Tech Nomads of the Universe

Into Canada

Canada has always been a place I hold dear, ever since I first moved there after my Japan post-doc days to continue my AI research work at the Canadian National Research Council. I had moved there as a landed immigrant, and as such, it became a new home for me for a few years before heading back to Silicon Valley.

Starting in 2016, I began diving into the Canadian tech ecosystem as well, having set up a base in Vancouver to grow the work I was doing at Xona and iValley.co, mostly in America and Asia to other regions, including Canada. Seen from afar, Canada looks like a daunting landmass: large and unconquerable, which to be fair, much of it is. According to a CBC study from 2009, 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the American border. Plenty of innovations and once-dominant businesses—Blackberry comes to mind—call Canada home. Fair or not, Canada is often eclipsed by its continent-mate to the south, particularly in terms of startup growth, tech investments, innovations, and infrastructure.

I caught up with four of my good Canadian friends, Boris Mann, Aranka Anema, Isabelle Paradis and Frank Rayal, and took a deep dive with them into the Canadian tech ecosystem.

Boris — People and community are the key

Boris moved to Vancouver in 2004 after working for Nortel in Ottawa, and he founded Canada's first blogging conference, Northern Voice. He also founded Bryght, the first commercial company built around the open source CMS, Drupal. He helped build the worldwide community for Drupal, including formalizing the non-profit Drupal Association and being involved in organizing all of the early in-person events, which were called Drupalcons. In Vancouver, they began with meetups of 8 people over dinner in 2004, but they soon became meetups of 80 people and up.

From open-source platforms, Boris soon moved on to mobile. He ran the second BarCamp in Amsterdam, participated in the wave of alternative tech conferences growth around the world, as examples of initiatives to jump-start some of the open source tech communities and technologies. After Bryght, he founded Bootup Labs, which was the first startup accelerator in Canada, back in 2008. Boris helped kick off many Vancouver-based entrepreneurial-focused meetups, training, and events to help grow the local community. "Launch Party" grew from a couple of hundred attendees to one thousand for the last one. A Romanian startup team they brought in became the genesis for creating Canada's federal Startup Visa program. He also ran Full Stack, an angel seed fund-plus for two years. He got involved with the National Angel Capital Organization, where he facilitated building out standardized early-stage investment term sheets for Canada.

Boris and I met in the spring of 2017, introduced by a common friend from my angel investors group. We had met at one of his favorite coffee shops, and was treated to one of his special fusion espressos. This would become a classic, as we would end up sampling unique coffee brews at most our meetings since then. I had come with a friend, met, and somehow within five minutes, Boris and I were deep in conversation, about tech, tech and more tech. We got to meet often after that, and every time we met, it was a fireworks display of tech ideas. I also ended up being an advisor to a blockchain startup he had co-founded, and that set us for even more late-night brainstorming sessions.

Boris points out that technology is cyclical, though once we hit the Internet Age, many things sped up, as noted by the law of accelerating change. Digital cycles are fast, and they bootstrap from previous cycles, but they are still cycles. Boris is roughly in his 25th year of being involved in tech, and he says he is just starting his third cycle, as far as tech and open source movement evolution.

"Only now do I have some perspective that helps me dig into the cycle," Boris says, "and where various aspects are at. I am only in my 13th year of understanding capital and investment, which has its own cycles that are partially linked to tech and innovation."