Mike Lazaridis Research In Motion | Canada
It's a classic new-economy fable: university student starts a tech firm in the U.S., never bothers to graduate, and goes on to make billions. The only difference between that legend and the true story of Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion (RIM), is that it took Lazaridis about a decade to come up with his killer idea and when his epiphany did come, it happened in Canada, not in California.
RIM was a little-known company until five years ago, when it launched its BlackBerry, a handheld gadget for writing and receiving secure e-mail. Before that, Lazaridis tinkered with industrial displays and developed a fast way to read time codes on film, which won him a Scientific and Technical Oscar in 1999. "We've always been innovative," he says. "Whatever we get involved in, we sink our teeth into." Today, the very term BlackBerry is synonymous with wireless e-mail. Over 1 million people use the thumb-operated gizmo, led by a long list of the rich and famous that RIM says includes George W. Bush, George Clooney, Sarah Jessica Parker and the Beckhams. "We got into a market where there was really nothing there," says Lazaridis, 43, an affable teddy bear of a man who founded RIM in 1984 as a student at the University of Waterloo, about 90 km west of Toronto. Last year, the number of people using a BlackBerry doubled to 1.1 million, and in the three months through June alone, RIM shipped over 500,000 devices, or almost three times as many as a year earlier, according to research firm Gartner, Inc. That may not be anywhere near the hundreds of millions of mobile phones sold every year, but the growth has made a huge impression on cell-phone and PDA vendors. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Sony Ericsson,
We've always been innovative. Whatever we get involved in, we sink our teeth into
— MIKE LAZARIDIS, founder, Research in Motion
Microsoft and PalmSource have all licensed RIM's e-mail software, allowing RIM to grow into a company with $594.6 million in revenue in its fiscal year ended Feb. 28, almost double its size a year earlier. What made the device catch on so fast? Unlike earlier handhelds, the BlackBerry pushed e-mail right to the device, rather than merely alerting users that they had e-mail the device could fetch. It also let employees send and receive using their corporate addresses, just as if they were in the office. RIM's curved layout of button-like keys has also made thumb operation a breeze. "It's very difficult to get someone to use another device," says Gartner vice president Ken Dulaney.
Of course, there are breakdowns on any road to success. RIM faces a possible ban on selling in the U.S. if the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington doesn't overturn a lower court ruling that RIM violated patents held by a rival. And Lazaridis has to worry that his big-name licensees might kill his hardware business—although, even if they do, RIM still has a healthy software and services business, which combined, bring in close to one-third of its revenue. Indeed, BlackBerry's success has made Lazaridis wealthy enough to provide over $100 million in funding to his other passion—quantum computing research—at the University of Waterloo, where the former dropout is now chancellor. One more reason for techies to continue to give him the thumbs-up.—By Mark Halper
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