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

In general, I'm with you, but in this case, it's significant in my opinion. There's very few people who at 23 could even think of donating $1M, especially money they've earned on their own. Meanwhile it's fairly common to hear about some founder/CEO in general donate $1M. I think mentioning the age is just to highlight how great this guy is. Just saying "Kik founder" might take away from it.

I always feel a twinge of sadness knowing that I can never be a 19 year old who invented something again.

It is annoying, only because it is obvious tabloid-level gossip and has nothing to do with the events involved. We should be talking about the Canadian start up scene, Waterloo in particular, not this guy's age. But something tells me something about his age is the reason this got upvoted so much.

Age is no different then skin color, marital status, or any other attribute you could assign to a person. I always (try to) by default ignore it from headlines and articles.

Nice try Ted.

The program is not limited to CS students.

Examples of previous projects: http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/projects

The work Jesse and VeloCity have been doing over the last few years has been great for the community at UW. YC-funded Allerta (of inPluse) is also VeloCity alum, as was the 7CUBED project (of QuickCite). Not bad results after only 3 years.

Just to ensure the correct people are given credit here, Velocity is Sean Van Koughnett's brainchild and he pushed the university to build the Velocity program. He's a great guy and the city of Waterloo is fortunate to have had his efforts dedicated to this.

Also, I want to address one of the grandchild comments. It's important to enforce the fact that Velocity is not simply a place for engineers or math students. It's a place to meet passionate entrepreneurs and build startups. The mindset of "arts/bus students are surprisingly useful" is outright disrespectful, and discredits the value of fresh insights and diverse skill sets.

VC monies from Fred Wilson and co. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/03/kik.html

As part of the VC round he sold some of his personal shares. This $1M is, presumably, coming from that amount.

It sounds like he sold part of his personal founders shares in order to prevent further dilution in the round. From the article he only took the 1M? If that's true that's a pretty benevolent gift.

The shares, valued at $1 million, were sold to one of three VC investors to prevent further dilution of other Kik employees’ shares.

Donating 100% and expecting no returns.

My reading of the Velocity article suggests that Ted donated his million to the University "to expand support for student entrepreneurs".

The University, in turn, has established a million dollar seed fund to support student ventures. So while it is probably basically the same million dollars, the University is acting as an intermediary and has control over the fund in some fashion or another.

It doesnt matter much for CS vs soft eng. Most entrepreneur clubs and meet ups are degree agnostic.

Get a strong background in what interests you most.

Most students are looking at a regular career path. You will have to seek out like minded people.

Soft engs are generally better. Velocity is full of them. The one problem with Soft Engs is that their work load is generally higher than CS students, so less time to work on startups.

Full disclosure: I'm in Soft Eng :)

CS is better, since you get the flexibility to adjust your school to support your life, startups, or whatever you're doing. Engineering is too rigid to do something like take a term off to focus on a personal project or do some research.

Full disclosure: Current Velocity Resident, 4th year CS

I've met brilliant CS students and brilliant SE's, and complete morons in each program. Degree title is irrelevant, it is the quality of person that determines the quality of hacker that leaves each program.

Having said that, while the core curriculum of the programs is almost identical, the SE curriculum contains a lot more non-CS requirements such as Chemistry, English, and Ethics. This makes their workload much heavier, without making them better software engineers.

In CS, we get a lot more freedom. I usually have one or two electives each term, which means I've been able to take courses in economics, entrepreneurship, music, biology, and others. It also leaves a lot more time for side-projects, which are what really make you a better hacker.