As the summer begins, many companies have begun to train interns and co-op students. Companies often need to teach these young people technical skills and how to act appropriately in the workplace because they never learned these skills in school.

Not for Ben Coulter.

Coulter is the CEO of TalkIQ, a San Francisco-based company that uses conversation science to better understand sales teams. During the company’s first summer of existence in 2014, Coulter hired an intern from the University of Waterloo to help with machine language processing.

“[He] became a respected voice and a peer among a team of veteran engineers and data scientists,” Coulter said. “That really speaks to his talent, but also the quality of education he got and continued to get at [the University of] Waterloo.”

Coulter was so impressed with the intern and the University of Waterloo, he explored Kitchener-Waterloo more and now TalkIQ has opened an office up there.

More and more Silicon Valley companies have begun to pay attention to Kitchener-Waterloo. A small but mighty community of University of Waterloo graduates, co-op students and interns in the Valley have boosted Kitchener-Waterloo’s reputation in the startup world. Now a few Silicon Valley companies – TalkIQ among them – are opening offices in Waterloo region to take advantage of the tremendous talent in the region.

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Everalbum, also headquartered in San Francisco, saw the talent available in Kitchener-Waterloo, and has since opened up an office in the old Shopify space. Everalbum automatically backs up photos and videos so users can access them at anytime, anywhere. It also allows users to free up space by backing up photos on Everalbum and then deleting them from a device.

As the No. 1 grossing productivity app in the U.S. and 85 other countries, Everalbum needs talent – fast. It saw the massive amount of talent coming out of the University of Waterloo, so it decided to build a presence there to bring in more talent.

“The market has become so competitive in San Francisco because there are so many startups and so many companies fighting for really talented people that it created an unhealthy environment for creating a company,” said Andrew Dudum, Co-Founder of Everalbum.

“We were far more impressed with the talent we were seeing up in Waterloo than the talent that was available on the market in San Francisco.”

Both Coulter and Dudum credit the University of Waterloo’s co-op program for Kitchener-Waterloo’s exceptional reputation in Silicon Valley. Students go on several co-ops throughout their undergrad years, so they come into the workplace – for another co-op or for a full-time job – without needing technical or behavioural instruction.

“I think [Waterloo’s co-op program] is a model that engineering programs should aspire to,” Coulter said.

Students at the University of Waterloo tend to complete their co-ops at different companies doing different things. This is beneficial for startups, especially ones in their early stages, like TalkIQ and Everalbum, in which most employees are expected to wear several different hats.

“The foundation of the company – the first 20 or 30 employees – and how talented they are, whether that be in engineering or design or business, is single-handedly the largest influencer in the outcome of the company’s success,” Dudum said.

Putting offices in Kitchener-Waterloo made sense for both TalkIQ and Everalbum, as they want to continue to bring in talent from the area, as well as participate in the strong startup ecosystem there.

“From a cultural and talent standpoint, the pool of people at Waterloo has proven to be the Stanford of Canada,” Dudum said.