Much like the US, the regulations and culture varies depending on which province (state) you're in, so someone starting a business in Alberta could have a very different experience than someone in Ontario.
You can still run a company from Canada under these terms, the same way every international YC batch company runs --- you can just go to the YC directory and select for EMEA, LATAM, APAC, &c. There's hundreds of them.
Since this is purely about ownership structure and equity governing law, I'm curious what the intersection you're seeing between these terms and "labour rights" are. We're a US company with employees in Europe (not even an HQ in Europe, just employees there), and I've learned more about European labor law idiosyncracies over the last few years than over the whole rest of my career, because I've had to.
> You can still run a company from Canada under these terms, the same way every international YC batch company runs
Having a Canada-registered company is usually required to get government grants and loans from Canadian banks, although that's probably not very important to VC-backed companies. There are also some tax advantages to running a Canada-registered company if you're based out of Canada, plus it's much easier to find a local professionals (lawyers, accountants, etc.) familiar with Canadian corporations than US corporations.
None of these issues should cause too many problems, but if given a choice, as a Canadian I'd certainly prefer to run a Canada-registered company over a US-registered one.
I'm sure a lot of British people want to run UK-registered companies! I'm not saying Canadians wouldn't rationally prefer to have the option of taking investments in a Canadian corporation, just that it doesn't look like there's a lot more to this than details for your finance person, and that it's the same deal every other country gets.
Read the thread: clearly a lot of people are reading this as "you can't HQ in Canada, your team has to move".
Right, I agree with you that where the business is incorporated has essentially zero bearing on where its HQ is, where it can operate, hire staff, etc.
But I think that it counts for a little bit more than just "details for your finance person", since the tax and grant eligibility implications could mean that some startups would be better off incorporating in Canada and not taking the Y Combinator money. But if you're taking the VC funding route (which most applicants to Y Combinator are), then I agree that none of this should really matter very much.
> We're a US company with employees in Europe (not even an HQ in Europe, just employees there)
I don't think that's true. You can't have employees without a local subsidiary. If you're going through an EOR agency, they're contractors not employees.
> Our provinces have fewer rights, powers and responsibilities than US states.
It's complicated. In theory, US states have more rights and powers ("The powers not delegated to the United States [...] are reserved to the States" [0]), but in practice, the Commerce Clause lets the Federal government do essentially anything that it wants. Canada's provinces are only given control over a specific set of topics [1], but their powers are almost absolute in these areas, since the courts almost never let the Federal government interfere.
So for labour code specifically, US companies need to adhere to both Federal and state labour codes, while Canadian companies only need to follow a single provincial labour code. (There is a Canadian Federal labour code, but that only applies to Federally-regulated companies, and those companies don't need to follow the provincial labour codes)
Again: what does any of this have to do with labor laws? I get that you're just responding to the comment there, but you kind of started this thread with your "you know, YC" thing, and it's still totally unclear what any of this has to do with operating a company in Canada. You can still operate YC companies in Canada!
Ah, see. Here's the problem. Yes: you misread the OP. You've misunderstood what's happening here. YC still funds Canadian startups. They don't have to move. They retain their Canadian HQ. Their operations remain in Canada.
Neither is the UK, Germany, Spain, or India, all places with with YC companies in them. None of those locales have ever been in the standard YC deal terms.
What founders in Europe (say, in the Netherland, where YC invested in Servo7 in the W26 batch) do to accept funding from YC is a "flipped structure": they create a new Delaware Corporation, which then acquires the original company and runs it as a subsidiary. The founders retain the same ownership of the new DE company as they would have had they been in the US. Literally nothing else changes about the operation of the company.
This structure is so standard that Canadian YC companies already tended to do it. You've got Dan in this thread talking about how he and Scott did it with Skysheets back in the mid-aughts. Whatever else YC is OK with, future priced-round investors want companies incorporated in the US.
