There’s a myth that if you want to build something great, you have to leave Canada.
University of Waterloo alum Jeff Shiner (BMath ’92), executive chairman of the board at 1Password, and Chris Albinson, co-founder and managing director of True North Fund, make the case for why Waterloo students will do better to build their companies in Canada than in the United States (U.S.).
Shiner and Albinson spoke to an audience of undergraduate and graduate students at the recent Insight to Creation talk hosted by Dr. Mary Wells and Dr. Jochen Koenemann, deans of Engineering and Mathematics, respectively, at the University of Waterloo. Both Shiner and Albinson challenged the “Cali or bust’ narrative and emphasized that Canada’s emerging entrepreneurs and business builders have more opportunities here.
Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Insight to Creation, from left to right: Dr. Mary Wells, Jeff Shiner, Chris Albinson and Dr. Jochen Koenemann.
Q: Jeff, you built your career at IBM, worked extensively in the U.S., then came back to help build 1Password in Canada. Why?
Jeff Shiner: There are two things that I believe we do better in Canada. One, we are a lot more likely to focus on a real problem that has commercial value. We don’t look for billion-dollar ideas; we find billion-dollar problems to solve. Because if you solve a billion-dollar problem, you’re going to make a billion dollars.
Two, we think globally. We know the U.S. is a huge market, but we know the rest of the world is a large market, too. Canada is in a fantastic position to sell to the U.S., but our global mindset gives us a huge advantage to do business internationally.
Q: Is “Cali or bust” a myth?
Jeff Shiner: It's a myth born out of a reality that existed 10 to 15 years ago. Do you need access to San Francisco? Yes — and you will travel there. But it's saturated — hard to stand out. If you can stand out in Canada, you will get all the attention in the world from funders, talent and customers."
Q: What is True North Fund, and why does it matter to students building here?
Chris Albinson: Think of it as the water station at the 21-mile mark in a marathon, that point where runners hit peak fatigue and need a boost to get over the line. We invest in high-performing Canadian tech firms with growth rates that match the top one per cent of companies in the world. The median time for a private company to go public is around 15 years. One of the big structural problems Canada had in the past was that we sold our best companies too early for too little, in part because there was no water station at the 21-mile mark, there was no True North Fund.
Faire, one of the companies in our portfolio, is a Waterloo company approaching $1 billion in revenue, built in part by more than 300 University of Waterloo engineers.”
Q: Why should a student choose a Team True North co-op over a big tech name?
Chris Albinson: Because most of the big tech companies are boring now. If you want to build something, then look for co-op work terms at companies that are building. A Team True North company has to grow at least 30 per cent per year. If a company is growing at 30 per cent per year, that means 30 per cent of the work that’s going to happen next year hasn’t been done yet. There’s so much opportunity when a company is growing that big and fast.
Albinson named Geotab, Fullscript, Arctic Wolf, and Ideogram — all Canadian companies crossing major revenue milestones in 2025 — as examples of great places for co-op. Dean Wells added that Waterloo Engineering has already created co-op pathways into Team True North companies specifically to make those connections easier.
Q: What makes Canada’s talent advantage structural rather than circumstantial?
Chris Albinson: Immigrants are more ambitious. Why? Because if you move thousands of miles from your family, your food, your culture, your religion, then in many ways you’ve got nothing to lose. Canada is home to one of the world's most internationally diverse populations of entrepreneurs, many of whom want to build global companies here.
Some of the names Albinson mentioned were: Marcelo Cortes, an immigrant from Brazil who co-founded Faire in Waterloo. Neil Cawse, an immigrant from South Africa who built Geotab to more than $1 billion in revenue. Raquel Urtasun, an immigrant from Spain who founded Waabi which recently closed a quarter-billion-dollar raise and a half-billion-dollar partnership with Uber. Mohammad Norouzi who came out of Geoffrey Hinton’s lab and left Google Brain to found Ideogram in Toronto, brought his entire team of world-class AI researchers with him to Canada.
Chris Albinson: They [Norouzi's team] could get a job at Anthropic or OpenAI for a million dollars cash tomorrow. And they’re like, no. We love the quality of life — here, we love the diversity — here, we love working on this problem — here.
Q: A student asked: The pay in San Francisco is higher. Why stay here?
Chris Albinson: Do the math. After you pay for health care, after you look at what it costs to live in San Francisco — could you have a little bit of extra disposable income, maybe? But would I much rather work at Faire, get the same stock options there as an engineer working in San Francisco, exercise those stock options, own part of Faire, and have enough money to live and buy a house in Kitchener? Absolutely.
Jeff Shiner: If your goal is a higher hourly salary, go to where the higher hourly salary is. But if you are a person building a company, the hourly salary is just — who cares? Your hourly wage will never match the equity you build in your own company. You will be too busy to spend your money for the first 15 years — and then you will have far too much to know what to do with.