Founders Drinks: MANILA

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Last night was the first edition of Founders Drinks Manila. I first started attending a “Founders Drinks” event in San Francisco when Jonathan Swanson of Thumbtack.com would host them in his swanky waterfront condo downtown San Francisco. We borrowed the idea from his events and started running them in Vancouver and last night, we put together Founders Drinks Manila with the help of Jay from Proudcloud and Christian from Kickstart.

All in all it was an excellent event. We put together a group of 50 people, the vast majority founders of Philippine startups as well as a couple from the media and our friends at Amazon AWS. The event was invite only so that we could ensure only founders were in the room as a way to foster conversation about the startup community and network with others that are working to grow a business.

A big thank you to Amazon for picking up the food tab and to the Kickstart guys for the round of drinks!

We will do this event again… if you want to be on the list, be sure to reach out and introduce yourself.

Here are a couple pictures from the event… for more photos head on over to the PayrollHero Facebook page.

Erwin from Yahoo! Philippines and Franky from The Bobbery

John Arce from WebGeek.ph, Stephen Jagger and Marga Dumlao from PayrollHero

Erwin from Yahoo! Philippines

Presentation: Ruby and JavaScript Quirks – Suman Mukherjee

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero lead engineer Suman Mukherjee presented the other day at a Ruby Meetup in Manila, Philippines. Suman put on a 20 minute clinic about some Ruby and JavaScript quirks for a room of about 50 engineers who are considering making the switch to Ruby. You can see his talk and slides below.

Suman Mukherjee

Ruby and JS quirks from Suman Mukherjee

A View Through The PayrollHero Window (pics)

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

We operate in multiple locations, and have for quite some time now. We use technology to bridge the gap so that teams in all locations can feel like they are together. Google Hangouts and Facetime are the goto technology but we find using large TVs on either end make all the difference. The teams literally feel like they are standing in the room together. We do daily standups, one on one meetings and group calls standing in front of these TVs with team members all over the world. (we even set it up during our 4 month stint in San Francisco)

(above) The view through the “window” from Manila, Philippines into Whistler, Canada

(above) The view through the “window” from Whistler, Canada into Manila, Philippines

Amazon Web Services ASEAN Head Drops By PayrollHero

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

A couple guests dropped by the PayrollHero office today in Manila. Franco Eisma, who is our representative at AWS and is no stranger to the PayrollHero dojo dropped by with Richard Harshman, Head of ASEAN and India for Amazon Web Services.

Maybe next time we can get Richard boxing with our head trainer?

(L – R) Stephen Jagger, PayrollHero Co-Founder, Franco Eisma
and Richard Harshman, Amazon Web Services

PayrollHero Opening New Engineering Office In Whistler, BC

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero is opening an engineering office in beautiful Whistler, BC.

PayrollHero was born out of our own need at OutsourcingThingsDone.com, where we tried to find a payroll, time and attendance solution for Southeast Asia, specifically the Philippines, but nothing seemed to have the complete feature set that we were looking for. So, we decided to build our own, which is now, PayrollHero.

As part of our journey to grow PayrollHero and build out a team of passionate engineers we knew we had to be different if we wanted to attract top talent and compete for team members against Facebook, Salesforce and the like in the valley, as well as Hootsuite in Vancouver.

Our Manila office is fantastic, but we want to continue attracting top talent and knew we needed an engineering office in North America. So, we decided on Whistler, BC for its beauty, reasonable cost of living, excellent lifestyle and its proximity to Vancouver and Vancouver’s international airport.

We will be announcing more details on our “Adventure Engineering” job availabilities shortly… but consider this… if you want to work for a great startup, with a huge goal and work from Whistler and Manila, then PayrollHero could be for you. Drop us a line for more details.

(L – R) PayrollHero co-founders Michael Stephenson, Stephen Jagger and
PayrollHero Advisor Eric Reis at The Four Season’s Hotel in Whistler, BC (Feb. 2011)

PayrollHero “Judges Choice” at Startup Riot in Seattle

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

PayrollHero was invited to pitch at the Startup Riot event in Seattle, WA last week. Along with 29 other startup PayrollHero co-founder Stephen Jagger had 3 minutes on stage, with maximum 4 slides to pitch the judges on the merits of PayrollHero.

After all 30 startups pitched, the judges met to decide on the “Judges Choice” for the top 5 startups. After a few minutes of deliberation, the judges announced that PayrollHero was their choice as one of the “Top 5” startups at Startup Riot 2012 Seattle.

If your interested in seeing the pitch, you can see the video below:

(You will notice I get a bit of a laugh at the start of the pitch. I was lucky to be 26th up to pitch, so had a benefit of watching others and seeing how the judges reacted. Most of the feedback was around the judges wanting to see more of the product. The problem is, none of us could change our slides as they were submitted a week earlier. So when I got on stage, I brought the PayrollHero TimeClock (iPad) with me and handed it to the judges. One of the judges jokingly commented that it was cheating, where I responded saying I thought it was smart)

The Top 5 Startups included:

– https://www.microryza.com – “Give Money To Research That You Care About”
– http://www.quoterobot.com – “Multi-Page Proposals In Moments”
– http://www.vendscreen.com – “Vending Machine Technology”
– http://www.trell.is – “On-Demand Android App Testing”
– http://www.payrollhero.com – “Optimizing Work Productivity With Happiness”

And 2 of them have Canadian roots!