Virtual entrepreneurs

Friends turn passion for computers into business with job-hunting site

Craig L. Moran/ViewJobbi co-founders and The Meadows School alumni Jordan Kelley, 22, left, and Lawrence Vaughan, 24, take a break at their office at 1505 S. Pavilion Drive in the Summerlin area, May 21. The two friends started the free Internet job search Web site www.Jobbi.com as an alternative to already existing job search sites that the two felt were inadequate. Advertisement

Best friends. Like minded. Driven. And on their way to their first million.

Summerlin's Lawrence Vaughan, 24, and Jordan Kelley, 22, have played ideas off each other since they first met in grade school at The Meadows School. As they progressed to high school, the bond got a little stronger. By the time Vaughan graduated in 2003, their friendship was tighter.

Jump forward to today, and they share the title of co-founder for a free Internet job search site called Jobbi.com.

Jobbi rhymes with hobby. The site can trace its roots back in high school, when Vaughan took a computer programming course in the ninth grade that had him writing code for his own software program.

Always into computers, Vaughan immersed himself in the project and ended up writing 4,000 lines of code. The result was a game loosely based on the movie "The Matrix."

"It's sort of like Mario Bros., but with laser guns," he said. "I still have it. It works great."

The two kept in touch even after Vaughan went to the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. He didn't stay there long, coming back to the states to work in the casino business.

As for Kelley, he got a four-year degree at Babson College, near Boston. Its Web site says it's "ranked No. 1 among all business schools for entrepreneurship."

All the time, the two friends kept in contact via computer.

"We're big fans of video conferencing," Vaughan said.

When Kelley returned to Las Vegas, the two reconnected. Looking for career opportunities, both lamented the inadequacies of online job search companies, seeing faults in each one. Besides that, neither of them saw any really promising job opportunities.

"We like to innovate and create," Kelley said. "We didn't want to be in a cubicle."

In a necessity is the mother of invention moment, they latched onto the idea of starting their own online job search company.

It took two years to prepare the software for Jobbi. Each brought his own strengths to the table, but the effort, they insisted, was done as a team.

"Both our minds work on the same sort of wavelength," Kelley added.

When they felt they were ready, they had a soft launch in January 2008.

That was version 1. Soon, they upgraded it with version 1.3, then 1.5, now 1.8. Each improvement took the Web site forward exponentially. Many of the changes were in response to user feedback.

"It's important to stay humble and hungry and not get complacent," Kelley said.

Today, Jobbi.com has half a million people signed up nationwide. It sees as many as 140,000 users a month.

Input from users, such as this example, has been positive: "This site is great, got me a job ... Thanks!!" wrote Daniel A. North of Hollywood, Calif., on Oct. 5, 2008.

Job postings run the gamut from technical to health care to administrative. Perhaps the oddest one came from a Houston company involved in the space program: a thermal engineer who could design a human-rated spacecraft that could withstand the extreme temperatures of outer space.

Then there was the one from the federal government. It wanted someone for top-secret clearance work, who could speak both Arabic and Kurdish.

These days, the two share the tasks of marketing, signing up advertisers and reworking the program. There is little time for family, little time for girlfriends, but they said they wouldn't want to be doing anything else.

They can spend all day at the office, often working until 7 p.m. Sometimes, they can go even longer, until 3 a.m.

"It's so much fun, it's hard to call it work," Kelley said.

Contact Summerlin View and South Summerlin reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 387-2949.