Vancouver: Maxed out on Internet Startups?

For me, Civilization reached its low water mark the day I realized that Michael Jackson could convince two women to marry him, but my single women friends could not get dates. Then Markus Frind came along and, with a server and a song, put the universe in balance by setting up Plenty of Fish out of his home in Vancouver.

Styling himself as the anti-VC, Markus has spoken often about how to build a company outside of the venture capital model. Sometimes I want to tkae him aside and say, take it down a notch, already. This is a point of view you're expressing, not an exorcism. Still, his obeservations are interesting.

Take this recent post about the sorry state of Vancouver's internet community. Markus believes Vancouver can't support its nascent internet startups, let alone build the next MySpace. Here are his thoughts:

"The main problem is Myspace alone would need more datacenter space then there are data centers in Vancouver. The major hosting companies have no more power to power servers and space is maxed out, the telco’s don’t want to lay more lines and because of strict building codes leaving no more places to build datacenters that have a fibre connection. Last time I checked peer1 and netnation were no longer taking customers for Vancouver datacenters. From discussions with them it seems there won’t be a solution to this problem any time soon."