Mike Lazaridis founded Research In Motion (RIM)
with his friend Doug Fregin in 1984 while still an
undergraduate at the University of Waterloo. One of
their first projects was a local area network that ran
industrial displays. Near the end of Lazaridis’s senior
year, they landed a $600,000 contract to build a similar
network for General Motors. A few weeks shy of
his graduation, Lazaridis left school to focus full-time
on the company.
RIM was one of the first companies to appreciate
the importance of wireless networks. In...

We tried to bridge the gap and explain to the teachers and students upstairs
what we were learning down there and how we were applying the mathematics
and science we were learning upstairs. Literally we were. I was able to give lectures
to the math program, showing them how trigonometry could be applied
to power generation, power control, power transformation that we were learning
downstairs.
Livingston: I read that your high school electronics teachers said that connecting
computers to wireless would be the next big thing. Did you realize how big
it...

really get seduced by the computer and what we could do there, I remember
him saying, “Don’t get too caught up with computers, because it’s going to be
the person that puts wireless technology and computers together that’s going to
make a big difference.” I don’t think he was seeing what we eventually did, but
he understood the fact that computers gave us two fundamental things. One
was the ability to send information unambiguously, and the second was that it
allowed us to control the RF process and make it more efficient. It wasn’t...

advanced technology—and we started getting more and more involved with the
various aspects of these different programs and research projects.
In my later years, I took on projects where I was helping some of the faculty
projects, just basically trying to pay my way. When the last year came, I had
already been doing some computer programming contract work. It was then
Mike Lazaridis 143
the 1984 recession, and it really impacted the high-tech industry. A lot of the
engineers weren’t getting jobs. University of Waterloo prided itself with its very
high...

remember now, but it would have been $400 or $600, because it didn’t work. I
took it back to our office—it was massive—and took it apart, and, as I powered
it up part by part, I realized that the power supply had broken. Once we fixed
the power supply, the computer just came right up. So we did our big contract
on that computer.
Livingston: How did you land these contracts as a young undergrad?
Lazaridis: When you have access to state-of-the-art education, and you know
how to use these machines—and you are...