Category:Famous Waterloo Alumni

Vitalik Buterin studied computer science at the University of Waterloo and dropped out in 2014, after a Thiel Fellowship paid him to work on Ethereum full time. This category collects biographical entries on people who studied at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and almost every entry in it is technical: computer science, computer engineering, mechatronics and biochemistry, with a heavy tilt toward founders rather than employees. The thing that recurs across the biographies is not a faculty or a famous professor but a scheduling structure, the university's cooperative education program, which alternates academic terms with paid work terms in industry.

Waterloo is a public university in the Waterloo Region of southwestern Ontario, and its co-op program is the feature its graduates' biographies mention most often. Students alternate study terms with employment terms, which means many of them arrive at graduation with several years of industry experience already logged. Apoorva Mehta studied engineering there while the surrounding region was becoming a startup cluster in its own right, and went on to found Instacart after roughly twenty earlier attempts failed. Jonny Hsu came through the Science and Business co-op program specializing in biochemistry before founding a company building RNA foundation models for drug discovery.

The category is small and it is young. Most of the members are living founders in their twenties and thirties, and the historical depth comes from a short earlier generation of computer scientists and investors.

Owen Brake is the clearest illustration. He took a mechatronics engineering degree between 2019 and 2024, served as technical lead of the university's Formula Electric team for those five years and led a Vex Robotics team before that, and spent his work terms at Ford in Waterloo, at Tesla and Apple, at Parallel Systems in Los Angeles and at Neuralink in Fremont. He then co-founded a San Francisco company building high-power-density motor controllers and inverters for electric vehicles, with Ethan Childerhose, who has his own ties to the university's engineering faculty and came to the same company out of Tesla.

The rest of the recent group follows the same shape at smaller scale. Daivik Goel graduated in computer engineering before roles at Tesla and Cisco Meraki and then a global payroll company. Adhityaa Chandrasekar holds degrees from Waterloo and IIT Madras and co-founded a network tracing tool for backend infrastructure.

David Cheriton took both a master's degree and a doctorate in computer science at Waterloo before a long career on the Stanford faculty, where he founded the Distributed Systems Group, and a second career as an investor. He later gave the university's school of computer science a donation of twenty-five million dollars, and his biography treats that gift as a marker of how much the Waterloo years mattered to his formation.

Chamath Palihapitiya earned a Bachelor of Applied Science at Waterloo, and his biography credits the university's engineering and technology programs with the technical grounding he brought to Facebook and then to his own venture firm. Buterin's route was the shortest: he studied computer science, took the fellowship, left before finishing, and built the platform that introduced smart contracts to a general audience.

• Famous McGill Alumni
• Famous People from Toronto
• Former Tesla Employees
• Y Combinator Alumni
• Famous Carnegie Mellon Alumni