Five Questions With: Larry Samuels

LARRY Samuels is president of Kenzan LLC, a software engineering company in Providence. / COURTESY/KENZAN
LARRY Samuels is president of Kenzan LLC, a software engineering company in Providence. / COURTESY/KENZAN

Larry Samuels, president of Kenzan LLC, a software engineering company in Providence, talks with Providence Business News about the firm, its involvement in the TechHire initiative and the “hack nights” it holds to connect with the larger tech community.
PBN: Tell me about Kenzan and how the business got started.
SAMUELS:
Kenzan is a software engineering, platform development and professional services firm that was founded in 2004 as an iTV (interactive television) development shop serving cable companies and advertisers. Since then, we have greatly expanded the depth of our services. Our team of architects, engineers, developers and business analysts support multi-billion dollar companies by crafting customized end-to-end solutions that are most often enterprise scale. While we are still media ‘heavy,’ our stable of clients has expanded to include other industries such as financial services, retail and more. Kenzan was launched in NYC, but established a Providence presence early on, when our CEO/founder and CTO moved to the area and established what became our main office. Kenzan currently has offices in Providence, NYC, Denver and Los Angeles.

PBN: How long have you been hosting hack nights?
SAMUELS:
Our first hack night was in January 2015. Since then, we’ve had monthly hack nights both in Rhode Island and in Denver.

PBN: What do you hope participants get out of them?
SAMUELS:
Hosting hack nights is one of the many ways Kenzan gets involved with the larger tech community. We hope that sharing our knowledge, expertise and code will help advance the industry and spur innovation. By inviting fellow techies into our offices, we aspire to create an open and comfortable environment for people to share their ideas and get feedback. We also enjoy meeting top tech talent from the area who might want to become a part of Kenzan.

PBN: What is your role with TechHire?

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SAMUELS: We initially connected with TechHire through LaunchCode, a nonprofit organization that partners with TechHire Rhode Island. LaunchCode seeks to place talented candidates who learned their skills from non-traditional sources like coding boot camps and mentorships, rather than a college or university. The TechHire approach to sourcing talent from non-traditional backgrounds aligns well with our company’s history, values and culture. We see a larger opportunity in partnering with TechHire, whose focus is to create a systemic pipeline that is responsive to employee need, state resources, educational offerings and applicant skills.

A common requirement for job seekers is a degree in computer science or related field from a four-year university. Enforcing this point might lead to employers missing out on skilled and motivated workers. At Kenzan, we do not insist upon a four-year degree for any of our positions. As such, our priorities align well with TechHire’s mission to empower a new pipeline of talent that’s often overlooked.

PBN: Do you find that there is a shortage of available workers in the tech industry here in R.I.?
SAMUELS:
Yes, in both volume and skill sets. We hope that our contributions will help inspire growth.

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