A Second Home
As more U.S. tech businesses open B.C. offices in cities like Victoria and Vancouver, access to talent is just one of the draws
Within an hour, staff at Netmotion Software can hop on a seaplane in the harbour and travel from the firm's new downtown Victoria location to its Seattle headquarters. Quick access to the main office, not to mention the lower cost of office space and talent, is a big reason the mobile performance management business looked north to B.C. when choosing a second HQ to aid its rapid growth.
It would have been easy for Netmotion to select a city where it already had outposts: Brisbane, Chicago, London, Tokyo or Toronto. But the company believed its best chances for success would be somewhere without a saturated tech sector; it wanted a place that was nascent and booming, explains chief marketing officer Joel Windels.
“We realized that on Seattle's doorstep, there's this city that has everything we could possibly want from a second headquarters. [Victoria] is on the cusp of really exploding,” Windels says, also praising the city's quality of life. “Being a big fish, or an influential fish, in an expanding pond is a much more fulfilling role for us to play as a company than being in a market that's further along.”
Netmotion's Victoria office —a 4,000-square-foot suite with blue and orange walls and views of downtown and Beacon Hill Park—opened last September. The location now by Jessica Natale Woollard has 14 employees, with capacity for 30, a number that Windels expects to reach in a few years. Affectionately calling the Victoria space the “Innovation Office,” he says the team in the capital city will play a key role in the company's future.
Netmotion joins a growing number of U.S. tech businesses opening offices in B.C. Amazon.com's first Vancouver location, launched in 2015, employs more than 1,000 people. A second Vancouver facility with 1,000 additional tech jobs is set to open this year, followed in 2023 by a 1.13-millionsquare-foot space in the former Canada Post building downtown that can hold up to 7,000 employees.
Other notable U.S. firms with new B.C. digs include Grammarly, Slalom and Streak in Vancouver and Agility Fuel Solutions in Kelowna.
This past summer, Tile, which makes Bluetooth tracking devices for personal items, opened its first large office outside of its San
Mateo, California, headquarters in Vancouver to take advantage of the province's tech talent.
“Initially we only set out to hire and build out our back-end services team [in B.C.],” says Simon Flemingwood, Tile's chief experience officer, originally from Toronto. “It quickly became evident to us that we could expand [other] teams more quickly in Canada than we could [in California],” he adds. “We've made the decision that our future human resources growth is likely to overemphasize Vancouver.”
Increased demand for tech workers means that people from outside the province and Canada are looking to B.C. for opportunity. Two of Netmotion's November hires came from Montreal, and Windels himself is from England, having moved to Victoria for his job with the company. Significantly, he and Fleming-wood acknowledge that hiring foreign talent is easier in Canada than it is south of the border.
Fleming-wood gives an example: a Canadian employee working in Tile's San Mateo office couldn't get her U.S. visa renewed fast enough to continue working in the country; thanks to the new Vancouver office, that employee was able to transfer north and remain with the business.
To help understand why people and companies do, or don't, move to Victoria, the Victoria Innovation, Advanced Technology and Entrepreneurship Council (VIATEC) recently created a new position, director of ecosystem talent and strategy. VIATEC chief executive Dan Gunn says the role will analyze what the industry association can do to attract businesses to Victoria and help its tech sector grow.
Gunn also notes that opening a new B.C. office isn't the only way foreign companies are entering the province; in some cases, they acquire startups and choose to keep a good thing going by retaining space and staff here. For example, U.s.-owned Kixeye, the developer behind Battle Pirates, the top-selling game on Facebook, was acquired by Swedish firm Stillfront last June. Not only has the new owner kept the Victoria location open, it's made the 60-person-and-growing office the new company headquarters.
“I think, often, what people expect is that the Fortune 100s are going to buy a company and fold them into the massive offices in Seattle or what have you,” Gunn says. “But the people who are working there say, No, I'm not moving, so if you want to retain me, keep the office here in Victoria… I think [these examples are] great evidence of just how high-quality the people are.”
Jill Tipping, president and CEO of the BC Tech Association, says the entire provincial technology industry benefits when big players from the U.S. and elsewhere set up shop here: “They're working on interesting global problems and doing things at scale, and that is an incredibly meaningful experience.”
But U.S. businesses moving in is something she'll keep an eye on, Tipping adds. “I'm concerned to make sure that [U.S. companies are] not the only growth story in B.C.
We'd like to make sure that British Columbia is a place where not only can you start up and succeed, you can also scale up and succeed.”
•