Company
We offer an opportunity for people anywhere in the world to develop themselves in the worldwide market, and to work for a truly multinational company ... if they prove their willingness, ability and reliability.
Our head office is located in suburban Bangkok, Thailand, near:
- Software Park, Thailand's leading software export and internet trading zone
- The Asia Institute of Technology (AIT), a regional Asian technology center
- NECTEC (National Electronics and Computer Technology Center)
The Bangkok office handles the widest variety of tasks. Clients needing quick response results or a lot of manpower usually depend on this office. Projects requiring a lot of definition and brainstorming usually start here. This office is also the headquarters for general administrative and accounting matters. Nearly half of our artists, programmers and content writers are located here.
Nonetheless, the company taps exceptionally talented and reliable people around the world, with most of the rest of our staff in India, Russia, eastern Europe, Australasia and suburban and rural U.S. Over the years, we have developed relationships with some extraordinary, top world class individuals. It's hard to imagine the idea of going back to just American artists and programmers. Internet and globalization have changed the world.
Initial communications, and often all communications with clients, are done with our native English-speaking American, New Zealand and Australian staff in order to fully understand each client's concepts. Our native English speaking executives usually create the conceptual design, write all the English language content, and direct offshore programmers and artists.
To understand our company philosophy, you first should get to know our founder, who carefully approves the hiring of each and every staff member himself.
Mark Prado, the founder and Managing Director, age 41, is an American with 15 years experience in the internet business and using offshore resources. Mr. Prado single-handedly set up one of the earliest public access ISPs in Washington, D.C., long before the web existed, and has unbeatable experience in internet business strategies and applying technical tools. Mr. Prado first used offshore programmers in the 1980s, starting with Russians and Europeans. Originally a physicist and writer working as a new technologies analyst and a policy writer for the US Department of Defense, Mr. Prado has been self-employed since 1987 as a communications consultant, mainly to the private sector. In 1994, Mr. Prado went to Thailand in a brief consulting association with a US government project (Bangkok is the Asia Regional HQ of the US govt.). From 1995 to date, Mr. Prado has consulted to Western multinationals in Thailand utilizing more economical Thai staff. The 1997 Asia economic collapse caused most foreigners to leave Thailand, but Mr. Prado kept client companies alive and healthy by switching their markets from domestic (Thailand) to offshore, e.g., Thai engineers and CAD operations working for companies in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Notably, Mr. Prado has experience in the quality field dating back to the 1980s when he teamed with Dr. Tom Glenn, former Director of Quality for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), for the purpose of advancing quality systems in both the government and America's leading private sector technology enterprises. Work included efforts by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to migrate defense technologies to private sector commercial enterprises. Mr. Prado realizes that quality comes from hiring the right kinds of people, not trying to squeeze performance or quality out of the wrong kinds. Creative solutions come from naturally innovative and industrious individuals. As a professional writer, Mr. Prado ensures a high standard for website content. Mr. Prado is well travelled, cultured and indeed multilingual (English, Spanish, Russian, Thai, all read/write/speak).
(Mark invests a lot of the profits into philanthropic projects. His first website (1994 to date) is about the survival of our species in view of biotech and nanotech advances, for space colonization by the transnational private sector in profitable ways, at www.permanent.com The ultimate goal is to get the best and most diverse DNA off the planetary cradle, immortally. Buddhism teaches about impermanence and change, though this is more than 2500 years later, technologically...)
Narin Oukosavanna is our main point of contact in the USA, located in New Jersey in a suburb of New York City. Narin is Thai and graduated from a university in Thailand with a degree in architecture. After working for the Thai government's National Housing Authority (NHA), Narin went into the private sector and eventually moved to the U.S. where he has worked for the past 25 years. Narin focuses mainly on architecture and engineering work.
The identities of staff are withheld due to poaching by competitors, but they can be reached via an intermediary at:
All staff are chosen based on talent, experience or commitment, and a quality attitude. Regarding the issue of quality, while standard ISO procedures are useful, quality really comes down to hiring the right individuals, not just trying to squeeze quality out of an ordinary organization. If they don't have it in them, you can't squeeze it out no matter how long and hard you try.
Frankly, offshore companies, both internet and non, often just have a bunch of MBAs and generic project managers who strategically target the booming internet field but are inexperienced in technical operations, often having little or no technical skills and experience themselves. They hire people based on paper credentials compared to market demand ("we can always find propellerheads"), with little understanding of the fields involved and individual quality issues, whereby one computer guy looks like another in their eyes.
We are not just brokers of services based on paper credentials. Instead, we have highly accomplished and experienced managers who have specialized in the same fields as the applicants they examine, hire and manage. The field of computers is as vast as the medical and legal fields, and quality comes from specialists hiring specialists. We are a lean and mean operation, not top heavy.
As noted on our FAQ page:
How long have you been using offshore labor?
Since 1989. It started as programmers in Europe and Russia (the Soviet Union at the time) providing custom programming services to New Generation Computers (NGC) in Washington, D.C., headed by me, Mark Prado. This happened before the World Wide Web existed.
Frankly, I did it because I was frustrated by local programmers who overbilled for often careless work. I got the best quality of work out of some immigrants in the Washington DC area, who also proved to be reliable and honorable. From there, we went offshore.
(Back around 1989, we communicated in various ways, sometimes internet in its early commercial e-mail years where and however it was available, sometimes commercial e-mail services such as CompuServe and MCI Mail where available, and sometimes direct modem links over international phone lines and "FidoNet". The web emerged in the early to mid-1990s, and with it far more e-mail links.)
However, before 1994, founder Mark Prado had always used offshore services without having travelled offshore himself. The main drawback of using offshore people was recruiting enough of them from afar. Using overseas companies instead of individuals led to problems with the purely foreign nature of the company and its staff, especially the senior staff's top-heavy control. It was clear that the operation would work more "efficiently" if a Western ex-pat could "be there" -- to set up an overseas office from scratch which focused solely on the task at hand, freshly with all the right employees and corporate culture (and without top-heavy local dinosaurs, as in many old companies), and could instantaneously manage day to day operations and mentor a large number of staff.
Mr. Prado travelled offshore in 1994, gained a lot of experience as a hired consultant himself to a variety of overseas business operations in several countries, and then started ramping up his own offshore business again in 1997, after internet had caught on in the world.
We are now well experienced in the various operational issues involved in offshore services.
Our biggest challenge now is dealing with all the job applicants, most of them based on referrals from existing staff! Everyone can have a bright future in our company, and it's just a matter of promoting good people to being responsible managers.
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