Author: Michelle Rosenfeld

Editor’s Note: 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 technology firms are looking for fresh talent, they often turn to recruiters to find the best and the brightest. A growing IT recruiting firm in town is taking on that challenge.

In true startup fashion, Hatch IT started in a garage in Leesburg, Va. And that humble start was key to their success.

Tim Winkler, CEO of Hatch IT, said, “Given our roots as a bootstrapped startup ourselves, and growing out of a garage, we are able to relate first-hand to many of the key cultural attributes our startup clients are targeting,” adding, “Being able to really understand our clients’ equity plan and communicating those details accordingly can be a make-or-break factor when selling the opportunity to candidates.”

Formerly known as TRW Consulting Services, the company was founded in 2011 based on three main principles. First, that recruiting is underrated and often is overlooked as a key element of a healthy business plan in early-stage startups and small businesses. Second, that recruiting can be outsourced to a true partner. And finally, that recruiting does not have to be overly costly for the startup community.

Winkler said the company’s name and logo — which depicts an egg hatching — are “symbolic of helping startups break out of their shell, and for engineers it sets the stage for fresh new beginnings in an innovative tech startup.”

Hatch is unique from other technology recruiting firms in the area, Winkler said, because of its focus on the technology startup industry.

“Hatch is on a mission to change this preconceived notion of recruiters by only connecting our engineers with opportunities that are 100 percent a fit in terms of tech stack, company culture and career growth,” Winkler said, adding, “What separates Hatch from the hundreds of other recruiting shops in the area is our specialization in the local D.C. tech startup space, specifically in the areas of software development, mobile development and product design.

“When partnering with startups, there is a noticeable difference in understanding the company culture and being able to identify with candidates that will adapt in such a fluid environment.”

When it came to picking a location when they were ready to upgrade their headquarters, Winkler said Arlington was a “no-brainer.”

“We knew Arlington was the perfect location for us given it’s perfectly positioned in the heart of the local startup boom,” Winkler said. “It’s exciting to have our new headquarters in Crystal City, where organizations such as WeWork and 1776, which share a similar vision, are right in your backyard.”

Editor’s Note: 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.

The Haleakala Silversword is a rare plant that grows in the hot, dry climate of a remote crater in Hawaii. The silver-fronded shrub can live up to about 90 years before sprouting an impressive flowering stalk as its final hurrah before spreading seeds across the barren landscape where the plant is found.

Silversword Software and Services — an Arlington-based technology startup also known as 4S — says they chose the name because it fit with their unique position in the market. “It seemed really apt for me for the kind of work we are doing: to kind of grow something beautiful in a very bizarre environment,” 4S President Eli Senter said.

When Senter first began working in the federal IT space, he said he was “a little bit shocked at how far behind the private sector we were in some areas.” 4S aims to fill that gap by developing software tools and technical management practices for federal clients. The company offers services ranging from building system architecture, systems engineering and developing custom software to creating Web-based applications and transitioning programs to cloud computing.

So far, the firm has been focused on the secondary use of health data. 4S is developing an infrastructure for military doctors find insight into their patients’ electronic health records. “There is a treasure trove of information [in EHRs] that could be very valuable in research if looked at anonymously in bulk,” said Dan Bowman, communications associate at Eastern Foundry, a Crystal City-based startup incubator of which 4S is a member. Senter added, “To actually be able to get any big data value, you have to structure it very differently in order to be able to find patients that are similar and compare outcomes for similar patients.”

The company recently was certified as a participant in the 8(a) Business Development Program as a Native Hawaiian Organization-owned firm. That means that in some cases, 4S can “behave a lot more like you would in the private sector” when acquiring contracts for government projects, Senter said. NHO-owned firms participating in the 8(a) program can market directly to potential clients, and those clients then can contract with 4S in a much shorter time frame than the traditional process for government contract awards, according to Senter. In addition, 4S can work collaboratively with clients to design the requirements, price and other aspects of the contracts they work under.

With its new status, Senter said 4S plans to bring modern development techniques and tools to the federal sector. And Arlington was the perfect base for the firm’s mission. “We’re close to all of our defense clients … that we’ve worked with before and would like to work with again,” Senter said.

Editor’s Note: 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.

As cyberattack techniques become less costly and more adaptable, organizations will have to up their cybersecurity game. To that end, Clarendon-based Endgame has built a team of domain experts, scientists, software engineers and designers to protect the country’s most critical assets.

Founded in 2008, Endgame is a software firm that helps governments and commercial organizations to detect, contain and evict “bad guys” from their networks to prevent damage and loss of data.

“By 2008, the accelerating pace of technological change and seismic geopolitical shifts began to intersect in unprecedented ways, from the early signs of tech-enabled social movements to increasingly brazen state-sponsored cyberattacks on private companies, and our increasing dependence on digital systems,” said Margot Koehler, senior manager of marketing and communications at Endgame.

“Companies around the world are spending billions of dollars every year on cybersecurity, [but] 90% of them are breached and the average dwell time for these advanced adversaries is 200 days before they’re even detected,” Koehler added. “Beating these threats requires us to rewrite the playbook and see the world as the adversaries see it.”

Endgame was established to “bring a faster and more agile style of software development to early adopters inside the intelligence community and the Department of Defense,” according to Koehler. “We figured that they are on the front lines of information security, and that their cutting-edge challenges would become commonplace more widely over time.”

Arlington was the obvious location choice to best reach Endgame’s clients. The company is expanding its office and was just named to the “Fast 50” list of high-growth cybersecurity and networking firms for the second year in a row.

“We’re thrilled to be based in Arlington. Arlington is a great place for Endgame headquarters — it offers a unique mix of amenities, talented workforce and convenient transportation options,” Koehler said.

Unlike other strategies, she said Endgame “brings offense to the enterprise by actively hunting for adversaries that bypass the traditional security stack,” helping “customers move from being the hunted to the hunter, stopping breaches at the earliest possible moment, before damage and loss can occur.”

Endgame has about 130 employees, who all focus on its five core values — integrity, boldness, speed, openness and responsibility. Aside from its Clarendon headquarters, the company has offices in Baltimore; Melbourne, Fla.; San Antonio; and San Francisco.

And Endgame continues to evolve to meet its customers’ changing needs and adapt to new research and development. “We’re here to take the security industry into the 21st century and beyond, and empower enterprises to hunt within their networks the adversaries of today and tomorrow,” the company’s website states.