
23-year-old donates US$1M to support Waterloo student entrepreneurs - pvilchez
http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/news/23-year-old-donates-us1-million-to-support-university-of-waterloo-student-entrepreneurs
======
blhack
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.

Good on Ted Livingston for supporting it.

~~~
c2
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.

~~~
pvilchez
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.

~~~
c2
I understand, the spin came directly from Velocity.

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tedlee
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.

~~~
DevX101
Nice try Ted.

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iamelgringo
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.

~~~
jarek
The program is not limited to CS students.

~~~
icegreentea
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.

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cheez
How is a free text messaging app making the founder rich enough to donate $1M?

~~~
oniTony
VC monies from Fred Wilson and co. <http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/kik.html>

~~~
yblokhin
This is not a company donation but a personal one.

~~~
cheez
I see, so is there any revenue?

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brianbreslin
how much did he take off the table from kik in their fundraising?

~~~
mikeryan
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._

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cal5k
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.

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jlgosse
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?

~~~
rdrimmie
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.

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kin
This is great! I'd really like to see RIM step up and do the same considering
half their talent comes from Waterloo.

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gruseom
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?

~~~
andrewmunn
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.

Full disclosure: I'm in Soft Eng :)

~~~
OmarIsmail
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.

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rudasi
I'm thinking of applying in the fall term!

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cme
This should be happening more.

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shadowz
Sweet! I'm living there next semester.

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shazow
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#.

<http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2002/08/1699.ars>

( _Disclaimer: I ended up going to University of Toronto, an arguably rival
school for Computer Science._ )

Update: Excuse the indirect relevance. Thought it was an interesting factoid
for school culture context.

