With Y Combinator founder Paul Graham's compliments still ringing in their ears, University of Waterloo students had a chance to get up close and personal with another key figure from the celebrated Silicon Valley startup accelerator this week: Harjeet Taggar, a YC alumnus-turned-partner.
Showing true commitment, Taggar left sunny California and blew into a frigid Waterloo on Thursday to speak to students at the university's William M. Tatham Centre for Co-operative Education. Then he headed to the Chainsaw Saloon for the latest Tech Startup Recruiting and Information Event, organized by Vidyard and sponsored by Communitech, LaBarge Weinstein LLP, Ernst & Young and UW VeloCity.
Amid a raucous crowd fuelled by copious quantities of Chainsaw poutine and Pabst Blue Ribbon, I managed a brief chat with Taggar about the increasing attention Y Combinator has been paying to Waterloo startup entrepreneurs, and about what distinguishes them from the hundreds of others from around the world vying for coveted spots in its accelerator program.
"When we read the YC applications and we see the teams from Waterloo, we just instinctively have a good reaction, because most of the applications we see from people from Waterloo are the right kind of applications," Taggar said, echoing Graham's comments in Fast Company earlier in the week.
Waterloo applications stand out, he said, because the applicants tend to focus on solving real problems, not just on starting companies.
"It’s like the BufferBox guys saying, ‘We think it would be cool to work on this thing as a project while we’re at school, and if it turns out that people find it interesting (it could make a good company)', Taggar said. "That’s exactly what we’re looking for."
Before it was a company, BufferBox was a design project devised in 2011 by three fourth-year Waterloo mechatronics engineering students, Mike McCauley, Aditya Bali and Jay Shah. Their solution, which solves the problem of missed parcel deliveries, won them entry to Y Combinator last summer, after which BufferBox launched as a company with parcel kiosks around southern Ontario.
In November, Google acquired BufferBox and brought it under the purview of its Kitchener development operations.
Citing applicants from the Bay Area who see the huge success of, say, apps like Instagram and apply to Y Combinator hoping to emulate them, Taggar said "I just feel like all the Waterloo ideas are more organic."
When I asked him why he thinks this is, he said, "I don’t know for sure, but if I had to guess, it might be because 1) it seems like it’s sort of built into the (Waterloo) curriculum, which is good, and 2) maybe there’s a benefit to being somewhat removed from Silicon Valley during the idea-creation phase. If you’re less absorbed in the hot startup of the moment and you’re more just figuring out projects to work on, maybe that’s a better way of coming up with ideas. I don’t know; it’s just a theory."
Continuing on why the vibe here feels different, Taggar said the Waterloo scene "is almost refreshing in a way," in part because startups aren't so culturally pervasive as they are in Silicon Valley.
"I think even before people get into, for example, Stanford, they already know everything about startups and they’re already being approached about startups, and for them, the decision is ‘which startup am I going to go and join?’", he said, "whereas here, people are more curious; they’re more interested in learning about the experience."
"People here have, like, startup innocence. It’s kind of cool."
