Our Work

Lending Club

Project challenge –Lending Club was blessed with fast growth, but with technology and organization scalability issues. The company needed to build a mission-critical SaaS platform, while hiring experienced software managers and programmers from San Francisco’s highly competitive software labor market for its onsite agile teams.

Positive project outcome – Lending Club hired Telegraph Hill Software as its Software Catalyst℠. We conducted a thorough review of their existing stack, documenting the connections between source code, user functionality, and technical operations, and identified architectural limits.  We then became their premier partner in rapidly building technology staff, creating elite consultant teams for development, QA, operations, and information security.

Today our consultant teams continue to work side-by-side with their growing technology organization, and many Telegraph Hill Software alumni are Lending Club managers and lead engineers.

Telegraph Hill’s managers excel at evaluating top technical talent across the entire spectrum of skills necessary for a rapidly-growing, elite SaaS firm like ours. Although they are not a staffing firm, they’ve assisted us in building a great team.

John MacIlwaine,
Chief Technology Officer

Telegraph Hill created a dedicated, highly-skilled cross-functional Agile team with strong leaders. They’re customer-focused. Their ability to identify potential gaps in the process—then make suggestions on how to overcome them—helped get us to the finish line.

Chaomei Chen,
Chief Risk Officer

Advanced Microgrid Solutions

Project challenge – Advanced Microgrid Solutions, Inc. had just won a contract to provide intelligent energy storage solutions. Their energy industry and technology experts needed a software team that understood how to develop energy modeling software that could grow into a distributed energy storage system solution. But they only had a pre-series A budget. They turned to Telegraph Hill for assistance.​​

Positive project outcome – Telegraph Hill provided an experienced onsite team who understood the challenges of advanced and scalable mathematical programming implemented in the cloud. Later, Telegraph Hill provided experts in secure, high-availability distributed systems. Working onsite with their product team, a minimal viable product was built, tested, and delivered while Advanced Microgrid raised capital, hired management and grew their internal developer team. Telegraph Hill continues to assist with the recruitment and training of Microgrid’s software team.

"Telegraph Hill Software's consulting and development expertise helped us get our advanced energy storage solution launched as we hired our own team. They understand the dynamics of early stage startups."

Susan Kennedy
CEO

Eargo, Inc.

Project challenge – Eargo, Inc, manufacturer of a patented wearable hearing device, was operating in stealth-mode through mid-2014, when they realized they needed to start building their web and mobile presence in anticipation of a 2015 beta release. ​They needed a web market presence in a very short time and had neither the technical management, developers, budget, or time to hire their own staff. They turned to Telegraph Hill for assistance.​ ​As they approached beta release in 2015, they urgently needed to implement an e-commerce site that would meet the needs of an FDA regulated product.​

Positive project outcome – Telegraph Hill met with their senior management team and determined that their go-to-market strategy was sound and doable. Telegraph Hill then set about to design, with Eargo’s business team, the requirements for the regulated e-commerce site that would support the business model and market strategy. Working side by side with their marketing team the site was built, tested, and delivered on schedule, allowing them to continue their rapid growth. Telegraph Hill continues to assist with the recruitment and training of Eargo’s IT team, as well as the implementation of new ecommerce capabilities.

Telegraph Hill helped provide the critical management and programming skills we needed to launch our revolutionary hearing device on a state of the art eCommerce site. We look forward to their continued help as we build our in-house IT team.

Matthew Welch,
Chief Business Officer, Eargo, Inc.

Appropo Software

Project challenge – Develop a speech activated Mobile app that would encourage Autistic children to speak for fun and thus become fluent speakers in their daily encounters with others.

Positive project outcome – Innovation in mobile application technology. The Sayin’ It app is an excellent example of the integration of:

• Creative domain experts (experience with autism),
• Artists (graphics, music, colors),
• Experts in mobile iOS, Objective C, graphics, and consumer interaction software,
• Experts in using voice recognition technology for non-fluent speakers, and
• Project management of overseas and local developers / advisors, and iOS test and release management

I contracted with Telegraph Hill for their proven success in Development, Engineering, Operations, and Program Management. They possessed a plentiful and highly experienced team of mature professionals all under one roof. They were genuinely interested in the success of my project and were able to counsel me along the way. Their level of commitment extended beyond normal work hours including attendance at a Meet-Up that I organized. Their Founder, David Ward, was supportive of my mission in a philanthropic way, making success a high priority.

Nea Hanscomb,
Founder, Appropo Software,LLC

Pantheon.io

Project Challenge – Create the foundation for operational analytics to guide decision-making from marketing tactics to investor funding.

Pantheon.io is the leading website hosting company.  With over 200,000 hosted sites.  And, over 10 BILLION pages served!  Pantheon focused on creating high performance hosting, professional development tools for teams and the most successful automated Drupal and WordPress publishing workflows available.

Like other successful SaaS companies, Pantheon needed accurate and timely operational analytics to guide decision-making from tactical sales decisions to board level strategy and investor presentations.  So, Pantheon partnered with Telegraph Hill Software to create a data repository to bring together marketing, sales, product, and, client data as the foundation for their analytics platform.

As THS consultants worked with Pantheon managers it was clear that Pantheon had grown large enough (approaching the infamous Dunbar number) that each functional area had developed it’s own systems and semantics.  So, that the first task was to create a consensus among the leader of each function regarding definitions of basic terms and the priority and urgency of each aspect of the analytics project.  So, THS consultants led facilitated product design meetings where functional leaders participated in defined ‘agile design’ exercises informed by research of each functions supporting systems.

The resulting task plan included design of customer-facing processes, evaluation of as-is and to-be work flows, selection of supporting software products.  And, of course, implementation.

During implementation, a THS consultant took on a role akin to a CIO tailored for a SaaS company as well as roles in business analysis, product management, project management and technology implementation.  THS helped Pantheon recruit for permanent roles and staff temporary roles.

As new processes were rolled out and more accurate and timely data filled the repository, THS consultants took on part-time roles as permanent staff ramped up.