Timing is everything. Blaze a trail at the right time, people will follow. In a nutshell, that’s how former Silicon Valley software developer Vikram Rangnekar became the driving force behind movnorth.com, and a go-to source for U.S. tech workers looking for help and advice about moving to Canada.
Movnorth.com is both a website and service dedicated to connecting skilled Valley tech workers with talent-hungry Canadian companies. Rangnekar, its co-founder, will be in Kitchener on Sept. 27, speaking at an event called Scaling Up: The Engineering Decisions That Helped LinkedIn Surpass 400 Million Users, one in an ongoing series of discussions hosted by Terminal.io called Terminal Tech Talks.
Two years ago, Rangnekar moved from the Valley, where he had been working for LinkedIn, to the family-friendly, east-Toronto neighbourhood of Leslieville. The decision was deliberate. An Indian citizen, he had spent six years at LinkedIn waiting for more permanent U.S. immigration status but it never came. It was abundantly clear to him that it would be a decade or more before it did. If it ever did. And then a friend told him about Toronto.
“There are a few problems in the Valley right now, in terms of immigrants, for a tech workforce,” says Rangnekar, speaking to Communitech News.
“Immigration things are getting a little out of control. There are all these new restrictions and arbitrary reasons for cancelling things. You live someplace six years, you want some kind of permanence, not a work visa forever.”
Once in Canada, and with the U.S. presidential election looming, Rangnekar began writing about the experience of moving. He wrote blog posts and LinkedIn items about looking for schools, searching for work, applying for permanent resident status, the cheap price of real estate relative to the Valley, and was quickly astonished to see his posts were generating 5,000, then 10,000, views. He began to get calls from friends and colleagues who wanted to know more. There was clearly a desire for information, and a clear interest from the tech community in the Valley in moving north.
And so movnorth.com was born.
The website has pivoted somewhat, he says, and now focuses on directly connecting Canadian companies with international tech talent. Instead of a finder’s fee (typically a recruiter will receive fee equal to a given percentage of a new hire’s salary) companies pay a flat-fee subscription “and you can connect to as many people as you like.”
Born in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, Rangnekar has become one of Canada’s greatest boosters, and sees the advantages and opportunities through the eyes of someone who grew weary of the roadblocks and problems inherent in living in the U.S., and the Valley.
“Canadians might be surprised, but maybe not, that Americans don’t really know enough about them,” he says.
He quickly came to appreciate Canada’s open, inclusive, immigrant-friendly policies and Toronto’s multicultural, welcoming neighbourhoods.
“In the U.S., dealing with immigration, you usually need lawyers. It’s a black box, a binary decision. [In Canada], it was surprisingly different: An online system; I was able to do it on my own. There were points [so] I knew where I stood. It was pretty transparent. There was call centre to call and ask about status.
“Try calling the U.S. [immigration department]; they’d laugh.”
Things that Canadians take for granted, in other words, he has come to appreciate as gifts.
“As a startup founder, I love the health-care system here – because that allows me to experiment with startup ideas as opposed to paying out of pocket for health care.”
And don’t get him started on the price of Toronto real estate – cheap by the Valley’s standards.
He says the U.S. – at least the U.S. as represented by Silicon Valley – turned out to be something of an illusion, and certainly different from what movies and pop culture had led him to imagine, back before he arrived in the U.S. to attend University of Delaware in 2001.
“The States is a little bit different than I what I expected it to be – kids outside on their bikes, not a care in the world.
“It’s not as open and free for kids. They’re protected and managed.
“Where we live in Toronto, everyone is outside, all the time. Kids are running about, kids are riding their bikes on their own.”
And, he says, “every park is beautiful, school is a short walk, [and] it’s a great school. The [downtown] isn’t far.
“So we really like it. My kids love it.”
The timing, he acknowledges, has been good. Trump’s election only made immigration to the U.S. more restrictive. At the same time, Canada, in the summer of 2017, implemented the Global Talent Stream program, a fast-track process for skilled tech workers that aims for a two-week turnaround for processing visas and short-term work permits.
Still, he says, Canada could do more.
“On the immigration side, have more flexibility on visas. If somebody is highly experienced, and has the [required] English level, just let him in.
“Age is another thing. You get negative [immigration] points for age. If someone is 40 or 50 and has spent the last 10 years working at Facebook or Twitter, is that really someone we don’t want here? It doesn’t make sense to me.
Finally, he says, Canadian companies “need to pay more” if they’re to attract skilled workers.
He’s well aware of the skilled talent emerging from University of Waterloo – he hired many when he was at LinkedIn – and is growing increasingly familiar with Waterloo Region. He attended Communitech’s True North conference last May, and the ETHWaterloo Hackathon last year.
As for his Terminal Tech Talk, he says the lessons that LinkedIn learned, as it grew from 37 million to 400 million users during his tenure, are ones that scaling companies here, and elsewhere, can use.
LinkedIn, he says, “did not start off with the best engineering stack out there.” It evolved. “It brought in really smart people who had [scaled companies] before at Yahoo and Google.”
“Internal tools” he says, were developed and put to work.
“Promoting craftsmanship as something that everyone needs to aspire to,” he says. “Writing good software that’s clean, well-tested. Internal processes for writing code and how the code gets out into production. Monitoring. Alerting.”
But good code doesn’t happen by accident. It gets written by talented, happy people. People depend on permanence. Security. Family friendly environs. Schools. Health care. Affordable housing.
That, he says, is where Canada comes in.
“The quality of life is just much better here,” says Rangnekar.
Blaze a trail. People will follow.
