23-year-old donates US$1M to support Waterloo student entrepreneurs

Are any other young tech nerds (I'm the same age as the person in the article) a bit annoyed when people mention age?<p>I mean...half of the news I hear about greplin is about the founder being 19 years old. Who cares? Greplin is a cool service, it's not relevant that the founder is 19 and, honestly, if it were me I would be a little offended.<p>Same thing with this. Who cares that the person who donated money is 23? Why not just: "Kik founder donates $1 Million to support Waterloo student entrepreneurs"?<p>/pet peeve<p>This does sound like an awesome project though :). A bit like the "hacker hostel" I think ever geek dreams about at some point.<p>Good on Ted Livingston for supporting it.

Serious kudos to Ted on stepping up to the plate big time and acknowledging the huge potential Canada has in developing the next generation of top tier tech startups. It's both humbling and inspiring to see this level of commitment from a 23 year old.

I talked with Jesse Rodgers, the guy who runs the Velocity program for U Waterloo a few weeks ago. He's a very cool guy, and the program sounds kick ass. Every session they put around 40 CS students into a dedicated dorm, and they work on building startups.

How is a free text messaging app making the founder rich enough to donate $1M?

how much did he take off the table from kik in their fundraising?

I was at the VeloCity demo today - there are some really smart kids with some cool concepts. And, thanks to Ted, they'll be able to continue building their companies over the summer without worrying about working a side job painting houses.

I keep seeing that he donated US$1M, but he is "donating" it to a seed fund. Does this mean he will be taking a piece from each of the funded projects, or is he actually donating 100% of the money and expecting no returns?

This is great! I'd really like to see RIM step up and do the same considering half their talent comes from Waterloo.

What's the most hacker-friendly major at Waterloo? Where are the most creative and/or entrepreneurial students to be found? Specifically, can anyone comment on CS vs. software eng in these respects?

I'm thinking of applying in the fall term!

This should be happening more.

Sweet! I'm living there next semester.

Whenever I see "$ donated to University of Waterloo" I always think of 2002 when Microsoft donated $2mil to Waterloo under the condition that they switch their existing curriculum from teaching C++ to C#.<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2002/08/1699.ars" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2002/08/1699.ars</a><p>(<i>Disclaimer: I ended up going to University of Toronto, an arguably rival school for Computer Science.</i>)<p>Update: Excuse the indirect relevance. Thought it was an interesting factoid for school culture context.