Creating a new startup

A startup is not a small business that hopes to get big. It is a different machine with a different failure mode.

The distinction that decides everything

A small business is built to be profitable and durable — it should pay its owner, survive, and ideally be sellable. A startup is built to find a repeatable model fast enough to justify outside money, and most of them do not.

This is not a ranking. It is a choice, and taking startup money for what is actually a small business is how good businesses end up with investors expecting a return the model cannot produce.

What changes if you take investment

You acquire a second job: managing people who now own part of your company and have a timeline. You lose the option of staying comfortably small. You gain runway and, if you pick well, people who have seen your next problem before.

Dilution is the part founders model worst. A seed round and a Series A commonly leave founders with well under half the company, and the number that matters is not the percentage — it is whether you still control the decisions you care about.

The Canadian specifics worth knowing

SR&ED is the largest R&D incentive in the country and Budget 2025 doubled the expenditure limit to $6M with capital expenditures back in scope. It pays for genuine technical uncertainty, not for buying software.

IRAP AI Assist is non-repayable and covers up to 80% of salary costs — the closest thing to free money for building something, and persistently underused because it starts with a conversation rather than a form.

Mitacs puts a graduate researcher on your problem for roughly half the cost of an intern.

The first thing to build

Whatever most quickly tells you that you are wrong. Not the product — the test. Founders who ship a small embarrassing thing in three weeks learn more than founders who ship a polished thing in nine months, and they still have money left when the answer comes back.