I'm sorry, but you were wrong; your analysis of what this change meant was based on a wildly false premise. The prospects of founders in Canada have not changed; the only thing that's changed is how the paperwork is managed if they are invited to a batch and accept.
The biggest benefit of the EU is the single market, but it's tricky to take advantage of that when Canada and the EU are 3000km apart from each other. The other potential benefits are relatively minor, and wouldn't really make up for all the potential downsides.
> Party leaders are picked internally by party members via leadership races
Correct.
> not by the general public. This is good because the leader is selected not by "Low Information Voters" […] but by people who have gone through a qualification filter
Not really. It's true that only party members can vote, but the only requirements to be a party member are to be a Canadian citizen and to not be a member of another party [0] [1], which is effectively the exact same requirements that the US primaries have.
I think the difference is that in the US all it takes is one pied piper because voters can vote directly to elect him president. In Canada, the pied piper is going to need more pied pipers under him to be elected as MPs.
> now I will only register an LLC if I can make at least $20k/month
That can be fairly risky depending on the type of business though, because an LLC gives you liability protection. Your strategy is probably fine for a B2C SAAS software business since there isn't much potential for liability there, but it would be really risky for any sort of business that operates in the "physical" world.
In places like Germany it's set up so they don't want you to have liability protection, they'd rather you don't do things that create liability. Is it different in America?
It's easy to avoid liability if you're selling a calculator app, but much harder if you're a plumber. Also, lawsuits tend to be more frequent and for higher values in the US than almost anywhere else in the world, so even relatively "safe" businesses are still somewhat risky.
Wikipedia makes it sound like forming a German business is quite expensive and time consuming [0], so I can certainly see why you'd want to avoid incorporating if possible there. But in Canada, it only takes an hour and a few hundred dollars to incorporate (random example [1]), so it's usually worth the effort/cost unless the business is tiny.
An invasion from who? I agree with you that Canada couldn't defend against an invasion from the US, but I also don't think that any country without nuclear weapons could defend against an invasion from the US. But I think that Canada could probably defend itself from an invasion from most other countries—the Canadian military is generally competent, and NATO and NORAD would almost certainly offer assistance.
Even then, who would want to invade Canada? Despite the recent political blustering, it seems incredibly unlikely that the US would invade Canada, and the only other plausible invader that I can think of right now is Russia, but their military isn't doing very well at all right now.
If the threat model is "the US goes rogue and does crazy stuff", Canada is a prime risk of suffering from such madness, so moving your resources there doesn't really change anything.
Agreed, but I'd argue that there's a big difference between the US making it difficult to access gold reserves stored there and invading/blockading Canada to the point where gold reserves stored there are unusable. The first seems unlikely but possible, while the second seems almost unimaginable, and even if the second does happen, I'd be more concerned about access to food/medicine than access to gold reserves.
(Although I'm Canadian, so this may perhaps just be wishful thinking on my part)
I agree with your general point that most companies/projects do a terrible job optimizing for slow computers/networks, but OpenSSH is from the OpenBSD people, who are well-known for supporting ancient hardware [0]. Picking a random architecture, they fully support a system with only 64MB of memory [1], and the base install includes SSH. So I suspect that OpenSSH is fairly well tested on crappy computers/networks.
I think that part of it is that relatively few people use bare-metal servers these days, and nested virtualisation isn't universally supported. I also found this technical critique [0] compelling, but I have no idea if any of it is accurate or not.
The majority of nanos users don't do either of these methods. They simply create the image (in the case of aws that's an ami) and boot it. This is part of what makes them vastly more simple than using normal linux vms or containers as you don't have to manage the "orchestration".
I don't really like VS Code either, but I personally use it because I tend to jump between a half-dozen semi-obscure languages, and VS Code is the only [0] editor that supports all of them.
[0]: Vim and Emacs have almost as good or slightly better language support, but I prefer GUIs over TUIs.
It's not very easy to use Metafont and its derivatives to produce a modern TrueType/OpenType font. Even the TeX Gyre fonts use FontForge [0] rather than Metafont.
reply