I’ve been thinking about Toronto. It’s almost 4 years since TorCamp and the first DemoCamp. The tech scene has changed significantly since I first posted BarCamp Toronto in September 2005. People are paying attention to Toronto. Just look at the past few weeks, we’ve had Dave McClure, Steve Ballmer, Hugh MacLeod, First Round Capital, Dharmesh Shah, Joel Spolsky, Yossi Vardi and others all in Toronto. There something going on here.
There are startups. They are raising money. They are hiring. They are doing great work. Have you checked out:
- Polar Mobile
- Crowd Science
- Rypple
- DayForce
- FreshBooks
- Well.ca (yeah, yeah, I know their based in Guelph not Toronto)
- Viigo
- AdParlor
- Thoora
- FixMo
- Bumptop
- BackType
- LearnHub
- Oanda
- Idee
- Fonolo
- PagerDuty
- Varicent
- ecobee
- Assetize
- Chango
- Agoracom
- enomaly
There are a ton of startups in Toronto. We have new corporate venture funds, there are incubator programs, there is something in the water. The best part is that there are great companies in Montreal, Vancouver, Waterloo, Ottawa (all across the country really, I’m looking at you Radian6 in Fredericton). It’s be a great four years since the start of this community thing in Toronto. Canada has always been a great place to live. Now it’s starting to be a great place to be a tech entrepreneur.