HONG KONG — Three CEOs who grew businesses from roots at the University of Waterloo, the hometown of smartphone-maker BlackBerry, come together this week to share their stories about the challenges and opportunities of growing a global technology business in Asia.
John Baker, CEO of Desire2Learn, and Ted Livingston, CEO of Kik Interactive, both Waterloo, Ontario-based companies will join Jason Chiu, the Hong Kong-based CEO of CherryPicks Inc, for a series of events in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore hosted by the University of Waterloo’s dean of engineering, Pearl Sullivan.
The event series, called “Connecting Waterloo to Asia and Beyond”, will see the three entrepreneurs address Waterloo alumni at three separate events. The trio will mix with local startups and investors at CoCoon on Thursday night as Hong Kong entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to local and international funders.
“These three CEOs epitomize the bold, globally-minded entrepreneurs growing out of Waterloo,” said Dean Sullivan. “Deep connections with industry and strong support for commercialization of research have made Waterloo a magnet for students with an entrepreneurial mindset. This unique environment is producing graduates like Jason, John and Ted who are uniquely equipped to lead technology innovation as well as tackle the challenges of business.”
The University of Waterloo is home to Canada’s largest engineering school and is regarded as one of the top feeder schools for Silicon Valley. In October, Bloomberg Businessweek named the University of Waterloo “Canada’s Stanford”. Waterloo operates the largest co-op education program in the world with more than 17,000 co-op students working for 4,500 employers.
“Hong Kong is the second-largest market for startups in the world, after Silicon Valley. The University of Waterloo is producing graduates who are highly adaptive to this environment,” said Dean Sullivan, Waterloo’s first female dean of engineering. “At least one-third of our software engineers are offered jobs in Silicon Valley, but increasingly our graduates start their own successful companies, like Jason Chiu here in Hong Kong.”
As founder of CherryPicks, Chiu has created a consumer marketing phenomenon with iButterfly, a mobile application that allows consumers to download location-based coupons by catching 3D virtual butterflies with a flick of phone, engaging shoppers with gamified contents and offers.
“Waterloo is producing talented engineers that have the potential to fuel tremendous growth for companies in Asia,” said Chiu. “Waterloo’s unique blend of outstanding academic programs, together with it’s deserved reputation for being a highly entrepreneurial university gave me the foundation I needed to found CherryPicks and enjoy success.”
Ted Livingston, the 26 year-old CEO of Kik, brought together a group of University of Waterloo students in 2009 to build a company that would shift the center of computing from the PC to the phone. Today, Kik Interactive is one of the world’s most popular gaming and mobile messaging platforms, with over 90 million registered users.
“The University of Waterloo’s model of experiential education will continue to generate graduates who will develop disruptive technologies like we developed at Kik,” said Livingston. “Engineers at Waterloo go through multiple real-world work terms before they graduate which means Waterloo students are the cream of Canadian engineering. They emerge ideally prepared for the business world, with ideas that have the potential to change society for the better.”
John Baker, President and CEO of Desire2Learn, is a member of Waterloo Engineering’s Dean’s Advisory Committee. He started the world-class education company at the age of 22 before he graduated from System Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Desire2Learn has grown into an international education phenomenon with more than 850 employees and local offices around the globe. The company provides an integrated learning platform to more than 1000 clients and 10 million learners in higher education, K-12, health care, government and the corporate sector.
A recent independent study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that for every $1 that the Ontario government spends on the University, the institution returns $8.80 in economic impacts to Canadian province alone.
University of Waterloo engineering graduates, together with those from Waterloo’s renowned computer science programs in the Faculty of Mathematics, are amongst some of the most sought after talent in the world and are regularly recruited by companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Tesla Motors.
