Most consumer tech founders in 2026 still default to San Francisco. I left Instagram in November 2025 and stayed in Toronto to build Onlure. This post is the case for why Toronto is the right place to build a creator marketplace serving North American local commerce, what San Francisco gets wrong about local marketing, and what working on Onlure looks like in week 24.
Six months ago, I left a job in infrastructure engineering at Instagram to build Onlure. Most founders I trained alongside in tech's last decade did the same exit and immediately moved to San Francisco. I stayed in Toronto. People keep asking why.
This post is the long version of the answer. It is not anti-San Francisco. It is pro-Toronto for the specific kind of company I am building. It also gets at why I think the next decade of consumer software will look different from the last one, and why the assumption that all category-defining companies must be built in California has quietly stopped being true.
What I learned in 4 years at Meta
I joined Meta straight out of college, on the Instagram infrastructure team. I shipped automated TestFlight beta distribution for Instagram and Threads (the first version of which got adopted across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp). I built Meta's first automated Google Play rollback system, after a P0 escalation that went directly to leadership.
Working at Meta taught me three things I now use every day at Onlure.
One: scale changes the problem more than people realize. A feature that works for 10K users behaves differently at 10M users and yet again at 1B. The patterns I saw shipping infrastructure that had to work across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads are the patterns I now use to design Onlure for the kind of growth a creator marketplace will see.
Two: the creator economy is structurally underpriced. I worked next to people who knew exactly what creator marketing was driving for the largest brands in the world. The same dynamics are absent at the small business level not because they do not work but because no one has built the infrastructure for them. That gap is the entire opportunity for Onlure.
Three: real measurement is hard and almost no one solves it correctly. I watched how attribution actually works at platform scale. The shortcuts everyone takes. The places where the data lies. The handful of techniques that actually work. The way creator-marketing measurement should be built for local commerce is informed by what I saw inside a platform serving billions of users — but with the right product choices for small businesses, not the wrong ones.
Why Toronto, specifically
Five reasons I am building from Toronto, in order.
Reason one: Toronto is a creator-dense city. An estimated 4% of Toronto adults earn at least some income from content creation. The food, fitness, beauty, and fashion verticals are all in the global top quartile for engagement. The neighborhoods (Queen West, Kensington, Liberty Village, Yorkville, Leslieville, the Annex) have their own creator communities that already know each other.
If I am building a creator marketplace, I want to build it where the creators are. San Francisco has technologists. Toronto has creators.
Reason two: Toronto's small business density. The number of independent restaurants, cafes, salons, fitness studios, and boutiques per square kilometer in central Toronto is among the highest in North America. The customer for Onlure on the brand side is everywhere here. I can walk down Queen West and see 30 potential brand customers in a 4-block stretch.
This matters. The product needs constant feedback from both sides of the marketplace. Walking outside and seeing the actual users is not a luxury. It is a competitive advantage.
Reason three: Canadian payments infrastructure. Interac e-Transfer is one of the best peer-to-peer payment rails in the world. It is fast, low-cost, and ubiquitous. Building a creator marketplace that pays in CAD via Interac is a structurally better experience for Canadian creators than any US-built platform forcing PayPal or wire transfers.
The dual-rail payment system Onlure uses (Stripe for cards, Interac for direct e-Transfer) is only possible because of where Canadian payments infrastructure sits in 2026.
Reason four: distance from the Bay Area echo chamber. A lot of consumer tech in the last 5 years was built for a fictional user that mostly looked like the founders. Toronto is far enough from that echo chamber that the local commerce thesis stays grounded. The cafe owner in Riverdale is not going to pretend Onlure makes sense if it does not. The creator in Junction will tell me directly when something is annoying.
This kind of feedback is the most valuable input a startup can get. It is harder to find inside the bubble.
Reason five: cost structure. Building a startup in Toronto in 2026 is roughly 35% to 50% cheaper than building the same startup in San Francisco. The runway math compounds. A solo founder in Toronto with the same capital can build longer, ship more, and stay independent further into the company's life.
I am not optimizing for cheap rent. I am optimizing for time to make Onlure right.
What working on Onlure looks like in week 24
Six months in. Week 24 of being a founder. The math:
The work splits roughly 60% engineering, 25% creator and brand outreach, 10% content and growth, and 5% operations and admin. I sleep less than I used to. I am also more focused than I have ever been.
The best part: the platform is being used. Real Toronto creators are getting paid by real Toronto brands through Onlure every week. The first paid bookings happened in March. The cadence has been steady since. Every week the number of completed bookings goes up.
The hardest part: building a two-sided marketplace solo is brutal. You cannot focus on creators without losing brand momentum. You cannot focus on brands without losing creator activity. The dance is constant.
What I am most proud of: the platform feels like it was built by someone who actually cares about both sides. Most creator marketplaces feel like they were built for brands and bolted-on for creators. Onlure was built for both, with the creator experience treated as the primary customer experience because creators are who decides whether the platform survives.
What I would tell other founders thinking about Toronto
A few things I have learned that might be useful:
The Toronto tech community is real and growing. The MaRS Discovery District, the network of Toronto-based founders, the events, the meetups. It exists. It is smaller than San Francisco's by an order of magnitude but the density is going up every quarter.
The capital is here, but you have to know where to look. Canadian VC has historically been concentrated and conservative. That is changing. There are funds in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal actively writing checks to local founders. The flagship US VCs are also opening Toronto channels. Pear, Greylock, a16z, all have started looking actively.
The talent is here. Canada has been training engineers for decades. The graduates from Waterloo, UofT, and McGill are world-class and most of them stay in Canada in 2026 because the opportunities here are competitive with the US for the first time in 20 years.
Work in public. This is true everywhere but more important in Toronto. The smaller community means a public profile compounds faster. Build in public, share lessons, and the right people will find you.
What's next
Onlure is in its second half of year one. The roadmap from here is clear:
I am one founder. I have shipped what most teams of 5 to 10 ship in the same window. I plan to keep doing that.
If you are a creator, claim a profile. If you are a brand, sign up. If you are a founder reading this thinking about whether to build from Toronto, the answer is probably yes.
