Techopia interviewed three tech veterans, each of whom began their careers in Ottawa but have since made the move to the U.S., to find out how they think “Silicon Valley North” matches up with the original.
Whether it’s to be closer to customers, other tech companies or investors, many Ottawa tech leaders have made the move south of the border to pursue their entrepreneurial careers. And most would agree that, while Ottawa and Silicon Valley share some traits, there is much to be learned from what is happening in other tech ecosystems.
Techopia interviewed three tech veterans, each of whom began their careers in Ottawa but have since made the move to the U.S., to find out how they think “Silicon Valley North” matches up with the original.
Raed Masri
Raed Masri is the founder of Transform VC, an early-stage venture capital investment and advisory firm based in San Francisco. He has extensive entrepreneurial experience in both the Ottawa and Silicon Valley tech ecosystems.
“I think Ottawa is a fantastic place, filled with talent that is sometimes completely under the radar. Ottawa has the same amount of pure talent as Silicon Valley,” he says.
But that’s where the similarities end. An entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, Masri says, is of such a “high stature” that investors are chasing them.
“That is the complete opposite of Ottawa, where there are too few investors and too few entrepreneurs,” he adds.
While Masri says that, during his early days in Ottawa, he took advantage of government support available to entrepreneurs, such as the self-employment benefits program, in Silicon Valley, instead of government support, there is a sheer critical mass of investors and talent, he says.
His entrepreneurial ambitions began while attending Carleton University, where he developed software for a website through which consumers could book an appointment with any service provider.
That eventually led Masri to found Eday Corporation, a software company, in 2001 with $20,000 in startup capital. Eday initially focused on management tasks, including items like bookings and client database, for hair salon clients.
“Later we invented SalonCanada.com, a website strictly for salons and spas, that exists to this day,” says Masri.
Eday subsequently expanded into telecommunications services, providing strategic and operational solutions to international clients, including large telecom operators.
Masri also founded a wireless telecom operator, SkySurf Communications in 2009, that became the exclusive national telecom operator for inflight Internet access across Canada.
Then, Masri moved to San Francisco in 2016.
After investing directly in several tech companies in the San Francisco Bay area, Masri founded Transform VC in 2019 to invest in early-stage startups from all over Canada and the U.S.
“As a venture capitalist, being situated here means I can identify, nurture and invest in many other companies, who each could have an impact and make a lot of money. We are building bridges where we identify entrepreneurs and investors from Ottawa and across Canada and the U.S., to help them crack into Silicon Valley and start up new companies here,” says Masri.
That same bridge has been successfully extended to tech executives, developers and other business people.
Masri also co-founded aiXplain in 2020. That company provides a low-code or no-code integrated development environment with an attached marketplace that enables domain experts, including those with no AI expertise, to architect, build and deploy AI solutions in minutes.
Although the headquarters of aiXplain is in San Francisco, most of the company’s software is built in Ottawa, providing the company with strong connections to both of the tech ecosystems with which Masri is familiar.
Charles Chi
Charles Chi remembers the early days of Ottawa’s tech ecosystem well.
“It was a very conservative environment. I think today it has improved dramatically to become much more entrepreneurial and attract entrepreneurial thinking,” he says.
Ottawa also offers excellent educational opportunities in addition to the hands-on experience in engineering and computer science that many local companies have provided over the years, he says.
“There’s a good technology base,” adds Chi, who retains ties to Ottawa, where he was honorary chancellor of Carleton University between 2012 and 2017.
Chi began his career in Ottawa with Bell Canada before going to Unitel/AT&T Canada in systems engineering and sales engineering.
After moving briefly to Toronto, he joined StrataCom in San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, as a customs systems engineer in 1995, then became marketing group manager after StrataCom was acquired by Cisco the following year.
“The opportunity I saw to move to an area with a very high density of startup big tech companies at StrataCom was really compelling. Everything you can think of about starting and running a company, including human, legal and accounting resources, are available in the San Francisco Bay area,” says Chi, who adds that there are also many venture capitalists and mentors for tech entrepreneurs to draw on.
He says one unique feature of the San Francisco Bay area is that commercial real estate experts understand that startups won’t have any revenue.
“They don’t require a one year deposit of rent, which would take away so much capital, and they’re willing to take the risk with the startups. A lot of places outside of Silicon Valley will require one year rent because you have no revenue, and that’s just so onerous,” says Chi.
Chi co-founded Lightera Networks in 1997. “It was a communications networking equipment company that did fibre optics switching that resulted in a very successful outcome,” he says.
Lightera was acquired by Ciena, where Chi stayed for one year as vice-president of marketing before joining Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm, in 2000 as a general partner. He remained with Greylock for 10 years, then served as executive chairman with Lytro, which developed light field cameras and was later sold to Google.
Chi notes that, unlike the Ottawa tech ecosystem where government has been a major player, government hasn’t played as big a role in helping develop modern Silicon Valley. The best niche for government, he believes, is to “lower the obstacles for companies to get started.”
Obaid Ahmed
Although Obaid Ahmed had already achieved success as an entrepreneur and tech executive in Ottawa, three years ago he set out to seek new challenges in Silicon Valley.
After working with Walmart Global Tech as a distinguished software engineer, Ahmed became an adviser to and investor in StyleOf, a San Francisco-based AI company that is creating personalized AI image models for artists.
In May 2023, Ahmed co-founded myUniMate, also based in San Francisco, which features a platform that provides AI assistance to university students.
“Essentially myUniMate is an AI assistant that is hyper-personalized,” explains Ahmed. “It understands which program students are in, what their interests are, what their campus looks like, and what events they should be interested in.”
The connection is multimodal, allowing access to myUniMate through SMS, WhatsApp or a mobile app, he adds.
Ahmed says he decided to start the company in Silicon Valley because “most of our customers for this particular product that we are going to target are U.S.-based universities and colleges.”
“But, more importantly, when we were starting to talk about what we were going to build, we found a lot more like-minded VCs in the Bay area very quickly.”
Both Ottawa and Silicon Valley have access to good talent, says Ahmed, citing the number of successful tech companies that have been built in the nation’s capital, including two that he co-founded, OAK Computing and Botmock.
OAK Computing, founded in 2007, is a boutique web design and software development company that specializes in custom software solutions, interactive websites and portals, content management systems, social media tools and mobile applications.
Botmock, founded in 2017, developed a voice technology software product that allowed users to create conversational flows and interactive prototypes from a drag and drop editor.
“That was more of a software as a service product that we would license to other companies. That enabled anybody who was building a chatbot or conversational agent to use our software to design that,” explains Ahmed.
Botmock was purchased by Walmart in 2021.
Ahmed now divides his time between Ottawa and San Francisco and says that one of the key differences between the two ecosystems is a higher concentration of both angel investors and venture capitalists to provide connections that help companies in the Silicon Valley ecosystem “go fast, grow faster and learn faster.”
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