People often assume startups are built in Canada by default. That founders stayed because it was easy, or because they couldn't make the Bay work, or because they just happened to be here when they started the company. The truth is more layered than that.

The co-founding team grew up here, in Canada. We went to Waterloo. We moved to the Bay. We built careers at companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Rippling where the expectation was that this is where serious technology gets built, and anything outside of that orbit is somehow a concession. When we decided to come back to Toronto and build Measure here, it was a deeply personal decision first, and a strategic one second. But what surprised us is how much the strategic case made itself over time.

I want to take a deeper dive into what building in Canada actually looks like, because I think the conversation is usually either too rosy or too dismissive, and the reality is more interesting than either version.

We came home first, the advantages revealed themselves after

The initial pull was emotional. Our families are here. We grew up here. We wanted to be around for the people who matter to us as they get older, and we wanted our kids to grow up with the same roots we had. That's not a business case. That's just life.

But once we started actually building the company, we uncovered advantages we hadn't fully appreciated. The Canadian government has put real infrastructure in place for technology companies through programs like SR&ED and IRAP, funds that give early-stage companies a genuine runway without forcing you to hand over large chunks of equity before you've even figured out what you're building. For a self-funded company like Measure, where we've been intentional about not raising capital just for the sake of raising capital, that kind of support matters more than people realize.

And then there's the currency math. We build in Canada. We run Canadian payroll. We hire talent here and create jobs here, and we get meaningful tax and government incentives for doing so. And then we sell to customers in the US, the UK, and Australia, markets where SaaS products command a strong premium in currencies that work drastically in our favor. That exchange arbitrage isn't a minor footnote. It's a structural advantage that compounds every single month.

The talent is better than the reputation suggests

This is the thing I want to be most direct about, because I think there's a persistent and outdated assumption that if you want world-class engineering talent, you have to be in San Francisco.

When we were building teams at Dropbox, there was a huge push to build remote teams and move talent out of the core centers like New York, Seattle, and SF. Even back then, I was recruiting engineers in Canada, and I could see the raw talent was there. But the ecosystem around that talent was not. There weren't enough startups to absorb them, not enough equity being offered, not enough career paths that let someone go from new grad to director without eventually having to move to the US to take the next step.

That's changing. Not overnight, and not completely, but meaningfully.

What I didn't expect was just how untapped the Canadian talent market still is. There's this incredible pool of people who went to Waterloo, UofT, UBC, and other strong programs, who are brilliant and available in a way that equivalent talent in SF simply is not. Half of Waterloo's graduates end up in the Bay, and the ones who stay or come back are often doing so because they want to build something here, which means they come with a motivation that goes beyond the paycheck.

And honestly, the base skills are at par. I wouldn't call out Canadian engineers as better or worse problem solvers than what I saw at Dropbox. The difference is something softer. There's a Canadianness to how our team operates. We're kind. We're thoughtful. We're proactive in a way that's less about hustle culture and more about genuine care for the people we work with and the customers we serve. That's not a platitude. It shows up in our support interactions, in our implementation calls, in how our customers describe working with us. It's a real differentiator, and it's one we didn't have to train for because it's just how people here are wired.

The math, because dollars matter

I want to give the real numbers here because the conversation about Canadian talent costs has changed dramatically over the last decade, and a lot of the conventional wisdom is stale.

Ten years ago, when I was recruiting for Dropbox in Canada, salaries here were easily 50% less than the Bay. It was a brutal discount. Engineers who wanted to stay in Canada were looking at 30 to 50% pay cuts in both raw salary and equity value. That was a difficult choice for talented people, and a lot of them understandably decided it wasn't worth it.

COVID changed the math significantly. Remote work leveled the playing field in ways that are hard to overstate. Today, the salary gap has compressed to something more like 10 to 20%, depending on the role and stage. Startup salaries are always a different equation because of the equity component, and that's another area where Canada has shifted. Canadian companies used to give out almost no equity, even to full-time employees. Stock options were something you got when the company was public, not when it was 10 people in a room trying to find product-market fit. That has changed with the influx of capital and the growing understanding that competitive equity packages are how you keep the best people from getting on a plane.

So the cost advantage is real, but it's not the 50% arbitrage it used to be. What's real is the combination of the salary gap plus the currency exchange plus the government incentives plus the quality of life. Stack all of those together and you have a real, compelling economic case for building here.

Selling to the US from Canada

We have many customers that are US-based B2B SaaS companies. Does it matter that we're Canadian?

Honestly, not really. The language barrier is nonexistent. The time zone difference from Toronto is negligible. Someone would really have to look hard and twice to realize they're buying from a Canadian company, and in our experience, most buyers simply don't care where our team operates. What they care about is whether you understand their problem, whether the product works, and whether you're going to be there when something goes wrong.

