The 'Hoser' Mafia

In an article in Bill Mann's Canada in Marketwatch, I read the phrase the 'Hoser Mafia' for the first time and laughed aloud. Apparently, DFAIT with the help of a group of expat Canadians from Silicon Valley  (C100) has organized barnstorming tours throughout Canada by a group of American and Canadian venture capitalists to selected Canada-based start-ups who are looking for VC help.

“Canada is a young and dynamic country with a young and highly educated population. We want to help Canadians build different kinds of companies, to start out on their own — instead of just being a Canadian subsidiary of a foreign company. Canada has traditionally relied on commodities, as we all know,” says C100 organizing committee member Ron Piovesan, Toronto-born manager of corporate development at Cisco Systems.


All this is being coordinated by Stewart Beck, Canadian consul general in San Francisco. Canadian government subsidies to tech start-ups have disappeared, so Beck and the government are now networking Silicon Valley tech people to their countrymen back home. Business Without Borders says some 300,000 Canadian expatriates work in such Silicon Valley companies as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, and many are execs of the big tech firms. DFAIT and the C100 are working together to get Silicon VC/tech money flowing northward to Canada.