Dinner with Thumbtack and Leaving Stanford

Before I get into this post, I should first explain that I have decided to leave Stanford after January, 2011 for the wild and whacky world of industry. I will be joining WorkerExpress as the Chief Technical Officer.

Briefly, WorkerExpress is start-up in San Francisco co-founded by Joe Mellin and Pablo Fuentes. We offer a service for blue collar workers to both market themselves and provide them with work. Our customers are contractors that essentially “lease” employees from us. We help the contractors by automatically matching available workers to the specifications of a particular job. We also provide a certain level of quality control on the workers in terms of their skill assessment, reference checks, internal reviews, background checks, and so forth. We use a lot of SMS technology to provide flexible on-demand labor.

Another San Francisco start-up called Thumbtack is somewhat playing in the same space as us. While we provide on-demand labor for contractors, essentially a business to business service, Thumbtack provides a market place for local services (i.e. business to consumer service). Think Craigslist but less 1995.

Joe and Pablo know some of the brains behind Thumbtack and as a result we were invited to Thumbtack’s “world headquarters” for dinner last night. The headquarters is in a three-story house in San Francisco. One floor is dedicated to development, another is a board room, and there’s also a dining and kitchen floor. A few of the developers actually live in the house too (can’t beat that commute).

I actually really like the idea of using a house for an office building. The advantage is that you generally have a built-in full kitchen along with a shower and even rooms to crash in after a long hacking session. I also think the rent is probably less expensive than an office building.

A potential disadvantage is that you basically may never leave your work. However, in a start-up environment, this is often the case and if I am going to be working crazy hours, I’d prefer to be able to prepare decent meals and catch a nap if necessary.

So, back to the dinner. I had not met any of the Thumbtack crew prior to the dinner. Joe and Pablo convinced me to bring along my wife, Theresa, claiming that this would be a social event and not about business. Of course, you stick me in a room full of other geeks/programmers, it’s pretty hard to keep the conversation in a realm where someone without a computer science degree can actually participate.

Theresa had not suffered that kind of geek assault since she accompanied me to the 2003 ACM ICPC world programming finals. Things got even worse when I realized one of the Thumbtack developers had competed in the ACM contests during his undergrad. Luckily our intern and sales guy from WorkerExpress were there to chat about non-programming related topics.

Despite my concern for Theresa’s boredom, I had a great time at the dinner. The team at Thumbtack seem to have the same kind of hunger to make a successful business as we do at WorkerExpress. They understand the kind of work environment that is necessary to work long hours.

I am extremely excited to be starting full-time with WorkerExpress. I plan to hire a couple of software developers early in 2011. So if you’re interested or know someone that is, shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment.