Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

When Aaron Rutter and Sahaj Sharda were randomly paired as freshman roommates at Georgetown University almost two years ago, they had no idea they would soon become business partners.

“Sahaj had bought a whiteboard for the room… just because he had thought that’s what app creators do,” Rutter said. “Throughout the entire year, we were continually coming up with new ideas, new apps, new concepts and at one point we just got to Dynos.”

Dynos — a play on “dynamic pricing” — is a free app that offers users discounts at several restaurants near Georgetown, and soon, they hope, throughout Arlington.

When Dynos launched in beta mode in March, it was available only to Georgetown students and accrued more than 1,000 users, Rutter said. Now, anyone can download the app, and Rutter and Sharda have plans to expand well beyond their college campus this summer.

“Right now, we’re actually focusing on keeping Georgetown and expanding through Arlington… with the target audience being everyone, not just students,” Rutter said.

Dynos also launched a “$1,000 Campus Challenge” as a way to “break in to areas outside” D.C. and Virginia, Rutter said. College-age participants can earn up to $1,000 for signing up restaurants near their universities.

Since they don’t charge either restaurants or customers to use the app, Dynos currently relies on the support of two companies: Miracle Systems, a Rosslyn-based contractor lending Dynos office space, and Supersmile, an oral care company based in New York, Rutter’s home state.

“In terms of actually means of making a profit, there are about 10 or so ways that we can go about it,” Rutter said, including by introducing “advertisements or charging a fee on either end.” At this point, however, their priority is “not deterring anyone from using the app,” Rutter added.

This is not Sharda’s first venture in the startup world: in 2015, he worked with Ajay Maheshwari, Dynos’s chief technology officer, to develop Notify Anywhere. That project, a platform that allows group leaders to send alerts to a list of contacts, also partnered with Miracle Systems.

In April, Sharda released a book about dynamic pricing. For Dynos, dynamic pricing means that the discounts restaurants offer are “based off of supply and demand,” Rutter said.

“By us helping [restaurants] to serve more food and draw in more customers, we’re cutting down their food waste,” he said.

Arlington businesses have thus far been supportive of the young startup’s efforts to expand, Rutter added.

“It’s just been shocking how helpful they are and how [good] of a community it is, where everyone knows each other… whereas in D.C. we had nothing like that,” Rutter said.

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Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

(Updated at 2:05 p.m.) In a post-Moneyball world, data analysis has become an integral part of decision making in the world of sports and beyond.

Ballston-based Decision Lens — whose services have been used by the Oakland Athletics and Green Bay Packers along with federal agencies and pharmaceutical companies — helps organizations move away from “advocacy-based approaches,” where whoever has “the loudest voice or biggest gavel” gets the final say, said John Saaty, CEO and co-founder of Decision Lens.

Instead, Decision Lens staff works with companies to develop criteria that capture their priorities. Its 100 government and commercial clients have access to a software program which uses that criteria to provide scenario and data analysis, among other services.

“When people see a much more effective and vigorous way to drive planning and improve it over time, they don’t go back to conference tables,” Saaty said.

John Saaty and his brother Dan Saaty launched Decision Lens in 2005 with around five employees. John focused on the company’s growth and management, while Dan developed the design of the software.

Although some people find the idea of working with a sibling “just abhorrent, we sort of complement each others skills,” John Saaty said.

In 2014, Decision Lens made headlines for receiving $6.5 million in investment to service the more than 80 “enterprise-level” customers it boasted at the time. Now, Decision Lens has around 60 employees, and retains all of the clients who began using the service in 2005, Saaty said.

Decision Lens’s model is grounded in analytic hierarchy process, an approach to decision-making developed by John Saaty’s father, Thomas Saaty, while he was working at the State Department during the Cold War.

“What he found is we had no way to really make tradeoffs among different priorities that we were trying to accomplish in the negotiations with the Soviets,” John Saaty said. This finding prompted Thomas Saaty to develop “a mathematical theory that actually quantified… tangible and intangible factors in a negotiation.”

Decision Lens has worked to expand over the years with its “growth mindset,” John Saaty said.

“I always tell people there [are] two things you can be certain of: one of them is that change is going to be the norm… and the second thing I tell them is this year will be the worst year we have going forward,” he said.

Accordingly, Decision Lens is not planning to slow down anytime soon — in about six months, they plan to launch a new service to streamline government planning and budgeting, Saaty said.

The company has previously worked with government agencies like the Defense Health Agency and Federal Aviation Administration to allocate around $30 billion and $2 billion in funding, respectively. The cost of a Decision Lens license depends on the size of the client’s budget.

Saaty also lauded the benefits of being located in Arlington, citing resources like Arlington Economic Development, the Ballston Business Improvement District and the young, driven workforce.

As the company aims to grow more, Saaty envisions a world where “Decision Lens” becomes “almost like a verb” — where it is commonplace to ask, “did you Decision Lens this?”

“Our goal going forward is to be the standard in planning and budgeting,” Saaty said.

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