Markeshia Ricks Photo
Checkmate Digital’s Matt Cameron (left) and Tom Nassr (right) join Mayor Harp in ribbon-cutting ceremony.
The Elm City’s growing tech eco-system has attracted a startup founded in Hamden to move its headquarters to Temple Street.
Mayor Toni Harp Thursday joined cofounders of the company, Checkmate Digital, Tom Nassr and Matt Cameron, and their 16 employees, at their new second-floor suite of offices in the Olympia Building at 142 Temple to cut a ribbon and officially welcome them to town.
Nassr and Cameron, two Quinnipiac University graduates, started their software design and development company in Hamden, operating the now three-year-old business out of Whitneyville Commons. They moved the company to New Haven about a month ago.
Nassr talks tech with Harp.
Nassr said that space in Hamden was instrumental in allowing them to launch their business, which started with four employees. But the emerging tech eco-system in New Haven was attractive to the company as it seeks to grow its business domestically and internationally.
Checkmate Digital works with other startup businesses and entrepreneurs to develop software to tackle business problems.
“We end up working with founders who are either technical or non-technical entrepreneur that have a crazy idea,” Nassr said. “They come to us with this idea and we work with them to figure out what exactly the problem is they’re trying to solve and build software around that particular problem to solve that problem. So in this office, we have strategists, designers and developers they’re all focused on helping an entrepreneur turn an idea into a company and that company drive impact.”
The strategist, designers and developers at Checkmate in their new Temple Street home.
The company works with other companies in the state as well as New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C. It’s also looking to build clientele abroad and sees New Haven as a good launching place to do that.
“I think New Haven is super-underrated in sort of where it sits in the tech eco-system both domestically and abroad,” Nassr said. “I think we have an enormous opportunity. And I think Checkmate is really an example of how that opportunity has been coming up.”
He said the tech culture of New Haven operates with a different mindset than what one might find in Silicon Valley, and that’s a good thing.
Harp.
“The community in New Haven, in particular, is much more of the mindset that a rising tide raises all ships than it is that we are against somebody else,” Nassr said. “It’s not like that in Connecticut. That’s not something you can say in Silicon Valley. Not something you can say in a lot of places around the world. That, I think, is really at the core of why I think New Haven is so special. The people in the community really want to help each other do really well.”
Mayor Toni Harp said Checkmate Digital’s move from Hamden underscores what other tech-driven and biosciences business are learning: “This city has a young, talented, well-educated workforce ready to help these businesses prosper and expand and succeed,” she said.
Nassr said another draw of being part of downtown’s “tech corridor” is that they have easy access to the many restaurants the city has to offer and there’s usually “a pretty good argument every day about where we’re going for lunch.” And that fits in with the culture of fun that startup companies like to incorporate in their work environments.
“We’re here always willing to go out for a coffee and a beer, have a game of pool or whatever it is,” Nassr said. “We like to have fun. This is a tech company and we will instill that tech culture of fun. It’s a pretty big part of this. ”