November 21, 2014
Waterloo’s entrepreneurial alumni featured on The Verge
reddit co-founder interviews Waterloo’s dean of engineering and alumni about entrepreneurship and co-op education at Waterloo
Startup founder and investor Alexis Ohanian liked what he saw when he came to the University of Waterloo last year on his book tour. This year he’s back with his show, Small Empires, to find out why Waterloo is such a hub for entrepreneurship.
In the latest episode, the startup success story behind Vidyard, the reddit co-founder asks engineering alumni Michael Litt, Devon Galloway and Tyler Campaigne about how they built Vidyard, a successful video marketing platform. He also asks Dean of Engineering Pearl Sullivan about Waterloo’s co-operative education program and how its unique intellectual property policy supports entrepreneurship at Waterloo.
Waterloo's IP policy gives students confidence
Sullivan told Ohanian: "When you know you own the intellectual property, you have freedom. . . You have the freedom to build it and the freedom to know you can walk away with it. It gives students the confidence to walk out of here and start a company. This is really good for the nation. It’s really good for the economy.”
Galloway told Ohanian that he hopes Vidyard will continue to grow and become a “really great technology powerhouse. We do it for the team members. We do it for Kitchener-Waterloo. We do it for Canada and we do it because we’re just really passionate about what we’re building.”
Unique IP policy benefits Waterloo in the long term
Ohanian tells viewer at the end of the episode that the University of Waterloo has it right when it grants inventors ownership of intellectual property. “Instead of obsessing about every idea in the head of their students, (Waterloo) gives them freedom to go off and create amazing things that only benefit the university long term.”
