The day Ryan Marshall landed a co-op job at Research in Motion Ltd., back in 1998, he admits he wasn't doing handsprings.
"I was a cynical university student. Did I have faith in a hundred-person company that almost no one had heard of? Well, yes, enough to sign an offer, but I knew that if it didn't work out, I could get another job," he says with a grin.
Now RIM's vice-president of operating systems, Mr. Marshall obviously experienced a change of heart when he realized the company was on to something huge. Incredibly, his first project as a lowly co-op student was writing a new operating system core for the RIM 950 Wireless Handheld, the first ever BlackBerry branded device.
"It wasn't like they said, 'Here are the keys and everybody else is going home now,' but I'm amazed they said, 'Rewrite the kernel' to a student," says Mr. Marshall.
After graduating from the University of Waterloo, Mr. Marshall signed on full-time at RIM. Since then he has helped expand the product into Europe, develop the operating system to support new radio technologies, and was part of the team responsible for integrating technologies into the BlackBerry operating system, ranging from colour LCD screens to USB, Bluetooth, MP3 and video streaming.
At the age of 31 he was promoted to his current position, overseeing 180 employees in Waterloo, Mississauga, Ottawa and Germany. But don't make him wax poetic about any personality traits that helped get him there.
"How did I end up in this chair? Just a willingness to take stuff on," he says simply before rhyming off other words such as "mentors" and "luck" and "my team."
In fact, one of the best perks of his job now, he says, is that he's able to hire people on his team who he likes working with.
"You end up with 100 people sitting in this office who really like each other. The biggest problem that I deal with in terms of management is that too many of my guys want to go on vacation together," he says.
A father of three, Mr. Marshall lives in Heidelberg, Ont., with his family and does his best to promote life balance in a busy technology company.
"There are some long weeks, don't get me wrong. But I don't sacrifice the family. That's important," he says.
