Building the Infrastructure We Couldn’t Find
May 4, 2025
Before it was a platform, it was a conversation.
Founded in Canada isn’t a government-backed initiative or a glossy strategy from a national institution. It’s a grassroots platform built from the ground up by two Canadian women who were tired of watching great founders burn out in a broken system.
This is the story of building something real. Something raw. Something necessary.
Kendra Garagan, a multi-time founder and innovation advisor, had spent years working with 150 startups from coast to coast. And the patterns never changed: brilliant builders buried under outdated PDFs, pitch deck theatre, inaccessible funding, and a maze of networks that all seemed to whisper the same thing: If you don’t already know the way in, good luck.
Cathy Xie lived that reality firsthand. As a community-first product operator, Cathy navigated Canada’s startup ecosystem the hard way: bootstrapping through pitch nights, applying to fragmented programs, digging through databases, and constantly coming up against invisible walls.
The two met when Kendra was mentoring Cathy during an earlier venture. That mentorship quickly evolved into something much deeper: a co-building relationship rooted in grit, trust, and the kind of brutal honesty founders need more of.
What started as a Notion doc and a Google Sheet snowballed into something Canada had never seen before: a platform designed by founders, for founders.
“Most partnerships look perfect on paper but fall apart when things get real,” Kendra shared. “Cathy didn’t ghost after our first fight. She came back the next day ready to unpack it. That’s when I knew we were building something that could last.”
The questions they were asking weren’t new:
Where do early-stage founders go for real support — beyond buzzword-heavy portals and press releases?
Why do so many funding programs still feel hidden or gatekept?
Why is there still no single place to see what’s actually available — now, not six months ago?
They didn’t find the answers. So they built them.
Today, Founded in Canada is:
A national support directory with verified programs, funders, and founder-facing orgs
A no-fluff, builder-first newsletter read coast-to-coast
A private WhatsApp group where early-stage founders share leads, vent, and collaborate in real time
A growing platform that bridges information, access, and real belonging
And this is just the start.
Kendra and Cathy are building what they couldn’t find. Not for headlines. Not for awards. But for the next wave of Canadian founders who deserve better.
This isn’t a side project. This is infrastructure.
About Founded in Canada
Founded in Canada is a founder-first platform building the connective tissue between the country’s startup talent, funding, and infrastructure. From a verified national directory to a weekly newsletter to live policy memos and grassroots events, Founded in Canada is on a mission to make this country the best place in the world to build something from scratch — no gatekeeping, no guesswork.