You should be more interesting.
Above all else, that’s what Montreal tells us. Toronto says we should be more important, and Vancouver that we should live better.
I’m borrowing a way of thinking about cities from Paul Graham, who co-founded the startup accelerator Y Combinator. In Cities and Ambition, he describes how a place tells its people what matters. New York, he says, tells you to be richer, Cambridge smarter, and Silicon Valley more powerful. By power, he means the ability to affect the world.
He notices these messages in ordinary things: what people admire, the books visible through their windows, and the conversations you overhear. A friend who moved to Silicon Valley complained to him about the quality of the eavesdropping.
I laughed, remembering a conversation I overheard at Saint Frank, a coffee shop on Folsom Street in San Francisco. Two people beside me were talking passionately about the cost of running AI, and I honestly couldn’t tell whether they were on a date or one was pitching the other a business idea. Maybe it was both.
Whatever it was, I’m rooting for them.
In San Francisco, AI would be my first guess for the conversation at the next table. At university in Montreal, I never knew where a conversation would go, which was one of the things I loved most about the city. There were so many ways to be someone you’d want to get to know. Perhaps what we had in common was an interest in what made each other different.
Toronto, meanwhile, expects the world to pay attention. I like its confidence that it should be a place the world comes to do business. Its selection to host the Canada Investment Summit seems fitting.
Vancouver likes to remind you how out of shape you are. “You really should be going for that 5 a.m. run,” it seems to say. I’ve only visited a handful of times, but knowing I could ski in the morning and paddleboard in the afternoon makes me less inclined to brag about my Saturday triathlon: coffee, a breakfast burrito, and a sweet treat.
These are my impressions as a proud Canadian who now lives in Silicon Valley. You may hear something different in the same cities. The people we spend time with have a lot to do with the message we receive.
I’ve been encouraged by the energy going into what Canada can build. We’re describing ourselves as “more unified, more determined, and more ambitious,” and I’d like that ambition to become a lasting part of our culture.
If our cities can encourage such different ambitions, what should we encourage as a country?
For my part, I’d like more Canadians to develop technologies the world needs and build the companies behind them in Canada. Those businesses can create jobs and expertise here as they reach customers around the world. I’d also like Canadian businesses to use the best technology developed anywhere: it helps us create more value from the work we do, making higher wages and living standards possible.
Governments can set priorities, fund research, and influence where companies choose to build. We can encourage those ambitions by building communities where Canadians learn from one another and work on ideas together. What a research group or a community of entrepreneurs accomplishes helps shape what others consider possible. The whole city needn’t share the same ambition. Montreal can be a place where AI matters deeply without becoming a city where everyone talks about AI.
In Silicon Valley, building a technology company that changes the world has become a familiar ambition. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Apple, and Google all came out of one stretch of Northern California. Any one would be an extraordinary company for a country to have produced. How did the region become capable of producing them, generation after generation?
Before it was Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Its orchards supplied apricots and other fruit to markets far beyond California. Leland Stanford imagined the university he founded helping to make that trade more prosperous. “In the future we shall can this fruit and send it all over the globe in exchange for wealth,” he said.
Alongside the orchards, a radio industry was taking shape. In 1909, Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell set out to commercialise a wireless transmitter. The university’s president, David Starr Jordan, invested $500 of his own money in the venture that became Federal Telegraph. Engineering faculty helped finance it, too.
Radio was also catching the interest of local children. Charles Litton built his first radio set at ten. By the 1920s, a local radio club brought together farm boys, Stanford students, technicians, and retired executives. Members competed to reach distant stations and shared the techniques that helped them do it. An ingenious transmitter could earn its maker a reputation among people who understood the achievement.
In 1929, William Eitel was driving a grocery wagon when he asked radio manufacturer Ralph Heintz for work. When Heintz asked about his qualifications, Eitel replied, “I’m a radio ham.”
“Well, that’s good enough,” Heintz said. Within months, Eitel was running the company’s tube department.
Vacuum tubes were used to generate and amplify radio signals. Heintz’s company, Heintz & Kaufman, developed its own transmitting tubes after large suppliers, including RCA, refused to sell to it. Litton, working at another radio company, helped choose the glass and obtain materials.
In 1934, during the Depression, Eitel and fellow radio enthusiast Jack McCullough left Heintz & Kaufman to start Eimac, making tubes for other amateurs. Heintz declined to sue, even after the pair offered one of his customers cheaper tubes. In an oral history forty years later, he still called them “good friends of mine.”
