Waterloo Investing Trends 6

It has been awhile since our Waterloo Investing Trends series, but this quote wound up on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, and it sounded pretty close to home:

Mike Lazaridis (Research in Motion) on the importance of recruiting students. “’…What’s important to me are the signs on the back of the building.’ Of course, everyone recoiled from that. I explained to them, ‘I don’t really care if anyone else knows where the building is. All I want is the students to know where the building is.’”

This quote does reinforce the sense I have that the big firms in Waterloo are making offers to the Mike’s of the future that they can’t refuse…and therefore reducing Waterloo’s complement of future entrepreneurs.

Nothing wrong with that, but it does serve as an explanation. Matt Roberts (of Wesley Clover) also blogged about it recently, here.

One our our readers alerted me to an announcement on March 9th that the University of Waterloo’s President (he is a great guy btw) is coming to Toronto at the end of the month to speak at the Board of Trade on March 28th. Neat timing!

MRM