‘Let’s build another 15 Shopifys’: New head of leading incubator says moment is ripe for Canadian tech

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Canada needs to foster companies that can compete on a global scale if it wants to build a sustainable technology ecosystem, according to the incoming chief executive of one of the country’s top tech incubators.

Chris Albinson, a Canadian venture capitalist who has spent the better part of two decades in California, was on Monday named the next head of Communitech, the Waterloo-based incubator that has more than 1,600 member companies.

A Kingston, Ont.-native, Albinson helped build the C100 network in Silicon Valley, a who’s who of Canadian technology leaders who came together to encourage collaboration and growth.

“To have a healthy ecosystem, you need big trees,” Albinson said in a recent interview with the Financial Post. “We need more big trees, otherwise, when the storms come through, stuff gets wiped out.”

In Canada, that means more companies like Shopify.

Albinson says the time is especially ripe for Canada to establish itself as a formidable player, in part due to the pandemic. Remote work has caused some companies to set up offices outside of cities as talent, once concentrated in urban centres, now flee.

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“Everyone assumes that the Valley’s sort of a fixed (hub),” Albinson said, before pointing to Boston, which was considered the centre of innovation in the 1990s before the San Francisco Bay area stole the crown.

“There is no reason why Canada couldn’t be the global hub of innovation.”

In order to get there, Albinson says we need to aspire to build globally relevant companies that can sustain long-term growth, something that’s already happening.

“When I talked to Canadian entrepreneurs coast to coast … they want to build the next Shopify,” Albinson said.

People also tend to forget, he said, that a University of Waterloo graduate, Apoorva Mehta, started Instacart.

He sees businesses such as Clearbanc, a company that helps finance entrepreneurs, and ApplyBoard, a company that helps foreigners apply to Canadian universities, as signs that Canada’s tech space is ready to explode.

It’s doubly helpful that the ecosystem up north is more inviting than stateside because Canada has a better immigration system, there is access to global markets and capital and we’re leading in artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning, Albinson said.

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Those Canadian-grown companies, and many more, are building scale and establishing themselves in global markets, helping to build the country’s competitive edge. Albinson wants to do more of that.

While he was in California, he didn’t like that the tech space didn’t aim for noble pursuits. “How the technology was done, the ethos of it, it just didn’t feel like ‘Tech for good,’” he said.

Back home, he wants to focus on investing in intellectual property and “making sure that we’re able to build really great companies, with great technology that’s doing tech for good.”

Companies, however, will have to work hard to establish a company culture that makes its employees feel included and motivated about its mission.

He said Shopify has done all three: building global scale, developing strong intellectual property and creating an authentic work culture.

“Really, what is comes down to is let’s build another 15 Shopifys and I think we’ll have a really strong ecosystem that will sustain and build a lot of value for Canada for a long time,” Albinson said.

Albinson will start at Communitech in May.

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