In the last two years, I’ve sat separately with Iain Klugman and Gerry Pond and listened to their divergent views on developing start-up communities in Atlantic Canada.
Klugman, the CEO of the Communitech accelerator in Kitchener, Ont., said in a recent interview that we should look at Halifax, not Atlantic Canada, as a start-up community because such a community has to be “something you can get your arms around.” He added that Atlantic Canada could have several communities, but they should be more localized than one big regional family.
Pond, the celebrated New Brunswick-based investor and tech advocate, has said repeatedly that the four provinces are too small to develop start-up infrastructure on their own and must work together. He’s so adamant on this point that he doesn’t like reporters highlighting what city a start-up is based in.
So we have two titans in the field with vastly conflicting views on how we should develop the Atlantic Canadian start-up community. With the greatest of respect to both experts, I agree with Gerry Pond that we have to develop a regional start-up community.
Every community is unique, and the start-up players in the Atlantic provinces face the same challenge: developing globally competitive companies in an uncompetitive economic environment. They all have to sell products and raise capital in distant places, and they all have to attract talent to a corner of the world with limited financial opportunity.
Atlantic Canadian entrepreneurs can best solve these challenges by coming together and sharing their collective brainpower, capital, facilities, and networks. In particular, the collaboration will help overcome these three important factors:
- Converting start-ups into companies. Atlantic Canada has had incredible success at seeding companies in the last two years, and now it must develop dozens of two- to five-person entities into bona fide companies. This process involves mentoring entrepreneurs so they grow from founders to CEOs, developing corporate structures, and finding specialized talent to staff key positions. No single province in the region has the know-how or talent pool to accomplish this, so we have to work together.
- International sales. Maybe the biggest need as we move from start-ups to companies is the development of teams that can sell innovation around the world. Pond likes to say that one sale in China could be better than sales in all of Canada, but there are no Atlantic Canadian tech salespeople experienced in Asian markets. If just one post-secondary institution offered training in this area, it would boost start-ups in all four provinces.
- Growing beyond Atlantic Canada. The East Coast community has to develop networks with the broader start-up and investment world in order to attract talent and capital to young companies and find customers for our products. Networks amplify exponentially. So if someone from Nova Scotia builds contacts in a foreign market, everyone that person knows in Atlantic Canada benefits. By enlarging the community to encompass all four provinces, we can accelerate the process of breaking out of our northeastern shell.
What’s preventing the development of a regional community? The obvious answers would be geographic distances and ill will among the various provinces. But those aren’t barriers right now. It’s amazing how much time we’re willing to spend in the car to attend events in other provinces.
And yes, there are regional rivalries, but they aren’t a factor in the start-up community. There’s an uplifting willingness to work together and see the virtues of each other’s ambitions. The Atlantic Canadian start-up community should be an example to other industries, and certainly to the provincial governments.
It’s impossible not to respect what Iain Klugman has achieved in Kitchener–Waterloo, and I’m awestruck by Communitech. But in this debate, I’m with Gerry Pond.
