The Globe and Mail published an interesting article this evening looking at the 21 largest venture capital investments in Canadian tech over the last 18 months. It’s called: Who needs Silicon Valley? Canadian startups scoring bigger deals.

To put things into perspective, total venture dollars invested in Canada last year (2014) was around $1.9 billion. In the US, that number is estimated to be somewhere around $48 billion. So there’s a big spread here. But the Globe is arguing that there’s a shift towards medium-sized Canadian tech companies raising larger and larger rounds.

Here are the top 21 largest venture capital investments made in Canada over the last 18 months:

At the same time, there’s also an attitude change that seems to be taking place. Confidence is growing. Here’s a quote from Mike McDerment of Freshbooks from the same article:

“Our goal is to be an anchor tenant in Toronto. At Freshbooks, we want to build a global company that really contributes in some meaningful way to the city,” Mr. McDerment said. He touts the local schools and talent pool and downplays the Valley’s head start.

“The money is shameless – it’ll just go wherever. It wants the opportunities,” Mr. McDerment said. “I don’t see why Toronto can’t beat Silicon Valley.”

All of this is important because the medium-sized companies of today will hopefully become the large-sized companies of tomorrow. And that’s what you need to build a thriving startup hub. You need big successes. You need those companies going public and generating wealth for their employees and communities.

Thankfully, that seems to be where we’re headed. The first company on the list above – Shopify – is already preparing for a dual US-Canada IPO.

Joe Cortright of City Observatory recently reposted an article that he wrote back in 2010 called, Keeping it Weird: The Secret to Portland’s Economic Success.

In it he talks about a “weirdness index” that he developed for CEOs for Cities that measured and ranked 50 American cities across 60 different behavioural indicators. San Francisco and Salt Lake City come out as the weirdest, and Portland ranked 11th out of 50. The most “normal” part of the US was the Midwest. Normal meaning behaviours that are most similar to the national average.

He then goes on to talk about weird as a competitive advantage. Here are a few snippets:

When it comes to economic success in today’s economy, the key is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter counsels businesses that “competitive strategy is about being different.” And the late, great urbanist Jane Jacobs told us, “The greatest asset that a city can have is something that’s different from every other place.”

True entrepreneurship is about deviant behavior: starting a business that makes a product that no one else has thought of or thinks there’s a market for. Entrepreneurs and open-minded, experimental customers go hand-in-hand.

We shouldn’t do things just to be different, but we should never be dissuaded from trying something simply because it is different or would make us different from other places.

What this all comes down to is the simple fact that what is weird today, might very well become the norm tomorrow. But you need to be open enough to allow that to happen if you want to be the place that generates those news ideas.

Could you have imagined that selfies would become as ubiquitous as they have? That would have been pretty hard to predict. It used to be the case that people were afraid to use their real name on the internet. Now we share our entire life online, including our faces.

Image: Flickr

This morning Richard Florida published an interesting CityLab article that talks about how different personality types cluster within cities. The study he references was done by a team of psychologists that surveyed 56,000 people in the London metro area.

Here is a summary of what they found (darker red indicates higher concentration of each personality trait):

Probably the most interesting personality trait is the “openness to experience” one, as there appears to be a clear divide between people who live in the center of London and people who live in the suburbs.

Here’s how Florida describes it:

The most clustered personality trait the researchers found was “openness to experience” (bottom left map), which is concentrated in the center of London. Openness to experience, according to a wide body of psychological studies, is associated with creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. This type is concentrated in higher density neighborhoods, with higher housing prices, more ethnic and religious diversity and higher crime rates. Meanwhile, the blue concentrations at the periphery indicate that there are fewer people open to experience in metro London’s suburbs.

It’s fascinating to think about the role of psychology in city building. It’s not something we often talk about, but it’s there.

I live downtown and I would definitely classify myself as extraverted and open to experiences. How would you classify yourself?

Maps via CityLab