Laurier grad Razor Suleman opened the first event of Entrepreneur Week in Waterloo.
I attended the event this morning called It Came From the Dorms featuring Chris Hughes from Facebook and Suleman. Both started companies while they were university students. Thusly Fed Hall at Waterloo was an apt venue.
Suleman is a large Indian man, who is young enough to talk student but old enough to be pulling up then average age at his company (30.2 years, he says). He wore tan suit and shirt with no tie.
He told some good and interesting stories that traced his way from being a young teen entrepreneur in Toronto though university down the road and on to his current company. He was kind of goofy though, sometimes pausing and tripping on words, and almost constantly pacing forwards and backwards in the same lane on the stage, periodically kicking his foot up. He did, however, offer real wisdom and insight.
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I ran into Larry Wednesday afternoon. He was walking in up to DC. We paused to chat for a bit, but he ushered me into the atrium so he could get out of the cold.
He asked what was new. I told him I was progressing on the project I had told him about last May.
“Which one was that,” he asked.
“Student-run financial services,” I told him.
“Right. See it all comes back to me. That’s all you need to tell me.” For sure he talks to loads of students about various projects.
I told him I would walk with him so as not to delay him. He told me he was going to Humanities. I told him it was nothing.
It turns out he takes an almost all indoor route. “Oh, the over-40 route,” I joked.
“Good thing you didn’t say a higher number.”
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Last Sunday, 17 October, I saw the Peter Diamandis talk at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at Perimeter Institute.
Perimeter Institute Director Neil Turok introduced the speaker.
The talk, titled The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent it Yourself!, described the ways that Diamandis is working to bring meaningful changes to the world. A common theme throughout this talk was his dream since childhood to go into space and his work to get himself and people in general, into space.
Diamandis opened describing his interest in how technological breakthroughs are achieved.
“The day before a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”
He listed what motivates people to pursue these efforts: 1. Fear 2. Curiosity . . .
“You can measure the ratio of fear to curiosity. Unfortunately it is the ratio of the defence budget to the science budget,” he joked.
Then 3. Wealth creation 4. Significance
Diamandis’s passion was to go into space. He referred to the beatitude “The meek shall inherit the earth.”
“Most people don’t know the rest of it,” he said. “It’s ‘. . . the rest of us are going to the stars.
He realized his chance of going into space if he ever became a government astronaut, still might not be good. So, he wanted to help spur a commercial space industry.
He told us about how Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 flight across the Atlantic was to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize.
He said that teams competing for that prize spent a total of $400,000 pursuing it.
He later referred to the impact of Lindbergh’s flight, saying that the year before there had been 6,000 air passengers and the year after there were 180,000.
He talked about a much earlier contest when the British government offered a prize in the 18th century for developing am method of determining ships longitude.
That led into Diamandis talking about the X-prize which was a $10 million prize for the first non-governmental team to fly three people on a vehicle 100km above the earth twice within two weeks.
It was interesting to me that he said the repeatability was a way to keep the solutions inexpensive because the price of the flight would be only the fuel and the labour.
Twenty-six teams competed for that prize and spent more than $100 million on their efforts, which produced a lot of innovative technologies.
He talked about DARPA’s contest to develop an autonomous vehicle. After 20 years and $200 million, defence contractors didn’t get very far. Later, when a prize was offered, a team from stanford won the contest after a year of work.
The next story was about Rob McEwan from GoldCorp (whom we met last year), who released his geological data for one of his mines and offered a $500,000 prize for telling where to find more gold.
About offering prizes, he said “For the right problems, it’s incredibly powerful.”
The X Prize Foundation is now going on to offering prizes in other areas, like fuel economy, genome sequencing, and moon landing.
He talked about his companies Space Adventures and Zero G.
FInally, he talked about Singularity University, which is a nine-week grad program to try to prepare people to develop breakthroughs.
Peter Diamandis’s talk was exciting. It was inspiring to hear about how he has a specific interest and to find out everything he has done to pursue it.
More than a year ago there was a federal election. It was the third election in four years.
Before that, the parliament passed a law which said there would be an election this year 2009.
(2) Subject to subsection (1), each general election must be held on the third Monday of October in the fourth calendar year following polling day for the last general election, with the first general election after this section comes into force being held on Monday, October 19, 2009.
Bill C-16
