Who You Calling a Jesse?

Director of Student Innovation and VeloCity at the University of Waterloo

It is now official, I can drop the “interim” part of my job and take on a new and exciting title of Director of Student Innovation at the University of Waterloo. I am really excited about all the positive change that is happening at the University of Waterloo and especially the Student Success Office lead by Sean Van Koughnett. Sean started VeloCity with just a crazy idea and a mandate to do something good for students. In only a year it had it first residents and less than three years later a 23-year-old donated $1 Million back to the program. That is success.

Now under the Student Success office with the mandate of “Student Innovation” I feel like the bar just got raised some more. There is a lot to do in regards to first identifying current innovation (which includes VeloCity) and doing the right (or best guess) things to help interesting things happen more often. We will start this fall, it will be a lot of fun.

I am really excited by the team Sean has put together and double excited to work again with Virginia Young who was once an Associate Director with me at VeloCity. She is taking over the Communications and Research role under Student Success. Pam Charbonneau is going to lead Student Experience and Heather Westmorland is leading Learning Services. It won’t be a quiet summer. More in the Daily Bulletin.

OMG the RIM is falling

If you didn’t think RIM was in trouble before one of the co-CEO’s had a meltdown on BBC you certainly started to wonder once that happened. For someone at that level to crack on TV in such a way they must be under immense pressure, now we know what it was. The company has hit a bad time. When that interview happened he must have known the Playbook just wasn’t ready and they had sacrificed the timing on the next model of the Blackberry (and how many great devs) to get that thing out fast. The delays are something they couldn’t afford with Apple’s profits soaring and Android making a whole bunch of different hardware decent to use. The media reaction is visceral, the talk of layoffs is the big news but lacks perspective and certainly is going to do some damage to their stock price (down to ~$25 from $45). Look at their basic numbers though, they are still OK with a lot of cash in the bank but they can’t afford business as usual. It is time to wake up.

There is a lot of talk about what they need to do or if they could be sold. I won’t pretend to have any idea on that. What I do know is that the culture there is broken — no I don’t work there but I have enough friends there and hear enough Office Space-esque stories that you know something is wrong. I know they love cubicles. I know they do nothing like what Google or Desire2Learn does locally for their employees. I know the office environment resembles an insurance company in the 1990′s (for most staff). I know they completely ignore Silicon Valley. RIM is competing with Apple, Google, and Microsoft on devices but on the culture side they don’t come close. Could they be “too Canadian?” By that I mean too boring, too risk adverse, too safe in how they behave, and very conservative in what they allow their employees to do or act in the workplace.

Here is how I would fix RIM: make it fun.

How do you do that? I have no idea with 17000 people. A guess? They have to let go of all the rules they have for themselves. They have to let go of their products. They have to let go of their OS. None of that means throw everything out but take away all their staff’s Blackberries and get them iPhone’s and Android powered phones. Use them. Fall in love with them like everyone else. Then find the flaws, the real flaws, not just the spec sheet ones (Do not sell me on “real multitasking” on the playbook, who the heck watches a movie AND plays a game on the same 7 inch screen?) and make the Blackberry better.

By the way you already have iCloud at RIM and I bet it works way better than iCloud will for the next 8 months. It is called BES and BBM but no one there seems to see the oppertunity there.

Disclaimer: I have never owned a Blackberry because I have never been impressed with their products.

LRT Debate is on the Road to Nowhere

On Friday my Rotary Club (Kitchener-Conestoga Rotary Club) had a speaker in to cover the pro side of the Light Rail Transit (LRT) issue that has everyone buzzing locally. The presenter was excellent, his slide deck full of facts/data, and the argument was sound. When he was done the club members (mostly very successful community leaders in both business and volunteerism) took on mainly the facts and figures. They were right to do so, facts have been warped by all sides of this debate and the arguments have become about unimportant things (yes even the cost is not important, more later).

