We brought on another superb engineer…this time a CMU grad involved in every aspect of campus/student life (literally 14 campus organizations, ranging from a capella groups to student senate to campus advisory committees - oh vey!). Emily Leathers joins us from the East, or rather the Middle East I should say, where she spent a year at the CMU Qatar campus. In fact, when we brought Emily in for an in-house interview, she had the raw nerves of steel to not only sustain a full-day flight, but then undergo our rigorous interview process while on a disorienting 12 hour time change. Pretty amazing in our eyes.

One of the great things about Emily is that she likes to cook and bake…and we like to eat, so it’s a perfect combination. She’s also a fan of the arts and crafts, so hopefully her craftwork will make our office more festive and flavorful (beyond our coveted pirate flag). In summary, Emily is pretty cool, and we’re happy to have her on board!

We brought Dan in as an intern, and boy was that a steal. He set the bar for all future interns. Customer service…check. Recruiting…check. Product…check. Marketing…check. But what blew us away was his tenacity and ability to adapt and pick up business development…which wasn’t even part of his internship. He knew what he wanted and he went after it. As an intern, he not only sourced but helped closed some pretty decent sized deals - a rainmaker in the making. And now we’re blessed to have him on our business development team as a full-time member and early employee of Rapleaf. We were fortunate enough to manage Dan (or rather he managed us) and we are all blessed to have him on our team. Congratulations Dan. Hurry up and graduate and help us blaze this trail!

We’re extremely excited to welcome Eric Wong as the newest Rapleaf engineer! Eric hails from the sunny streets of San Francisco, and is a graduate of UCLA. He’s also an extreme biker – he is really determined and has biked for miles in some of the harshest conditions. Luckily for Eric, his work at Rapleaf will consist mostly of coding. Unluckily for the rest of Rapleaf, Eric is planning a team-building extreme biking trip for 2008.

Another Eric Wong notable: He is an excellent bread maker. We’re already fortunate to have the baking support of significant others, but we’re happy to bring some of that baking talent in-house with Eric. Bread is the preferred snack of the Rapleaf Gorilla.

He’s a former engineer at Zappos and we’re psyched to add him to the Rapleaf engineering squad. He’s already moving our software forward and building some awesome tools for Rapleaf! So give it up for Eric, the newest Rapleaf super engineer!

(PS – We’re still looking for more kick butt coders like Eric…check out our jobs page for the latest opportunities)

Former Rapleaf super-intern Sean Carr has officially graduated and is now full-time here in the office. For the early Rapleaf blog readers, you’ll remember that Sean went to UC-Berkeley where he studied computer science. He’s now traversed the transbay tube and has joined the Living in San Francisco club.

Check out Sean’s picture today compared to his picture almost a year ago!
(his hair is a bit shorter!)

Other Sean Carr notables:

- Built our two Facebook apps
- College friend of Rapleaf co-founder Vivek
- He is the official “This Day in History” fact finder for the office

We’re psyched that Sean has now joined the team permanently and he’s another great addition to the Rapleaf engineering squad. Welcome Sean!

The summer is heating up, and Rapleaf is piling on the new hires! Two brand spanking new interns, a new engineer, and now another new employee joins Rapleaf! That’s right – two in one week!

This fresh face is Cristina Hernandez. Cristina comes from SoCal (that’s Southern California) to join Rapleaf up here in the Bay Area. Cristina graduated the University of Southern California with a degree in International Relations. She’s fluent in Spanish, Portugese, and also the elegant language of Ethics. Quick fact: Cristina studied abroad in Chile for a semester while in college.

Cristina will be doing a bit of everything, and is a great boost to the team as we continue to grow and change the world! Miss Jack-of-all-trades has already helped us get our conference room scheduling straightened out, so we won’t be having any more water balloon fights around the office over who gets to have meetings here and who has to walk 2 blocks to meet at Starbucks.

Bienvenido Cristina!

Rapleaf has been on a roll for recruiting in the Midwest. Bryan Duxbury is our latest hire from mid-America, as he rolls in from the rural farmlands of Ohio.

Bryan is the newest engineer to come on board, bringing Ruby on Rails skills to the streets of San Francisco. Amazingly, he also is a Jujitsu all-star and participates in the Korean Martial Arts society. We can really call him a kick-butt coder! Get it?

Some quick facts about Bryan: He attended University of Miami-Ohio and previously worked as a Software Engineer for Hyland Software.

