to do and I needed his help. He was up within 2 weeks of that call.
Livingston: Did you have to tell your parents you weren’t finishing school?
Lazaridis: Oh yeah. But what was actually harder was having to go to the president
of the university and ask for a leave of absence. I had never met him
before. It was quite interesting because he apologized for having to try to dissuade
me from it. After he finished his speech, he wished me the best of luck
and shook my hand with a big...

trying to conserve expenses because we had no idea how long it would take
before we’d be established.
We heard about these government programs, and we started applying for
them. It was a lot of work to actually apply for these things, and then it was a lot
of paperwork to maintain them. In the early days, they weren’t really big grants.
They were rather small, and sometimes you wondered if it was worth all the
trouble. But it was very helpful when we needed it. As you became experienced,
and as the...

I can read this well enough”—because he was from the Netherlands—“that we
could probably get this stuff to work.” We spent the next few hours hooking
everything up, and we surprised them because we got it working.
We got the contract and started writing software to make it all work, and the
rest was history. We wrote most of the very first wireless protocol software,
application programming interface (API), the development tools—all the early
stuff for the first wireless data networks.
That was our first break. That was our first chance to break...

Mike Lazaridis 147
At about the time when I was getting deeper into wireless data, I had an opportunity
to work for SPAR Aerospace, a Canadian company. They had contacted
us and asked if we wanted to bid on something that was very similar to something
that we had done before. They needed this product for what was going to
be the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station.
You have to remember that people were just starting to understand what
Canadarm1 was. And the space station was still a document before Congress,
...

because the BlackBerries were used by NASA, and they were using them to
communicate with the International Space Station.
Livingston: Fast-forward a little bit to when you came up with the idea for the
BlackBerry. You were in your basement—it seems like you have a thing for
basements!
Lazaridis: When you try to get away from it, the basement is a nice place to
hide.
All through this, I was always looking for value. I was trying to find,
“Where’s the value of wireless data?” Early on, we had realized that wireless...