However, even these community leaders got caught up in the details of community growth projections, cost, hypothetical increases in property value (has anyone noticed the hockey stick growth curve on prices locally?), and the obvious but ignored issue by the province that the hwy 401 corridor is holding us back — we need better rail to Toronto. Why are we arguing about guesses on growth or ridership or value when this is really about what type of community you want my kids to grow up in.

What does Waterloo Region in 2026 look like?

The Light Rail discussion should be about what kind of community do we want to live in. What should the downtown cores look like? How do we connect the amazing architecture of Galt to the growing tech hub of Kitchener and the youthful energy of Waterloo’s two exciting uni campuses? Do we want to? What are our values as a community? A committee isn’t going to come up with that in this generation btw. Our community leaders should be defining it and leading this vision from thought to execution.

Who is leading or defining a vision? Certainly not the Mayor of Waterloo. Her opinion is as fluid as the Grand River — the people that complain seem to influence her the most and she doesn’t seem to have any vision for the future. Mayor of Kitchener? Well maybe. You can certainly see a vision coming together for the downtown there and where Waterloo is loosing Kitchener is winning. How about Cambridge? There is a mayor with an opinion and a backbone. Sadly he is mayor of urban sprawl land but he has some gems to work with.

This is a Region though — where is our leadership? Who is standing up for what they believe in and not getting into silly arguments about details that don’t matter? The Three mayoral musketeers make up a committee on this (ignoring regional council because relatively they don’t matter)… leadership by committee is the path to mediocrity.

Why is this about my kids?

I have three amazing kids with the oldest only starting school next year. What we debate now is the community that will help shape their view on the world. My wife and I bought a house near the schools we wanted them to go to before we knew we were having kids and our thinking is a long term commitment to this area even with cars arriving upside down into my garage. I will likely not get to enjoy the lifestyle I would like to see in Waterloo as we don’t have reliable transit, our downtown cores are just starting to be rebuilt, and condos that I would have loved just 10 years ago are now starting to go up.

My life has changed. I don’t need LRT, I could use a fast train back and forth to Toronto and an airport that flew to Boston, New York, and San Francisco. This isn’t about me. Even at the age of 35 I see I am living in the present Waterloo and I must make do with what we have now. However, I look at the future of Waterloo (my kids or even the students I work with every day) and I want them to live in a modern city with dense modern core with a ton of culture and no need for a car. Sure I want a gentrified city that I too can enjoy, the more things that contribute to that the better, but again I know that if I want one at an age that I can really enjoy it (now) I need to move somewhere else.

Will LRT represent gentrification of medium sized town? Maybe. What I really want is to know where this community is heading and what the core values are that driving this. The really talented people (not saying that is me) don’t need to live anywhere specific. They are attracted to work in cities by both opportunity and environment. Risk takers that like novel things don’t like communities that fail to plan and develop with an eye on the future. If we don’t modernize our environment we stand to be left behind by more hungry cities that are desperate and have yet to shift out of a manufacturing economy (London, Hamilton, St Catherines — with 2/3 having a much better core to redevelopment). I think this debate is only a debate because “we have it good now, why change it” thinking.

The LRT debate is out of control, expensive, and disheartening

I applaud the folks over at snapsnort for the excellent infographraphic. Kudos for doing that. However I still think it misses the point. The numbers don’t matter, the stats to support or shoot down LRT don’t matter, what matters to me is this debate is bordering on asinine:

• The Region won’t grow that fast, we don’t need it now (Population growth shouldn’t be in the argument for LRT)
• What about Cambridge? (seriously my Cambridge friends, the distance and the rail cost would make it a $1.5Billion or larger project to start but I am with you on the coolness factor, you need to let it go or move if you want a less sprawlish area to live in)
• My taxes will go up. (taxes will always go up)
• You will make a bigger traffic problem on King st. (argument carries as much weight as the ridership reducing traffic… strong economy, lots of cars. Rails or no rails the traffic is going to suck more and more)
• It will cost more than what you say it will. (yes it will but that money is being spent locally so that is $1billion or so being injected into the local economy through taxes or other ways, that won’t be a bad thing)
• All those facts are wrong and here is why… (I don’t care, the facts don’t matter.)

