I’ve heard time and time again from friends, mentors and acquaintances that heading to the Valley is the best idea for your startup.  I hear that the culture of the Valley/Bay area is a LOT more different that in Toronto.  Everywhere you turn in terms of coffee shops or restaurants, someone is either doing their own startup or an investor.  And deals are always being done - even as favours to friends.

One friend who works at ExperienceProject.com remarked on the Toronto tech scene and referred to us being barely “zygotes”, not even fully developed babies compared to Silicon Valley.  But I digress.

Talking to acquaintances, mentors, who are seasoned entrepreneurs to Y-Combinator alums, all of them have constantly remarked that heading to the Valley is something that you *need* to do.  Not only to see whether or not you can drum up interest (investment), but it’s almost a “rites of passage” so to speak.

I read somewhere in a post on HackerNews in that being in the Valley is having “instant startup mix” (I think it referred to Facebook moving there or something like that).

A few years ago, Albert Lai apparently got into spat with VC-turned-entrepreneur, Rick Segal over the viability of starting a startup in Toronto.  The argument was over the lack of support from the venture capital community in Canada and their “conservative approach”.  (It was a different time back then, but still not much has changed despite this impending “bubble” of 2011).

Even a mentor of mine remarked to a VC who I gave a tour of Extreme Venture Partners’ offices to (and I’m paraphrasing this), “the valuations you can get here in Toronto are much better than what you can get in the Valley or Boston”.  Obviously, not in the favour of the Toronto based entrepreneur.

That’s not to say that you can’t take advantage of having offices in Toronto (or Canada for that matter) AND in the Valley/Bay Area.

There’s too much action going on there and the speed is ferociously fast.  Obviously I’m still “a zygote” when it comes to all of this, but I am noticing a pattern.  I’m starting to sway over to Albert’s argument that being in the Valley is a lot more advantageous for your startup than sticking around solely in Canada.

*Disclosure, this is not to say that I’m ungrateful to my initial seed investors EVP as they have afforded opportunities that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to achieve at a hyper-accelerated pace.  They connected me with so many of my mentors and taught me pretty much everything I know up to this point.