We moved him out here because he’s a startup natural, already launching two of his own projects, GreekAdmin.com and Miami-Bid.com. His drive and passion for making great web apps will be used to continue to grow Rapleaf. Welcome aboard Bryan!

For this summer (and hopefully longer) we brought in two outstanding interns from the East Coast. First off, we have Dan….a marketing/product guru from Babson. You may recognize Dan - he created DormItem (one of our partner sites) and he’s already been posting on this blog. In the short time that he’s been here, Dan has been instrumental in pushing things forward and is gearing up to make profound changes to the site. Dan Scudder everyone…round of applause!

And to our right is Justin, a software engineer with more passion than passion fruit. Passion for no holds barred coding that is. Justin’s been here for about a week now (from Southern Illinois University) and we’re already having him lead on several projects. A little known fact about Justin: he plays the guitar. And given the musical talent on this team thus far, we could possibly moonlight as a Kiss coverband.

(NOTE: Both interns were caught off guard when the pictures were taken)

The super six: Jeremy (with knife), Dayo, Vivek (hidden), Auren, Manish, and Kyle.

Welcome to Kyle Wilson at Rapleaf … we stole Kyle from AMD where he hailed as a Senior Systems Engineer and master of all things network/systems/ops. Now he is master of servers at Rapleaf.

Some interesting tidbits about Kyle:

• - He was a math major from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• - He brings a lot of baked goods to the office (all of us at Rapleaf love his girlfriend)
• - He now wins the award for living the closest to the office (he lives 2 blocks away) … which is very important for a network person (and beats his old commute of 80 miles) … now five of Rapleaf’s seven employees live within 7 blocks of work …

Since he manages all our servers, Kyle is now the most powerful person in the company … so be nice to him.

Rapleaf officially wecomes Dayo Esho to the team as co-founder and our fifth person. Dayo (pronounced “dye-yo”) comes to us straight from UC Berkeley where he received his M.S. in Systems Engineering (software/civilian focus) and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  He also received a minor in being ethical.

We’re extremely excited to have Dayo, as we’re rounding out our team and getting one step closer to having our founding team be complete.

We’re still looking for one more software engineer and one network engineer. Notice the MacBook Pro on Dayo’s desk? Yeah that’s his courtesy of Rapleaf. That’s why he’s grinning in the picture. Just another incentive to join Rapleaf!

This week we welcome super-intern Sean Carr to Rapleaf. He’s a Senior in computer science at UC Berkeley and a great guy … we’re lucky to have him.

Sean is a buddy of Vivek’s and we’re excited to have him, his problem solving skills, and his readiness to tackle big problems.

Welcome Sean!

Rapleaf officially welcomes Jeremy Lizt to the team as co-founder and our fourth person. Jeremy is a stellar software engineer who has been at Oracle for the past 8 years doing Java development and building a lot of cool apps there.

Vivek, Manish, and I are excited to welcome Jeremy to the founding team. we are really looking forward to working with him … and we need him because we have a ton of sweet stuff to build

A person’s career can sometimes be dictated by the name given to them. If your name is “Brock”, it’s pretty much expected that you’ll be some type of athlete. Having the name “Jeeves”, well that’s no-brainer.

So we hired a new employee at RapLeaf - his name is “Dummy.” And of course, Dummy* is very slow, he really is. But we hired Dummy for a reason…to take all your abuse.

Rate him at dummy@rapleaf.com - leave a test comment, let him know how upset you are, try out the system; do whatever you want to Dummy. Don’t worry, it’s his job to take it all in. How is he able to do this without getting his feelings hurt? He was born without any emotions. Sad, but true.

But if you do have any helpful feedback for RapLeaf, don’t send it to Dummy. He doesn’t have the mental capacity to know what to do with it. Instead any helpful feedback should be directed to people@rapleaf.com.

So rate Dummy. Rate your friends. And rate those that you bought and sold from.

*Note - Dummy’s last name was withheld for privacy/security reasons.

when we met up yesterday with Vivek Sodera, we were instead met by a gorilla in a Rapleaf shirt.

the gorilla rode into San Francisco on BART and got a lot of stares. it flirted with Faelpar. it caused a sensation. and it had some good things to say about Rapleaf.

moreover … then the gorilla went on a rampage, attacked Rapleaf super-engineer Manish Shah, and came up with an elite marketing strategy. all while i could barely finish my lo-mien (Hong-Kong-style of course).

so the next time you run into a gorilla in a Rapleaf shirt, beware and prepare to run for your life.