What Happened?

About the Company

Originate is a digital product development and venture firm. We design, build, operate, and invest in transformational software products. Our designers, developers, and product strategists design and build modern mobile, web, and data-driven software in iOS, Android, Ruby, Scala, Node.js, Javascript, and other scalable technologies. To fully align partners and employees, Originate passes through 20% of the upside it earns in each partnership to the employees that contributed to the success. Founded in 2007, Originate has nine global offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Orange County, Las Vegas, New York, Boston, Stockholm, and Hangzhou, China.  

About the Person

Lloyd Taylor has a unique way of looking at the world, most likely due to his upbringing by a quantum physicist and a professional musician. He spent most of his childhood and teen years hanging out with people holding widely varying, and often contradictory, perspectives on the universe, and learned to appreciate that our ability to deal with reality is largely a matter of how we perceive it. Understanding the overall system, and getting to the underlying facts, is the core of his professional and pro bono work. Some of his better-known methods for getting to the underlying truth include asking "What problem are we really trying to solve here?", applying the discipline of the five whys, and focusing on why people behave in self-limiting ways rather than work for their own good as well as the good of the organization. Lloyd`s professional work includes developing a worldwide infrastructure platform for mobile social media companies ngmoco and DeNA; preparing LinkedIn for its rapid growth; developing, implementing and operating an infinitely scalable physical infrastructure for Google`s server farms; building out a worldwide performance measurement infrastructure for Keynote Systems; and developing one of the first managed hosting architectures for Digex. His pro bono work includes angel funding and advising a select group of non-profits working on no-dependency systems approaches to ending poverty throughout the world. Lloyd is an accomplished communicator, consistently getting very high marks from his public speaking engagements. His ability to connect with both logical and artistic minds, coupled with his strong storytelling skills, result in talks that are relevant, engaging, and entertaining.