Canada's Problem Isn't Ambition

One of the more commonly-referenced differences between the US tech ecosystem and the rest of the world is that American founders are perceived as being more “ambitious” than founders from other countries. Investors and founders both inside and outside of Silicon Valley regularly discuss this topic:

Recently, the topic of Canadian ambition was brought to the forefront at a town hall hosted by Betakit to discuss Canada’s productivity crisis. At the event, Shopify founder Tobi Lütke spoke about Canadian innovation, government and policy, and his views on what should come next. One quote in particular seemed to resonate with the Canadian tech community and quickly made its rounds:

“I think ambition is a problem…Canada is a go-for-bronze culture, and that sucks.

No one wants bronze. Bronze is the thing you got because you didn’t get the gold. You’ve got to go for gold.

Why would you ever start a company in anything that isn’t in some frame of reference…the best product in the world?”

Tobi Lütke of Shopify speaking with Satish Kanwar at the Betakit town hall

As the founder of the largest tech company in Canada (and one of the most successful companies in the world), when Tobi Lütke speaks, people listen. And he’s been sharing his concerns about Canadian ambition for many years (I first heard him reference the topic at a Creative Destruction Lab event back in 2019).

The following week, I was on a Vancouver Tech Week panel and was asked about the topic. Do Canadian founders have a “go-for-bronze” mentality? My answer was immediate and clear:

“Ambition isn’t the problem. We have ambition.”

The longer I’ve been back in Canada, the more I’ve come to believe that complaints about the lack of ambition amongst Canadian founders is a red herring. In fact, I believe that Canadian founders are amongst the most ambitious in the world.

But if Canadians are so ambitious, why do we buy into the narrative of a “bronze medal mentality”?

Because to do otherwise would require us to accept an inconvenient truth: that the problem isn’t the founders, it’s the ecosystem.

It would require us to accept a fact that many Canadian founders have come to terms with over the years: in many cases, the best path to fulfill their ambitions involves leaving Canada.

Before I continue, let’s detour into another aspect of Canadian culture: our inability to take constructive criticism.

Like many Commonwealth countries, Canadians don’t typically communicate or give feedback in a direct manner. Unlike our neighbors to the south, who value concise and direct communications, Canadians typically perceive bluntness as rude. As a result, we couch our feedback in soft language and detours into adjacent topics (I lost this ability many years ago while living in the US 🙃).

One unfortunate result of this is that many Canadians are simply not accustomed to receiving direct constructive criticism. That lack of experience means that we tend to reject it — even when it’s both well-meaning and accurate. Case-in-point: a post that Alex Danco wrote back in 2021 about what he perceived as structural weaknesses in Canada’s tech ecosystem — factors that he believed would prevent the Canadian tech ecosystem from achieving it’s full potential.

I had only just moved back to Canada when Alex published this essay, but I distinctly remember reading it and thinking that almost everything he described matched what I had observed engaging with the Canadian tech ecosystem from the outside. Frankly, I didn’t think anything he wrote was controversial at all (other than maybe a slight over-obsession with the SR&D program). But soon, leaders from across the Canadian ecosystem were tripping over each other to make it clear how wrong Alex was and how he didn’t understand the “real” Canadian tech ecosystem.

At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around this reaction. It felt like someone had said to a runner, “Great job running that half-marathon. But the strategies you’ve been using so far aren’t going to work if you want to run a full marathon,” and the runner reacted by getting angry and screaming, “But you don’t understand — I used to only be able to run 5km!”

In America, this type of thoughtful, detailed feedback is viewed as gold. But not, apparently, in Canada. Even when it's unmistakeable that the post was written in the spirit of constructive criticism and that Alex is a ardent supporter of Canada’s tech ecosystem:

“It was a bit of a bummer writing this essay. It’s not fun to write about this systemic trap we’ve gotten ourselves into; especially because there are so many individually good people and startups and firms in Canada who are trying their best to do good work. This is a system problem.

