The following article is brought to you by the Hatchery. The Hatchery – U of T’s “Shark Tank”. Not that we’re trying to advertise The Hatchery through a Toike article. What even is ‘native advertising’? You said ‘native advertising’, right?

Okay all you fish-fuckers and swordfish-suckers, get your minds out of the gutter for a second because this isn’t gonna be one of the amoral aquatic adventure articles that you came here for. This issue has enough of those. No, this piece is gonna do what real newspapers do –answer a question that no one has ever asked and pretend that people care about it. Today’s topic: is The Hatchery like ‘Shark Tank’?

“I hadn’t really heard that comparison before,” said Dean Chris Yip. “Obviously I’m very proud of the great work the people at The Hatchery do, in helping our brilliant student engineers achieve their full potential and start successful companies of their own. So, yeah, I guess The Hatchery is our own mini version of ‘Shark Tank’.”

The Hatchery itself welcomed the comparison, saying that they were honoured by the mere suggestion that they were in the same league as the long-running ABC hit. The Hatchery also requested we print this statement to assure our readers of their commitment to helping advance entrepreneurship at U of T.

“Here at The Hatchery, we promise to do our best to help startups succeed. And by ‘succeed’, we of course mean ‘disrupt an established market just enough that one of the massive companies takes notice and gives you a bunch of money to eliminate you as competition so that they don’t have to spend any time or money on R&D that would improve their product offerings because any change to the status quo will likely reduce their annual profits and why would they do that just to improve their customer’s lives, I mean come on’. Don’t you just love ‘free’ market capitalism?”

So, what do the “experts” say? Well…oh, I’m being told that this article is actually running a little long, so we unfortunately won’t be able to get into the opinions of our entrepreneurship and small business experts but the gist of their comments are…pretty much the same. Maybe a few small differences but mostly the same.

For more information on U of T’s “Shark Tank”, visit https://hatchery.engineering.utoronto.ca/.