When Really Big Tech comes to your town, a little trepidation is natural. But the municipal patriotism local tech leaders express here is heartening. Amazon’s arrival in Vancouver is not a Godzilla moment - the company is occupying two office towers and a downtown block with 5,000 jobs, not burning down said goods with radioactive napalm.
Read Innovate BC’s position on talent production.
“Amazon’s massive plans will undoubtedly cause short-term strain, but ultimately boost Vancouver’s reputation as a global tech hub. "It makes it easier to go hire someone in Brazil and bring them here, because we’re more present in the media that way,” [he said]...
“It’ll help our tech sector mature," added Carl Schmidt, co-founder of the website landing page sales platform Unbounce Marketing Solutions Inc. Jay Rhind, partner at Vancouver’s Rhino Ventures, pointed to the “entrepreneurial engineers” that build their own companies after leaving Big Tech giants in Seattle and San Francisco: “That’s why innovation still exists there."
The existence of whales doesn’t preclude the existence of other creatures in the sea. As Unbounce’s Carl Schmidt observes, sectoral expansion is the mark of a maturing economy -- and a big-footprint enterprise encourages tremendous activity at its margins.