Several UW alumni students have been listed in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list of 2017, including co-founder of Vidyard, Devon Galloway, age 29, who was included under the marketing and advertising category.
Vidyard co-founders Galloway and Michael Litt are both class of 2010 students of the University of Waterloo with a BASc in the systems design engineering program.
“[My time at UW was some] of the most informative years of my life,” Galloway said. “One of the things that I love about it is the number of alumni who have gone on to do some pretty awesome things in quite a variety of fields. [It was] good to be inspired by some of the entrepreneurs like John Baker and Will Tatham. I have no doubt that every 30 Under 30 nominee or winner who went to the University of Waterloo has nothing but positive things to say about how the university had influenced them.”
According to Galloway, Vidyard, a software company that hosts and analyzes video content, originally had humble beginnings as a video production to company.
“We were making videos for companies as opposed to [what we are] now, a software platform,” said Galloway.
Galloway said that his co-operative work term at Blackberry, formerly known as Research In Motion, helped him andpartner Litt evolve Vidyard into the software platform it is today.
“[Michael] and I were working together at Blackberry [during our co-op term] on a project. They contracted out a company to produce videos for them,” Galloway said. “And we had the experience of kind of working with that and kind of thought ‘hey, we can really do this better.’”
While Vidyard has experienced some hardships over the past years, such as struggling to find local sales talent in their hometown of Kitchener-Waterloo, the company has also achieved accomplishments such as raising $35 million to further expand in video analytics and digital body language.
“It’s been obviously a wild ride, tough change over the years, but [it] continues to challenge me every day and [makes] me very excited to be here,” said Galloway.
Other UW alumni who made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list include co-founders of Thalmic Labs, Matthew Bailey, Stephen Lake, and Aaron Grant, all age 27 and listed under the consumer technology category.
Bailey, Lake, and Grant were class of 2012 students in the mechatronics engineering program at the University of Waterloo and joined the Velocity program in May 2012 to help launch their startup, Thalmic Labs, a company that focuses on wearable technology.
Thalmic Labs’ most notable product is the Myo armband. Released in 2014, the Myo is a device that is worn on the forearm and manipulates electronic devices by reading the movements made by the arm.
