Perks Give Area Firms a Silicon Valley Feel
Whether Posh or Quirky, Extras Help Lure Talent To the High-Tech Sector

By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2007

A Porsche 911 sits outside company headquarters, ready for employees to grab and go for a spin. Inside, a "chill out" room offers an XBox, while the staff lounge displays the kookiest items employees have found on eBay, including a beer-branded model airplane.

The perks and atmosphere may sound like they're from a Silicon Valley startup, with more attitude than profit and executives straight out of college. But Command Information of Herndon is run by experienced managers and claims a solid profit from its work for the government.

The company says it borrowed those West Coast-style fringe benefits to compete for talent in Washington's high-tech job market, which has become so tight that companies are getting creative to make themselves attractive.

"One of our biggest issues is hiring great people," said chief executive Tom Patterson. "With zero unemployment, nobody is hitting the bench saying, 'I hope I can find a job one day.' "

Command Information helps clients upgrade their networks to Internet Protocol Version 6, a higher-capacity system that would enable nearly every device -- including medical dispensers, cars, computers and handhelds -- to connect and work with one another automatically. In its two years, Command Information has attracted $40 million in venture funding.

As the business grows -- it already has $50 million in sales -- Patterson, a former executive at IBM and Deloitte, says he worries about how he'll be able to recruit enough people to meet the company's needs.

For that reason, Patterson has imported some of the other coast's mentality. "For the kind of people we want," he said, "we have to go above and beyond to really make Command an attractive place to work, and that goes beyond just having foosball and being able to shoot hoops, but really there's a lot of career development opportunities."

That was important for David Green, who runs the company's technology lab. "For a start-up, they had excellent benefits," he said. "It's very sociable with our development teams. . . . We have the Porsche, we have video games, we've been having a lot of company picnics."

There are some drawbacks to the Washington region, said Hooman Radfar, founder of McLean online widget maker Clearspring. By being away from Silicon Valley, companies miss out on what he calls the "recombinative innovative effect" -- the idea that a couple of people could be sitting in a bar and spontaneously generate a great product.

Radfar has injected his company with a bit of a Silicon Valley feel, however, with what employees call a "war room" -- a projector for movies, a Nintendo Wii, an Xbox, bean bags and sleeping bags. Most of the company's 35 employees in Washington are in their mid- to late 20s. And he's opened offices on the West Coast.

Despite their similarities to Silicon Valley start-ups, Command and Clearspring have a distinct Washington flavor.

Patterson considered opening Command Information in Silicon Valley, Austin or Boston, but he chose Northern Virginia after receiving venture backing from the District's Carlyle Group. He later received support from Bethesda's Novak Biddle. The investors understood IPv6, he said, but wanted him to take fewer risks with his business plan, scaling back an ambitious marketing effort.

"One of the things I think really helped here was that the D.C. area has a wealth of experience -- gray-bearded talent from the telecom and Internet space -- the actual formation of the Internet," Patterson said, referring to when the Internet was a Pentagon program.

And while two-thirds of the company's revenue today comes from the government, which is required to upgrade to IPv6 by June, Patterson expects commercial clients such as Bechtel and Cisco to increasingly dominate its customer base.

"We're absolutely going after a huge new market," he said. "But we're doing it in a very low-risk way."

That more cautious attitude is welcomed by East Coast venture firms, in contrast to those on the West Coast, which are often looking for the next big thing.

April Young, senior vice president and managing director of Comerica Bank's Mid-Atlantic technology and life sciences division, said Washington area venture capitalists look for companies in markets "that are better known or more predictable rather than a truly disruptive technology that nobody's ever thought of."

In deciding to start his Web company in Washington, Radfar said he appreciated the sustained attention he received from investors and the fact that he could count on employees to stay on.

"If you go to the Valley, there's the glamour side of it and the becoming-a-Google side of it," he said. "It's not uncommon for a person in Silicon Valley to have three or four jobs in a year or two."

By contrast, in Washington, "when you do get capital, the venture capitalists are long term and the employees are long term."

During the dot-com era, lavish benefits became a symbol of the tech bubble. By contrast, the benefits today are less about displaying wealth and more about relaxing corporate culture. The idea of building the business -- a constant worry for startups -- even shows up in perks.

For Command Information, the Porsche doubles as a marketing vehicle. Earlier in the summer, Command employee Forrest Snowden borrowed the Porsche to drive to Maryland's Eastern Shore. He decided he had to see what the Porsche could do. "You've just got to try it," he said.

But in "trying it," he attracted a police officer's attention as he hit 90 mph.

Snowden received only a warning. "The officer was more interested in the logos and the verbiage," Snowden said.

That would be the words "Command Information" and "veesix" planted on the Porsche's sides and rear.

Watch a video of how one company, Command Information, is attracting and retaining its employees with different kinds of perks. Go tohttp://washingtonpost.com/business.