Hi, we're Ooga Labs. We're a group of software engineers and designers based in downtown San Francisco developing several consumer Internet businesses simultaneously. Our goal is to build remarkable Internet products loved by millions and to create a company culture capable of cranking them out year after year. We are led by James Currier, Stan Chudnovsky, Adrian Danieli and Evan Pon who have built many consumer Internet products over the last seven years which have registered over 200 million people. Ooga Labs is self-funded and can thus control the direction of its products 100%. We only develop our own internal ideas - and of those, only the ones that we feel have a chance to be very significant. We are reaching out to the best software engineers to join us.
We really don't care about your degrees. We don't really care what programming languages you know. We just care that you're a great engineer or designer who loves to work hard & build stuff and who has a personality that fits with ours -- you talk and communicate openly and you're honest with yourself. Personality is very important to us because culture is primary for us.
Many of our projects are being developed using Ruby on Rails and others primarily in PHP and others in Python. If you don't know any of these languages, no worries, we'll teach you. We work in small teams and build applications from back-end to front-end, so we are also looking for people who know HTML, CSS, Javascript/Ajax, and Flash. You either have these skills, or you should be dying to learn them. (local candidates only)
At Ooga, "building stuff" is job number one, so engineering is skill number one. But unlike your typical company, we also have a philosophy that each of us should be knowledgeable in the other skills that are needed to build great consumer Internet companies: user experience, design, project management, etc. Each site has one or two engineers developing it, so you'll do everything. When a product takes off, we focus more resources on it. If a product doesn't take off, the engineers move over to new projects.
For us, this is about building a culture, not just a company. From great culture & people we will create great products which produce happy customers which produce financial success. Most companies start the opposite way -- by figuring out a way to make money and then making their people & culture an afterthought. We look to Apple, Disney in the 30's, Toyota, Pixar, Southwest Airlines, and HP-in-the-60's as our cultural models. We communicate openly and honestly, and enforce a strict no-assholes policy. The organization is very flat -- everyone works directly with the CEO at some point during every month.
We have found over the years that it is no more effort to start and grow a big idea than it is to start and grow a small idea. It's also no more effort to start things that can make a positive difference in the world instead of frivolous or destructive things. So we go after ideas that we think could be big and positive. No brainer. We currently have businesses under development in the areas of social gaming (www.wonderhill.com) and medicine (www.medpedia.com), local services, and work communication.
By developing multiple products under one roof, Ooga Labs gives you the best of a start-up and a venture capital firm. You get the excitement, responsibility and learning of a startup plus the safety of having a portfolio of ventures. In terms of learning, you'll probably see about eight "company starts" in four years, compared to seeing one at a traditional start-up, or zero if you work for a big company.
In addition to salaries, we compensate ourselves with equity & cash bonuses based on the performance of our businesses. Over a few years, those amounts can and should be higher than typical packages. We also use innovative Starter Stock in our companies, which allows for much more flexibility in how we all manage our equity shares.
The Ooga structure and culture gives us rapid learning, accelerated responsibility, and an open, fast, zero-politics work environment. If that's the sort of thing you're looking for, Ooga Labs may be the place for you. Together, we can literally change the world.
To join the tribe, contact our talent czar Jon at
Andrew Anker : SixApart, August Capital, Wired Digital
Michael Birch : Bebo, Birthday Alarm
Don MacAskill : SmugMug
Davis Masten : Academy of Sciences, Cheskin Research
Christopher P. Michel : Affinity Labs, Military.com
Philip Rosedale : SecondLife, Real Networks
Toni Schneider : WordPress, OddPost
Jeff Veen : Google, Adaptive Path, Wired Digital
Don't make my mistake!
So you're going to take a cube job with slow Microsoft, bureaucratic Oracle, or with some boring financial company?
C'mon! Do you want spend all of your life wearing modest habits of charcoal grey, driving your Volvo on the salty roads of the drab East Coast, paying 50% of your earnings to taxes, and hanging out with narrow minded people, congratulating yourselves on improving a feature of a widget of version 12.1b.4 of some software, or maybe improving the financial return of some rich bald dude in Greenwich, CT by 0.2% above the S&P Index?
Has no one taken you aside and said, "Wait! You're about to waste 10 years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is crap!"
No one did to me either when I went to Princeton, and it took me until I was 31 to get my ass out to San Francisco and do tech start ups. Don't make my mistake. Save yourself now. Even if you don't work for me. I mean it.
Out here, you think about the future. Out here, you are surrounded by colorful, dynamic technologists and entrepreneurs who are really making a difference, pushing the edge.
Most people think that working for a big or known company will give them good experience. That's kind of like saying learning to sit still for dental surgery is good experience. Sure, it's an experience, but there are life paths where you don't have to have dental surgery, or work for a big company, to have the best life. In fact, I would argue that you learn the wrong things working for a big company, and that it's actually not good experience. A good experience is when you really make something happen in the world. Big companies teach you how to work through layers of bureaucracy and how to solve problems in very risk-averse ways -- in short, how to make something happen in their organization. A big company is not the safe career choice. It's the risky choice. It risks your mind and your life.
Oh, and one more thing. Initially, your friends and family may not understand why you didn't take that "safe" cube-job with the company whose name they know, but in two years they will understand. They will love using the websites you build, and they will talk often with their friends about it. They will see you having a vibrant life, pushing the edge of what's happening, and they'll be proud to know you.
Take a few minutes and reconsider your first "starting point" out of college. It sets up a direction that takes some time to change. Aim yourself in the right direction. Again, you don't have to come to Ooga Labs, just get to the Bay Area and join a startup. You will never regret it.