Canada Day: Where My Founder Story Started

Before the Bay Area, before GrackerAI, before anyone used the term CIAM, there was Canada.

I started my first company there. I arrived with a customer identity idea that nobody had a budget line for, and Canada took it seriously before I had the traction to justify it. Early customers were willing to bet on a young startup. Engineering talent came out of world-class universities. The ecosystem funds research and welcomes newcomers without drama. That foundation carried the company until the product could carry itself. What started there went on to manage identities for more than a billion users.

Canada taught me to build with constraints. A smaller market and tighter capital leave no room for waste, so you learn efficiency before it becomes fashionable. When I expanded into the US, that discipline was the edge. Every company I have built since still runs on habits I formed there.

That is the quiet strength of Canada. You do not need a giant tech ecosystem to start something real. The smaller stage is a gift. It is a great place to build, experiment, and get a first idea off the ground without the noise and cost of the biggest markets. Open to immigrants, generous with research, and quietly producing engineering talent far out of proportion to its size. Toronto, Vancouver, and Waterloo are shipping serious AI work right now, and the world still underrates it.

Happy Canada Day to the country that gave my first company its start. Some founders have an origin story. Mine has a maple leaf on it.

Deepak Gupta is a serial entrepreneur and cybersecurity expert who co-founded and scaled a CIAM platform to serve over 1 billion users globally. He now leads GrackerAI, a GEO platform built for B2B SaaS and cybersecurity companies. He writes about AI, cybersecurity, and building companies at guptadeepak.com.