Founders at Work.pdf

Mike Lazaridis 145
your shell and going out and talking to them—looking in the newspapers, looking
in local message boards, talking to different companies, asking if they
needed any work done. Basically, you had to do a little bit of sales.
But what was interesting was that, in every case, you were able to bring this
experience to bear on a tricky problem that had been there for a while and that
you found that you could solve it very elegantly and quickly using what you’d
learned. That’s how we got these projects with General Motors and the
National Film Board and Kodak, which eventually led to the Emmy Award and
the Technical Oscar.
When you go back, you realize that the exposure you had in high school and
in university was actually preparing you for a decade and two decades out.
We need to make sure that we are allowing students to be exposed to future
technology and not reducing it to current—what a lot of people would like to
say, “relevant” teaching. What’s relevant teaching? What’s relevant research?
When I was at university, if you went in and started looking at what we were
doing, you would say, “Why don’t you guys get a life and do something relevant?
What is this stuff? Nobody’s going to use this.”
When we were there, that’s what people were thinking. “How many people
are going to have a computer in their house? What is this networking stuff? You
are talking about science fiction; you’re not talking about important things.
Why don’t you do something important?” “Important” back then became
“obsolete” very quickly after we left university.
Livingston: Was Doug part of the consulting business?
Lazaridis: Doug was at University of Windsor, and we collaborated. It wasn’t
until I decided to start RIM that I called Doug up and told him what I wanted
to do and I needed his help. He was up within 2 weeks of that call.
Livingston: Did you have to tell your parents you weren’t finishing school?
Lazaridis: Oh yeah. But what was actually harder was having to go to the president
of the university and ask for a leave of absence. I had never met him
before. It was quite interesting because he apologized for having to try to dissuade
me from it. After he finished his speech, he wished me the best of luck
and shook my hand with a big smile. I remembered that and, ironically, 20 years
later he’s one of RIM’s board members.
Livingston: So you start RIM, and you have a $600,000 contract with General
Motors. What were you doing?
Lazaridis: One of the things we did was that we listened to what General
Motors was trying to accomplish. The RFP had been out for over 2 years. We
got a copy of it and looked at it, and we recognized a couple things in there that
you couldn’t do without some of the state-of-the-art techniques that we’d
learned at university. One was that it was begging for a local area network. So
we had to create one, based on what we remembered.
I went back and talked to some of the teachers there and looked at some of
the research that was being done. We had to develop that LAN from scratch,
but we had to also make sure that it was very rugged, because it had to be used