It's All About The People
In late 1999, about six months before I started TransGaming, I made a list.
At the time, I had been working as a professional software developer for close to 10 years, at some points on my own, and at some points employed by companies such as Corel, Microsoft, and Metrowerks. I had reached a point in my life where I was able to step back and give some serious thought to what I really wanted out of my career.
The list was a simple one; it was a list of the things in my working life that I truly cherished and enjoyed, and it was a list of all the attributes I wanted any organization I worked in to have. What was on that list? Well, rather a lot of stuff, but the core of it was very simple:
I wanted to work with great people, doing great things, and I wanted to challenge myself with things I'd never done before.
I looked around at the opportunities that I had before me at the time, and decided that while each had some potential, to pursue those things in the way that I cared about the most, none would be better than founding my own company. Certainly, none of my other options had the potential to challenge me in every aspect of the software business from business development to legal agreements and finance, not to mention technology.
Having decided to challenge myself, I had to decide what great thing I wanted my thought-experiment of a company to do. For me, that was easy . I've been a gamer from the age of 5 years old, when my father, the founder of one of the first computer retailers in Canada, put me in front of some games on an early Commodore Pet computer. He never typed in the 'Hunt the Wumpus' game from Byte magazine that he had promised me, but he certainly got me started down the path of loving both programming and games.
Love, of course, is not something that you can start a business with, so I took a serious look at the market for games and where I thought it was heading. What I saw was the continuation of platform fragmentation that the games industry has to deal with to this day, and the danger of allowing a single company to dominate the general consumer PC market the way that Microsoft was at the time.
So the great idea that TransGaming started with and continues to espouse was to help game developers and publishers focus on the game experience they wanted to deliver, rather than the platform they wanted to deliver it on. By providing this, we could make alternative platform choices viable for consumers who wanted to play great games on their systems (which, for those of you who haven't been paying attention, is basically everyone).
That now brings us to the first item on my list, and by far the most important: People.
You can't do great things without great people. Of all the lessons in my career, this one is the clearest. All the software projects I had been involved with lived or died on the passion, commitment, and skill of the people involved. When I set out to start TransGaming I knew this, and also my own limitations. Thus, one of the first people I brought on board was a hardcore fellow entrepreneur who'd been around the block a time or two with his own companies, and who had a far better grasp of business and finance then I did: Vikas Gupta, TransGaming's President and CEO.
Over time, we've proceeded to fill out the team at TransGaming with people who are truly some of the best and the brightest that
I've ever had the pleasure to work with: ultra-smart developers, steady and experienced project managers, QA staff who dream
about the games they're testing in their sleep, a crack IT team, a go-for-broke sales department, and a mature and
seasoned executive leadership team - all committed to the success of our collective venture.
But it's not enough - we need more people to join us and share our vision for a future where games are ubiquitously available, taking best advantage of the strengths of each platform, while never shutting players out for having the wrong hardware or OS.
The last year has resulted in unprecedented growth for TransGaming, and we are now poised on the cusp of huge strides in bringing this
vision forward. Over the next 12-18 months, TransGaming will likely double in size as we work to achieve these aims.
So, are you looking for a place to work that lets you get involved in the guts of hardcore low-level graphics and OS development? Do you
want to push the entire graphics industry forward with projects like SwiftShader, our advanced software rasterization systems? Do
you want to help make Linux and MacOS X first class citizens in the gaming world? Do you want to explore some of the most interesting
problems in software portability anywhere in the world?
In the next 3-4 months we will be opening a new office in California to be closer to our most important partners
and customers. We're looking for developers and QA staff at all levels to help us round out our new California team and
expand our Canadian offices. Don't hesitate to drop us an email at careers@transgaming.com to tell us more about yourself and let us answer any questions that you may have.
Ultimately, what you have to decide is whether you want to work with a team of the most dedicated and creative
people you will ever meet, doing some of the most challenging work you'll ever face,
all the while making the computing world a better place while you're at it.
I know what my choice was.
