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Mike Keriakos, right, with co-founder Ben Wolin at the Everyday Health offices in New York City.
exchanges and a ride board enabling students to organize trips home. Although 10 universities showed interest, and Molson’s and Microsoft were on side as sponsors, they couldn’t raise enough venture capital to build the infrastructure. “We missed the piece in the middle, and that’s what sent me to New York,” Keriakos says. “It’s a good example of brain drain.” McKenzie, now major shareholder and CEO of eLUXE, a trendy Toronto-based online shop for women, considers campusnet one of Keriakos’ most inspired ideas. “I didn’t realize the opportunity at stake at the time,” says McKenzie. “We should have packed up and moved to San Francisco. I didn’t see it then, and I regret it more now than I did then.” Nevertheless, the endeavour was the start of a personal and professional collaboration that continues today for the onetime Bricker Residence dons. McKenzie particularly values Keriakos’ firmly held principles, saying “he won’t compromise his integrity even if it hurts him.” Wolin agrees: “Mike’s extremely principled. More than anything, that’s his most amazing characteristic.” In business, McKenzie adds, “He has a unique ability to look at the environment around him and put together disparate facts to come up with new ideas.” “I like building, and figuring out what can’t be figured out,” Keriakos says. He sees his greatest strength as taking a good
photo by Jill Lotenberg, Everyday Health
idea, assembling the necessary resources and motivating people to create it. “A good entrepreneur can be a jack of many trades.” BORN IN EGYPT, Keriakos was five when Nortel moved his family to Ottawa. He chose Laurier for its business co-op program and the community feeling on campus. In 1997, as vice-president of marketing, he was credited with getting a smart new website up and running for the Laurier Students’ Union. Since 2010, he has returned to campus yearly to recruit final-year students. He has hired 20 and plans for more. When campusnet failed, Keriakos joined Procter & Gamble, quickly learning a lot about business, and about himself. After four and a half months, he quit to go to New York City where the opportunities “were palpable.” His parents cautioned him about giving up a good job to gamble on a dream. However, “I was not a corporate soldier, I was an entrepreneur,” Keriakos says. “If you’re a dancer, you shouldn’t try to be a chef.” Even today though, his mom, a pharmacist by profession, “is still more concerned about how I’m eating than how the business is going.” IN NEW YORK, he took a room at a Holiday Inn and went to employment fairs. His first job was in media sales for iVillage. By 2000, he was at Beliefnet, “the ESPN of religion and spirituality.”
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