Why We Build Is Not About Where We Build
The Waterloo Thesis Made Real
I began with a simple idea: Waterloo is the talent engine of Canada’s past, present, and future builders.
Not a place competing for attention, but a pattern—of belief, trust, and persistence—that has quietly shaped the people who build wherever they go.
Thirty days later, that idea no longer feels like a thesis.
It’s a doctrine.
Something we’ve all been living, often without naming it.
Years ago, researchers Ajay Agrawal, Devesh Kapur, and John McHale described this pattern in their paper “Brain Drain or Brain Bank?” They found that when talented people leave their home country but stay connected, the result isn’t loss, it’s leverage. Skilled emigration creates a global brain bank that transfers knowledge, investment, and opportunity back home.
That’s exactly what’s happened with Waterloo.
The students, founders, and engineers who left for San Francisco, New York, or London didn’t disappear. They became part of a living network. One that still funds, mentors, and inspires the next generation of builders coming through the same halls and coffee shops they once did.
But that story has been buried.
Caught up in economic development priorities, institutional interests, and a narrow understanding of how talent really moves between cities and across borders.
The Pattern Beneath the Place
What makes Waterloo special isn’t that it holds on to people, it’s that it gives them something worth carrying.
Every generation leaves, and every generation returns in a different form. Sometimes it’s a startup built abroad with Canadian roots. Sometimes it’s a check written from across the border. Sometimes it’s a whisper of advice in a Slack thread, or a connection made between two strangers who share a hometown they’ve outgrown but never forgotten.
The pattern isn’t local, it’s relational.
It’s not about density in one city, but gravity across many. When enough people share the same formative experience — the late nights, the co-ops, the quiet belief that work matters more than talk — they start to find each other again. The connections reform, stronger and more distributed each time.
That’s the invisible structure of Waterloo.
It’s not the buildings or the programs. It’s the habit of belief. The way one generation of builders trusts that another will emerge, and that even when they scatter, the current will keep flowing. That’s what turns a brain drain into a brain bank.
The Builders Return
Every ecosystem has a rhythm. In Waterloo, it’s always been cyclical. The waves of builders arrive, learn, leave, and eventually send something back.
In the early days, that return looked like mentorship or capital. Founders who left for Silicon Valley would quietly wire advice or introductions back home. They didn’t make a show of it; they just did what builders do, kept the network alive.
But in this cycle, something new is happening. The builders aren’t just returning individually, they’re rebuilding the structure that built them.
You can see it in Socratica’s symposium, where more than 3,000 people came together to see what local students had made possible. You can see it in the rebirth of grassroots events and organizations — Devhouse, New Systems in Toronto, Builders Club — each one an echo of the early days of Velocity or Communitech, reinterpreted for a new generation.
These aren’t nostalgia projects. They’re living systems of belief, rebuilt by people who understand the value of staying connected.
The return isn’t physical, it’s relational. Builders who once left are now co-investors, advisors, mentors, and friends. The next generation doesn’t have to start over. They begin with trust already baked in.
This is the brain bank compounding in real time, not through policy or programs, but through people who kept their connections alive long enough for the cycle to start again.
The Global Flow
For years, Canada’s story about talent was told in one direction.
Students left, companies scaled abroad, and governments worried about how to keep people here. The narrative was always about loss.
But that was never the full picture.
The builders didn’t vanish. They just plugged into a bigger circuit. What looked like departure was actually distribution, Canadian-trained builders embedding themselves in global companies, networks, and markets.
Now that current very much runs both ways.
Talent and capital move back and forth. Ideas born in Waterloo are refined in San Francisco, deployed in New York, and rebuilt in Toronto. The feedback loop between these places grows tighter with each cycle. Builders no longer need to “come home” to contribute, they’re connected constantly, flowing knowledge and opportunity in real time.
This is the new advantage.
The global flow of builders, forged in Waterloo’s culture of substance and humility, now powers a distributed network of ambition that stretches across continents. It’s a system built not on location, but on alignment, of purpose, trust, and a shared understanding of how to get things done.
And in that flow, Canada isn’t a branch of someone else’s story. It’s the backbone of one that keeps expanding.
Building From Here
What began as a theory — that Waterloo was the talent engine of Canada’s builders — has become something we can see and touch.
It’s in the spaces rebuilt by those who once left: the communities like Builders Club, Socratica, and New Systems that keep the rhythm alive. It’s in the patience of those who stayed, the curiosity of those who arrived, and the ambition of those who found their way back.
The story isn’t about keeping people in one place. It’s about keeping them connected.
Because talent doesn’t drain when it moves, it compounds when it stays in relationship. That’s the quiet magic of Waterloo’s pattern: people leave, but the current continues. Every conversation, investment, and introduction made abroad flows back into the next wave of builders here.
The work doesn’t stop at the border. It circulates.
That’s why the surface has returned. The deep work of the last decade, the patient building, the invisible trust, the unglamorous belief that momentum would come again, has broken through. The noise is quieter now, but the signal is stronger than ever.
And that signal isn’t a call to stay put. It’s an invitation to build from wherever you are — connected to a shared foundation that began in a small city in Canada and now spans the world.
This isn’t just Waterloo’s story anymore. It’s the doctrine of a generation that’s learned how to turn motion into meaning, distance into connection, and belief into something real.
That’s how we Build From Here.
Next? Not sure yet. Thanks for following along!