What I learned

BetaKit Most Ambitious

Larry Smith

University of Waterloo

Larry Smith was hired to teach the principles of economics. Feeling his students were missing something, Smith asked if he could add a class on entrepreneurship to the curriculum for one semester. Forty years later, Smith calculates that he has taught one out of every five of the school’s engineering students. His now legendary classes have informed generations of Canadian builders, many of whom cite him as an ongoing source of inspiration and insight.

Michael Litt, the co-founder and CEO of Vidyard, said the perspective he gained in Smith’s class (class of ‘11) formed the spine of his entrepreneurial career. “It keeps me patient in downturns, bold in moments of inflection, and relentlessly focused on building the next curve,” he said. “Whenever the future feels messy, I imagine Larry saying: ‘Change is just time reorganizing value.’”

Here, Smith reflects on the lessons he tried to impart, what makes Mike Lazaridis thoughtfully ambitious, and whether Canada can do audacious things.

I talk to former students on, effectively, a daily basis. I don’t want to suggest that’s a burden: it’s an extraordinary privilege.

People often ask me, How have students changed?

Fundamentally, there has not been a great change.

They don’t look any different. Literally, collegiate fashion has just stopped.

It’s my obligation when entering a classroom to be as useful to as many of the students as possible. I was looking for a universal message, which is this: maximize the talent of every person in the room.

I added history to my courses because my students told me they liked it and found it useful. They were hungry for it.

Engineering frequently forgets to teach people where the tech came from. If they knew where the tech came from, they might better understand where it is going and how it might be better used.

I watch ambition grow as people know more.

A lot of students tell me they’re not creative and they never have been. But when they were three years old, they all played pretend. They’ll actually tell me things they used to pretend to be: firefighters, astronauts, they used to play with dolls. I try to provoke them into resenting the fact the school system might have killed something that was in them. It’s buried in there, somewhere. Find it.

On Thoughtful Ambition

I’ve been studying entrepreneurship for half a century. I’ve also been watching it evolve over all this time.

The challenges, the things that don’t work, are largely the same: there’s a failure to be persistent, or a failure to understand when persistence is destroying you, and your goal is impossible.

I try to help every student be more thoughtfully ambitious.

Do the most useful thing you can do with your time and your talents. Don’t tell me you just want to be rich. Who doesn’t want to be rich?

Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Research in Motion, was the second student I saw at the University of Waterloo. He’s the epitome of a thoughtfully ambitious person. I asked him why he wished to start an enterprise. He began by saying that he wanted to be rich, but then he said he wanted to be rich so he could support research into basic science. And true to his word, he’s built the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.

Being thoughtful about your ambition doesn’t guarantee success but it certainly is a strong contributor, in my experience.

You don’t have to do something spectacular this afternoon.

It may be a decade or longer from now when the moment arises and you see an opportunity.

Don’t bail at the first difficulty, but listen to what the world is telling you about your idea or your career strategy.

If you don’t have patience, give up being a noteworthy entrepreneur. I do not care that someone started something in their garage in California and sold the company three years later for $2 billion. Fine. It’s called roulette.

I am all too familiar with California culture. It walks into my office quite literally. We send a large number of our students to California, and they often come back reflecting that culture. Some of that is advantageous. It exposes them to other talented men and women, and a huge range of ideas. It also, if we’re going to be blunt about it, exposes them to a disproportionate scent of money made quickly.

On Canada

I have no reason to believe my students are any less adept than those at Stanford or MIT. I know they are the equal of those students because I send them to those institutions.

The talent is here. The ambition is less than it could be, based on the talent. I began to recognize that the gap between what my students are trying to do and what they can do is greater than I had supposed. And it is greater than it would be in the United States.

No country’s perfect and certainly not this one. I don’t find Canada more thoughtful, to be honest. I find it more cautious. The guy who sits in his house because he’s afraid of walking down the street could look like he’s being thoughtful.

There’s caution across the board. Our investment community is more cautious, our banks are more cautious, governments are cautious. Everyone is trying to not make a mistake. That is not a recipe for ambitious innovation.

We have lived too long in the shadow of a very successful place. And now we have a crisis.

Many Canadians, young and old, are oblivious to our history, they’re oblivious to our accomplishments. They know all the stuff America’s invented and practically nothing that Canada’s invented.

We have done audacious things. The reason Canada isn’t the United States is because of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Full stop. Without that, the chance of having stayed independent would have been a fantasy. In 1945, Canada was the fourth most powerful military nation on Earth. A million soldiers from a tiny population and it did not bankrupt us.

We also have a relatively long history of aborting innovations we could have pioneered. The Avro Arrow comes to mind. Yet, we have done moonshots successfully.

Canada needs to find its place in the world. The need has never been more urgent. In my lifetime, it has never been more urgent.

We don’t need more new ideas. Just do the stuff we already know we should be doing.

We have to—perhaps for the first time—properly define ourselves and probe the limits of our capabilities. And I do believe we shall surprise ourselves.

Dealing with the challenges of today’s world is not going to be done with little tweaks. This is full throttle innovation. It will take clear-eyed self-confidence and thoughtfully ambitious people who aren’t easily spooked. And those are in short supply, around the world, by the way.

We’re a small country in the shadow of a big thing which is lumbering around, and we’d best get our act together.

Larry Smith spoke to BetaKit on April 16, 2025. His thoughts have been condensed and edited.

Feature image courtesy the Grand Valley Construction Association.