The Hidden Engine Behind U.S. Tech
A closer look at the Canadian founders, funders, and operators shaping the Valley’s biggest companies.
At The Hard Part, I’ve mostly focused on Canadians building in Canada.
But after three years of digging, researching, and asking, “Where’s this founder from?” I kept finding the same thing: Canadians are everywhere.
OpenAI. Uber. Databricks. Slack.
Some of the most iconic tech companies in the world have Canadian fingerprints all over them.
There’s a running joke I have with friends:
Say the name of a well-known tech company, and I can probably name a Canadian who helped build it.
From founders and early engineers to C-suite execs and VC firms, Canadians have quietly shaped nearly every major tech company and trend of the past 20 years.
This isn’t about brain drain. It’s a spotlight.
A reminder that the next OpenAI, the next Databricks, the next $100B company?
It could start with someone from Waterloo, Calgary, or a tiny town in Saskatchewan.
And I know I’m missing people. That’s the best part.
Drop names in the comments. This list should grow forever, and I will do updated articles over time.
Just How Many?
📌 “Waterloo has been the number one place we hire from in the world.”
—Bill Gates
828,000+ Canadian-born immigrants lived in the U.S. as of 2023
~1,762 Canadian tech workers leave for the U.S. each year
One VC’s internal data pegged 40,000–50,000 Canadian university grads working in U.S. tech
A basic LinkedIn search (Bay Area + CEO/founder title + UBC, Queen’s, McGill, etc.) pulls up thousands of results
This isn’t a trickle. It’s a pipeline.
The Big Ones
🇨🇦 The University of Toronto AI Mafia
OpenAI (Valued at $300B)
Co-founded by Ilya Sutskever (Toronto). Helped invent AlexNet. Was OpenAI’s Chief Scientist and is now co-founder of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), which already has a rumoured $32B valuation.xAI (Raising at $200B)
Jimmy Ba (UofT prof and Hinton protégé) co-founded Elon Musk’s AI company.Anthropic (Raising at $170B)
Chris Olah (UofT + Google Brain). Co-founded Anthropic, after stints at OpenAI and DeepMind.
📈 Total value created by Canadian AI founders:
$700B+
Elon, Technically 🇨🇦
Attended Queen’s, holds a Canadian passport, and his mom’s from here
His companies include:
• Tesla – $925B
• SpaceX – $400B
• xAI – $200B
• Neuralink – $8.5B
• Boring Co – $7B
= ~$1.5T in value
Also: Shivon Zilis, Neuralink exec and mother to two of Elon’s children, is Canadian.
Marketplaces
Uber
Founded by Garrett Camp (Calgary).Instacart
Apoorva Mehta (Waterloo). Got into YC by sending beer via Instacart to Garry Tan.
Now building Cloud Health Systems ($200M valuation).Lyft
Rajat Suri was a co-founder of Zimride, which became Lyft.
Infra & Data
Databricks
Co-founded by Matei Zaharia (Waterloo) and Reynold Xin (Toronto).
Matei also created Apache Spark. Databricks is now worth $62B.Cloudflare
Co-founded by Michelle Zatlyn from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
Market cap: $65B+
The Others
Slack – Stewart Butterfield (Lund, BC). Sold to Salesforce for $28B.
Notion – Ivan Zhao (UBC). Valued at $10B.
Faire – Marcelo Cortes (Waterloo). Built Cash App, now helping lead the $12.6B company.
PagerDuty – Founded in 2009 by Waterloo grads: Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas, Baskar Puvanathasan.
Roblox – David Baszucki (Winnipeg). Market cap: $76B.
New Relic – Lew Cirne (Port Hope, Ontario). Taken private for $6.5B in 2023.
Swarm Technologies – Founded by Sara Spangelo. Acquired by SpaceX for $524M.
Aurora - Founded by Chris Urmson. Market cap: $10B.
Greatest Angel Ever
David Cheriton
In 1998, Larry and Sergey met on his front porch.
He and Andy Bechtolsheim wrote the first check to fund Google.
Cheriton’s $100K investment is now worth an estimated $10B–$15B.
Co-founded:
• Granite Systems (sold to Cisco for $220M)
• Kealia (sold to Sun Microsystems)
• Arista Networks (IPO’d, now worth ~$100B)Waterloo named its CS school after him.
