Allen Lau: Leadership and Entrepreneurship

Chapter 1: Who is Allen Lau?

Allen Lau is the co-founder and CEO of Wattpad, a Toronto-based tech company that was founded in 2006. Wattpad is a free mobile reading app that connects self-published writers to readers (Khandaker, 2015).

Lau, 47 years old, grew up in Hong Kong and taught himself how to code at the age of 12. He moved with his parents to Toronto, Canada in 1987 at the age of 19, where he studied electrical engineering at the University of Toronto. He had a keen interest in mobile science and wrote his Master's thesis on how to convert cell phones from analog to digital (Landau, 2014).

After graduating, he joined IBM as a developer but left 10 months later as he found the company too big and corporate for his liking (Landau, 2014). He then started working at Delrina in 1993 until Symantec acquired the business. He left Delrina and co-founded Tira Wireless, a start-up tech that helped large companies such as Disney and Sony enter the mobile gaming space (Sprouter, 2012). However, after working there for 5 years he realised that mobile gaming was not his passion. He wanted to create something that he would actually use himself. As an avid sci-fi fan, he began prototyping a mobile reading app that he could read his favourite books on the run (Landau, 2014). In 2006, he received a text message from a friend, Ivan Yeun, who also happened to be working on developing a mobile reading application. The two met in Vancouver to discuss the possibilities of actually creating such an app, and Wattpad was officially co-founded in the Vancouver airport lobby (Sprouter, 2012).