About BitGym

We believe the phrase "20 minutes of cardio" has done serious damage to people's relationship with fitness. People are simply not wired to value miles, minutes or calories. We are wired to value other things: autonomy, mastery, community and tangible achievement. Sports are great at giving us these, but sports are not always convenient for our day to day exercise. We wanted to build something that was. Something we could deploy to millions of people without any costly hardware. Something which fundamentally transforms cardio into a fun and fulfilling experience. The best answer so far is exercise video games running on widely available hardware, and so that is what we have been building.

It was in our pursuit of this vision that we developed our vibration-based exercise tracking and camera-based head tracking that underpin BitGym. We believe due to technology like this we are only a matter of years away from a future where video games are the default assumption for what you do after you lace up your gym shoes.

If you would like to help build this future we are hiring and are always looking for game developers who want to build BitGym games using our SDK.

• Alex Gourley has a long history of athletics and a longer history of video games. When he moved to San Francisco the only regular exercise he could find involved a treadmill, and so he began investigating how to take the best elements of sports and bring it them to cardiovascular machines. Before founding Active Theory he ran Loopt's internal metrics and analytics, worked on a source-code search engine at Krugle and lead a team building an autonomous vehicle at UC Davis.
• Clint Stevenson is a passionate gamer who understands the hooks that video games can put into players. His goal is to harness the power of these hooks to motivate exercise instead of sedentary behavior. Programming has been part of his life ever since he got his first TI-83 calculator. Clint studied English and Computer Science at UC Davis, where he also collaborated on a system for tracking the spread of West Nile virus. More recently he was Lead Developer at Sagax Media.
• Joshua McCready is all about designing technology cogniscent of human biological expectation s. He has a passion for biology, art, physical fitness, and primitive living. Past work experience includes designing neuroscience equipment for Harvard Medical School and dev eloping sensor fusion algorithms for MIT's Lincoln Labs. He studied Systems Engineering at F.W. Olin College of Engineering.
• Keerthik Omanakuttan decided he wanted to spend his life making games before deciding what his favourite colour was, at the age of six. While pursuing an Electrical and Computer Engineering Degree at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, he had a habit of turning projects for any course into a game design or development project (sometimes to hilarious effects). He quickly discovered the immense potential for turning many mundane and boring things in life that we really *should* be doing into fun and memorable experiences. He means it when he says, "Life...that thing I do between playing, making and designing games".

• Advisors

• Bhavin Shah is an entrepreneur with over a decade of experience building companies, assembling great management teams, and creating quality brands and products. Through his work as Co-Founder, Board Member, and COO at Gazillion Entertainment (developers of LEGO Universe & Marvel Universe) and Director of Business Development at LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc., he's taken a company from inception to scale and from private to public in education, toys, consumer internet, video games, media and entertainment industries. Bhavin has a BS from University of California, San Diego and an MA from Stanford University.

BitGym is a very young company and we believe the line between founders and early employees has become blurry. As such our early hires will be self-directed people compensated with a high level of ownership in the company.

The founding team comes from an engineering background but we try very hard to pretend we are designers. We take this book very seriously. We are based in the San Francisco mission district and may move to SOMA later.

Server Engineer
We need someone who can architect and implement an entire asynchronous multiplayer game stack. Your interview will be composed of discussing/arguing with us on the best approach to implement it.

Game Developer
We are looking for someone with past commercial experience creating games. You will be paired with a designer and given an art budget so that you can autonomously produce exercise video games. Right now we use Unity3D for most development but for this role we value experience over tool-chain familiarity.

Game Designer
We are looking for a someone with commercial experience designing games. The ideal candidate have experience building games that would not be considered "male" (to balance us out, really, we love violence and explosions). You will own internal development of your own games as well as outreach and interaction with our community of 3rd party developers to get them on the right track.