Fixing Canada's Trade Accelerators by Saving What Silicon Valley Throws Away
The photo was taken at the ENKA factory in Ede, Netherlands. The date is 1922. Two things will strike an enlightened observer:
The men, in black, are all management. The women, in white, are all workers. It looks discordant to us today — because we've progressed.
But we have not progressed the tools — trade missions — for developing exports and international expansion in more than a hundred years.
We're using yesterday's tools to meet today's challenges.
"Our 'Age of Anxiety' is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools — with yesterday's concepts." — Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (1967)
Canada's trade missions haven't changed in a hundred years.
Every year, government export programs send a small group of companies overseas — to pitch, meet buyers, and try to close deals.
The tool hasn't meaningfully changed since the trade delegations of a century ago.
What has changed is everything around it.
That's not a criticism of the people running these programs. The problem is the world changed, quietly, underneath a tool that didn't.
Two things everyone assumed quietly stopped being true.
"You need to be in-market to know if it works." True for a hundred years — a real conversation with a real customer required travel. It doesn't anymore. Zoom and the internet changed that, and almost nobody has revisited the model since.
"Every market is different — there's no reusable method." True at the level of language and localization. Not true at the level of a method.
Silicon Valley figured out, decades ago, a way to bring a new product to market cheaply and fast, before committing real money. They turned that into a repeatable, scalable process.
And gave it a name — an accelerator.
Accelerators: an appropriation government got right, but incomplete.
Government noticed that Silicon Valley was bringing new products to market, fast. So they imported the accelerator model into trade and export development.
A real, and credit-worthy instinct.
The instinct was right, but the implementation left three things behind:
They made the trade mission the endpoint, when it was only ever supposed to be reserved for readiness already present. They kept the applications and the cohorts, but let go of the one principle that made the original model work — decide who advances based on evidence, not activity or an application form.
And they threw away something even the Americans never fully saw the value of.
Saving what Silicon Valley throws away.
Every accelerator produces more than a new product for an existing market.
The slogan every accelerator uses says it plainly: Build. Measure. Learn.
Everybody learned.
The company that came out of the accelerator a breakout success learned. The company that raised money learned. The company that never raised a dime and was quietly dropped from the cohort learned too — how to talk to a customer, test an idea cheaply, read real signal instead of guessing.
Nobody built the system to produce that. It happens anyway, as a byproduct.
American investors treat it as a cost — time and effort spent educating founders who won't become the next Google. Thus the time-bound cohort. Thus, the act of dropping them.
Nobody has asked what happens if you make that byproduct the entire point — and apply it to exports and international expansion.
But we already do this.
That's the reflex. Seminars. Pitch Practice. Advisors. Workshops. Check the boxes, call it readiness.
None of it produces evidence. It produces confidence — the wrong kind.
A company that's rehearsed a pitch for a coach with nothing riding on the answer hasn't learned whether a real customer will buy. That test hasn't happened yet.
It happens on the trade mission. In front of the buyer. With public money already spent getting them there, and the company's one shot already underway — running on confidence nobody has actually earned.
That's not preparation. That's a live bet, placed with public money, on a company that was never actually ready — and doesn't find out until it's too late to matter. Anyone who actually knows how Silicon Valley accelerators work would dismiss that approach outright.
The Strong Are Doing What They Can.
Export and international expansion have been an appendix in most Canadian business plans. The companies that did venture out followed the path of least resistance — south, into the world's largest, most accessible market.
The math made that easy. The math just broke.
Canadian companies are facing trade pressure and tariff exposure without modern precedent — not a slow policy drift, but a live, fast-moving threat to how this country earns a living. Diversification is no longer a five-year strategic goal.
It's this year's survival plan — the subject of board meetings, budget meetings, and breakfast-table conversations, right now.
Are the accelerators feeding our trade missions, as they work today, ready for the results of a rupture?
Bridging the gap.
I've been privileged to see across two domains:
- bringing new products to market — in startups and accelerators,
- and building those businesses across borders — international expansion.
As an entrepreneur, the first step is always to understand the problem before proposing a fix. That's the intent behind this page — an attempt to diagnose, honestly, where the accelerator model breaks down before offering a solution.
Working with a mentor steeped in the discipline that built Silicon Valley's approach to new products, I arrived at a view a number of thought leaders in this space already share: bringing a new product to an existing market shares the same problem set as bringing an existing product to a new market.
The method transfers; nothing is proprietary, and it's teachable.
That's what closes the gap — and turns what the Americans throw away into the thing that gets a Canadian ready before they ever board a plane.
It won't take years to implement. It takes weeks — and that's the speed this moment calls for.
I'd like to share it with you. The conversation and Q&A will take 60 – 90 minutes.
I'm having this conversation with several stakeholders this fall. Starting with my home provinces.
I'll be in Canada September 22 – October 5. Contact me if you'd like to set up a conversation while I'm there.
📩 Jerry Everett — jeverett@onglobalventures.com
Jerry Everett has built cross-border companies from the inside — as founder and CEO of a bootstrapped startup that grew to 4,000+ customers in over 70 countries. He has built ventures from Canada and Europe and has lived and worked on four continents. He was born in Nova Scotia, brought up in New Brunswick. At the time of writing, he resides in the Netherlands.
"Because entrepreneurs, builders, dreamers power our economy." Prime Minister Carney Sept 5, 2025. This page, and the paper below, is one answer to that call.
For anyone who wants the full thinking behind this: "In Search of Export Unicorns" lays out the complete argument — capital allocation, power laws, how Silicon Valley actually finds its winners, and what gets thrown away in the process. Fair warning: it's dense and technical, drawing on the worlds of venture capital, startup accelerators, and first-principles thinking. It's the outcome of a better part of a month, spent wrestling this problem onto paper before it became the version above.
¹ Portions of the page and the paper it was derived from were developed with the assistance of Claude Sonnet 5 (Anthropic, 2026), acting as interlocutor, editor, and copywriter. All arguments, framing, and conclusions were directed, reviewed, and approved by the author.