In high school, he juggled shop classes with the academic courses required for university. He and Doug Fregin won the Windsor science fair with a solar-powered water heater that could track the sun, and he improved upon the buzzer system to help the school's Reach for the Top team practice; when other schools started calling in their orders, his first year's tuition fee at the University of Waterloo was paid with the profits.
He spent hours tinkering with the equipment that a wealthy benefactor had donated to the school -- an example he follows with local schools today -- and it was there that he and Mr. Fregin met John Micsinszki, the electronics shop teacher. Mr. Micsinszki let the boys use the lab during the summer, and would take Mr. Lazaridis to ham-radio swap meets, where he could buy parts on the cheap.
Mr. Lazaridis is generous in his credit for all his teachers, but it was Mr. Micsinszki who once said to him: "Don't get too hooked on computers. Someday the person who puts wireless and computers together is really going to make something."
Decades later, in 1997, shortly after his first child was born, Mr. Lazaridis sat in his basement at midnight and e-mailed to his office the white paper -- the "secret sauce," he calls it today -- entitled "Success Lies in Paradox." When, he asked, is a tiny keyboard more efficient than a large one? When you use your thumbs.
That became the blueprint for the Blackberry, and the engineers in "the pit" went to work finding ways to keep the power demands small and the capacity big on a device then the size of a hamburger. "Have you saved a milliwatt today?" became the company's unofficial in-house slogan.
At that point, RIM was already a far different place than in the lean early years, when Mr. Lazaridis, Mr. Fregin and their first full-time employee, Mike Barnstijn, crammed into a 500-square-foot office, biking to work and staying late to finish contracts.
"They were nice boys," recalls Manfred Conrad, their first landlord. "They showed me what they were fiddling around with on the computer, but I had no clue."
Mr. Lazaridis had left school a month before he would have graduated with an electrical engineering degree to accept a $600,000 contract with General Motors. His parents, through disappointed, fronted him some money. Those first years, says Mr. Barnstijn, who cashed out his stock and retired in 1999, were "like being part of a family. We didn't know where we were going to end up."
Once place Mike Lazaridis landed was on stage at a pre-Oscar ceremony in 1999, accepting an Academy Award from Anne Heche for RIM's role in inventing a digital-barcode reader for film editing. Mr. Lazaridis boasts that RIM was at least partly responsible for the flood of new movies in the early 1990s; their invention meant that work that used to take a film editor two days now required only 20 minutes.
But that was his only encounter with Hollywood. By then, the Blackberry was causing a buzz on Wall Street. Today, in an unusual corporate structure, Doug Fregin is the COO and Mr. Lazaridis shares CEO duties with Jim Balsillie, a Harvard MBA, who invested his life savings and came aboard when the company needed money in 1992. It was Mr. Balsillie who invented RIM's famous rule that anyone caught checking the stock price would have to buy doughnuts for everyone else. (It's happened twice.)
