Courtesy Jenny Lemieux
- Entrepreneur First, an accelerator backed by Reid Hoffman, launched a program in Toronto last fall.
- Canadian entrepreneur Sally Daub says it’s helping Toronto become an international startup hub.
- In its second year, the program has drawn 2,000 applications from around the world for its 80 spots.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Sally Daub founded a Toronto semiconductor company whose technology helped enable something any Netflix subscriber takes for granted today: streaming video smoothly on wireless internet.
But it was an uphill battle for her, she said, as one of the few female CEOs in her industry, far, far away from Silicon Valley. Though she eventually raised funding from NEA and took her company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange, her company was undercapitalized for years, competing against the likes of Broadcom and Intel.
When she later moved to the Bay Area for a few years, she saw firsthand how disadvantaged her company had been.
“I came back from San Francisco with a chip on my shoulder,” she told Insider.
Yet the past few years have shown that the Bay Area isn’t the only place to be for startups. And the arrival of Entrepreneur First to Toronto, an accelerator backed by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, is a game-changer, Daub said. She recently joined the program as a partner.
Entrepreneur First, which began in 2011 in…
