With the new H1B restrictions, the 2016 debate about Silicon Valley startups moving HQ to Canada was abruptly reopened. Our team actually looked at 10 years of data and moving HQ to Canada never happened. What actually happened is much more interesting. 1/ https://twitter.com/mattturck/status/1275230280366907392

Instead, founders kept their HQ in the Bay Area and aggressively set up offices or remote teams up north. In 2017, the pace picked up to 1 Canada office opening per month. Last year, that pace doubled to 1 opening every two weeks. 2/

Pre-2016, of 11 companies that opened a Canadian engineering office, only Slack, PagerDuty, Wish, AppDirect and Mattermost did it early. All 5 were founded by Canadians in the Valley. The other 6 were established by late-stage startups. 3/

Since 2016, the appetite has come from early and late-stage startups alike. Lead hypotheses: Canada's liberal immigration policy, stronger awareness from SV recognizing the quality of Canada's eng talent, better tooling, saturated talent market in SV... 4/

You might also assume that most of these companies had Canadian co-founders. Why would you build an engineering presence where you have no advantage over your competitor to effectively tap into top local talent networks? Surprisingly, that's increasingly not the case. 5/

Part of the reason is that service providers such as @JoinTerminal, @commitdev and others are paving the way for "Canadian remote eng office as a service" and government agencies such as @Toronto_Global have helped SV founders quickly figure this out. 6/

No evidence moving HQ cross-border happened or ever made sense. What happened is what I refer to as "functional talent arbitrage". The center of decision-making for Sales, Marketing, Product and BizOps remained in the Bay Area, with these companies' HQ. 7/

But the center of gravity for software engineering talent has clearly shifted out of the Bay Area for these Silicon Valley HQ'ed startups. Canada was the top choice for these 68 companies to build a remote engineering team. 8/

3 out of 4 startups picked Toronto to set up shop and founders locally are both feeling the effects of increased competition for talent and realizing that to be successful, they too need to attract talent on a global scale. 9/

We've seen many success stories of Canadian startups hiring 100s of engineers and getting visas via Global Talent Stream. In 2017, one startup worked hand in hand with the Canadian gvt to issue over 300 visas for engineers and their families, all within 6 months' time! 10/

We're making this data public and will update it a couple of times a year. Submit edits and comments if we missed anything. 11/ https://www.notion.so/inoviacapital/Silicon-Valley-Startups-Opening-Offices-in-Canada-5c6c12f579d1405e98c7cecf1df02a86

Lastly, we've helped a few companies on this list (not just port cos) get started. We're building a set of dedicated services to help founders and H1B holders get set up in Canada or the UK where we have offices. If you're thinking about this, just reach out @Inovia. end/