Tech Skunks join Clearhaus to build the fighter jets of the payment industry
Clearhaus is leading the field of paytech in Europe. That effort takes tech, creativity and…Tech Skunks?? Find out how our Tech Skunk team helps build the next fighter jet of payments, inspired by Lockheed Martin’s good old Skunk Works.
Throughout history, technology companies have been forced to think creatively when challenging the status quo and becoming the leader of their industry. Clearhaus is no exception, and for that reason we are often inspired by new technologies,tools and approaches.
In the 1940’s Lockheed Martin, an aerospace company, created a team called Skunk Works. It consisted of a small team of employees given exceptional freedom from the normal factory routines. Lockheed Martin hoped that the small team of talented engineers, gathered in a small workshop would come up with game-changing ideas, technologies and prototypes.
The name Skunk Works is inspired by the stinky factory “Skonk Works” from a famous American comic strip. But despite the odd name, the experiment turned out to be extremely successful. So successful that it still exists today. Skunk Works simply never ceased to generate game-changing solutions. One of its most recent successes is the high-tech fighter jet soon to be used throughout the Western World: the F35 Lightning II.
Observing the success of Skunk Works, the CEO at Clearhaus, Claus Methmann Christensen, decided to build his own Skunk Works to help Clearhaus create the next fighter jet of payments. We call it Tech Skunk.
“We believe that we need Tech Skunk in order to build the best payment technology and become an industry leader,” says Claus Methmann Christensen.
Hands-on, immediately
Today, new “baby skunks” start their time in Tech Skunk at Clearhaus in fellowship with the experienced developer and Head of Tech Skunk, David Andersen. He guides the new employees in 4-6 weeks sprints and works to establish a safe environment where mistakes and problems are embraced to accelerate learning. It is all about developing people and prototypes.
“When new people join us, they immediately get hands-on with a project and start doing valuable stuff. We believe in extraordinary people using great technology. In the end our goal is to make other industry players go “Wow, that’s awesome,” says David Andersen who is constantly on the look-out for talent.
“We are always recruiting new developers, designers and business people. But we are also looking for entrepreneurial talent who want to take their work to the next level. Either at Clearhaus or one of our corporate spin-offs, like 3dsecure.io,” David says.
Coding and cake
One of the more experienced tech skunks is Lasse Johansen. One of his projects was to build an automation robot, which ended up saving 4 hours of his colleagues’ time on a weekly basis. For the techies: It was based on Puppeteer by Google, which can automate a Chrome browser.
“It was great to build the robot and see the created value for the company, but it also resulted in a lot of failure and experimentation. One day, I was banned from our own API because I made a mistake in the code. And sure, we embrace mistakes, but sometimes it costs cake,” Lasse says, referring to the Clearhaus Cake legislation.
Jokes aside, one thing is certain. Clearhaus is accelerating with lightning speed in the paytech space. And if you want to join us on the journey, Tech Skunk will make sure that we can build the fighter jet of payments together.
Contacts for more information
Anders Holmgaard, Communications Manager at Clearhaus, ah@clearhauscom, +4560704967
David Andersen, Head of Tech Skunk at Clearhaus, da@clearhaus.com
About Clearhaus
Clearhaus is a payment institution and European licensed acquirer, serving more than 33,000 web shop owners in 33 countries with simple and secure solutions at competitive prices. By using Clearhaus, webshop owners can accept payments from Visa, MasterCard and Apple Pay in 1-3 days. Clearhaus offers one of the industry’s best support departments and access to all transaction data and has in a short time gained market share among European acquirers. As a pioneer in payment technology, Clearhaus was the first in Denmark to offer Apple Pay and Google Pay as payment methods to web shop owners. Clearhaus continues to add innovative features that make payment more smooth and effortless.
