Young millionaire makes major donation
Posted Mar 29, 2011 02:38:02 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Ted Livingston was once a student entrepreneur at the University of Waterloo.
While at school, he sought the support of VeloCity, a student residence-based start-up incubator designed to connect talented, like-minded students with each other and with the surrounding start-up community, support, and mentorship.
Today, Livingston is 23-years old and the founder and CEO of Kik Interactive, a successful instant messaging system for smartphones. The company just raised $8-million in venture capital. And Livingston wants to make sure other entrepreneurs get the same chance.
Livingston has just made a $1-million donation to VeloCity.
“That will enable us to expand our programming beyond the residence,” explains Sean Van Koughnett, founding director at VeloCity. “We’ve got about 26,000 undergraduate students on-campus and several thousand more graduate students. So we’re going to be able to develop events and programs for a broader range of students and hopefully encourage more students to get into entrepreneurship, specifically technology-based entrepreneurship.”
Livingston’s generous support of VeloCity has inspired the university to establish a $1-million seed fund for student startups. Over the next several years the fund will provide at least 30 student ventures with $25,000, four months of office space, incorporation services and mentoring.
The $25,000 in funding is no accident. Livingston once received that same amount of money from his grandfather’s estate.
“That $25,000 is what kept (Livingston’s) business afloat over its beginning phases so he wanted to create that exact same opportunity for students going through VeloCity,” Van Koughnett explains. “So he gave money to the program and that, in turn, inspired the university to create that fund that would support student start-ups.”
The donation is the largest individual amount VeloCity has received since its establishment in September of 2008. Van Koughnett hopes it marks the start of a trend.
“There are a lot of University of Waterloo alumni who have had success as entrepreneurs and who may be inspired by what Ted has done,” Van Koughnett notes. “He’s 23-years old and he’s given a million dollars.”
Livingston’s donation was made possible by the sale of some of his personal Kik shares in the recently completed $8-million round of venture capital (VC) funding. The shares, valued at $1 million, were sold to one of three VC investors to prevent further dilution of other Kik employees’ shares.
“With few responsibilities and surrounded by other talented minds, UW students are uniquely positioned to start world-changing companies,” Livingston says. “Unfortunately, few investors are willing to bet on young entrepreneurs, especially in Canada, so getting the start-up funds they need is a huge challenge. This fund is a step towards changing that.”
