Are any other young tech nerds (I'm the same age as the person in the article) a bit annoyed when people mention age?
I mean...half of the news I hear about greplin is about the founder being 19 years old. Who cares? Greplin is a cool service, it's not relevant that the founder is 19 and, honestly, if it were me I would be a little offended.
Same thing with this. Who cares that the person who donated money is 23? Why not just: "Kik founder donates $1 Million to support Waterloo student entrepreneurs"?
/pet peeve
This does sound like an awesome project though :). A bit like the "hacker hostel" I think ever geek dreams about at some point.
In general, I'm with you, but in this case, it's significant in my opinion. There's very few people who at 23 could even think of donating $1M, especially money they've earned on their own. Meanwhile it's fairly common to hear about some founder/CEO in general donate $1M. I think mentioning the age is just to highlight how great this guy is. Just saying "Kik founder" might take away from it.
It is annoying, only because it is obvious tabloid-level gossip and has nothing to do with the events involved. We should be talking about the Canadian start up scene, Waterloo in particular, not this guy's age. But something tells me something about his age is the reason this got upvoted so much.
Age is no different then skin color, marital status, or any other attribute you could assign to a person. I always (try to) by default ignore it from headlines and articles.
I'm not a fan of trying to put spin on anything - when I submitted the story, the only edits I made to the original title were to satisfy HN's 80 character limit.
So you ignore age/skin color/marital status/etc? So it is not more impressive if a single mother with 3 kids starts a startup than a 45 year-old rich serial-entrepreneur. It is not more impressive if a 16 year old solves one of the millennium problems (as opposed to a 65 year old career academic)?
Of course it is more impressive and I wouldn't ignore these factors...
Serious kudos to Ted on stepping up to the plate big time and acknowledging the huge potential Canada has in developing the next generation of top tier tech startups. It's both humbling and inspiring to see this level of commitment from a 23 year old.
I talked with Jesse Rodgers, the guy who runs the Velocity program for U Waterloo a few weeks ago. He's a very cool guy, and the program sounds kick ass. Every session they put around 40 CS students into a dedicated dorm, and they work on building startups.
Yup, it's open to all students. My (engineering) friends, love the art/business students who pop up there. Turns out that they are smart. And really useful. Especially since the faculties time their crunch time differently, so a mixed group/team will likely always have at least one person who isn't totally crushed at any given time.
Just to ensure the correct people are given credit here, Velocity is Sean Van Koughnett's brainchild and he pushed the university to build the Velocity program. He's a great guy and the city of Waterloo is fortunate to have had his efforts dedicated to this.
Also, I want to address one of the grandchild comments. It's important to enforce the fact that Velocity is not simply a place for engineers or math students. It's a place to meet passionate entrepreneurs and build startups. The mindset of "arts/bus students are surprisingly useful" is outright disrespectful, and discredits the value of fresh insights and diverse skill sets.
Sean is indeed the guy that got VeloCity going and he deserves a huge amount of credit. Without him it would not have existed.
Bud Walker (head of business ops at the time) and Chris Read (head of Housing and Residences) also deserve some credit as well as Bud found the money and Chris found the space.
Students (never mind the city) at Waterloo have these same folks driving the new Student Success office. The student experience at Waterloo is going to get much better.
Now Ted is the guy that has given VeloCity elevated value and opportunity beyond what was already there from the amazing talent that has lived in the residence over the last 8 terms.
The work Jesse and VeloCity have been doing over the last few years has been great for the community at UW. YC-funded Allerta (of inPluse) is also VeloCity alum, as was the 7CUBED project (of QuickCite). Not bad results after only 3 years.
It sounds like he sold part of his personal founders shares in order to prevent further dilution in the round. From the article he only took the 1M? If that's true that's a pretty benevolent gift.
The shares, valued at $1 million, were sold to one of three VC investors to prevent further dilution of other Kik employees’ shares.
I was at the VeloCity demo today - there are some really smart kids with some cool concepts. And, thanks to Ted, they'll be able to continue building their companies over the summer without worrying about working a side job painting houses.
I keep seeing that he donated US$1M, but he is "donating" it to a seed fund. Does this mean he will be taking a piece from each of the funded projects, or is he actually donating 100% of the money and expecting no returns?
My reading of the Velocity article suggests that Ted donated his million to the University "to expand support for student entrepreneurs".
The University, in turn, has established a million dollar seed fund to support student ventures. So while it is probably basically the same million dollars, the University is acting as an intermediary and has control over the fund in some fashion or another.
What's the most hacker-friendly major at Waterloo? Where are the most creative and/or entrepreneurial students to be found? Specifically, can anyone comment on CS vs. software eng in these respects?
Full disclosure: Current Velocity Resident, 4th year CS
I've met brilliant CS students and brilliant SE's, and complete morons in each program. Degree title is irrelevant, it is the quality of person that determines the quality of hacker that leaves each program.
Having said that, while the core curriculum of the programs is almost identical, the SE curriculum contains a lot more non-CS requirements such as Chemistry, English, and Ethics. This makes their workload much heavier, without making them better software engineers.
In CS, we get a lot more freedom. I usually have one or two electives each term, which means I've been able to take courses in economics, entrepreneurship, music, biology, and others. It also leaves a lot more time for side-projects, which are what really make you a better hacker.
CS is better, since you get the flexibility to adjust your school to support your life, startups, or whatever you're doing. Engineering is too rigid to do something like take a term off to focus on a personal project or do some research.
Soft engs are generally better. Velocity is full of them. The one problem with Soft Engs is that their work load is generally higher than CS students, so less time to work on startups.
Agreed with SoftEng being the better program, at least when I was there (class of '06). From my one class of 85 grads there have been at least 3 companies started, including PagerDuty which is in the current YC cohort.
The benefits of SoftEng vs CS may be mitigated by being in Velocity. But if you're not, then the fact that you're with the same group of people for 5 years on the same schedule is great for forging bonds and thus cofounders.
Whenever I see "$ donated to University of Waterloo" I always think of 2002 when Microsoft donated $2mil to Waterloo under the condition that they switch their existing curriculum from teaching C++ to C#.
I mean...half of the news I hear about greplin is about the founder being 19 years old. Who cares? Greplin is a cool service, it's not relevant that the founder is 19 and, honestly, if it were me I would be a little offended.
Same thing with this. Who cares that the person who donated money is 23? Why not just: "Kik founder donates $1 Million to support Waterloo student entrepreneurs"?
/pet peeve
This does sound like an awesome project though :). A bit like the "hacker hostel" I think ever geek dreams about at some point.
Good on Ted Livingston for supporting it.