SAN FRANCISCO – Scattered papers and a handful of laptops sit atop a block of six desks pushed together in the middle of an office. The eight chairs around this workspace are mostly empty a few biodegradable coffee cups sit next to the laptops.
Two young guys in blazers cruise by, outfitted with iPhones and man-purses. They’re coming from a business meeting over pickerel tacos..
This, in a shared workplace called RocketSpace, could be any casual-cool digital office in Silicon Valley.
Except hanging over these desks is the Canada logo. Only blocks from Twitter’s headquarters, this is a Government of Canada office.
It’s part of the Canadian Technology Accelerator, a three-month government-run program to launch digital companies into Silicon Valley.
This is what the government has been doing for decades for the arts: exporting talent and seeing impressive returns come back onto Canadian soil. So it’s a welcome and progressive move to apply the same approach to our digital talent.
Thus far, the program’s been a success. In nearby Mission Bay, another incubator is planned, the fourth in the Bay Area, for Canadians in the white-hot health technology sector.
But like those arts programs, the Accelerator seems like perfect fodder for right-wing talk radio.
It is, after all, funded by taxpayer dollars. And the goal is to help emerging Canadian companies from places like Toronto make it in the Bay Area and beyond.
So I went to the downtown SF office space with all the cynicism of an angry YouTube commenter. I wanted to know, if these companies are working online, why can’t they just work from King and John? Why do they have to be in downtown SF, where the rent is somewhere in the vicinity of Barry Bonds’s salary?
“Proximity,” says Jay Parmar, at the Accelerator with his Saskatoon-based event management start-up Picatic.
This part of the country has about a third of all investment money in web business. The key is finding it.
The Canadians here point to meetings with Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, who responds to just about any email from an entrepreneur.
“You hear anecdotes about the executives who didn’t take these meetings, who didn’t have time to meet Mark Zuckerberg,” says Andrew D’Souza of Top Hat Monocle, a Waterloo company moving to King West soon. “Now they take those meetings.”
The point is, this part of the world is for the web what Wall Street is for bankers, the Vatican for Catholics and Ossington for 905ers.
As a micro-funder of these web start-ups via my tax bucks, I wondered what my return on investment is.
The benefit to Canadians is in the creation of a start-up economy here. Take BC company Summify, not part of the program but an example of how Canadians moving to the Bay Area bring cash up north.
Summify basically collected popular tweets and grouped them by subject. Twitter bought the company and moved it to San Francisco. Summify’s original investors – Canadians, one hopes – all get their dividends from the sale, money that goes back to Canada.
This sort of profit is incentive enough for other Canadian investors to put money down on other start-ups.
The more investment north of the border, the more a start-up ecosystem thrives in places like Toronto. And then more innovation.
Thierry Weissenburger, Canadian Consulate General and the brains behind the whole Canadian incubator idea, perhaps says it best.
“Innovation happens outside the box. And it’s about shaping the future. That’s the whole goal here.”
joshuae@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/joshuaerrett