Yes I said that. The facts don’t matter. Do we invest in the core of our city or not…? that is the question. Investment in the core requires transit to move a more dense population across a spread out core. No one can argue that. Is it rails disrupting our core or is it the Ottawa style mess of buses? If cost were no object what would you choose?

I keep hoping a leader will emerge that is dynamic and inspiring to put a character to a vision of the city and region I might want to live in. I am tired of the “never let go of power” baby boomers, more tired of their parents grumping up the coffee shop (generalization here, but it only takes a few), just as they are tired of this lazy younger entitled and immature generation that have no respect. Lets do things better than our parents, think outside of the next election cycle, and stop arguing about things that just feed arguments. If not, I may just need to extend the stone wall to my front yard sooner than I wanted to.

How the car got on the Jeep in my driveway

The now infamous incident (because Reddit had the jeep/car mashup on their front page and it is in the Chive best photos of the week) re-appeared this month so I figure I could offer some explanation as well as make a claim on that being my driveway.

The car came off of Westmount road and a decent rate of speed to jump over our garden, hit our house, bounce upside down off the jeep and then slide into my garage door. Why it did that? I think it hit another car, overreacted, and then headed across around 30-40 feet of lawn into the corner of my house. At Norman and Westmount there begins a bit of a hill and the grade of my lawn is much higher than my driveway. You can see below the view from the top (my front lawn) after the jeep was pulled out.

The odd thing is that there was little damage to my house. Some siding is destroyed and my garage door is a bit messed up but considering a car that made no effort to break (from what I can tell) or turn and went right at my house after a bit of Dukes of Hazard over my garden there should have been a lot more damage. He was going fast enough to put that car 10ft in the air into the house.

The Jeep has been considered “totalled” I believe but it too didn’t have a lot of damage just damage to expensive parts.

Overall, crazy day in Waterloo. I have no idea what happened to the driver (besides not being hurt) but I have to say the insurance headache to follow is extremely annoying. People in Waterloo and Kitchener drive like idiots down Westmount… not much police presence to slow them down and considering it is a residential area dating back to the 1950′s you have to think the road was not expected to be a main thruway for a Region of 500 000 people. There is an unwillingness from anyone in city council to help… likely won’t be until one of these idiots runs into a bunch of kids on their way to school (which I hope never ever happens).

What is next for VeloCity?

After the most awesome two months and a bit I have experienced in my professional career I have yet to sit down and take stock. There simply isn’t time to take a breath but I am going to take a moment and explain what is going on with my part of the universe. By now everyone knows we (at VeloCity) got some funding from, to many, was a very unlikely source. That funding was the missing piece — now we have the funds to give people a chance to try that may not have been able to as we can now clear the financial limitation.

The VeloCity program is going to be a full service incubator for students like none other.

What I mean by full service is that;

• we will (and do) recruit best talent in the world,
• inspire students that can do awesome stuff and have the passion but might have financial reasons blocking them to take a risk that can do awesome stuff,
• provide an environment (build community) where ideas and entrepreneurs find their legs,
• follow that up with a location to start to build a startup in an environment with just a bit more and way more experienced entrepreneurs and support one another,
• then encourage (read: kick them out when they are ready) into the wild startup world (ideal) or into a job working for another startup (not bad for the community) or recommend one of the countless tech jobs in town (not everyone handles risk well).

At the end of it all, the student or alumni has the opportunity to try in an environment that gives them a big long term advantage over those not involved with VeloCity.

The plan for the next 4 months is to lay low and focus on: what we have learned so far, what we can do that is better (or figure out what not to do anymore), try out a couple things, hopefully staff up a little, and recharge. This means, I think, no conferences, very little travel, and fewer meetings. At least until some big outstanding tasks get tackled. I want to blog more as well. Writing helps focus thoughts and share the journey. Twitter is just too short.

It is going to be an exciting Spring term in Waterloo