Canadian C-Suite Talent
Canadians are running the show across US tech:
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (Xero CEO)
Andréa Mallard (Pinterest CMO)
Burt Podbere (CrowdStrike CFO)
Michel Protti (Meta Chief Privacy Officer)
Jenny Gonsalves (Lyra Health CTO)
Sonalee Parekh (Asana CFO)
Adrienne Down Coulson (Rakuten COO)
Emily Dancyger King (Lime CPO)
Michael Scarpelli (Snowflake CFO)
Amit Agarwal (ex-Datadog President)
Andrew MacDonald (Uber President & COO)
Chris Rogers (Instacart CEO)
Avlok Kohli (AngelList CEO)
Jeff Skoll (ex-Ebay President)
Rob Burgess (Board: Adobe, NVIDIA)
Dan Gill (Carvana CPO)
Alex MacDonald (ex-NASA Chief Economist)
Rob Lloyd (ex-Cisco President)
Praveer Melwani (Figma CFO)
Patrick Spence (Board: SNAP & ex-Sonos CEO)
and many more
Sleepers
James Hamilton (AWS)
Architect of Amazon’s infrastructure scale. Called the “brain behind AWS’s data centers.” Helped shape cloud as we know it.Jonathan Abrams (Friendster)
Founded the first social network in 2002, before MySpace or Facebook.
David Baszucki (Roblox) was an early investor. When Abrams demo’d Friendster, Baszucki was blown away by seeing his social graph visualized.
Friendster peaked at 111M users.
In 2010, Facebook bought Friendster’s patent portfolio for $40M.James Gosling
Invented Java. Born in Calgary. Worked at Sun, Google, and AWS.
Canadian VC Power
Canadians aren’t just building companies—they’re funding them too. From seed to IPO, Canadians are everywhere on the cap table.
💰 Firms Founded by Canadians
8VC – Alex Kolicich – $6B AUM
Backed: Anduril, Cognition, Saronic, Asana, FlexportDCVC Bio – John Hamer – $4B AUM
Notable Capital (formerly part of GGV Capital) – Scott Bonham – $4.2B AUM at time of 2024 split
GGV split into Notable (U.S.) and Granite AsiaBedrock – Geoff Lewis – $2B AUM
Backed: OpenAI, Rippling, Flock Safety, VercelAfore Capital – Gaurav Jain – $500M AUM
Mithril Capital – Co-founded by Ajay Royan with Peter Thiel in 2012
(AUM not publicly disclosed)Also, Garry Tan, now President of YC, was born in Winnipeg and lived there until age 10.
📊 VC Firms With Canadian GPs or Investors
Alphabetical, and everywhere
Canadians are scattered across the venture stack—from top-tier seed funds to crossover and growth:
a16z, Alta Park Capital, Aspenwood Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Bedrock, Buckley Ventures, Coatue, Craft Ventures, DCVC Bio, Dragoneer, Eclipse, General Catalyst, GGV Capital / Notable Capital, Greylock, ICONIQ Capital, Insight Partners, IVP, L Catterton, Lightspeed, Madrona, NEA, Pioneer Fund, Position Ventures, Roar Ventures, Sequoia, SoftBank, Sound Ventures, South Park Commons, Spark Capital, Thoma Bravo, Tiger Global, xFund
It might be easier to name the firms that don’t have Canadian involvement.
Canadian Early Builders
Chamath Palihapitiya – Joined Facebook in 2007
Jeff Mallett – Became President & COO of Yahoo! when it had just 11 employees
Canadians were early at Slack, Uber, Instacart, Figma, Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash
Founders Building in the U.S.
A few quick shoutouts to more Canadians building in the US
Substack - $1.1B valuation
Clay - $2B valuation
EvenUp - $1B valuation
Augment - $1B valuation
…and teams behind:
Augment, Magic, Shepherd, Super.com, Patch, Railway, Pilgrim, OpenPhone, Re, Revyl, Power, Agora, Mintlify, Dexa, Circleback, Poppy, Datacurve, Landbase, Flexpa, Finni Health, Ollama, Hedgehog, Spade, Uniblock, Pebble v2, Vapi, Valstad, Nox Metals, OffDeal, Fable Security, Solcoa Industries, Sentradel and thousands more.
Final Word
This list isn’t complete, and that’s exactly the point.
Canadian talent is embedded at every layer of U.S. tech.
From the first check to the billion-dollar IPO. From side projects to superintelligence.
If you’re a young founder in Canada reading this:
They started where you are. Now it’s your turn.