I talked to Gordon for an unrelated story a couple of days ago, but it reminded me to go through my notes from a previous interview with him on questions of Canada’s nano brain drain. Here’s an excerpt:
- Me: “I don’t want to insult you as a Canadian, and I’m half Canadian, myself …
Gordon: “Everyone insults the Cana …”
Me: “My mother was born and raised in Toronto.”
Gordon: “In Toronto, OK. I don’t know her, though. They assume we all know each other.”
Me: The way you’re describing the way the system works in Canada is similar to what I hear in reference to developing countries and countries of the former Soviet Union – that there are all these brilliant scientists, but no way to use their knowhow to found companies in their own countries, so a lot of them go overseas. Maybe the analogy stops there, because obviously Canada is not a developing country, but it has a similar problem. After all these brilliant scientists and businesspeople graduate from these great universities, and are interested in nanotechnology, where do they go? Am I reflecting what you said?
Gordon: There is a spirit of entrepreneurship in Canada, and we do have a proportional amount of nanotech companies. Problem is, many of them are facing a lot of severe financial problems. So, number one, there aren’t a lot of precomercialization funding available in Canada, that’s so critical for nanotech and Small Tech, like the NNI, DARPA, ATP, SBIRs, so if these precommercialization programs don’t exist that will get the company two years of cashflow until they actually get the VC funding available, it’s not helpful.
For the rest of the interview, please see Howard Lovy’s NanoBot.