Waterloo Class of '99 impresses

Great article over the weekend in the Financial Post about the success of the Class of ’99 from the University of Waterloo’s engineering program

One is a venture capitalist who just pocketed $30-million from Google for one of his startups. Another is a Microsoft senior technology advisor, picking out tomorrow’s big products. A third is a Facebook guru on the cutting edge of social networking.

Meet the Class of ’99 from the University of Waterloo’s engineering program. Restless and overachievers, they rode the crest of the dot-com wave. Then they crashed with the tech bust.

But today, they are making an indelible mark on the information-technology world in Canada, Silicon Valley and beyond.

Extreme Venture Partners' Amar Varma is among the successful 1999 grad class and he suggests that there is a lot more to come from Waterloo's Engineering department.

Varma predicts the Class of 2008 will be the next big influencers. The two floors occupied by his Toronto-based Extreme Venture Partners are filled with recent software graduates churning out new gaming and mobile apps. Dave Protasowski and Boris Chan at Xtreme Labs, and Kunal Gupta, chief executive officer of Polar Mobile, are three contenders for the next generation of leaders.