The Insight to Creation Speaker Series brings Waterloo Engineering alumni back to campus for honest, unscripted conversations with students about career journeys, bold decisions and what it really takes to build something meaningful.
In this session, Dean Mary Wells welcomed three graduates from the electrical and computer engineering class of 2001 —Thiru Sinnathamby, Vice President of Software Engineering at Nvidia, and Shao Xia and Terry Guo, co-founders of LotusFlare — whose shared starting point led to strikingly different destinations.
Sinnathamby has spent two decades at Nvidia driving innovation in system software. Xia and Guo went from Microsoft and Facebook to co-founding LotusFlare, a digital commerce and monetization platform built on the conviction that simplifying technology can change how industries serve people. Their conversation — candid, funny and grounded in hard-won experience — is exactly the kind of thing you don’t hear in a lecture.
Thiru Sinnathamby, Terry Guo, Dean Mary Wells and Shao Xia.
Dean Wells: When you were students at Waterloo, what did you think your career was going to look like?
Thiru: Honestly? During a co-op term I told Terry that my dream was to become a director at RBC and stay in Toronto close to my family. That’s as far as my vision went. Life had other plans.
Terry: I was very stepwise about it. Get to Waterloo. Get good grades. Land a well-paying job at a big company. Get a graduate degree. Then, at some point, start a company — but I never had a 25-year plan. Looking back, I have a couple of regrets. I wish I'd spent less time singularly focused on grades and built more meaningful connections outside the classroom. And when I did my master's at Stanford while still at Microsoft, I don't think I did either one justice.
Shao: When we graduated in 2001, it was the dot-com bust. A lot of our classmates had a tough time finding jobs. My goal was simple: go to a big company, work hard, learn. But over time I started thinking less about what I could do for the company and more about how I could keep growing. That shift is ultimately what led me toward starting something of my own.
Dean Wells: What is one thing about your path that nobody told you as a student — but really should have?
Terry: The smartest person in the room doesn’t always run the room. I learned this as a product manager at Facebook. My manager pulled me aside and told me that as a PM, it’s more important to own the process than to own the idea. The people who rise through organizations are often not the most technically brilliant — they’re the ones who can put smart people together and make them work well.
Thiru: AI agents are going to do more and more of the technical heavy lifting. What that means for you is that humans need to be exceptional problem solvers. When we hire at Nvidia, the most important thing we look for is problem-solving ability — because we can’t predict the specific challenges of the future. They’re changing too fast. We have engineers who moved from writing boot code to designing optimal fluid cooling systems for data centres. Nothing in common with their original work. They just adapted.
Shao: Learn to work with people who aren’t engineers. One of my early startup attempts was just a group of engineers building a product with no idea how to get anyone to use it. Engineering is great, but you need complementary skills around you — product thinking, business sense, the ability to sell an idea. Terry moved from engineering into product, and that ultimately made all the difference when we built LotusFlare together.
Dean Wells: What’s your view on whether students need to work at a big company before starting something?
Shao: It’s not binary. A startup forces you to own everything — you expand your range very fast. A big company teaches you discipline, process, and how things actually run at scale. If you don’t have a product idea yet, spend a few years somewhere and find the problems worth solving. But whatever you do, be genuinely honest about whether your idea is good. When you come up with it, you’ll think it’s amazing. Get people to push back hard.
Terry: If you already have a strong idea and you’ve stress-tested it with honest feedback — don’t wait forever. It’s better to be wrong in the arena than right on the sidelines.
Dean Wells: What should students be doing more of while they’re here at Waterloo?
Thiru: Two things. Go deep on AI — not just using it but learning how to leverage it for real work. The people currently in the workforce who can’t adapt are at a genuine disadvantage, and you’re the generation that can walk in and show them how it’s done. That’s real leverage. Second, invest in your network now. My connection to Nvidia came through two Waterloo classmates I’d stayed close to over the years. That’s not luck — relationships are built and maintained.
Shao: The connections sitting around you right now matter more than you think. Our biggest investor at LotusFlare is a Waterloo Engineering grad. Many of our clients are Waterloo grads. The network you build here follows you everywhere.
Terry: And don’t treat the people around you purely as competition. The students stressing about who’s going to outcompete them for jobs — this is such a short window of your life. The people who you compete with for co-op work placements now are very often the same people who help you land your first permanent job and the people you’ll be referring and investing in ten years from now.
The Insight to Creation Speaker Series is hosted by Dean Mary Wells and is open to Waterloo Engineering students. Events are free and typically include food, Q&A and networking with alumni guests.