Avery Pennarun says Canadians don\u2019t need to become American to sell to Americans.<\/p>\n
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Avery Pennarun is the co-founder and CEO of Tailscale, a secure connectivity platform.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Canada has an advantage we don\u2019t say out loud often enough: most of the world still wants to work with us.<\/p>\n
That sounds soft, so it\u2019s easy to underrate. It isn\u2019t. Infrastructure runs on trust. If customers in Toronto, Frankfurt, Tokyo, London, or Chicago can make a purchase without feeling like they\u2019re choosing sides in someone else\u2019s political argument, that trust becomes market access.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cWe don\u2019t need to become American to sell to Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
The U.S. is still an enormous technology market. But it isn\u2019t the whole market, and treating it as such is a habit Canadian tech needs to unlearn. The rest of the world is still buying technology, building infrastructure, and trying not to depend on a single country\u2019s output.<\/p>\n
This is Canada\u2019s opening to become the trusted base for infrastructure companies selling to a world that wants options. That includes sovereign AI. Canada fits that conversation differently: trusted, technically serious, and good at connecting markets that don\u2019t fully trust each other.<\/p>\n
PointClickCare is the latest example in the other direction. According to The Globe and Mail<\/a>, the healthtech company has a contingency plan to move to the United States if the trade war gets bad enough. It reportedly gets 97 percent of its revenue from the US and described the move as a worst-case scenario it would choose if staying put would risk the business.<\/p>\n But PointClickCare shouldn\u2019t become the template for every Canadian technology company. It\u2019s one company, in one regulated sector, with one very specific customer concentration problem. Most software companies don\u2019t have to choose between being Canadian and being global.\u00a0<\/p>\n At Tailscale<\/a>, we see the same trade tension, yet we have come to a different conclusion. We don\u2019t need to become American to sell to Americans. This is software. It crosses borders for a living.<\/p>\n Tailscale is Canadian by design. That says something about the kind of company we want to build: globally useful, trusted, and interoperable, without trying to turn Canadian technology into another closed national silo. We think the world needs more serious infrastructure companies that aren\u2019t automatically American. Customers should be able to buy Canadian technology because it is good, not because they are choosing sides in a geopolitical argument.\u00a0<\/p>\n Buying the products we want to exist<\/p>\n Being Canadian doesn\u2019t mean being Canada-only. Tailscale has US employees, US customers, US investors, and a US entity. That\u2019s to be expected. The question is whether operating in the US requires making the US the company\u2019s centre of gravity. It doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Our product works the same way. Tailscale lets people, devices, and services access infrastructure securely from Toronto, Virginia, Frankfurt, a factory, an airport, even a satellite beyond the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line\u2014the conventional edge of space. Authenticate the right person or machine. Encrypt the traffic. Done.<\/p>\n The old network assumed the office was trusted. Then work moved to homes, clouds, vendors, contractors, and machines that don\u2019t care where the org chart says they live. Trust moved from place to identity. The same thing is happening to companies. Geography is a bad proxy for trust or ambition.<\/p>\n