FAW #10: Mike Lazaridis of Research in Motion
The high school shop teacher that changed everything
Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, founders of RIM, knew each other in high school. Mike had a shop class to which a local electronics manufacturer had donated a bunch of random equipment. It arrived in sealed crates and Mike was curious about what it all did. His shop teacher told him, “Well, you can open any box you like, but there’s one condition: you have to read the manual first.” This proved to be a formative moment for Mike and he eventually opened every crate and learned what each piece of equipment did.
This exercise on it’s own might have destined Mike to be an electronics repair person but Mike was simultaneously getting the mathematics and physics theory from his other classes and was able to put the two together in meaningful ways. Mike said: “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, and power transformation that we were learning downstairs…what we learned there was the actual fundamentals of computers: how to build gates, how to build recent memory circuits, how to build registers and how to wire them all together and sequence them with a clock. It was very fundamental knowledge, and it really made a difference as time went on.”
This paragraph resonated with me. I can remember being in eighth grade and going through this subversive phase with my friends where we would launch water balloons off the roof of my parents’ house at cars passing through an intersection blocks away. We came up with all these crazy James Bond inventions like rope ladders off the roof and escape hatches cut in the backyard fence. At one point we tried to build this “zip line” to the edge of the back yard so we could just zoom down a rope to safety. I had one of these “theoretical bridging to practical” moments like Lazaridis describes when I was able to use two different math techniques (trig and geometry) to successfully calculate the length of the rope we needed for the zip line. There’s something supremely cool as a kid when your book knowledge proves useful in the realm of something more important like water ballooning a car.
Mike says: “We need to make sure that we are allowing students to be exposed to future technology and not reducing it to current- what a lot of people would like to say, “relevant” teaching. What’s relevant teaching? What’s relevant research? When I was at the university, if you went in and started looking at what we were doing, you would say, “Why don’t you guys get a life and do something relevant? What is this stuff? Nobody’s going to use this.”
I couldn’t agree more. I recently wrote a short piece called “Computers emulating nature: why high schoolers should be excited.” It proposes that the fundamental knowledge of tomorrow will be in understanding the mechanics of genetic algorithms and Hierarchical Temporal Memory Systems and being able bridge the practical/theoretical gap like Lararidis did in order to make useful applications with them. The high school computer science teacher that has his/her students doing science projects with this stuff now will be priming those kids to develop the next world-advancing technology.
Ditching school to start a company
Lazaridis arrived at a crossroads in his final year at the University of Waterloo in Canada and had to give up either school or the business. He chose the route that nearly all of the founders did and took a leave of absence in order to pursue building his company. He landed a $600k contract with General Motors to build a LAN for their manufacturing plants. They had been eeking by with the help of government grants and consulting gigs but this contract put them on the map and introduced them to technology which would become foundational for RIM.
The light bulb
The epiphany for Lazaridis came when they recognized the role of wireless technology in the context of reducing restocking fees for vending machines in Japan. He met someone in 1987 at a conference who explained how a Japanese company had figured out how to install sensors that communicated via wireless to take all the manual labor out of the process of ensuring that vending machines around the city stayed full of product. Lazaridis found a contract that allowed him to develop the first wireless protocol software API and transition from a consulting role to producing a product.
How do you intercept a market and create an industrial trend?
When asked how he knew to “skate where the puck would be,” Lazaridis replied: “It took a lot of faith. You call it vision, but it’s a combination of vision and faith that 1) it’s going to happen someday, and 2) it has value, and 3) you can actually accomplish it in an economic way and promote it so that you can fund the development and growth of the business. That’s pretty tricky stuff.”
When we originally started JumpBox we had the idea that we’d create the toolset that allowed software vendors to turn their existing software applications into appliances. We saw the opportunity around virtual appliances and thought that seemed like a good way to tackle it. We eventually shifted the approach from building the toolset towards selling Open Source applications as appliances ourselves. The ultimate endpoint that we see remains the same but we had to change up the path to get there based on factors like 1) we have limited sales experience 2) our platform wasn’t very mature at the time 3) rPath - a competitor under that scenario - had already thouroughly canvassed the world of software providers with this proposition. The “tricky stuff” as Lazaridis says, is in finding how to become sustainable, how to tack with the wind while moving continuously towards the desired destination.
Trojan the Blackberry into market under a concept people already understand
Email in 1997 still had not reached critical mass. It had the same issue as fax machines when they first came out: when nobody has a fax machine, buying one is not very attractive because you won’t be able to send a fax to anyone yet. RIM basically positioned the Blackberry device as an “interactive pager” because pagers were something people could understand. It was doing email under the hood but people just knew it as “the pager that you could respond with.” And that proved important in getting them early adoption when mobile email had no appeal for consumers.
Importance of founding near a school
When asked about whether he ever considered moving RIM to Silicon Valley, Lazaridis said: “I had to have this company next to University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier, a university down the street, because I knew that we needed to draw this talent to grow. There’s something about having the proximity to the students and university in terms of brand awareness. In fact, when we first leased our building here right next to the university, we could put a sign up, and I remember they were asking, ‘Do you like this sign? Do you like that sign?’ I said, ‘Actually, I don’t care about that. What’s important to me are the signs on the back of the building… All I want is the students to know where the building is.’”
Clearly ensuring a new crop of sharp academic workers was important to RIM. Lazaridis looks for employee types that shared his own traits and who have the grasp of that fundamental knowledge that he picked up.
RIM went public in 1997 and currently has the most popular mobile email technology with their Blackberry product.