I was reading a report from the investment firm LetkoBrosseau, which highlights how minimally the Canadian pension system is investing in Canada. Their headline caught my attention:

“Canada Has Cut Back On Investing In Its Greatest Asset – Itself.”

Canadian pension funds largely invest our money outside of Canada. Given Canada’s population size, it’s not unreasonable for our pension funds to look abroad, but the pendulum may have swung too far. That’s a topic for another day, however.

One particular slide, slide 4, jumped out at me, presenting several not-too-fun facts:

• Canada’s GDP per capita has steadily declined to 75% of that of the United States, down from near parity 40 years ago. One of the main reasons is Canada invests substantially less in our own startups, R&D, and our workers.
• In 2023, American investment per worker is 2.25x that in Canada. It was near parity 40 years ago.
• In R&D intensity (the ratio of a country’s R&D expenditures to its GDP), the US is at 3.5, Japan at 3.3, Germany at 3.1, the G7 average at 2.6, France at 2.4. Canada lags at 1.9.
• Canada is underinvesting in its own startups: For every dollar Canada invests in venture capital, Israel invests $2 (despite Israel’s economy being a quarter the size of Canada’s), and the US invests $39. This means that on a per capita basis, Israel invests 8 times more than Canada, and the US 4 times more.
• Moreover, Canadians only provide about 33% of the funding for their own startups, with the remaining 66% coming from other countries. At Wattpad, we observed a similar ratio. Our largest investors were Union Square Ventures (NYC), Khosla Ventures (Silicon Valley), OMERS (Canada), August Capital (Silicon Valley), and Tencent (Asia). As you can see, most of them are not Canadian, highlighting a limited appetite for investing in our own innovative ventures.

But it’s not just about pension funds. The awareness and appetite to invest in venture capital as an asset class are significantly lower among family offices and endowments in Canada. For example, in the US, it’s not uncommon for university endowments to allocate over 20% to VC. In Canada, many are at zero or in the low single digits.

But it all depends on whether you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty person.

I’m a glass-half-full person. This is clearly a market gap, and market gaps create opportunities.

A decade ago, when Wattpad began raising capital from Silicon Valley, Valley VCs didn’t ask me ‘if’ I would move the company there; they asked ‘when.’ I told them, ‘I won’t move.’ They were all surprised to hear from me that building the company in Canada would be far better due to less competition for talent, paradoxically allowing us to hire and retain top talent more easily. Wattpad was one of the first to commit to scaling our company in Canada, successfully proving (to them) that a world-class tech company could be built here (obvious to me). The Wattpad team played a part in reshaping the narrative of Canada’s innovation ecosystem.

I am very committed to doing it again. This time, I’m not convincing people in the Valley that Canada is great; I’m convincing Canadians that Canada is great! My goal is to encourage more attention towards VC as an asset class. As a VC myself, I’m putting my money where my mouth is, and I will let our results speak for themselves. For many decades, Americans and Israelis have known that investing in top-tier VCs can help create world-class, iconic companies, benefiting their local economies significantly while also generating consistent, outsized returns. Canada can undoubtedly do the same.

This is my last post of the year. I’ll be “off the grid” until the new year, recharging for what promises to be a super busy 2024. Happy holidays!

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