How one electrical engineer became an unexpected champion for reading in the 21st century
By Marit Mitchell
If Charles Dickens were alive today, he’d be an avid Wattpad user—Allen Lau is sure of it.
The ECE alumnus is co-founder and CEO of the fast-growing company that lets readers and writers share their love of literature in new and immediate ways—writers release their work chapter by chapter, and readers around the globe instantly devour new stories on their phones, tablets and laptops.
At its core it’s the same format that made Dickens’s work so addictive to Victorian England, when chapters of his novels were published in serial, making them much more affordable and accessible to the public. But in an era where print materials are dismissed as ‘dead trees’ and attention spans have shrunk to the length of a GIF, what does the future of reading look like?
Lau and his co-founder Ivan Yuen have that answer. “We believe we can build a billion-user company that entirely focuses on reading and writing,” says Lau.
And with more than 32 million unique monthly visitors to Wattpad—roughly the population of Canada—the formula is working. A funding round earlier this year brought a $46-million investment from a group led by OMERS Ventures, money that will help grow the company. Its global impact is already evident: Wattpad is the number one app in the Philippines, and more than 10 per cent of its traffic comes from Spanish-speaking countries. If Fifty Shades of Grey showed us anything, let it be that people’s voracious appetite for romance, fan fiction and sci-fi is big business.
The company has grown from two members—Lau and Yuen, hanging out in their basements—to almost 90, and just moved to a multi-floor loft-style headquarters in the King East neighbourhood of Toronto. The open-concept office is bathed in natural light from huge warehouse windows and its finished in warm wood and bright colours. Developers, marketers and business strategists work around tables together, huddle in meeting rooms or chat over snacks and coffee in the expansive kitchen. It’s the kind of space you see in recruitment materials for Silicon Valley darlings such as Twitter or Airbnb, but this isn’t California—Wattpad is deliberately Toronto-based, and proud of it.
“To build a global internet company, understanding different languages is the first step, but understanding the nuances of different cultures—that’s super important,” says Lau. “If you talk to some of the workers
here, for a majority of them, they’re bilingual, have a different ethnic background, or lived or worked outside of Canada. Why? It’s not because we chose to do that, it’s because that’s the nature of Toronto.”
Lau’s family arrived in Toronto in 1987, the last of his mother’s side to move to Canada from Hong Kong. When it came time for university, he just asked his relatives which school they thought was best and off he went to University of Toronto. He graduated from Electrical Engineering in 1991, just before the Computer Engineering program was created, and finished his master’s degree under the supervision of Professor Elvino Sousa in 1992. “I took a lot of the computer engineering, software engineering courses, and there were two areas that I focused on: computer and communications,” says Lau. “My master’s degree specifically focused on mobile communications. In a way it’s a full circle.”
Lau has always strived to combine his hobbies and passions with his day job, but didn’t set out to become the three-time entrepreneur he is today. “I wanted to work for NASA—I wanted to be a scientist,” he remembers. “When I watched the scientists launch the shuttle, all that equipment, it was fascinating—so inspiring. I just wanted to be part of it.” His parents encouraged him to broaden his rather specific goal and play to his strengths in math and science. It’s a skill set that’s served him well— Lau founded his first company, a mobile gaming and advertising company called Tira Wireless in 2001. (Yuen was his first hire.) In 2002, he started developing a reading app for his Nokia Candybar before deciding the screen was impossibly small and setting the project aside. Fast forward to 2006, when he resurrected the idea for the Motorola Razr, the best phone on the market at the time.
“So I was busy in my basement coding, and one day Ivan instant-messaged me: ‘Hey Allen, I’m working on a new prototype, can you give me some feedback?’ and I clicked on that link, what I saw was mobile reading on a cell phone. I thought, ‘No way!’” he recalls. “Ivan is the smartest person I’ve ever worked with. And if Ivan and I both independently came up with the same idea, it must be a good idea.” Within two days he was on a plane to see Yuen, who was living in Vancouver at the time. “We were literally writing our business plan on a piece of napkin— like a Hollywood movie, but it’s real life.”
Will Wattpad’s story have a Hollywood ending? Lau’s not interested in that kind of drama just yet.
“I think in a way, startups and entrepreneurship have been heavily romanticized. I believe people hear about YouTube and Instagram, and they suddenly want a YouTube or they want an Instagram. They want WhatsApp. Those are once in a decade or twice in a decade kind of startups—most companies are not like that. And even some of the more successful ones, in the early years they may struggle a lot. It just takes time to build a great company,” says Lau. “We don’t think about exit, or going public—I don’t even waste time thinking about this. I believe we should think about the type of company that we want to build, and that type of success or outcome will come automatically.”
We’ll just have to wait for the next chapter.
This feature appeared in the latest issue of ANNUM: read or download the full magazine.