BC Bleeding Talent

Argh. I know this might be more salt in the wound for BC after my last couple of posts on this topic (which, incidentally, got picked up by Heath Row over at Fast Company), but I have to point to this information about Flickr.

Maybe I’m late to the party, but I only recently came to realize (via Niall) that the Flickr crew has moved en masse to the Bay Area. This is the problem I’m talking about – BC is bleeding talent. Here are some talented entrepreneurs that cut their teeth at home and abroad, built something up of value in Vancouver, and then moved on once they got bought. It’s not that I blame the Flickr team – they built a successful venture, and their buyer probably needed them down here – but it’s like the BC tech environment is made of helium. Succeed and leave. Rinse, lather, repeat.

What’s worse: I’m convinced most people in BC have never even heard of Flickr. Now, understandably, it’s a pretty niche product. But it’s got a pretty cult-like following, and when someone like Yahoo! buys a company that’s only about a year old for a rumored $30 million in a place the size of Vancouver, I’d expect people to sit up and take notice.

Sigh.

Escape From Vancouver

It’s funny – the further you get from Vancouver, the more of it you see. No matter where I look, there it is! What’s really funny is to hear people say, “Yeah, I hear Vancouver’s nice…I should really check it out someday.” – not realizing that they probably know more about Vancouver than they might suspect.

Consider music. Now, I’m personally not a big fan of Finger Eleven, and God knows I’m happy to have escaped the 24-7 Nickelback shill machine that is C-FOX. However, the local music stations have regular rotations of both, as well as the occasional Hootie and the Blowfish version of 54-40‘s “I Go Blind”. And of course, there’s always regular play of chick-rock fav Sarah McLachlan.

Or how about movies and television? Scooby-Doo 2 is due out in short order, not that it’s anything I didn’t already see in production on West Georgia. Or how about Paycheck? Only a real Vancouverite would recognize the squeal of brakes from a BC Transit bus as it nearly runs over Ben Affleck. And didn’t that movie also star former Prime Minister Trudeau as an arch-villain – or at least, the guy who played him? And, of course, any number of television shows are shot in Vancouver, though they don’t really count. They’re all shot in warehouses in Burnaby. And with Aamer Haleem, former host on VTV’s morning show, hosting VH1’s Bands Reunited, it’s like we never left!

Notwithstanding the television shows, I think most people here in Silicon Valley could wander around Vancouver without so much as stopping to ask for directions.