Ameet Shah
Golden Ventures
Published in
3 min readSep 25, 2018

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Prospect: The Canadian Startup Career Hub

Today we are excited to announce the launch of Prospect, the definitive startup career hub for the Canadian tech industry. Prospect is a collaborative effort with 50+ leaders in the Canadian tech community. We share a common mission: to make it frictionless for great talent to find the right opportunities in Canada. We’re going live with over 1500 jobs and nearly 200 scaling companies across the nation, with more being added every day.

Why?

Canada’s innovation sector has exhibited dramatic growth in the past decade and is garnering attention from all around the world. As CBRE notes, “High-quality and well-educated tech talent, cost-efficiencies and welcoming immigration policies are competitive advantages for the Canadian tech markets.” For the second year running, Toronto is the fastest growing market in North America, Montreal is the most cost-effective for tech talent, and Ottawa has exhibited the most robust momentum. Combining all of this with a strong US dollar and the current geopolitical climate, building in Canada is undeniably attractive.

Yet, there is still a long way to go in becoming a dominant global tech hub. Hiring is the number one concern for scaling companies. It’s expensive, time-consuming and the right talent is in short supply. We believe some of the challenges are systemic:

  • Companies need to develop and strengthen their recruiting muscle faster and earlier
  • An employee’s rate of learning is limited by the quality of their peers, mentors, managers and the opportunities they are exposed to
  • There is tremendous talent locked up in more traditional industries (i.e., consulting, banking) that is ready to consider tech
  • Scaling startups need better visibility to top candidates
  • A lack of exposure to the full universe of opportunities across our innovation sector makes it difficult for people to leave their existing posts or to move their families to Canada.

Enter Prospect

Prospect aims to help solve these underlying issues by unlocking local and global talent for scaling companies across Canada. The first step is to showcase all of the diverse and incredible opportunities through an aggregated job board that is free to all scaling startups. Secondly, we want to make it easier for visitors and those considering a move, to understand what Canada has to offer. We’re starting with Toronto, but have plans to add Waterloo, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver and other cities across Canada in short order. In the future, we have big ideas to create additional value for job seekers and companies and reduce the friction between the two parties.

Prospect started off as an experiment but gained significant support out of the gate from the top members in the community. This is a grassroots and collaborative effort that we hope will help the Canadian tech ecosystem continue its meteoric rise and establish itself as the world’s best place to build a company.

Prospect Launch Partners

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Ameet Shah
Golden Ventures

Partner @goldenventures. Prev: GM @zynga, Founder @fivemobile (acq’d)