And this is where being a Canadian company actually helps. In a world where it's getting easier to spin up products with AI, the human relationships in the sales process, the support experience, and the implementation - those matter more than ever. We keep hearing from customers that working with us feels different. They use words like "easy to work with" and "they actually care." That sprinkle of kindness, the genuine desire to earn every dollar before we take it, I think that comes from a place that's fundamentally Canadian. We're programmed to operate that way. It's not a customer success strategy we learned at a conference. It's just how we were raised.

I'll also say this: there are nationalistic waves happening everywhere right now, and we've actually seen that work in our favor. Canadian companies have been choosing to buy Canadian products, and that tailwind has been meaningful for us in ways we didn't anticipate when we started.

Measure’s pricing philosophy is part of the same mindset

This might seem like a tangent, but I think how we price Measure is actually an expression of the same Canadian sensibility.

We start at an approachable price of $500 a month, with the full platform unlocked from day one. We're transparent about the ramp, and what you'll pay in year two and year three. We don't lock you into a three-year contract. We don't gate features behind enterprise pricing tiers. We don't try to have the pricing conversation before we've even shown you the problem we solve.

That philosophy of wanting to earn the dollar, of wanting to show value before we take it, is something our customers have called out again and again, especially in a market where the norm is opaque pricing, surprise overages, and vendors who extract maximum revenue at the exact moment you're most dependent on them. We think about pricing the way we think about relationships: be honest about what it costs, deliver more than what you're paying for, and trust that the math works out over time.

Canadian tech companies I admire

When I look at the Canadian tech landscape, I see a wave of companies that make me genuinely proud to be building here.

Cohere is setting the bar in the AI space, and it's not a coincidence that so much of the foundational work in AI and computation emerged from Canadian universities and research labs. The talent base that produced that work is the same talent base we're all drawing from, and seeing a company like Cohere compete at the highest global level from Canada validates something that should have been obvious all along: the people here are world class.

Shopify is the ultimate Canadian story. Someone starting from their bootstraps and building something that scaled to where it is today. That story matters because it proves the whole cycle works, from founding to IPO to creating a "mafia" of operators and investors who go on to fund and build the next generation.

Spellbook and Clio are doing incredible things in legal tech, a space that had barely been touched by technology until recently. Float and Venn are building strong products in finance. These companies matter not just for what they're building, but for the ecosystem they're creating. Every one of them is a proof point that you can build a serious, global technology company from Canada.

The moonshot gap (and why it matters)

If a technical founder asked me today whether they should build in Canada or move to SF, I wouldn't give them a simple answer, because it really depends on what they're building.

If the idea is something so technologically novel that it needs many years to prove itself, something that requires network effects at massive scale, something that needs visionary capital and a willingness to take enormous bets on uncertain outcomes, I would tell them to go to the Bay. As much as it pains me to say it, Canada's VC ecosystem has not yet reached the point where we consistently make moonshot bets. The Valley has proven that capability time and time again, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But if you're building a profitable business in a known space with an underserved market, if you have an execution strategy that's scoped and tangible, if you're the kind of founder who wants to build something real without burning through capital trying to find product-market fit, there are massive advantages to building here. The cost arbitrage, the talent quality, the quality of life, the government support, and honestly, the ability to just sit in your garage and code with Claude without needing to justify a $15,000 a month SF office lease.

What needs to change to attract more builders in Canada

For building in Canada to become the default choice rather than the backup plan, I think it comes down to outcomes.

We need more long-term companies built here. Not just startups that raise seed rounds and get acqui-hired, but companies that scale to hundreds of millions in revenue and create wealth that stays in the country. That wealth is what funds the next generation. The Shopify mafia, the Cohere mafia, the Clio mafia, eventually the Spellbook mafia. These networks of accomplished people who feel the pull to keep capital here and reinvest it into the next wave of companies.

And for that to work, the companies being built here need to offer real career paths. A new grad should be able to start as an engineer, grow into a manager, become a director, and eventually reach the executive level without ever having to leave the country. That only happens when companies here have enough scope and ambition and longevity to support that kind of growth. Right now, too many talented people still hit a ceiling where the next step is a flight to San Francisco.

The capital environment is getting better. YC is taking more Canadian companies. US investors are more willing to put money into Canadian entities. A lot of the structural barriers that used to exist are coming down. But I think we're still in the early innings of building the kind of self-sustaining ecosystem where staying in Canada is the obvious choice, not the compromise.

Continuing to build Measure in Canada is an easy decision

I started by saying the decision to build in Canada was personal first and strategic second. After several years of doing it, I'd say it's become both in equal measure.

The structural advantages are real and they compound: the talent, the cost, the currency, the time zones, the government support, the culture of care that shows up in every customer interaction. But the thing that makes it work is that we actually want to be here. We want to build something in the country that built us. We want to create the kind of company that gives the next generation of Canadian engineers a reason to stay.

That's not a sacrifice. It turns out it's one of the best decisions we've made.

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