Originate wants to save brilliant college grads from the corporate world. They want to save YOU from working for the big dark world of suits and cubicles. They believe brilliant people belong at startups and they have just the company that smart, fun folks should work at.
Meet Originate’s recent hire from Readyforce: Maxwell Elliot
from Ohio State. Max connected with over 25 companies using Readyforce and received four job offers. He will start at Originate in June 2013.
Part VC, part software house, Originate builds startups by investing engineering expertise instead of cash. A different model for sure, but a model that both attracts smart and motivated engineering talent, and one that yields results. We spoke with Director of Corporate Development, Rob Mallery about what they are looking for in recent college grads and interns and what they can expect at Originate. His answers were frank and to the point. As he said: “we work hard and we play hard,” and this was confirmed when he sent across a couple of super fun photos from their last holiday party (check them out below).
So what does Originate do?
Instead of infusing cash into startups, Originate provides software development expertise and often serves as the founding technical team for their portfolio companies. In return for working on the projects, the engineers share 20% of the equity in each investment.
Wow, that’s really cool. How big is the team and what kinds of companies do you work with?
Originate has done more than 30 different projects over the past 5 years. Currently there are 85 people across six different offices, 60 of which are engineers. We work on anything that has venture return; it could be mobile or social and the domain can be anything from education to bio-tech to entertainment. We look for portfolio companies and founders that have expertise in one area and we compliment their deep domain knowledge with our technical knowledge. Our teams focus on Ruby on Rails, Scala and Android/iOS, typically we do 50% mobile and 50% web projects.
Why is Originate an attractive place to work for college grads ?
It’s pretty straight forward. We can offer you the ability to own a significant portion of the project that you are working on while still maintaining the stability of a big-book company.
For the people that want to go work at a startup, you can spend the first 6-months working on the product but then during the next 12-18 months you are watching the company sell its product and find clients. In that situation, if you have a passion for engineering, you can get bored. At Originate, we are seeing 150 different pitches a week and continuously working on new things. What we offer is that you can be a tech lead on a project straight out of the gate and again and again.
What else is different about Originate?
One of the biggest perks in working at Originate is the fact that we see so many pitches. Because of that, you always have your finger on the pulse and you know what the trends are. You are also surrounded by very, very smart people.
Another perk that we offer is the Entrepreneur In Residence program. In this program, you are free to use 20% of your time to work on your own side projects. You can even work on something towards your own startup and then when it’s ready, you can pitch it to us. A current example of this is Ballon’d, a platform to sell comic books which was the brain child of two of our employees.
Developing Software…The “Originate Way” :-)
Tell us a little bit about the culture at Originate. Is it all work and no play?
The culture at Originate is ‘work hard, play hard’. We are very flexible and a lot of times people will work from home. We have 6 offices and we like people to be close to an office. But typically, people want to be at the office because the team is stellar and it’s easier to collaborate in person than at home.
Corporate retreat, a.k.a ‘attack’
So are you a passionate, fun and brilliant engineer that wants to have a slice of the pie and continue to have your finger on the pulse? Contact Rob Mallery at Originate via Readyforce. They are constantly looking for awesome talent and expanding their team.
