Shopify, Cohere, and Wealthsimple leaders reject the pull away from building in Canada at Toronto Tech Week.
Leaders from Canada’s most prominent tech companies kicked off Toronto Tech Week’s flagship Homecoming event with a simple message to founders in attendance: just say “no.”
Shopify president Harley Finkelstein, Wealthsimple founder Mike Katchen, and Cohere founder Aidan Gomez told the crowd at Toronto’s Evergreen Brickworks to say no to leaving Canada, no to selling out, no to the idea that Canada lacks ambition.
Finkelstein started the panel conversation by addressing the “600-pound beaver in the room,” referring to a comment he made at Elevate last year about Canadian ambition that sparked conversation across the tech ecosystem. On stage at Homecoming, Shopify’s president clarified that he believes Canadian founders do have ambition, but they need more.
“I hope all of us leave today with a little bit more of that energy, with more of that ambition,” he said.
Gomez, who agreed that Canadians are “exceptionally ambitious,” set his sights on the talent brain drain pulling ambitious Canadians outside of the country. The CEO of Canada’s most prominent AI company said, “It’s the Valley-or-bust mentality that breaks the ecosystem and really hurts Canada.”
“I had a deep nationalism: a loyalty to this country, to building here,” he continued. “It’s not enough to build a company for Canada, you want to build a company for the world in Canada.”
Finkelstein then polled the room, asking how many had left Canada and come back. Close to half the room raised their hands, while Katchen recounted how he returned to Canada himself because he was “deeply worried” about the trajectory of the country.
“Any sort of exit that would take us out of Canada is only if we fail, and we haven’t failed. I think acquisition is failure.”
Aidan Gomez
Cohere
“We do two things [in Canada]: we pull things out of the ground, and we finance pulling things out of the ground,” Katchen said. “We have a desperate need to build Canada and to really reshape our economy. The only way to do that is through entrepreneurship.”
“I feel that the box of Canada’s sovereignty has been opened and it can’t be closed,” Gomez added. “If we don’t strengthen our economy, if we don’t build a diverse supply chain, if we don’t build a diverse set of companies that don’t rely on just natural resources, finance or whatever, we will not be here in half a century.”
To do that, the tech leaders advocated for Canadian entrepreneurs to stay in Canada and build, resisting acquisition offers and investor pressure to move out of the country. Both Gomez and Finkelstein shared advice on not returning M&A calls from corporate development departments and rejecting term sheets requiring reincorporating in Delaware.
“All of our little bright lights that start—these ambitious Canadians who want to build a company inside of Canada—they get pulled,” Gomez said. “You need to start saying no.”
Both tech leaders offered this guidance from a place of personal experience, with Gomez sharing that he was “so grateful” Cohere had turned down a nine-figure acquisition offer in the company’s early days to stay in Canada.
“We’re not for sale. There’s a full belief in all three co-founders that we’re not done building,” Gomez said. “Any sort of exit that would take us out of Canada is only if we fail, and we haven’t failed. I think acquisition is failure; it’s ending this process of building.”
BetaKit is the official media partner of Toronto Tech Week. Feature image courtesy Jon Fingas for BetaKit.
BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.