Marcelo Cortes
Faculty of Mathematics
> CTO and Co-founder, Faire
Since the age of 11, Marcelo Cortes has been passionate about computers and coding. By 13, he was considered the “resident computer expert” after his parents bought a system for their family-owned store in Brazil.
Sandra Banks
Vice-President, University Relations
According to Randall Lane, chief content officer and editor with Forbes, COVID-19 has accelerated almost every field and trend that might otherwise take a decade to unfold.
Michael Litt (BASc ’11) smiles when he recalls the factors that led him to starting the company that would later become Vidyard. A cross-country road trip with his friend and now business partner Devon Galloway (BASc ’10) created the right environment for bouncing around ideas and building a dream for the future, but it was Waterloo’s co-op program that molded Litt into the entrepreneur that he is today.
It was an event well-attended, although presented entirely virtually for the first time ever.
Within the initial 12 hours, Velocity’s virtual Fund Pitch Competition (VFPC) garnered more than one thousand pageviews through its new VFPC video portal — a page designed specifically for this term’s competing entrepreneurs. Eleven companies went head-to-head in hopes of receiving up to $400,000 in pre-seed investments.
Although graduates cannot be together to celebrate their spring convocation on campus, the University of Waterloo hopes to make their achievement a more memorable experience with a personalized video.
The videos were made using a product created by Vidyard, a video platform for business based in Kitchener, that was founded by two Waterloo alumni. Michael Litt (BASc ’11) and Devon Galloway (BASc ’10) founded Vidyard in 2010.
As COVID-19 has introduced a host of new challenges to the world collectively, it is simultaneously presenting new opportunities and approaches to existing, real-word problems, according to a panel of experts at the University of Waterloo.
As the coronavirus pandemic forces people to hunker down and keep their distance in the physical world, the exact opposite is happening in the virtual realm of remote work and online video conferencing.
For just over two years, Waterloo alumni Julia Gogoleva (BSc ’15) and Sam Nabi (BES ’13) have been running Full Circle Foods, a medium-sized grocery store located in the heart of Kitchener.
The pair took ownership of the almost 40-year old community shop after it went up for sale back in 2018. Neither could have predicted the world-wide pandemic two-years later.
Julia Gogoleva (BSc ’15)
This isn’t how the Faculty of Math’s class of 2020 envisioned their graduating year. Instead of walking across the convocation stage to receive their diploma in front of family and friends, students will participate in a virtual ceremony. Then, in the months ahead, these same graduates will seek work in one of the toughest job markets in recent memory.
But there is cause for hope and optimism.
The disruptive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have shown there is a need to make global supply chains more resilient, according to an expert panel.
The panel, part of Waterloo’s GEDI Post-COVID-19 Reboot Panel Series, was made up of subject matter experts from the University of Waterloo and a supply chain manager from Amazon Canada. They agreed that COVID-19 had exposed some significant vulnerabilities in global supply chains that should be addressed to insulate economies from possible future disruptions.