Originally from Whitby, Ontario, I went to the University of Waterloo for my undergrad and masters in Computer Science. While I was there I did the co-op program and worked at The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Google. My master’s thesis was about using Wikipedia to better extract info for question answering.

When I was done school I moved to Vancouver to work at a greentech startup then at SAP before starting my own startup at the (now defunct) Growlab accelerator. That startup was a geo-local-mobile one (all the rage in 2011) which failed. After that, I started working on MapDash as tech lead. While working on MapDash, we started on a notification-based publishing solution for Instagram and we made “latergram” at a hackathon in late 2013.

We launched “latergramme” in spring 2014 and the founders went full-time on it in early 2015 which was rebranded to Later in spring 2016. Later raised $1.5MM in 2015 and has grown to over 100 employees, over a hundred thousand paying customers, and ranks around #1500 in Alexa's US Website Ranking.

I’ve also been an Instructor at Lighthouse Labs (both web and iOS) and am a pretty big hackathon enthusiast.

• Minimum Viable CTO by Ian MacKinnon of Later
• Startups | The Later Story
• FuckUp Nights - Vancouver, BC - Ian MacKinnon
• How Latergramme Grew to 290,000 Users

• 40 under 40, Business in Vancouver, 2019
• SIGIR Test of Time Award, "Novelty and Diversity in Information Retrieval Evaluation", SIGIR 2019, 2019

• MacKinnon, Ian & Smith, Matthew Robert & Patterson, Roger, "METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR FACILITATING PUBLICATION OF A MEDIA FILE AT A SCHEDULED TIME", Canadian Patent 2882836, issued January 17, 2017
• Clarke, Charles & Kolla, Maheedhar & Cormack, Gordon & Vechtomova, Olga & Ashkan, Azin & Büttcher, Stefan & MacKinnon, Ian. (2008). Novelty and diversity in information retrieval evaluation. Proc. of the 31st ACM SIGIR. 659-666.
• MacKinnon, Ian & Vechtomova, Olga. (2008). Improving Complex Interactive Question Answering with Wikipedia Anchor Text. ECIR 2008: Advances in Information Retrieval 438-445
• MacKinnon, Ian & Warren, Robert (2006). Age and Geographic Inferences of the LiveJournal Social Network. Statistical Network Analysis: Models, Issues, and New Directions: ICML 2006 Workshop on Statistical Network Analysis