Founders at Work.pdf

144 Founders at Work
the 1984 recession, and it really impacted the high-tech industry. A lot of the
engineers weren’t getting jobs. University of Waterloo prided itself with its very
high placement record for both co-op and graduate programs, and that was one
of the worst years we ever had.
I remember a lot of the students were very upset. They said, “We worked
really hard, and now we can’t even get jobs.” I just couldn’t believe that,
because you’re talking about students that had to work very hard and had to be
very talented to get to this university. We were being trained with stuff that was
right out of a science fiction novel, so I couldn’t imagine how we couldn’t be in
a better position. I remember us having these arguments, and they knocked me
off my soapbox one day when they said, “If you believe this so much, why don’t
you start a company?” Literally, I went out and started it within a few weeks
after that.
Livingston: Weren’t you a month away from graduating?
Lazaridis: Yeah. I started a company before then. We got a contract that just
got us so busy, we started hiring people, and I couldn’t actually keep working at
school. I had to take a leave of absence.
Livingston: When did you start this?
Lazaridis: Contract work would have been in my third year. Then, in my fourth
year, I started what became RIM.
Livingston: In the third year, you were just doing this work to earn some extra
money to pay for college?
Lazaridis: It was that, and there was also some very interesting work going on
at the university. In university I was working on some new languages that were
sort of the beginnings of what became Java. The whole virtual machine. I’m
drawing a difficult parallel, but I was working on something called STOIC. It
was an interpretive language that we were getting working on various microcomputers
at the time.
In fact, we ended up buying one of those computers when the university
put it up for surplus. Apparently, it had broken, and I remembered that computer
system because we were using it in our engineering class. We were doing
all our assignments on that one computer. I put a bid in and I got it for—I can’t
remember now, but it would have been $400 or $600, because it didn’t work. I
took it back to our office—it was massive—and took it apart, and, as I powered
it up part by part, I realized that the power supply had broken. Once we fixed
the power supply, the computer just came right up. So we did our big contract
on that computer.
Livingston: How did you land these contracts as a young undergrad?
Lazaridis: When you have access to state-of-the-art education, and you know
how to use these machines—and you are comfortable with them—you just
have to make that one leap to realize that you can actually help people. There is
a need for that kind of experience, but the problem was that a lot of these companies
didn’t know they had that need. It was just a matter of breaking out of