Stanford engineering professor Frederick Terman also sought Litton’s help in establishing a vacuum-tube research lab. Litton’s $1,000 grant funded an assistantship for David Packard. Packard and Bill Hewlett, both former students of Terman’s, went on to start Hewlett-Packard in 1939.
By 1939, Eimac’s tubes were being used in Navy radar tests, and during World War II its employees worked around the clock to produce thousands of tubes a day. The company had found a market far beyond the radio amateurs it had begun by serving.
Defence and aerospace spending continued to support the region’s electronics industry after the war. Stanford began leasing land to technology companies through its industrial park, where businesses could work close to the university’s researchers.
Transistors could do much of the work of vacuum tubes in a far smaller device. In 1956, William Shockley, one of their inventors, opened a laboratory in Mountain View and recruited scientists and engineers from around the country. Within a year, a group unhappy with his management wanted to leave. They approached a New York investment firm hoping to find an employer who would hire them together.
Arthur Rock, an investment banker at the firm, suggested starting a company instead. Rock recalled spending months working through a list of 45 prospective corporate backers before someone suggested Sherman Fairchild, an inventor and industrialist who agreed to finance the venture. The eight employees who left Shockley to establish Fairchild Semiconductor became known as the “Traitorous Eight.”
They went looking for a better boss and ended up becoming their own.
Two of Fairchild’s founders, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, later left to start the chipmaker Intel. Other Fairchild employees started companies, too. So many businesses trace their origins to Fairchild that there’s an actual family tree.
By the 1970s, computer processors were small and inexpensive enough for hobbyists to build computers of their own. At the Homebrew Computer Club, enthusiasts gathered around card tables to compare designs and help one another with their projects. Steve Wozniak brought a computer he’d built, the Apple I, to show fellow enthusiasts. His friend Steve Jobs wanted to sell it. As they turned the computer into a business, Mike Markkula, a former marketing manager at Fairchild and Intel, invested and helped develop Apple’s business plan.
Other Fairchild alumni had established venture capital firms. Eugene Kleiner co-founded Kleiner Perkins, and Don Valentine founded Sequoia Capital. In 1999, those firms led a $25 million investment in Google, a company that had grown out of research at Stanford.
As technologies changed, founders could draw on a growing number of people who knew how to turn an invention into a business. Those relationships survived moves between companies, and by the 1990s, executives were joking that “people can change jobs here without changing car pools.”
I can’t help but think back to those orchards. Apple probably wasn’t the fruit Leland Stanford had in mind.
So what does this all mean for Canada?
Silicon Valley developed through a distinct combination of technological breakthroughs, military demand, universities, migration, and investment over more than a century. Trying to reproduce that history in Canada would be misguided, even if it were possible.
None of us can know with certainty which catalytic events lie ahead, or which technologies will offer the greatest opportunities. What we can know for certain, however, is that we’ll be better served if we help Canadians develop the knowledge and relationships to recognise those opportunities, and back and celebrate the people willing to pursue their wildest ideas.
Graham describes ideas as “one step upstream from economic power.” That’s one reason I’ve been encouraged by Canada’s effort to attract leading researchers. A leading researcher can give students a reason to study here and other researchers a reason to join them.
What began as Yoshua Bengio’s research lab at the University of Montreal in 1993 has grown into Mila, an AI research institute bringing together researchers from several universities. Its startup program gives founders a place to work alongside researchers and other entrepreneurs, with help recruiting technical talent and finding companies that could test what they’re developing.
Ted Livingston started the messaging company Kik while living in Velocity, a University of Waterloo residence. A $25,000 inheritance from his grandfather helped keep Kik going. When he was in a position to help other students, at just 23, he gave US$1 million through Velocity to fund $25,000 awards.
Student volunteers also launched Socratica, a community for projects ranging from engineering to art and poetry, and partnered with Velocity on a shared workspace. More than 2,500 students came to its 2025 symposium to celebrate what their peers had made.
These are only a few examples of what Canadians are making possible for one another. Across the country, there are communities where we can pursue our own ideas and help others with theirs.
Many of us here in Silicon Valley are eager to help. Leaving Canada rarely means leaving Canada behind. Through C100, where I serve on the board, we connect founders building in Canada with experienced technology leaders who can help them grow.
If Not Sorry were a city, I’d want it to tell us we have a hand in shaping Canada’s future—and help us find one another. I hope you’ll join us and tell me about a community doing work you admire.
The more people who can point to what they’ve accomplished in Canada, and to the people who helped them do it, the more convincing our country’s message becomes: