WATERLOO, ONT.—Hongwei Liu is standing in his office wearing head-to-toe black: crisp poplin shirt, jeans, suede sneakers. The co-founder and CEO of MappedIn, a multimillion-dollar company that crafts touch-screen directories for shopping malls and retail stores, is a University of Waterloo dropout who oversees a staff of 26.

He is 24 years old.

Liu is among a small but growing number of young adults in the Kitchener-Waterloo area who are redefining what it takes to create a successful business. They’ve abandoned their studies in order to launch startups in this cauldron of tech ingenuity. It could be argued they epitomize the entrepreneurial spirit, skipping classes to get in the game instead, following in the footsteps of industry icons such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

There’s even a lucrative program for these dropouts. The Thiel Fellowship, established in 2011 by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, hands out $100,000 (U.S.) and invaluable mentorship to university students under the age of 22 who are willing to leave school to pursue a tech project. Two University of Waterloo dropouts, Liam Horne and Harry Gandhi, were among the 20 recipients of the two-year fellowship in 2015. More than 2,800 people had applied.

In Liu’s case, after three-and-a-half semesters he abandoned his electrical engineering studies to focus on MappedIn, which he founded in 2011 with two classmates. Less than five years later, the company now boasts clients such as Cadillac Fairview and Canadian Tire.

“This is the longest single thing I’ve done in my whole life,” Liu says with a laugh. “It got to the point that I could no longer pass school because of the amount of time I was spending on MappedIn. It was a pretty practical and necessary decision.”

Liu says going to university isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “When my parents were going through post-secondary education, it was a distinction; now it’s a norm.

“It’s not going to guarantee anything anymore … that’s what a lot of parents miss out on, but I think most people our age have already figured that out.”

“There’s been a change, I would say, in the last five years with this generation of Internet kids,” says Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech. The not-for-profit company is the Kitchener-Waterloo region’s leading tech hub and startup accelerator.

“They are latchkey kids. They’ve had access to the Internet their entire lives. Their peers are more important than their parents. They think differently and they communicate differently.”

During the past five years, more than 2,200 startups have been launched in Kitchener-Waterloo, raising nearly $850 million in investment. Innovation is the area’s forte, spurred by an alchemy of university-fuelled research, government investment, eager young minds and the presence of tech giants such as Google and BlackBerry.

Communitech is a hive of laptop-wielding 20-somethings located in a reclaimed downtown Kitchener factory once home to the largest leather tannery in the British Commonwealth. The Tannery is a place where startups are engaged in everything from data analytics to creating wearable technology for horses.

Walk through its colourful labyrinthine halls and you’ll also find Velocity Garage. Velocity, which provides University of Waterloo student- and alumni-run startups with workspace, mentorship and funding opportunities, has nurtured 165 companies, including MappedIn, since its 2008 launch. Sometimes that support creates such momentum in students’ startups that they need to drop out of school to see their business ideas through.

Reinforcing the program’s community spirit, many in the Garage’s open workspace wear Velocity hoodies and T-shirts. Their average age is 23.

“It’s never been cheaper to build a company and so the opportunity for young people has never been better,” Velocity director Mike Kirkup says. “They’re only constrained, ultimately, by their vision.”

Dropouts, Kirkup adds, are still in the minority — he estimates there is one for every five or six entrepreneurs who stay in school. But Klugman believes the number of dropouts is growing, even though the university aims to keep students by allowing them to use their businesses for co-op credits and class projects.

“There is no one way to do this,” Kirkup says of making it in the startup world.

Some suspend or terminate their studies. Twenty-one-year-old Liam Horne, who dropped out of Waterloo’s undergraduate computer science program after receiving a 2015 Thiel fellowship, has been coding for nearly a decade.

“Being in the tech environment, having a degree is not a thing that matters. What matters is your skill and experience,” says Horne as he sits in the Tannery’s pizza parlour.

Horne is soft-spoken and earnest, with the kind of straightforward ambition of a man twice his age. (He already has a mortgage on a house in Kitchener with his girlfriend.)

Harry Gandhi is the other Waterloo-area Thiel Fellowship recipient. Affable and eloquent, the 23-year-old former biotechnology and economics major has an interest in dystopian fiction and libertarianism. Horne and Gandhi maintain a loose friendship.

Instead of succeeding in the classroom, Gandhi found his calling in robotics and genetic engineering extracurriculars. “I made the right decision in choosing Waterloo, but for all the wrong reasons,” he says.

“Once I saw the flip side of education, something hit and I said, ‘This is not what I’m paying thousands of dollars to do.’”

Gandhi co-founded Medella Health, which is developing contact lenses that can monitor blood glucose levels to help manage diabetes.

Horne co-founded Hack the North — Canada’s largest international hackathon — and is the chief technology officer at PiinPoint, which has created software that uses demographic, real estate and traffic data to help businesses find the best locations for expansion.

According to the Thiel Foundation, fellows have raised more than $320 million (U.S.) in venture capital to date, with their companies having a combined valuation of more than $1.15 billion.

Horne and Gandhi concede the hours are long with a new startup, but there’s nothing they’d rather do. “Piinpoint is so integrated into my life, it’s hard to say what my hours are,” Horne says.

Gandhi typically puts in 70 to 80 hours a week. He says you need to be a self-starter with a keen interest in personal improvement to make it in the startup world. With money coming from investors, fellowships and startup incubators, the financial risks remain low.

