Hi, we're Ooga. We're a group of software engineers and designers based in downtown San Francisco developing several consumer Internet businesses at the same time. We come up with the ideas ourselves, and once a company finds its product/market fit, we might raise outside capital for it. We like to build digital consumer services that have a chance to touch tens of millions of users and make the world a little better than it was. You can see some of the companies we are building on the companies page. Join us.
Culture
For us, this is about building a culture, not just a company, so people are everything. Do you know any Ooga people? We communicate openly and honestly, and enforce a strict no-assholes policy. As a result, we have a fast, zero-politics work environment. The organization is flat -- everyone works directly with the CEO at some point during every month. We look to Apple, Disney in the 30's, Toyota, Pixar, Southwest Airlines, and HP-in-the-60's as our cultural models.
At Ooga, "building stuff" is job #1, so engineering is skill #1. Each product has a small group of very talented engineers developing it, so you'll do everything. We develop primarily in Ruby on Rails (or PHP), Objective C, HTML/CSS/Javascript and Flash. When a product takes off, we focus more resources on it. If a product doesn't take off, we move over to other projects.
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, as we’ve said, culture is primary for us. Join us.
Our CEO's Open Letter
...to the engineers in the class of '06 at his alma mater.
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.
