Mr. Kevin OLeary

Born in Mount Royal; a suburb of Montreal, Canada to an Irish father who was a salesman. His mother was of Lebanese descent, and was a seamstress. Growing up, he was fond of photography and even took it up as a career for some time during his college career. He found soon after that there was unfortunately no money to be made. He studied for two years at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean followed by the University of Waterloo, where he received an Honours Bachelors degree in Environmental Studies and Anthropology. In 1980, he earned an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business at The University of Western Ontario. Immediately after college, he and a couple of friends launched Special event television (SET) and found limited success producing small television shows and in-between periods commercials and local professional hockey games. Later he was bought out for $25,000 by one of his partners. He started a software company in the basement of a small Toronto home along with partners John Freeman and Gary Babcock. His mother provided the seed investment of $10,000, which he used to start software publisher, SoftKey International, a publisher and distributor of CD-ROM based personal computer software for Windows and Macintosh computers during the 1990s. Their products typically consisted of software intended for home audiences, especially compilation discs containing various freeware or shareware game software. SoftKey enjoyed great success by offering "jewel-case only" products, which they dubbed their 'Platinum' line.