You don’t need a degree to get a good job in the tech world, they say, and if all else fails, university is still an option. Still, neither plans to go back to school.

“It’s 2016,” Horne says. “Anything that you want to learn you can just get on the Internet.”

Entering the real world

Following in the footsteps of industry icons, these University of Waterloo dropouts are striking out on their own as tech entrepreneurs:

Liam Horne, 21 — PiinPoint

Liam Horne works with a team of 10 people from a monitor-cluttered office in downtown Kitchener’s Tannery building. Bottles of Sambuca and whisky sit next to a Keurig coffee machine. Every week, a different PiinPoint member is handed a “Best at Everything Oscar” for their work.

Horne, who grew up a short hop away in Cambridge, Ont., dropped his university studies after two-and-a-half years. He says winning a prestigious Thiel Fellowship hasn’t changed much in his life.

“There’s more people where you don’t know who they are but they know who you are,” he says, laughing. “There’s also a lot bigger expectation for you — but personally, I handle those things well.”

Harry Gandhi, 23 — Medella Health

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In the Velocity Foundry — another University of Waterloo incubator space — the shelf behind Harry Gandhi’s desk is stuffed with dystopian fiction and books on startups. Gandhi abandoned his studies with only three semesters left in his degree.

“I didn’t feel much pressure, but I definitely see it coming from other immigrant parents,” he says.

When he was 9, his family immigrated to Toronto from India. “My mom and dad are my biggest supporters,” he says.

With all of its resources, young talent and entrepreneurial enthusiasm, Kitchener-Waterloo is the right location for his company, Gandhi believes.

“There’s a very strong belief that there’s enough pie for everyone,” he says of the area’s communal spirit. “But what Waterloo needs next is a capital injection — and specifically irrational money (e.g., angel investors).”

Investors, he says, can rely too much on charts and projections. In places like Silicon Valley, they are much more willing to take financial risks.

“Every time you take a bet on a startup and you run those projections, you’ll walk away saying no to the deal,” Gandhi says. “It’s that conservative mentality that is limiting us.”

Rachel Friesen, 22 — EyeCheck

Millions of people in the developing world need glasses, but it’s not easy to get everyone into an optometrist’s chair. EyeCheck’s solution is simple: develop a smartphone app and camera to triage patients. It also wants to be able to screen for glaucoma, cataracts and cardiovascular disease.

“Your eyes are, interestingly, quite a portal to your overall health,” says chief operating officer and co-founder Rachel Friesen. Despite being in the fourth year of a business and international development degree, Friesen is on the verge of dropping out.

“My dad is encouraging me,” she says from EyeCheck’s workspace in the Velocity Foundry. “He said school will always be there, but this opportunity might go away.”

Friesen is one of very few women working in the Foundry. “It is a bit of a boys club, but I think that’s changing.”

William Zhou, 23, and Ryan McKay-Fleming, 23 — Chalk.com

“Chalk.com is a platform that enables teachers to personalize their instructions for their students,” says the company’s CEO, William Zhou. The company got its start with Velocity.

While Zhou was able to slowly cobble together a degree through part-time classes and co-ops, the company’s chief technology officer, Ryan McKay-Fleming, left university in his third year.

“I went to university because I wanted to meet people,” says the computer programmer. “I liked school; something else just came up.”

When asked if they see anything ironic about running an education-focused business, the two laugh.

“To be fair, our product is for K-to-12 education, and we have that!” Zhou says. “Unless you have a mission, stay in school.”

Hongwei Liu, 24 — MappedIn

When meeting with potential clients in MappedIn’s early days, Hongwei Liu didn’t think much about ageism.

“I have the Asian genes going for me,” he laughs. “I’m ambiguously 20 to 40.”

Born in China, Liu moved to Ottawa with his family when he was 7. He left university after three-and-a-half semesters to create what is now the leading indoor way-finding platform in Canada.

“I come from a family of three generations of doctors and engineers, and this is breaking the combo,” Liu says. “I think that our generation more than any other is lacking a sense of purpose, so that draws a lot of people to look for something to do that is more meaningful … The combination of that plus a tolerance for risk, I think, results in a lot of people doing startups.”

Tips for success from a 24-year-old veteran

Lots of people have good ideas, but not everyone can turn them into reality. Hongwei Liu, co-founder and CEO of MappedIn, offers some tips for startup success:

1. Build something that people want enough to pay you for it. It’s easy to get someone to say, “Yeah I’d love that,” but much harder to get paid for it.

2. Stay lean. WhatsApp sold for $19 billion (U.S.) with 55 employees.

3. Evaluate whether starting a company is something you really want to do right now. It’s generally understood that having a kid is a big decision — a commitment of time and resources for decades that cannot be reversed. A successful company looks the same!

4. A startup is where the tricks stop working. It’s great because there’s no way to cheat, no arbitrary tests to take, no one evaluating your incremental actions. You win by getting the right results. You lose by the same measure. It’s a breath of fresh air followed by punches to the gut. It’s not for everyone.

5. A good way to “dip your feet in” without the need to look successful all the time is to work on a project. Tell everyone it’s a side project, not your big fancy startup. If it works and develops into a startup, great. If not, you learned something worth sharing.

6. Minimize your long-term regret. Backpack around the world while you still can, be an artist (with a self-sustaining financial plan), get your dream job or start a startup. Just do you.