Pontifications

Mark Busse writes:

Does Vancouver drive away more creative people than it attracts? Affordability aside, what other factors influence this issue? In particular, what are the forces that draw people here? Where does the potential lie?

I don’t know how to answer this question but I do know I’ve lived in creative bubbles my entire life and so that’s how I will start this series of blog posts on creatives in Vancouver:

  • The bubble of middle class childhood in a small Ontario town where I never had to worry about food, the police or racism.
  • The bubble of a patriarchal family where the boys and the men did nothing; women did 90% of the cooking and cleaning which means I had plenty of free time for hobbies like computers.
  • The bubble of Canadian middle class which enabled me to buy a computer and teach myself how to write software.
  • The bubble of the University of Waterloo co-op engineering program which allowed me in 1984 dollars to get a job at Nortel (well actually it BNR then and BNR was owned by Nortel then!) and earn $35K/year in 1984 dollars as a coop which set me up for life in the software industry in my very first year of University.
  • The bubble of a “secure” job at Nortel in 1999 which enabled me to start blogging.
  • The very small bubble of the Vancouver startup scene in 2004 which enabled our startup Bryght to be funded, me to become part of the open source community which led to working for the bubble of Mozilla.
  • What are your bubbles?

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