[sbarre]

Yeah but Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US.

All that US-centric stuff overshadows us constantly. And it's not just in the startup landscape.

We literally have laws on the books [0] that force our media companies to maintain a certain amount of Canadian content on TV/radio/streaming/etc so we're not only consuming US content.

This isn't a comment on whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact, and it has a real impact on our society at all levels.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_content

[alephnerd]

> Israel doesn't have the proximity (in culture, media, advertising, entertainment, etc) that we do to the US

Have you been to Israel?!?

NBA and NFL is everywhere, the Israeli dream before tech began booming in the 2010s was "immigrate to Boston, Brooklyn, or Miami", and Jewish Americans like Seth Klarman, Sheldon Adelson, Ronald Lauder, and Bill Ackman have had an outsized stake in media and entertainment ownership before the Mizrahi cultural boom in the 2010s.

Literally the only reason Canada fell behind was because the political leadership in countries like Israel decided to work on building a domestic tech VC ecosystem in the 1990s-2000s while their Canadian equivalents during that era had no economic vision aside from resource extraction.

Additionally, the Canadian equivalents of Shlomo Kramer (Checkpoint, Palo Alto Network, Imperva, Cato Networks, Cyberstarts), Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks, Cyberstarts), and Gili Rannan (Sequoia, Wiz, Cyberstarts) - David Cheriton (Google, Arista), Chamath Palihapitiya (Facebook, Slack, Groq), Joseph Tsai (Alibaba), Changpeng Zhao (Binance), Chip Wilson (Lululemon), and Ryan Cohen (Chewy) - are all hard MAGA. Heck, even Big 5 banks like Scotiabank are pro-Trump [0] because their LatAm business benefits from Trump power projection in the region.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-06/scotiaban...