Canadian operating culture and entrepreneurial culture have long been described as distinct. I’ve long held reservations about these cultural environments, particularly regarding the incubation phases.
Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about taking risks. You’re literally rewarded for your risk, and in a purely academic context, you’re rewarded for nothing else. Any property or labour invested in the endeavour is academically categorized as rent or wages, while profit is specifically reserved for risk.
The first mistake we make with many young Canadians is that we don’t sufficiently drill this into their heads. Typically, the overwhelming exercise is for them to think about a problem they personally experience and try to solve it. Problem-solving is beneficial, and becoming skilled at identifying problems is undoubtedly useful. However, there’s a profound lack of explicit bet-making.
Startups are bets on the future—an outsized wager on a particular outcome. While mathematically similar to gambling, the key difference is that the Expected Value is always supposed to be positive. Paul Graham’s recent criticism of a popular HackerNews post has reintroduced this concept to my perspective.
There are many reasons startups don’t thrive in Canada compared to the United States. The most obvious reason is simply that Canada isn’t the United States, and the second most obvious reason is that Canadians generally don’t take enough risks. I find these answers accurate enough and won’t try to propose a third. “Tall poppy syndrome” is also a relevant factor worth noting.
When I originally wrote this five months ago, I intended to offer a more personal and reflective view of why Canadians aren’t as effective at startup risk-taking as Americans. A lot has changed since then. Today, instead of emphasizing risk alone, I want to stress the importance of building for the future—a future that benefits the stakeholders you care about. This can and should involve enterprise risk, because if an endeavor isn’t risky, it’s either useless or already built.
More importantly, it takes personal risk to commit your life to a future that might not materialize. One of my pet peeves is that Canadian university faculty don’t embrace this approach as consistently as their American counterparts. Barely anyone outside leading research labs has a ten-year research vision, some outsized risk they’re uniquely positioned to tackle. This may sound incredibly obvious, and anyone who’s spent time in startups recognizes it. However, it’s precisely the absence of this personal vision-oriented risk-taking that disadvantages Canadians. I argue this mindset is equally important as institutional or enterprise risk attitudes.
I don’t like betting ten years of my life on something. Rational individuals require genuine incentives such as fame, tenure, or financial reward to undertake such commitments. But if it increasingly appears to be the only meaningful path to impact, then let’s embrace it. Personally, I aim to build a Unified Model of Human Interaction. Not literally, but through centering human UX in everything I do. To me, this is the most crucial focal point at the AI frontier.