My hope is that people in Canada reading this will realize that the problem facing us isn’t a lack of anything. The problem with our startup scene isn’t a lack of money, startups, investors, hustle, great universities, technical talent, or creativity…Canada is great and there’s a lot to be proud of here. But Canadian tech, specifically, can do better. I hope we do!”

Which brings us to the topic of ambition.

I believe that Canadian founders are amongst the most ambitious in the world.

Since the dawn of time, humans have travelled in search of more. And, in general, we encourage and support that. When children leave home to go to school or travel the world or move to “the big city” or to a new country, we are sad but proud. We lament our loss but smile for their futures.

When I left Canada in 2002 to attend grad school at Stanford, not a single person questioned my decision (including my advisor at SFU, to whom I had to renege on an offer I had previously accepted to be a PhD student in his lab). Instead, there was only encouragement and support: go forth and do big things and make us proud!

But that’s not how the Canadian ecosystem generally reacts when it comes to founders (and startups) moving. Especially if they’re moving to the US.

Instead of encouragement and support, we try to convince them that they can do it here. Instead of listening to their reasons for leaving, we argue that they don’t need to. Instead of praising them for their ambition and willingness to move to the place they believe will give them the greatest likelihood of success, we quietly criticize them and question their commitment to Canada.

Until, of course, they succeed — and then the revisionist history kicks in and we were obviously behind them the entire time.

There are two problems with this reaction:

First, we downplay the ambition required of all of the amazing Canadian founders who choose to uproot their lives (and often those of their cofounders and early employees) in pursuit of success. “The ambition of Canadian founders” becomes “the ambition of founders in Canada” in our collective discourse.

(I was an ambitious Canadian founder, yet I was never an ambitious founder in Canada.)

Second, we downplay the ambition required of all of the amazing Canadian founders who choose to stay in Canada and, in doing so, take on another challenge unrelated to that of their company: the challenge of improving their local tech ecosystem. Of course, to give credit for this ambition would be to admit that it exists. Which would mean admitting that there are weaknesses and limitations to the Canadian tech ecosystem…

I believe that Canadian founders are amongst the most ambitious in the world.

Let’s look at some numbers.

Since we’re focused on tech, let’s use raising venture capital as a proxy (a very, very bad one…but it’s all I’ve got 🤷‍♂️):

According to PitchBook, there are currently 4,007 active Canadian companies that have raised venture capital (likely a significant undercount if you read my recent post on why there is no such thing as accurate Pre-Seed valuation data). Let’s compare that to the UK, a tech ecosystem has broadly similar characteristics but with a larger population and GDP. In the UK, there are currently 9,580 VC-backed startups according to PitchBook.

So what?

Let’s look at expat founders in the US.

In the US, there are currently 1,189 VC-backed companies with one or more founders who attended a Canadian university. In other words, there are another 30% more VC-backed “Canadian startups” if we focus on who the founders are instead of on where they live.

What about the UK? According to PitchBook, there are only 1,091 VC-backed companies based in the US with one or more founders who attended a UK university.

As a data guy, I’m going to be the first one to admit that there are a whooooooooooooole lot of assumptions baked into the numbers above. But my point is simple: there are a lot of ambitious Canadian founders building companies outside of Canada.

And I promise they’re not going for bronze.

But neither are the founders who choose to build their company in an ecosystem that they know is missing key ingredients.

And every single tech ecosystem in Canada (and the vast majority around the world) are missing key ingredients — at least, relative to Silicon Valley. That’s not a criticism, that’s a fact.

So as we head into the Canada Day long weekend, let’s get rid of this red herring that Canadian founders aren’t ambitious and let’s celebrate, encourage and support them.

Let’s celebrate and support the founders who choose to build their companies in Canada despite the very real limitations of Canada’s still-emerging ecosystem. The founders who are putting a piece of their local ecosystem on their back and saying, “I want to make this better.”

And let’s celebrate and support the founders who choose to uproot their lives and relocate elsewhere in pursuit of their ambitions.

Because, at the end of the day, ambition was never the problem.

Want to learn more about the ambition required to build a global tech company in an emerging ecosystem? Read about the critical lesson in MySpace’s failure that is still relevant today.