“I believe that someone in this room right now… will create a $1 trillion company over the next decade, or maybe two,” said Harley Finkelstein.
Toronto Tech Week’s Homecoming event opened with a tone not often heard in Canadian tech circles: unapologetic ambition.
The packed audience at Evergreen Brickworks and more than 20,000 people watching online, listened as Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, led a conversation with Michael Katchen, CEO of Wealthsimple, and Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere.
The message was blunt: the world is ready to buy from Canada. The challenge is whether Canadians are prepared to build companies that are big enough and bold enough to meet that demand. Founders continue to face pressure to relocate, sell early or restructure their companies to satisfy foreign investors.
Throughout the conversation, the three founders shared what it has taken to stay and build in Canada. They spoke about resisting early acquisition offers, navigating investor expectations, and building global companies without abandoning their Canadian roots.
Beneath it all was a question that framed the entire discussion: whether Canada can develop enough world-leading companies to secure its long-term economic future.
While the pressures facing Canadian founders are well-known, this conversation stood out for the clarity and conviction with which the speakers addressed them. Rather than simply diagnosing the challenges, Finkelstein, Katchen and Gomez used the stage to deliver a direct call to action. For Canada to build world-leading companies, founders will need to reject the familiar pressures to relocate or sell early, and commit to building globally competitive businesses from home.
Choosing to say no
Staying in Canada has never been easy or automatic, the panel said. The gravitational pull of Silicon Valley, large U.S. acquirers, and foreign investors exerts constant pressure on Canadian founders.
Gomez offered a vivid example from just the week before when a founder he had invested in reached out after being accepted into a prominent Silicon Valley incubator. The catch: they would need to flip their company into a Delaware corporation to proceed.
Gomez’s advice was immediate and unequivocal.
“Don’t do it,” he said. “Refuse. Don’t do it. You’re here to build a Canadian company. We need this.”
That was not a theoretical stance. Gomez recounted an earlier moment in Cohere’s own journey, when the company received a nine-figure acquisition offer from a major U.S. firm.
At the time, large language models had not yet become a global phenomenon, and the acquisition offer became a board-level conversation where the team considered selling.
“There was no market for what we were building,” said Gomez. “No one had bought a language model. No one was using the language model.”
In fact, he noted that a little over 50 people globally were engaging with language models at the time, highlighting just how early and uncertain the market was.
“We spent some time, we invested in it, and eventually we said no,” he told the audience.
Looking back, Gomez said he was deeply grateful they did not take the offer. The company has since grown far beyond that early valuation, with its most recent funding round in 2024 valuing Cohere at $5.5 billion.
Finkelstein shared that Shopify faced similar early pressure when acquirers constantly reached out.
“The way we resisted was we didn’t return phone calls to M&A departments,” he said. “We knew that would start a cycle of conversation that would lead to a potential term sheet.”
Instead of engaging, Shopify simply stayed focused on building and deliberately avoided opening acquisition conversations that might have led down that path.
Building with Canadian capital and conviction
While Gomez and Finkelstein described the pressures of saying no to foreign buyers, Katchen faced a different kind of challenge in Wealthsimple’s early days: convincing anyone to invest at all.
“In our case, no one wanted to invest,” recalled Katchen. “We started the company because nobody believed we could do something,” he said.
Traditional venture capital showed little interest in the company’s earliest days. Rather than chasing U.S. tech investors, Wealthsimple approached established Canadian financial leaders who understood both the opportunity and the specific challenges of financial services. This approach ultimately led to Power Corporation becoming Wealthsimple’s primary early backer.
While this alternative path may have lacked the speed and buzz of typical tech venture rounds, it provided stability and allowed the company to focus on execution.
“They effectively became our exclusive capital provider for a number of years,” said Katchen. Only after proving its model and scaling did Wealthsimple attract global investors.
Gomez pointed out that while Canada had developed a strong base of early-stage support through incubators, accelerators, and initial investors, many founders still faced a funding cliff when their companies tried to scale and required substantial capital to grow globally.
“Where we need to invest is on the growth side or the venture side,” he said.
Without more domestic sources of growth capital, Gomez warned that many promising companies risked being pulled away just as they were poised to scale.
“We need to take an active nationalistic stance to build for Canada,” he said. “Otherwise all of our little bright lights that start, these ambitious Canadians who want to build a global company inside of Canada, they get pulled.”
Strengthening Canada’s economic independence
Beyond the personal stories, the panel made clear that these decisions carried national consequences.
“If we don’t strengthen our economy, if we don’t build a diverse set of companies that don’t rely on just natural resources or just finance or just whatever, we will not be here in half a century. It is existential,” said Gomez.
The stakes, in his view, were not just economic. They were tied to Canada’s ability to maintain sovereignty, economic independence, and long-term prosperity.
At the same time, Canada’s global reputation offered a powerful asset. Gomez had seen first-hand how international partners viewed Canadian companies.
“Everyone trusts Canada,” he said. “Everyone wants to support Canada. Everyone wants to buy Canadian.”
But global goodwill alone is not enough.
“They want to buy your product,” said Gomez. “Give them a reason. Go build it. Go scale across the world. That is the only way we’ll keep our country safe.”
The opportunity is real, but it will require Canadian entrepreneurs to do what this panel had already done: resist short-term pressures, build institutions that stay home, and create businesses strong enough to compete globally without abandoning Canadian roots.
