Who we are

An introduction to ThoughtWorks by Trevor Mather, CEO

Welcome to ThoughtWorks. Our fifteen-year journey has been marked by startling achievement, groundbreaking innovation, and an ever-growing community of passionate and brilliant people. This site will help introduce you to who we are, what we value, and the work we do.

ThoughtWorks was founded by Roy Singham in a Chicago basement in 1993. Roy's formula for success from the start was "Attitude, Aptitude, and Integrity" -- he built ThoughtWorks upon the firm belief that communities of talented, driven, and principled people could move mountains.

Today we employ over 1000 people across the globe. Roy is now Executive Chairman; I had the honor of stepping into the CEO role at the beginning of 2007 after five years helping to build our company. We've experienced huge and rapid change, but we have held fast to our aspirations to attract the world's best knowledge workers and our mission to revolutionize the bloated IT industry. You can see that commitment reflected in our values, which underpin our devotion to our customers' success and everything we do.

Whether we're building a new custom system for a client, fixing a project that's tied up in knots, or helping to make a software development organization more productive, ThoughtWorks delivers. Our customers start seeing benefits in weeks, not months or years, a radical change for some clients and partners caught up in the inertia of working as they've always worked.

Software development with ThoughtWorks feels and looks different: it is fast, evolutionary, even fun. There are no secrets -- you can walk into a ThoughtWorks project room and see exactly where we are at a single glance. We take good ideas -- best practices like collaboration, feedback, transparency, and testing -- and we build them into the fabric of the way we work. We've spent years, and many early mistakes, building a set of ThoughtWorks Agile capabilities and reusable approaches that we believe to be world class, but every problem is different, and our commitment to satisfying our clients far outstrips any affinity to a set of practices.

We are based in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, India, China and Sweden and we work with clients from each location. Whilst our global reach means we can find the right combination of sourcing, team distribution, risk transfer, and degree of innovation to meet nearly any company's needs, we pride ourselves on marrying our big-company services to personalized small-company service.

In 2006, our mission required stretching into building and distributing world class software products. We launched ThoughtWorks Studios to leverage our hard-earned development expertise and help conquer the problems we see CIOs confronting. We've already seen a substantial impact through Mingle and the progress we've made with Cruise, the buzz in the community is building rapidly, and we're excited about the future of ThoughtWorks Studios.

The ThoughtWorks journey continues. My own personal journey with ThoughtWorks has not just made me into a better leader and a better professional. I believe that our unflinching ambition to improve our industry and the world has made me a better human being. Whether you are a potential customer, partner, or ThoughtWorker, I hope you will consider joining us and helping to shape our path.

Trevor Mather, CEO. View Trevor's profile

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