Startup Monday

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

Their episode aired Friday night (watch it online here), but the company today is vastly different from the one they sold in front of the five sharks when the episode was filmed last July. Back then, the company was simply a curation engine for children’s books, where parents could subscribe and get delivered a book every month based on their preferences.

Al DiLeonardo and Abe Usher, the co-founders of HumanGeo, rarely have to worry about that. The two met in 2007 when DiLeonardo, working for the U.S. Army Special Ops Command (SOCOM) visited Google’s D.C. headquarters to try to recruit technology talent for a new data project.

Sitting in their new office conference room on the top floor of a Ballston startup, DiLeonardo shrugs and admits he might be the only person to have walked into a Google office hoping to lure people away. Most of the employees laughed it off, but Usher — a graduate of West Point and former NSA cryptologist — chased DiLeonardo down in the parking lot and accepted the job.

Ben Hastings had worked for years as a management consultant and continued to see a divide between human resource practices, management techniques and supportive technology. At the end of 2012, he launched PerformYard, a technology-driven management company to try to close that divide.

“In every business I’ve worked with, there was this gap between what executives and management understand about who’s doing well and what the employees see,” Hastings told ARLnow.com. “There was this feedback gap. It was all tied to a stodgy annual review process. I really wanted to solve that problem.”

That year, Tim’s son, a 14-year-old lacrosse player, was pursued through social networks by a child predator who had molested dozens of children before he was eventually arrested.

“We realized the world had changed fast and parents were way behind,” Steven Woda said. “We were Internet security experts, so if it could happen to us, it could happen to anybody.”

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

That’s why the three left their jobs and founded Mindseye in 2008 as a next-generation tool for eDiscovery, giving law firms and corporations the ability to save heaps of time scouring electronic files for documents.

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

“She said ‘this is horrifying,'” he said with a smile. “Students now expect to use one device for everything. Why wouldn’t you use the mobile phone instead of the clicker?”

Editor’s Note: Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

After all, he was in construction, used to building office buildings and retail spaces. It’s not as if he wanted an industrial oven, or anything else too fancy, and the kitchen seemed like a simple project. Months later, he was confused, frustrated and looking for an easier solution.