Why We Founded & Funded Terminal
The Future of Work is Remote, Global, and Now
Some of the most successful B2B products and businesses in history were originally created to solve problems a company faced firsthand. Slack was created when Stewart Butterfield’s development team at his gaming startup were fed up with communicating over IRC and by the lack of team messaging software. AWS, before it became a $30 billion business and the operating system for the Internet, emerged from internal initiatives to improve the efficiency of Amazon’s own infrastructure.
At Atomic, we, through co-founding and building multiple companies in parallel get to see (and try to solve) plenty of problems. One, in particular, was just how ridiculously challenging, costly, and time-consuming it had become for our startups to hire top engineers in San Francisco. Yet, increasingly, we were meeting incredible engineers outside of this 50 mile Silicon Valley radius and from all around the world.
Remote, distributed teams are of course the answer. But they’re really hard. Especially for startups. So we created an internal service, ATG (“Atomic Talent Group”) to help our portfolio companies quickly, cost-effectively, and easily build and scale remote engineering teams. We started by opening our first remote office (“terminal”) in Kitchener-Waterloo (“KW”), the birthplace of the smartphone and home to University of Waterloo, a top 5 engineering school in the world. Immediately, this was a hit. All of our companies were quickly augmenting their SF teams with engineers in KW, and some of our new companies were outright building their entire teams in KW. Word quickly spread about our “secret weapon”, and soon other founders and VC’s were asking if we could help their companies go remote. We decided this was too powerful to keep to ourselves. Terminal was born.
Fast forward two years and today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve doubled down on Terminal in a $17 million Series B financing round alongside like-minded investors also betting that the future of work is remote, including 8VC, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Craft Ventures, and Cherubic Ventures. Terminal has already built teams for some of the fastest growing companies including Bungalow, Chime, Dialpad, Earnin, Eventbrite, Gusto, Hims & Hers, KeepTruckin across five campuses in Waterloo, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Guadalajara & soon more Terminals to come. But there is a lot more work to be done.
As Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch points out:
(There is a) dearth of engineers in major tech centers, and beyond, with typically five job openings for every one engineer in the U.S. alone.
While the technology world has coalesced around several key geographical areas — Silicon Valley at the epicentre… the fact remains that the demand for engineers in those places, where the companies are based, still outstrips supply. On top of that, the biggest cities are overcrowded and expensive, and that turns off many people from wanting to live in them.
Terminal’s solution is to source suitable engineers in other locales and use its platform to help a company build a team from them. This is not just about building a team ‘in the cloud’ — although the idea is that, yes, the cloud is basically what makes all of this possible — but also covering office space, payroll and other HR specifics and more.
With 1 million unfilled software development jobs in the US and millions of talented engineers across the world, our mission of bringing the best companies to the doorstep of the best talent has just begun. We hope that someday ATG (now Terminal) will make it as easy to build and scale global engineering teams, as it is to build and scale cloud software thanks to AWS.
Terminal’s CEO Clay Kellogg put it best:
Talent is global; opportunities are not. We asked ourselves, what if we change this? How can we bring incredible opportunities to talented individuals, regardless of location? How can we empower people to do their best work at all times?
