Immigrants, Refugees, Talent

Ukrainians fleeing the war will be incredibly valuable to Europe and North America

When I sat on a panel at UBC Entrepreneurship about ten days ago, someone in the audience asked the question if age could be a factor in determining founder success. And if gender could also be a determinant. A good question, unfortunately it was not upvoted by the audience (UBC used an actually nice plug-in to Zoom to run the questions) so I could not launch into the answer which I had quickly pieced together in my head.

The answer of course is that it does not matter, I always cite two women I work with who are well into their sixties and who run some strong and innovative tech companies and are doing quite well. Age and entrepreneurship just do not have a straightforward relationship. This is even further complicated if you start to correlate age with more than just the effort as such and add the factor ‘success’. You get to very convoluted datasets. In my experience age does not matter. Sure seasoned founders who have had exits before are more likely to avoid downside outcomes given their experience, but I can also point to youthful energy as a key driver of success. From what I have seen in the many companies I advised, invested in and work with, age and gender do not necessarily matter when it comes to building successful ventures.

What matters far more are traits that point to qualities like being entrepreneurial, flexible, risk taking, creative, inquisitive etc. , but at the same time having conservative instincts that are geared towards preservation, taking outside advice and ‘go steady’ when the downside risks start to pile up. In a lot of cases it requires real pressure and crises for certain entrepreneurial qualities to manifest themselves in a person. You may have been born with these traits, but that still does not guarantee you will become a rockstar founder, your journey through life determines the eventual outcomes: it is the age old nature/nurture story.

I started thinking about this in prepping for the answer that I did not get to give and that was where I realized that there was actually one group that does stand out of having a better than average chance of entrepreneurial success: immigrants. I have worked with many and always found them far more driven and determined than those that were born in Canada, on average. There are superb Canadian founders, but if you take ten immigrants and ten Canadians there is a fair chance that the higher number of entrepreneurs is to be found in the immigrant cohort. The reasons for this are manifold, but I like to lift out three:

1. Risk Taking - if you decided to burn all bridges behind you and immigrate, you are probably of a mindset that is entrepreneurial, you can probably make it work whatever happens, is what you’re thinking. The incredible hurdles before you are not obstacles, they are either there to be overcome or you may not even consider them as such. Not an entrepreneur myself in the strictest terms, I came to Canada with no connections or plans or well defined ideas (I had not even been here before my official arrival), but a rock solid belief that I would somehow figure it out.

2. No Return - in a lot of cases the immigrant is a refugee and there is no way back. Whatever your skills or talent, you go for it. I once worked with someone who came from Kazakhstan and I once casually asked her what she thought about life in Vancouver. She said, ‘Pieter, you have no idea, this is a dream come true and there is no way I can go back, this is the one opportunity for me’. She was actually so qualified for the journey that she moved on to Silicon Valley where she is now quite successful.

3. The Outsider’s View - the immigrant brings a wide range of ideas and is far better able than the locals to critique, analyze and find new and better ways of doing things. A fresh look and they often combine this with a stellar academic background. I talk to immigrant entrepreneurial minds who are keen to reform Canada’s antiquated telecoms and banking sectors all the time. Or look at for instance how Jewish refugees propelled Israel as a start-up nation which got going in the 1900s concurrent with the influx of close to a million of Russian arrivals. Or Iranians who all over the world can be found fully engaged in tech and other industries.

All of this of course brought me back to the current stream of refugees from Ukraine, which for now are mostly women and children as men are held back to fight. In most cases they will not be able to go back, have to go for new opportunities while bringing great experiences and backgrounds. No doubt Ukrainian men will follow in due course once hostilities cease. Someone last week commented to me on how many Ukrainians are so good in English, yes, tech has been outsourcing development there for decades. When doing a bit of background research on this article I found most articles on immigration and tech/entrepreneurship are from 2016, the year Syrian refugees made their way out of a ravaged country, sadly and ironically also because of Russian bombs.

We need to think of immigration as a key driver for innovation and growth and it surprises me that this is not getting more attention. The deep tragedy of the war in Ukraine will bring us many refugees - including by the way Russians who are checking out by the tens of thousands - who we should care for in any way we possibly can. The best way however is to give them a real start by opening up entrepreneurial opportunities for them.

Note: Just realized writing this that Russia - both now and in the Soviet days - exported many refugees. From Syria to Europe/North America, from Russia to Israel, from the former Eastern European nations, and now from Ukraine. An incredible brain drain that is now again affecting Russia itself.

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