technologies and York University, talent is growing at levels this city hasn’t seen before. From Owen's perspective, having these communities is the key to accelerating tech talent:
“I didn’t realize what was possible… I wasn’t involved with any communities or groups. If I had a community like Socratica earlier, it would’ve inspired me to do that a lot more.”
Personally, I heard about Socratica during my last year of University from my friend Pranav who I met at my first hackathon HackWestern 11 in London, Ontario. Not long after, I moved to Waterloo for the first time, and attended my first Socratica co-working session. Here, I witnessed a developer who was building a Virtual Reality Rubik's Cube Solver, I met a photographer who demonstrated how she edits photos in LightRoom, spoke with a math student who was also pursuing Hyperpop music production, and many more passionate people. For me, Socratica was a stepping stone into the Toronto-Waterloo tech-scene, and in just one year, I've participated in over six Hackathons (...and won two), worked on building my own startup at the Laurier StartUp Lab, and re-invigorated my interest in technology and my optimism for Canada.
So, if you're new to technology and want to build something in Toronto but don't know where to start, all you have to do is attend a Socratica event, Shopify Builder Sundays, or any New Systems event. You'll meet passionate builders and tech nerds who can inspire and help you learn more. Canadians still uphold the stereotype of being much kinder than Americans, which could be part of our unique value proposition. But ultimately, to me, it feels impossible to name another city with this much passion and ambition- even if Toronto is only getting started.
“Canada is on an upward trend… you don’t need to go to SF to build something now.” - Owen Gretzinger
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no affiliation to Boardy