Those who attended the Feb. 6 Boardroom Breakfast event, held in the Red Cross Building at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, were able to hear from Unosquare Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett while he talked with Vancouver Business Journal Co-Publisher John McDonagh, and answered questions from the audience.
McDonagh talked with Barrett in front of an audience of community members and business leaders about growing up in the Los Angeles area, starting his company Unosquare, surfing and more.
Here are 10 things those who attended the breakfast learned about Barrett and Unosquare:
- Barrett grew up in the Los Angeles area and learned how to surf at the age of 10. He still surfs in areas all over the world with his son, Joel; the two recently just return from surfing in Fiji at one of the best surf spots in the world.
- Because of his involvement in surfing, Barrett has six friends who have been attacked by Great White Sharks.
- Barrett wrote an article about his dad, who was a cop in LA, that was published in LA Magazine. The article was about his dad rescuing a relative of Dustin Hoffman during his time as a police officer.
- Barrett received his undergraduate degree in communications. He first started out majoring in business, switched to theater and then eventually switched to communications.
- Barrett’s business, Unosquare, has 520 full-time employees in the U.S., Mexico and Belfast, Ireland.
- Unosquare basically sells software engineering time and expertise. They build software teams in either Mexico or Belfast, and some in the U.S. that build big enterprise mobile software. Anything a company can’t buy from Microsoft, etc., that needs to be built from the ground up, that’s what Unosquare does.
- Unosquare’s clients include companies like OHSU, Columbia Sportswear, Harvard and more.
- Barrett and his wife were the first residents to move into the Rediviva apartment building at the Vancouver Waterfront.
- Barrett and a friend in Mexico who is 20 years younger than him started Unosquare together. Barrett said he was “by far the best engineer he had ever worked with” when they met.
- When deciding on the companies name, Barrett and his business partner came up with about 20 times, many of which ended up being already taken. They decided on the name Unosquare because it was half Spanish and half English, and in Mexico if your address was “one square,” it meant you were in the center of the town. Barrett said he really liked what that signified.
The next Boardroom Breakfast is scheduled for Wednesday, April 3, from 7:30-9 a.m., at the Red Cross Building, 605 Barnes St., on the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Speaker will be announced soon.
