That's truly saddening. I hope there will be more VC backing in Canada because the talent is definitely there.

We in the VC, PE, and Growth Equity space invest using other people's money.

The people who have capital in Canada are uninterested in funding Canadian domiciled GPs - they mostly end up choosing American asset classes because of high returns.

Institutional investors like the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and CDQP tend to target asset classes outside of Canada due to their returns requirements being in the double digits range.

Edit: Can't reply

> TBF, the OTPP has a huge home bias - they’ve got more Canadian investments than they do US investments despite the market being less than a tenth the size

Huge by institutional investor standards but not in aggregate.

The majority of OTPP's assets are not in real estate [0] - out of $209B AUM, only $29.4B is invested in real estate globally.

Most of their Canadian assets are fixed income investments, and even then their overall Canadian assets are dwarfed by their transnational investments (primarily US and Asia).

[0] - https://www.otpp.com/content/dam/otpp/documents/reports/2024...

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Marsymars 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Institutional investors like the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and CDQP tend to target asset classes outside of Canada due to their returns requirements being in the double digits range.

TBF, the OTPP has a huge home bias - they’ve got more Canadian investments than they do US investments despite the market being less than a tenth the size.

They couldn’t target a higher proportion of Canadian assets while remaining reasonably diversified.

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garbawarb 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or Canadian real estate.

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4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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alephnerd 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most institutional investors limit real estate to around less than 5% of their portfolio.

	▲	Joel_Mckay 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not in Canada, the investment holding companies are leveraged 17:1 in some markets. Keep in mind the 2008 correction never happened in Canada. =3

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EGreg 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So what's the upshot? No Canadian VCs? I guess there's always ClearCo LOL

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alephnerd 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> No Canadian VCs

Pretty much.

Israel [0], China [1], and increasingly India [2][3] worked on resolving this issue by establishing funds of funds that partnered with private sector players by matching dollar-to-dollar with them to help build a VC ecosystem.

It's the same problem in the EU as well despite ECB proclamations. Heck, Norway's (ik not EU, it's EFTA) PIF has been conspicuously absent from any sort of statment of solidarity for Greenland unlike their Swedish, Finnish, and Danish peers because 25% of Norway's budget is dependent on the PIF maintaining double digit performance.

Edit: can't reply

> I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small [...]

Israel is even smaller than Canada - 9 million people versus 40 million - and the median Israeli remains poorer [4] than the median Canada [5]. That didn't stop Israel.

Size of home country doesn't matter. The only difference is vision (and moreso lack thereof amongst Canadian and European decisionmakers).

> I don't think an Israeli founder would have trouble moving to the US if they wanted to.

They don't. In fact, Israel had an India-style brain drain to the US until the 2010s.

Heck, a little over a decade ago I had acquaintances of mine in TLV seriously considering moving their entire family to Sunnyvale for a $150k base salary job instead of earning $90k. They ended up deciding to become founders instead.

> 900M in the EU

The EU only has a population of 450M people.

[0] - https://www.yozmagroup.com/overview

[1] - https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202512/26/content_WS694e4e56...

[2] - https://idtalliance.org/

[3] - https://rdifund.anrf.gov.in/

[4] - https://www.ynet.co.il/economy/article/bjn8ppfz2

[5] - https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/Tab...

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sbarre 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think our biggest problem in Canada is total addressable market is small.. We're 40M people (compared to what, 350M in the US, and 900M in the EU), and we're directly next door to the largest startup economy in the world.

So not only do we have fewer customers, we're competing against an economic juggernaut that shares our broad business rules, our culture and language (with one exception) and can market to us through all our media channels with very little friction.

So unless you're in health care or some other regulated field that a US startup can't just expand into easily, it's a tough go.

	▲	garbawarb 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Israel, like the parent poster said, is even smaller. I don't think an Israeli founder would have trouble moving to the US if they wanted to.