The fear that a Canadian technology company will be sold and absorbed into a larger foreign owner is, for Jamie Greenberg, the wrong fixation. What decides whether it stays and grows at home, he argues, is conviction, not the exit.
Greenberg is the top lawyer at Solink, the Kanata, Ontario video security company whose cloud platform pairs camera footage with operational data for retailers, restaurants and banks worldwide. He spent five years as general counsel at Wattpad through its acquisition by South Korea's Naver Corp.; today, he is the general counsel at Solink. Asked whether Canadian founders should plan around the eventual sale, he does not hedge. “We don't think about that at all. The only thing we think about is building a generational company in Canada,” he says.
Building a generational company in Canada
That view shapes how Greenberg reads Ottawa's enthusiasm for homegrown technology, which has made scaling domestic “AI champions” a pillar of its national strategy, AI for All, released in June 2026. Solink is “proudly Canadian-based in Kanata, Ontario,” he says, even though most customers sit outside the country. He calls it “a global company that's based in Canada,” one of many Canadian businesses betting on AI for growth.
The location is not incidental. Solink sits in a Kanata cluster built on talent seeded by Nortel, BlackBerry, and Shopify, and in the riding of Jenna Sudds, the Liberal MP for Kanata and a member of the Liberal Technology Caucus. Its cap table mixes Canadian and US money – longtime backers like OMERS Ventures and the Business Development Bank of Canada sit alongside Valor Equity Partners and Goldman Sachs.
Why data sovereignty is 'a bit of a red herring'
Where the national conversation turns to keeping data on Canadian soil, Greenberg is willing to be contrarian. “I think data sovereignty is a little bit of a red herring,” he says. Data residency – the idea that information can be tied to a single jurisdiction – conflicts with the economics of cloud computing and the reality that customers operate everywhere. European data stays in Europe to satisfy the General Data Protection Regulation, but beyond that, he calls it “more of a political idea than a practical idea.”
Solink's own model complicates the debate in a different way. Because its recording devices sit on customers' premises, “customers own their data, and the vast majority of their data is stored on-site,” he says – a Canadian business that wants its footage local can keep it that way, with the cloud an option rather than a default, consistent with how Solink approaches data security and privacy.
The strings attached to defensible Canadian IP
Greenberg sees a practical tension in the conditions sometimes attached to government support for Canadian intellectual property. “A lot of the defensible Canadian IP that the government is trying to encourage comes with strings attached,” he says. For a global company, grant terms affecting where it can move or dispose of its IP require careful consideration and a clear explanation to the board.
The same friction shows up in procurement, which the government touts for giving scale-ups early revenue. Ottawa has appointed former Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette to run Digital Transformation Canada, a new federal agency meant in part to steer more public purchasing toward Canadian technology firms. Greenberg welcomes the intent: “It is not easy to sell into government. It is a long and difficult process,” he says – and speeding up that cycle would be “the best rocket fuel for Canadian companies to grow into global companies.”
Growing his legal role
Those questions land on Greenberg because his job has outgrown the legal department. Having led the financing with Solink's chief executive and chief financial officer, he has taken on strategy, communications, investor relations, policy and government relations. “There is a lot more to my role other than legal,” he says, framing them as an extension of the job, not a break from it: “They're all legal adjacent, and they give me additional leverage on the legal side to understand what's actually important to the business.”
What it takes to thrive in-house
For lawyers who assume a general counsel is a behind-the-scenes figure, his advice is to stop waiting for permission. “No one is going to hand anything to you as the general counsel. You just have to do it,” he says. The path to a bigger mandate is plain: “My advice to lawyers who want a more outward-facing role is just start doing the work.”
He is equally direct about who belongs in-house. A lawyer who wants to master one narrow area will chafe because the work is general and tied to one client. “In-house is good for people who like people, who like interacting on issues that aren't necessarily legal,” he says. “You really have to show a lot of love to that specific client, and that client is your business.”
In practice, he triages whatever the day sends – a tariff question in the morning, a commercial dispute by the afternoon – while planning far enough ahead that the team absorbs the surprises. “The best part about my role is I sit down at my desk every day, and I don't know what I'm going to get hit with,” he says, and he won't lead from a distance: “I'm going to be a player-coach, so I'm going to do the work.”
His message to younger lawyers is to worry less about the trappings than the community, and “not be fixated on title or reporting structure or salary because ... once you're in this community ... the sky is really the limit.”
Jamie Greenberg is a member of the Canadian In-House Lawyers Leaders Network, powered by Canadian Lawyer.