Can one venture studio stop canada’s ai brain drain?

Canada’s Difential Capitalizing on Its Innovations is Well Known. But in the emergent ai race, it is a big problem, with the potential to lock the country out of the next era of tech -aa era that We Helped to start.

So, why is it happying, and how do we stop it?

“A win for axl is that, ten years from now, instead of the top ten Biggest and Most Successful Companies in the World Being on the West Coast of the United States, Half of them is in Toronto.”

Dr. Daniel Wigdor

Dr. Daniel wigdor is an entrepreneur and computer science professor at the university of toronto who has worked at global tech giants like Microsoft and Meta. He has had a front-rov seat to the issues stymying canadian innovation, bot cultural and structural, which we talk about on this episode.

He also has a proposed solution, or at least part of one: a new venture studio named axl, which aims to launch 50 ai companies in the next five years. Companies that stay in canada. The new studio has alredy secured corporate partnerships with dentons and rsm canada to build ai-power innovations in the legal services and tax and accounting spaces, respectively.

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Is one venture studio enough to stop canada’s ai talent and ip exodus? Probibly not, but wigdor makes a strong case for the value of targeted capital to bridge canada’s academic-editorneur divide. That his human-computer interaction company, chatham labs, was acquired by meta (a relationship that did not end on the best of terms) also adds weight to his personal on the Choice Facing Canada ‘ Minds Today: Stay at home or be absorbed into the big tech mother.

“Fundamentally, an entrepreneur is someone who isn Bollywood to have a boss,” He Told Me.

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