Meet Toronto's answer to Donald Trump, only with way better hair. And instead of becoming a flashy reality-TV star, millionaire businessman Reza Satchu, 35, has reinvented himself as an educational entrepreneur.
After a dizzying success in the New York tech boom, Mr. Satchu could have kicked back to a life of golf and corporate directorships. Instead, he created a wildly popular undergraduate economics course at the University of Toronto, teaching the art of entrepreneurship in the real world. He takes no salary, and launched an annual scholarship that awards his top student out of his own pocket.
He's generous, yes, but he's no modest mouse. Mr. Satchu's approach is packed with high drama; he cold-calls on students and berates the unprepared by preaching one of his most staunchly held tenets: Don't get comfortable. Oh, and don't show up late.
One of the top students in his class, Miraz Manji, 22, wasn't planning on taking the class last September -- until he heard about the "millionaire jerk" professor who threw a "horrid tantrum" on the first day of the semester.
"He told them his time was worth more than theirs, and they better participate and not waste his time," Mr. Manji had heard from someone already taking Economics of Entrepreneurship, and he promptly dropped another class to sign up.
"I e-mailed Professor Satchu to let him know that I had joined the course after missing the first week. He replied only with a firm, 'Do not miss any more classes.' "
For a session this past fall -- his second -- Mr. Satchu had 200 students vying for 35 seats. In the school's Anti-Calendar, which ranks classes and profs, he came out as one of the best liked, garnering a 100-per-cent "retake" from students, meaning every one of them would sign up for the class again.
"I don't focus on the weakest performers," Mr. Satchu says. "I focus on the best performers and make them even better. When you get into the real world, you don't have people babying you along. If you're not good and prepared, you're gonna get hurt. I'm harsh on people and the better you are, the more harsh I am."
The unlikely professor emigrated to Canada from Kenya in 1976 with his parents and brother, Asif, and grew up in a one-bedroom Scarborough apartment. Armed with a fierce work ethic for which he credits his hard-working parents -- his mother a secretary, his father a real-estate agent -- he headed to New York after graduating with a BA in economics from McGill University and "applied at a hundred places."
He finally persuaded Merrill Lynch to hire him as a financial analyst, and says his first day at work provided a lesson he won't forget and one he aims to impart to his students: While the education in the United States and Canada is on a par, the goals and expectations are not.
"They'd been taught to be the world's best from the age of 4, true American-style," he says from his sleek, spacious Rosedale home. "I'm 22 and sitting next to this guy who's gone to Harvard. He has been thinking for the past few years that he's going to be a Nobel laureate in economics or run a firm, or write a book that's going to be a bestseller.
"If I compare that to friends of mine who stayed here, their goal is to be vice-president of Royal Bank or go through law school and maybe make partner at one of the law firms in Canada. It's a very narrow straightforward path. There's nothing particularly challenging about it."
He took up the challenge, and hit Harvard Business School for an MBA, then entered the world of private equity. In 1999, he and his brother co-founded Suppliermarket.com Inc., a business-to-business website for industrial manufacturers that raised $60-million from investors, including KKR and Onex. They sold the 225-employee company to a competitor for more than $1-billion (U.S.) in 2000. In 2003, he moved with his lawyer wife, Marion Annau, and their three small children back to Toronto, where he's thrilled they "won't be run over by yellow taxi cabs every time they leave the house."
