Colare's Nain Abdi explains why his generation considers the Valley their “launching pad”.
“Valley or Bust”.
This has been a common refrain among Canadian entrepreneurs for years, but lately it's become more of a rallying cry. New data shows that only a third of the “high-potential startups” created in 2024 will still be headquartered in Canada in 2025, and half of those companies will flee to the United States.
“At first we thought, 'This must be a scam,' because with the way things were going in Waterloo and Toronto, it seemed too fast.”
Nain Abdi
Pour
You don't have to be an entrepreneur to feel the pull of Silicon Valley, either: American tech workers earn on average 46 percent more than their Canadian counterparts.
Today on the BetaKit Podcast we talk to one Canadian entrepreneur who has gone dry. Nein Abdi, co-founder of the hardtech recruiting platform Pourrecently a third year student at the University of Waterloo; in this episode, he reveals what brought his company to San Francisco, what keeps it there, and what (if anything) might bring him back to Canada.
Nain's story clearly demonstrates these data. As a member of the culinary generation who has been working in the Canadian tech industry for over two decades, I must admit that it was heartbreaking to hear a young entrepreneur compare the speed with which he was accepted in the Valley to how he was treated in Canada.
At Toronto Tech Week, executives from Shopify, Wealthsimple and Cohere advised Canadian founders to:just say no'to leave Canada. Was this message too late?
Let's dig in.
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Recorded and edited Toronto Podcasts. Artistic image courtesy of Madhur Chadha via Unsplash.
