April 15, 2021
Meet Shiva Bhardwaj, Founder and CEO of Pitstop!
How did you pick your discipline?
Growing up I spent a lot of time with automotive mechanics at our family-owned shop. This introduced me to the world of engineering which included mechanical, electrical, and software engineering disciplines amongst others embedded in one machine. My main fascination was how the computers so efficiently regulated combustion. This had me tearing apart scrap cars for computers, reprogramming the fuel maps and understanding the intricacies of the structure. I started to think about how a system could be improved which is a never-ending cycle of curiosity and the tech industry was growing which made me get into electrical engineering.
How did you make the most out of your time at Waterloo?
At Waterloo I spent most of my time working on projects and thinking about practical applications for what was being taught. This is another way of saying that I wasn't so academic! My second year, I assembled a team of four engineers, and we placed 2nd in North America for the IEEE humanitarian competition. My third year I started a project called Shocklock which was a mechanical device to save technicians from injuries. This allowed me to think about business and not just building. We sold a few thousand devices and it evolved into my current company Pitstop. For my capstone project, my team built a physical bitcoin wallet that stored cryptocurrency and allowed you to transfer it securely to someone located next to you.
Behind every successful project were countless failures, it's easy for me to look back and tell a very clean story but the reality is much messier. Being relentless and not giving up had been critical for me to get through these projects and keep on a path of exponential learning.
What skills would you advise students to work on while studying?
Be relentless about learning new things fast. Treat time as a scarce resource. While you're in school you can get really deep into how and why things work. Some refer to this as maker vs manager time. Spend a lot of your time being a maker because it really shapes your problem-solving abilities.