Mike Lazaridis founded...
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 the early
1990s, when email was still largely unknown in corporate
America, Lazaridis foresaw the potential of mobile email. A series of
projects in this area culminated in 1999 in the BlackBerry, now the dominant
product in this market.
The BlackBerry was one of those innovations that not only became popular,
but changed the way organizations operate. Some of the most powerful people
in business and politics run their lives with this device.
RIM went public in 1997, and is one of Canada’s most admired technology
companies.
Livingston: How did you get started with Research In Motion? How did you
know Doug?
Lazaridis: I knew Doug from grade school, but we started working together in
high school. Our high school had a state-of-the-art electronics and shop program
that was the result of a donation from a local industrialist. When all this
equipment had arrived, it was still in crates. I had asked to open some of the
boxes and pull out the equipment, and I remember the teacher saying, “Well,
you can open any box you like, but there’s one condition: you have to read the
manual first.”
This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but, to a student that just came to high
school—to read a manual on how to use an oscilloscope, how to use a signal
generator, a computer trainer, how to use all this advanced equipment—these
were tricky textbooks to get through and understand. Of course, once I was able
to prove that I knew how to use the equipment and what it did, I was able to
open the box. And we opened every single box.
Livingston: This was at a high school?
Lazaridis: Yeah. It was a tricky time back then because a divide between the
honor roll students and the shop students was beginning. The shop teachers
tried to correct it before it got out of control and became the culture there.
Many of us down in that shop program were also honor roll students. It was sort
of “Upstairs, Downstairs”—the upstairs math and computer science classrooms,
and then there was the downstairs shop program.
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