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Although Boulder-based web development firm Quick Left has expanded from a team of three to 25 in just four years and has landed on several to-watch lists this year like Inc. 500’s fastest-growing companies list, they haven’t done it by slashing down their competition.

 

In fact, Quick Left’s relationships with competitors like Pivotal Labs, whose team just recently stopped by Quick Left to share internal processes on pair programming, and Thoughtbot whose team toured Denver schools last week with Quick Left CEO Ingrid Alongi to talk about computer science, are based on sharing insights, Director of Marketing Rachel Scott said.

 

“One amazing thing about the tech community is how competitors can be your friends,” Scott said. “Yes, we may be competing for some of the same clients, but I think these relationships are how the community continues to thrive, learn and innovate.”

 

Quick Left’s fast growth means that it is also connecting with other startup communities nationwide: the team has recently frequented Omaha, Brooklyn, San Francisco and Las Vegas “just to get a pulse and see what’s going on,” Scott said.

 

Quick Left’s ever-growing team is even being drawn from international startup communities. For instance, the team just hired a developer from Dublin who relocated to Boulder: “A thing that holds back the startup community, as a whole, is outsourcing overseas,” Scott said. “We are trying to make good talent more accessible here.”

 

And good talent is something Quick Left seems to get quite a lot of. (“We do get recruiters calling here, asking directly for our developers,” Scott said.) Maybe it’s because Quick Left requires all of their engineers to be client-facing, so there are no project managers to do the communicating for them.

 

“The developers we hire have to do more than write exceptional code,” Scott said. “They have a whole host of other skillsets.”

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Growing the team so quickly was a challenge for Ingrid Alongi and co-founder Sam Breed, but Alongi said she is proud of how the company culture has morphed over four years.

 

In addition to building relationships within the company through activities like team mountain bike trips, Quick Left team members are hyper-involved in Boulder and Denver’s startup communities. Quick Left typically hosts six hackfests a year, with about 100 attendees each. Managing Director Bing Chou plays a major part in representing Quick Left throughout the community, too, by involving himself in House of Genius Boulder and Open Coffee Club. Quick Left team members also get themselves out to Denver quite often since they began alternating days to work out of Galvanize about four months ago.

 

As Quick Left builds its name locally, nationally and internationally, Alongi said the struggle will be to continue to create custom software for Fortune 500 clients and startups alike while keeping her team’s vision refined and maintaining the company’s dynamic culture. “It permeates Quick Left,” Scott said.  “People come to us, wanting our mojo to rub off on them.”

 

 

“Since we are a services company, we focused on execution at first. The pitch, networking and even business plan/vision came later. For us, it was all about focusing on doing the best job we could. The building of the company and how that all would happen came later. I think for us, it was really important to see how things developed organically.”

 

“Quick Left has a bit of history before I came along, in the form of a loose couple of freelancers. One of the first clients I remember very well was Giveo (now SpotRight). Ed Messman and I met on a group bike ride. He's one of the nicest people I've met in Boulder and we got a chance to work with him on two iterations of his product.” 

 

“Putting engineers' wellbeing first- ahead of deadlines and launch schedules. We've seen how much better products come out if people are well rested and have time to decompress.”

 

“We've always had some of the best Hackfests around, and we've grown to include other companies. This gives product companies a chance to introduce their products/apis to developers in a fun, non-poachy, non-salesy environment.”