We're Not Sorry
The strategy to keep our best talent at home and bring the rest of the world here
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In the month since Prime Minister Carney’s Davos address, I’ve been asked the same question seventeen times: What’s different this time?
The answer is simple: this time, we’re not sorry.
Yesterday afternoon in San Francisco, I sat on my couch watching Team Canada dismantle France in the Olympic preliminaries. For an hour, I listened to an American broadcast. The commentators were using words like masterclass and dominance. When Sidney Crosby became Canada’s all-time Olympic scoring leader in a 10-2 blowout, the announcers called it like they saw it: world-class.
It felt right, and I felt proud.
I felt that same surge during Carney’s address at Davos last month. I was in a room with friends from New York, London, Paris, and Mumbai. They all came up to me to say the same thing: “Wow, you must be proud to be Canadian right now.”
In those moments, the world sees us as we are. We are peers. We are winners. We are leaders.
Here’s what I’ve come to realize: excellence is universal, but influence is distributed. Sidney Crosby didn’t suddenly become a better player when he stepped onto Olympic ice. Nor did Mark Carney become a better economist when he stepped onto the Davos stage. The talent was always there. What changed was the platform. The Olympics and Davos are global distribution engines. They turn excellence into influence.
I write cases at Stanford on some of the world’s best founders. Part of my mission is bringing more Canadian builders into that classroom, because the Stanford classroom works the same way. When the next generation of leaders studies Canadian founders alongside their peers, Canada becomes part of the standard.
The next question is obvious: how do we build that kind of stage at home?
The Patek Paradox
I often describe Canada as the Patek Philippe of nations. We are Quiet Luxury.
In watchmaking, the “movement” refers to the internal mechanism, the masterpiece of engineering that powers everything. In a Patek Philippe, that movement is refined. Subtle. You have to hold it to your ear to hear it.
We have perfected that kind of movement: exceptional, precise, quietly brilliant. Look at turbopuffer in Ottawa. Founded by Simon Hørup Eskildsen, the team has quietly rebuilt the economics of AI, making vector search 100x more scalable for companies like Anthropic, Cursor, and Notion. They are the "movement" inside some of the world's best software.
A Patek Philippe can afford to be a secret known only to those in the know. A nation can't. If we stay quiet, we'll only attract the people who already know us, and lose everyone else to the louder signal.
Creating Our Own Gravity
When excellence stays quiet, we miss what Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison calls a “Schelling Point.”
Think about the Collison brothers. They are Irish to their core. Stripe became a Silicon Valley icon because they followed the signal to the place where smart, optimistic people naturally congregate, the place where “everyone” agrees the world-changing conversations are happening.
Silicon Valley built the loudest signal. When a PhD in Waterloo looks for a blueprint for global ambition, that signal pulls them south. We are training the world’s best pilots but giving them the G7’s smallest fleet: despite producing 5% of the world’s top AI researchers, Canada holds just 0.7% of global AI compute capacity.
We can build our own signal. We are entering a new era of strategic autonomy. We lead the world in two of the most critical technologies of the next century: agriculture and electricity.
We have gold in the ground and gold in the grid. From the prairies, Morad Al-Katib (known as the “lentil king”) turned the humble lentil into a multi-billion dollar global empire that feeds millions across continents. Meanwhile, our mastery of electricity grid management can become the secret weapon of the AI revolution. You cannot run a world-class AI lab without the smart grid precision we have perfected.
The advantages are real and storytelling is how we make them visible.
The Compounding Power of Storytelling
Sitting in both rooms, studying excellence in the Valley and caring deeply about what is being built back home, I see a critical gap: distribution.
When Mike Wessinger’s story was published in Not Sorry earlier this month, founders wrote that they decided to incorporate in Canada because they saw a path to winning from home. One story can create hundreds of small shifts. As Charlie Munger said:
“The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.”
In nation-building, storytelling is the compounding agent. Every time we celebrate a win, we accelerate our own growth. One success story is interesting. Ten is a trend. A hundred becomes gravity.
The playbook already exists. When Estonia decided to become synonymous with digital government, they told that story relentlessly on global stages. Now, for a country of 1.3 million people, they are the automatic choice.
Storytelling creates attention, and attention is what makes capital move and policy follow. When a 23-year-old in Hamilton sees ten paths at home instead of one, the talent retention math changes. When an ambitious founder in Bangalore thinks about where to build their next breakthrough, Canada becomes the obvious answer.
The “Not Sorry” Strategy
Not Sorry is designed to be a megaphone: a platform that turns isolated wins into gravitational force. Our mission this year is to profile dozens of winners, telling stories that work in two directions at once.
At Home: Proving the path exists. When builders see Morad Al-Katib turn lentils into a global empire from Saskatchewan, or Neil Cawse (Geotab) and Vitaly Pecherskiy (StackAdapt) scale to billions from Ontario, they realize you don’t have to leave to win.
Everywhere: Proving our values travel. When the world studies Garrett Camp (Uber) , Stewart Butterfield (Slack), and Michelle Zatlyn (CloudFlare), they see that kindness and ambition are unmatched when combined. Take Zatlyn: a Prince Albert, Saskatchewan native who co-founded the security and performance infrastructure that now powers nearly 20% of the entire internet.
Together, these stories create pattern recognition. Just as Estonia became the automatic choice for digital government, Canada can own the categories where we choose to lead, whether agriculture technology, grid infrastructure, or something else entirely.
Success looks like this: when the best builder in Canada realizes they don’t have to leave to be world-class, and the best builder in Bangalore realizes they should move to Canada to join the standard.
To Winning
What’s different this time? We’re not sorry.
We have the best hockey team, the best values, and the foundation to lead the world in the technologies that define the next century.
We've perfected the movement and now we're building the stage. When we do, respect becomes gravity and the world will come here to build.
We are here. We are world-class. And we are not sorry.
To winning (together),
Bryan
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I left Canada long before the current discussions -- 1990. I became very frustrated working for a big consulting firm and left to pursue an executive MBA in New Zealand. I stayed for ten years. What I discovered in New Zealand is not what I had imagined. After a month, I discovered what a society looks like and feels like when you are not living in the shadow of the USA. They live in the sunshine. I also learned of a decades-old tradition among university grads: an OE, an overseas experience. Each year, thousands of grads head to London (or a similar city) to work for a year, then travel home for a year. Hence, each year, thousands of Kiwis and Aussies return home after seeing the world. I spent a decade there and a decade in Australia.
I developed a specialization in innovation in NZ and started writing columns for several business and management publications starting in 1997. Moving back to Canada, I saw far too few people who have a sense of the world beyond the USA. I wish we had a tradition like the OE.
While the new government is opening the doors to new countries, one of Carney's challenges will be to get executives to work through those doors to sell our products and services. For all of the talk of "builders", I wonder how many have a sense of selling beyond the USA. I can only wonder if they might be more successful if they did an OE.
While NZ has excelled at leveraging the value of its agri sector, it is now #3 in rocket launches. Rocket Lab has now expanded into the USA and bought a company in Canada. (The space industry started in the private sector. Two guys wanted to build rockets in the 2000s. In Canada, we want the government to lead the space industry. Perhaps a future column topic.)
I wonder if the feeling you refer to is the same as discovering that we do not have to live in the shadows... we can experience and enjoy the sunshine of our own.