Why Montreal is a Great Place for Your Tech Company
This is a slightly revised version of a post I wrote on my blog almost a year ago.
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now. After having been an “intrapreneur” at Yellow Pages Group until 2007, I’ve had the chance in the last three years to live the full-time life of a Web entrepreneur. Developing a vision and concepts, hiring a team, developing prototypes, raising capital, launching a product, marketing a product, selling a product, managing VCs, executing, executing, executing, pivoting strategy, executing, executing, executing, working long hours and drinking lots of caffeinated drinks are now part of my body of experience and daily life. We like to say the Praized Media team’s mind is in Silicon Valley where we measure ourselves with the best but we’re physically located in one of the best cities in North America to do it: Montreal.
Here’s why (all stats I quote are from Montreal International’s amazing brochure (.pdf) on investing in Montreal):
- Talented developers. With its network of universities and technical schools, Montreal produces world-class technical resources. Did you know Montreal is #1 in North America in the per capita number of university students? Montreal also ranks 5th in North America in concentration (%) of high tech jobs in proportion to the total number of jobs, ahead of San Francisco!
- Relatively-low cost of operating and living. Greater Montreal has the most competitive cost structure of any North American metro area. Salaries are competitively-priced (and lower than major tech hubs like Boston, Seattle and San Francisco) and office space leasing costs are the lowest in North America.
- Superior R&D tax credits. The kind of development we do at Praized greatly benefits from provincial and federal tax credits and drastically extends the value of an investment.
- Multilingual population. 52% of greater Montreal residents are bilingual (with English and French being the most prevalent). 18% are fluent in three languages or more. Montreal is often seen as the perfect bridge between North America and Europe.
- Quality of life. Joie de vivre (i.e. restaurants, bars, culture, etc.), a mix of North American and European culture, lowest cost of housing, lowest tuition and childcare fees and lowest homicide rate in North America makes Montreal a fun place to live.
No wonder Monocle magazine has been putting Montreal in their top list of most liveable cities a few years in a row. The videogame industry has quickly clued in to Montreal’s strengths with major companies like Ubisoft, Eidos, Electronic Arts, Funcom, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive having established large offices here. Google also opened an office in Montreal two years ago. Agendize, a French software company with many customers in the local media space opened its North American office here last year. In more recent news, Silicon Valley superstar Tara Hunt moved from San Francisco to Montreal, Vanilla Forums moved from Colorado to Montreal, Beyond The Rack announced a $12M funding round and Tungle assembled a star-studded advisory board.
Is it a perfect city for technology entrepreneurs? No, obviously not, but after a few years of drought, access to seed and venture capital has been slowly improving and it’s starting to feel like 2006-2007 again, when money was available to world-class projects and teams. The ecosystem is not as robust as what you’d find in Silicon Valley and winters are quite rigorous but if you’re thinking of launching a tech company or expanding in North America, Montreal should be a serious option!
image from montroyaler
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