Recent engineering graduate Mike McCauley is living the dream. During his senior year, he and two classmates launched BufferBox, a delivery service that lets consumers send packages and online purchases to secure locations for pickup. After college, the startup was accepted into the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, then Google acquired BufferBox for north of $25 million, according to TechCrunch. “I remember waking up one day and just thinking to myself, things really couldn’t get any crazier,” McCauley says. “All this is happening, and I’m not even 25.”
It’s a familiar story in the Valley, except that McCauley isn’t the product of Stanford University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His alma mater is the University of Waterloo—as in Waterloo, Ont., home to BlackBerry, one of the biggest flameouts in tech history.
