The Full-Circle Effect
Where It All Began
In 1984, Frank Baldesarra, a young professional engineer, co-founded Rand Worldwide to provide computer-aided design and engineering software solutions and services to manufacturers, and by 2000, Rand was a global company with over 1,500 employees.
“The formula then was simple,” Baldesarra said. “Provide the best-in-class software, educate and support the right people and help implement the right processes. But with major success comes new and different challenges. With 1,000s of clients and many engineering partners, we needed to find better ways to connect and engage with those very important relationships.”
That better way presented itself in the form of the World Wide Web. At the time, the web was
in its infancy. To put it in perspective, Google was only two years old, Facebook wasn’t invented yet and only 40 percent of U.S. households had access to the Internet.
Baldesarra recognized early that utilizing the vast potential of the web would change everything and could connect effectively to far more engineers then his existing team ever would. The domain name engineering.com was purchased, at a then a crazy high price and engineering.com set sail to the new world of the online universe.
“Creating engineering.com allowed us the opportunity to build meaningfully relationships with everyone in the engineering community,” said Baldesarra, “not just a select few, and that untapped potential was and is really exciting.”
engineering.com Takes Shape
With an early mission to “Create an open meeting place for our global engineering community to share ideas and improve the quality of life for humankind,” over the course of 16 years, engineering.com has built a strong and loyal community of millions of engineering-minded visitors by being a leading voice informing our community through inspiring stories and resources.
“Our unique publishing style is helping many of the world’s best-known technology providers get their messages out to our global community more effectively and continuously helping to inspire amazing innovations to everyone’s benefit,” said Baldesarra.
Building on the Solid Foundation
In 2016, with the boom of online communities, and the rise of the shared and gig economy, Baldesarra believed that engineering minds are, and will continue to be, the drivers to this exciting future. He sought out to find some new talent and brought onboard Eva Lau, an engineer and early community builder at Wattpad, as a key advisor and board member, and Lauren Baldesarra, an out-of-the-box thinker and former Walt Disney Imagineer in Los Angeles, to jumpstart a new initiative.
In January 2017, a new R&D team was assembled in a satellite office in downtown Toronto, led by Renata Vaccaro, managing director, vice president of technology, and was challenged to mobilize our great community and create a new platform where anyone with an engineering mind could work creatively together.
All About New Projects
Figuring It Out as We Go
“Our team is filled with perfectionists who really care about making something of real value for our community,” said Vaccaro. “But we quickly came to the realization that we couldn’t do that without trying things, failing, asking for feedback and then trying again. It’s been a real iterative process, and because of it, we’re excited about what we, together with our community, are creating and building.”
What Does the Future Hold?
Exciting things are on the horizon for engineering.com, with a mission to connect and mobilize the dreamers, doers, makers and hackers in the shared and gig economy.
“Our goal, simply put, is to help the next generation of amazing engineering minds reach their career and life potential,” Lauren Baldesarra said. “STEM students in particular have amazing ideas that need to be heard. We hope to do everything in our power to remove whatever barriers they face, so that they have the confidence and support to do what they are meant to do: ask questions, think big and make a difference!”
To learn more, visit www.projects.engineering.com/about