Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

A few weeks ago I posted about Ormigo being nominated as a winner for the Red Herring Europe 2008, and now (before the post gets pushed from the front page due to light blogging ;)) I can say that we are among the 100 winners! If we counted correctly there are 12 winners in Germany and 3 of those are in Cologne.

Henning is now in Malta accepting the award for us and probably having some thought provoking discussions with other entrepreneurs.

Wohoo… Ormigo is a finalist in the Red Herring 100 Europe. We’re in nice company this year, with other services like BuyVIP, Sevenload, Amiando, cellity, Experteer, and others. We are moving ahead in big steps here to a nice new release in a few days which will make our local market focus even clearer and open up for some fun innovations going down the road.

We are looking for a few new people to bolster our development team at Ormigo. If you know German, just go to our jobs section, but if you don’t we are still happy to hear form you. The entire documentation, trac, wiki, is in english anyway. For those not knowing what we do, we are making the local market advertisable in a scalable way, helping local merchants to gain new customers. So there is ad server stuff to do (on Amazon’s AWS Infrastructure), billing backends to handle, statistical analysis with loads of data, optimization of lead processes, design frameworks for landing pages, customer care infrastructure with loads of people on the phone, lots of micro formats, … . Most of what we have done up till now is not visible to the naked eye. The opportunities are endless, which is exactly why we chose that market.

So here is a short summary of the jobs currently advertised for the development team:

• Web Developer: Our platform is written in CakePHP and we are looking for a core PHP developer, somebody with the experience to know to write unit tests first, and code second. Knowledge with recommendation engines, ad servers, cloud computing, scaling big systems, … is always appreciated.
• Web Designer / Producer: We need somebody that knows HTML and CSS inside out, has design knowledge, understands a bit of JavaScript and possibly PHP. This has a real focus on the generation of customer contacts for local merchants, over hundreds of products, with loads of different partners running ads, … handling all of this in a scalable manner.
• System Administrator: This is actually the best overarching title that I came up with. We don’t really have titles at Ormigo, but sys admin seems to be fitting to some extent. We need somebody to take care of the servers in-house, which includes handing our Amazon infrastructure, deploy processes, customer care infrastructure, testing environment, and so on. Dependent on the person, I can see them focussing more on the stuff other than direct server management, which would be their responsibility, but possibly not doing.

So those are the main positions we are looking for at the moment. Leave a comment or mail me at oliver at thylmann.com with your documents. Looking forward to hearing from you.

This is actually Jason Calacanis’ list, but because I am reading lots of good stuff from him in recent times, I thought I’d see how we score at Ormigo.

1. Every employee uses their own computer, so we actually do not have lots of windows systems. I actually think we score very well here especially with several macs and lots of ubuntu machines
2. Everybody gets a second monitor. Score. Very important actually.
3. We don’t do the buying lunch bit … need to think about that.
4. Cheap tables and expensive chairs … yep. Check.
5. We have a phone system, but it’s an asterisk system and with a call center, and thousands of local market customers that need caring, you need a phone system. I think I can safely say this point does not apply to us And yes, the devs do have one phone between them and their Ormigo number is forwarded to their mobile phone.
6. We don’t rent out extra space, because our contract allows us to block the extra space without paying for it, so I do not need to rent it out. Too much hassle anyway.
7. Accounting and HR is outsourced.
8. Yes only the people that really really need it have MS Office.
9. Yes we have Google Hosted with Docs, eMail and more. For now we actually use the free version.
10. All employees actually get a laptop. It really does not make such a difference if you believe everyone should have two monitors and you don’t need a huge amount of CPU power. But did I say I hate designers? Huge Monitors, Photoshop, + + + … it ads up
11. We hire only passionate people, and that is very close to workaholics. It pays having people not being able to not think about stuff they do. (Update: but we actually encourage people to have a life!)
12. Yes we do have a good coffee machine … and a Wii actually
13. We don’t have sodas at this time, only water.
14. People choose when they want to come to work and they can have home office time if they think it will help them achieve their goals. The devs like it when they have very clear work backlogs that need implementation focus.
15. We do get special deals at our vendors already, but I will put this on my focus list.
16. We didn’t use recruiters yet, and hey, we are looking for some people again. Actually a system admin, a producer, and another php developer. The last one is not posted yet.
17. We haven’t put a focus on PR yet actually. The consumer focusing part of the system is not far enough developed yet.

So, not bad. The only thing I need to think about is discounts from vendors, and possibly more drinks and free food. Thanks Jason.

Update 2: See this Techcrunch post for some good points and some very suggested links at 37Signals and others. And Jason has a very good follow up to make is point clearer. I commented there.