Some of the PayrollHero team was in attendance at the International Contact Center Conference & Expo (ICCCE) that ended yesterday. “ICCCE 2012 is the premier learning event for the contact center industry. It’s the must-attend conference for executives, managers, and professionals from both outsource and in-house call centers.” quote The President of the Philippines, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, even dropped by to check out the event.
Here are a few pictures from the event:
Amazon’s AWS ASEAN team, based in Singapore, was looking for a location for their 3 day “Architecting with AWS” event that they were planning on holding in Manila. We offered the PayrollHero offices, and this morning 35 engineers from some of the Philippines leading organizations showed up for three days of learning from Amazon’s AWS technical team.
Attendees needed to have some existing knowledge or experience with AWS and have a conceptual understanding of the key infrastructure services (EC2, S3, RDS, etc), their features, and how they are used.
Over the next 3 days, attendees will be immersed in all things AWS and will walk away with a great knowledge of what Amazon’s solution is truly capable of. Here are a couple of pictures from this morning. Looks like it is going to be a great few days!!
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
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
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
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 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 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!
PayrollHero has a new addition to its growing team of 14. On June 30, 2012, PayrollHero welcomed its newest team member, Mike Hwang, formerly from Automatic Data Processing, Inc, (ADP), a business outsourcing solutions provider based in the U.S.A., into the team.
A welcome party was held in his honor and he was warmly welcomed by his fellow team mates at PayrollHero’s office in BGC, Taguig.
From Left: Stephen Jagger of PayrollHero, Kenneth Palacios of Novare and Mike Hwang of PayrollHero at the Future Perfect Interview
Mike, originally the District Manager for ADP, is now PayrollHero’s Business Development Country Manager, specifically for the Philippine Market. With his extensive background in business development and sales in the payroll services field, he makes the perfect business development country manager and the team is definitely looking forward to his contribution to the company’s success.
Mike will primarily be handling Business Development, specifically in the Philippines, and will be constantly on the lookout for new business relationships in the country.
Last July 12, 2012, the PayrollHero team participated and pitched at the ON3 Nationals, held at the SMX Convention. Among 12 competitors only 6 were selected as the finalists for the Silicon Valley Immersion which will be finalized in Decemeber.
The PayrollHero team was represented by Client Succes Manager, Tin Sanchez, and Senior Engineer, Nico Suria, both of whom delivered the elevator pitch in front of several judges. Among the judges were Ms Minette Navarete and Christian Bessler of Kickstart.ph, Mr Jay Fajardo of ProudCloud, Mr Kenneth Palacios of Novare, and Mr Federico Gonzales of A.I.M.
The ON3 Judges
The dynamic duo wowed the audience with their smooth pitching and entertaining slides. For the question and answer portion, Business Development Country Manager for the Philippines, Mike Hwang joined the duo onstage and gave his input regarding the judges questions.
Tin Sanchez and Nico Suria of PayrollHero pitching
It was a triumphant day for the team as Plug and Play Co-Founder, Mr Jojo Flores announced the winners, Payrollhero being one of the top 6 companies eligible for the Silicon Valley Immersion. Included in the top 6 are the following companies:
Speed Dial
The PayrollHero team with the finalists
Join the team as they continue on with their exhilarating journey toward success- next step, Silicon Valley!
Watch the PH team’s pitch here!