History of Famous Startups. Research In Motion

It was a

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:04:38 -0700

It was a 3- to 4-year investment we started making with students early on
because I knew their value. We treated them like full-time employees. We’re
the largest co-op employer in Canada.

What was interesting

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What was interesting was how we named it, because it goes back to our
research roots. We decided to do it very scientifically. We went out and found
one of the leading naming companies at the time, called Lexicon, and we
worked with them for 6 months to come up with the name. It was probably the
most expensive word I ever bought.
BlackBerry ended up being one of the all-time most famous brands worldwide.
It works everywhere. We tested it around the world. It was one of
40 names that were on the list that we narrowed it down…

impacted things like

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impacted things like battery life.
Livingston: Back in 1997, was it hard to convince people that they should want
to travel with email access?
Lazaridis: The key thing to remember was that email was not a new idea for
anyone that went to school in the early ’80s. But industry was rather slow to
adopt it. Not because of anything with industry, but because the technology just
hadn’t reached the kind of ubiquity that it needed. It had to reach a certain critical
mass so that there was somebody to send it to.
What we realized was that, in 1997…

because the BlackBerries

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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
push email had some serious value. But it…

Mike Lazaridis 147

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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,
and Canadarm2 was something that was going to…

I can read

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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 out of a consulting
role and really…

trying to conserve

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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 government agencies that we were working with…

to do and

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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 smile. I remembered that and, ironically,...

remember now, but

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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 comfortable with them—you just
have to make…

advanced technology—and we

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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 placement record for both co-op and graduate programs,...