On a recent Friday morning in Vancouver, Tyler Nee is both cautious and bold. Cautious, because he knows anything he says could be stamped into print. Bold, because he says it anyway: he wants to build the Y Combinator of Canada.

“We do want to build a YC in Canada—period, full stop,” Nee says. The line sounds audacious until you trace the trail he’s been running the past few years: software, finance, and strategy stints; launching an innovation lab at Apply Digital; co-founding an AI newsletter that became a consulting outfit; a turn building AI products for creators; and then corporate development at Sanctuary AI, where humanoid robots are not a metaphor but a morning stand-up backdrop. That breadth led to a summer experiment—Red Thread Club—that snowballed into The Syndicate, his new vehicle for founder-first momentum.

“I still really resonated with the problem we’re trying to solve,” he says. “I just don’t think there’s a great environment for the next generation to start a company here.”

Red Thread Club was the proof of concept: fourteen gatherings in a single summer, drawing more than 700 founders, operators, and investors. Nee says a striking number of them weren’t the usual suspects you’d see on the local-event circuit—an early signal that story and curation might be as important as stage time and sponsors.

“There are people coming to our events that would not go to every other event in the city,” he says. “Whether it’s the marketing message or the mission we’re on, it compels them to join and build it with us.”

That “mission” has hardened into The Syndicate’s simple, three-part thesis: solve access to capital, access to mentorship, and access to founders. The last of those is where he’s started, and it’s where his methods are the most un-accelerator-like.

In lieu of a published curriculum, The Syndicate’s product right now is the room itself. Nee screens who gets in—personally.

“I have a call with every single person,” he says. “For the last four months, from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.” The filter is straightforward: “Highest talent density” plus what he calls a “no asshole policy**.” It’s not scalable forever; he knows that. But in the “cold start problem” of community, he argues the network needs a careful spark before it can self-propagate.

The result, even at this early stage, has been reach well beyond the Lower Mainland. “My LinkedIn has popped off… people from Kazakhstan, Germany, the UK,” he says. In Canada, interest is clustering from Toronto, Hamilton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Montreal, and Victoria. For The Syndicate’s launch, people flew in from Toronto. Others were waylaid only by overlapping hackathons. To Nee, those signals suggest he shouldn’t settle for being “another local accelerator.”

“In each province there’s a similar problem,” he says. “I don’t want to be local—I’m trying to do this at a greater scale.”

So what is The Syndicate right now? “Effectively, we’re a community,” Nee says. “We have social events, build days, and demo days coming up. We’re all-hands to help companies scale.” That’s the near-term: get the right people in the same room; nudge collisions into collaborations; keep the cadence high enough that the habit sticks.

Ask about three- or five-year plans and he shrugs. “It’s only been three or four weeks for The Syndicate,” he says.

Nee talks about a next phase that feels more like an athlete’s residency than a startup coworking space. “A physical house would be interesting,” he says. Founders would work “10–12 hours a day,” eat on a clean, high-protein regimen, and break together to move their bodies. “At 2 p.m. we ring a gong… time to get outside, touch some grass, or go for a workout,” he laughs. They’ve already piloted the vibe: a “Founders Reset Day” with a pre-work run on the seawall, cold plunge and sauna, and breakfast. It’s deliberately Vancouver: performance through wellness.

“A holistic approach to health and wellness improves performance,” he says.

Invoking YC is a choice; Nee knows the math. “They give out $150,000 for 7% equity” and admit “500–600 startups per year… at a 2% acceptance rate.” That implies 25,000 credible applications annually, he explains. “Do we have 25,000 startups in Canada? Per year, definitely not.” Which is why he sees Phase One as demand mapping: attract top founders, operators, and venture capitalists; quantify the real market; then deliberately address supply.

In other words, before you build the cap table, build the table.

While The Syndicate is still Tyler-led, there’s a small crew helping steer. “Three community leads,” he says—friends who raised their hands while the scaffolding goes up: Kai Lytton, who runs a marketing agency; Raymond Tan, who “quit his job at Microsoft to do this”; and Galen Tang, an engineer who recently moved back from a stint at AnyScale in San Francisco. It reads like a scrappy production company’s credits—lean, flexible, shipping weekly.

“I’m looking for the highest talent density of founders, operators, venture capitalists, [and] ecosystem partners across Canada,” Nee says. There’s no grand portal or polished cohort yet; the point of entry is human. Show up. Talk. Get a coffee. If the fit is right, you’ll know quickly.

Vancouver often feels like it’s caught between two gravitational pulls: the Bay Area’s talent magnet to the south and Canada’s capital clusters to the east. Nee’s bet is that curation, cadence, and a differentiated operating system can generate a field of its own—one strong enough that people “fly to Vancouver to start their companies with The Syndicate.” If the last decade was about proving you could build here, the next may hinge on how quickly you can compound here.

Ambition can read as arrogance on paper. In conversation, Nee’s sounds more like urgency. “If you don’t address access to capital, mentorship, and founders, you might as well pack your bag and go home.”