Christy,
Congratulations on the new program.
This is an amazing commitment to technology and our future. Congratulations on this leadership!
I wanted to share my two cents and a few thoughts. Overall, I get a bit nervous with 100% of this $100 million being lent by the government to Venture Capitalists to invest. There is potential for bad investments, funds get lost in management fees, and worst case, in 4 years, the voters have nothing to show for investment which leaves them unsupportive of future investment.
Let’s hedge our risk. As there is a global talent shortage for developers and engineers, let’s take 1/2 and invest a different way…
- $43 million on technology education (computer science, technology entrepreneurship accelerators, web development bootcamps, etc.) will go a very far way
- $2 million on education awareness/marketing for students
- $5 million on business development creating incentives for the Amazons, Facebooks, etc., of the world to create engineering and customer support centres in BC
At the end of 2-4 years, you have highly trained talent that pairs with large technology businesses like Facebook and Amazon who will set up engineering centres employing high paid workforce. With the Canadian dollar at a 30% discount, this is a no-brainer for them as long as the province can guarantee talent.
In the short term, you create thousands of high paying BC jobs.
In the long term, the alum of this education will also create their own startups, and the other 50m there for investment in their ideas. These will be the people who go build the next Hootsuite, Slack, Vision Critical, Plentyoffish, BuildDirect, Recon Instruments, Foodee, Global Relay, Elastic Path Software, TIO Networks, Bench.co, Payfirma, BroadbandTV, SHOEme, Quietly, etc etc.
Again, congratulations on this bold investment. I am a huge fan of technology and believe that this is the best bet for our economy moving into the future.
Syndicated with permission from Ryan Holmes’ (highly active) Facebook post.
Image courtesy Chad Hipolito via Huffington Post.