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CalcTree

One of the best ways to land your dream job is to intern, sooner rather than later. Pressures on businesses drive employers to find ways to get value from hires sooner. Away to get value sooner is to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and career skills through internships. And the best places for engineers to intern are at engineering tech startups like CalcTree!

"It’s because of CalcTree that I got this job… I was talking to my manager, and he was saying he had to pick between me and someone else, and it was completely even. But he chose me because of the skills I learnt during the CalcTree internship” 

In this article, we’re going to unpack:

Prolific tech investor Marc Andreessen famously once said, “Software is eating the world.” It’s true, wherever software can drive greater efficiencies, it will. Therefore, remaining relevant means working at the intersection of tech and the built world. In our view, it’s the best position to find yourself as a budding engineer.

Sitting at this intersection exposes you to new ways of tackling problems. You can bring these innovations into your company to help increase productivity and efficiency. Doing so means you are quickly seen as an innovator and influencer in your own organisation, which only accelerates your career development.

In fact, there's no better time to be working at this intersection than now. See more in our article: 

Contech is the new fintech: Why it's time to get in!

This brings us to why interning at CalcTree is such a rare and valuable opportunity. Firstly, it's not easy creating and bringing genuine, game-changing innovations to market. Most startups fail to do so. We won't pretend we've dodged that bullet, but we're pretty confident CalcTree is on a path to making a mark in the traditional engineering market. For you, that means deep exposure to innovations coming to your profession and playing a direct role in building that innovation. As they say, 

the early bird catches the worm; couldn't be truer in this case. 

In short, CalcTree offers you a unique view into your industry. Where it is today, where it's heading and where you can make the greatest impact. Read more about the difference CalcTree wants to make in engineering heavy industries here: 

CalcTree's mission - Bringing engineering, designs and calculations together.

“As an intern at CalcTree, I learnt so many valuable skills and enriched my general engineering knowledge. It genuinely advanced my career and opened doors that otherwise would have remained closed as an engineering graduate.” 

💬 May Tran, Structural Engineering Intern, WSP

From time to time, CalcTree offers internships across all major engineering disciplines, such as:

The nature of work completed during an internship changes according to the priorities of the business. It typically comes with a healthy exposure to lots of different parts of the business like:

“The ACE industry is ripe with momentum when it comes to committing to innovation and sustainability. For me, the most exciting thing about working at CalcTree is that I have the opportunity to anchor my learning with real work that’s tooth and nail with these disruptors in the industry.”

Vladimir Jovanovic, Commercial Graduate, Lendlease

Working at a startup involves a lot of self-drive and ownership of outcomes. At CalcTree, you won’t have a manager who prepares a list of things for you to do every morning. You make up your own list of work. You know what the project is that you’re on, but it’s up to you to figure out how to get it done. We’ll still work closely with you to ensure your plan is solid and that you get the support and guidance you need to succeed, but ultimately we want you to take pride in owning your work.

Interning at CalcTree exposes you to lean, agile ways of working. Through daily standups, sprint planning and retros to reflect on how we improve how we work. In an increasingly changing and complex world, these ways of working will help you become a professional who is adaptable and capable of leading in the face of uncertainty.

“Interning at CalcTree provided me the opportunity to work on and have a genuine impact on projects that are at the cutting edge of integrating engineering and technology. This allowed me to develop technical skills in a wide range of engineering disciplines, as well as leadership and project management skills.”

💬 Kale Morrow, Mechanical Engineering Graduate, CalcTree

CalcTree is a hybrid company, meaning team members can work from anywhere they like. Sometimes we’re in an office, sometimes at home and sometimes in a completely different country.

The way we work at CalcTree is best summarised through our values:

‍We care about creating an engineering-led culture. A place where pragmatic intelligence is valued. Check out this article for: 

A window into CalcTree’s values and culture.

Most CalcTree interns have gone on to secure roles in top-tier engineering firms like WSP, LendLease and more! We love being part of their career progression and are excited to work with future engineering leaders.

If an internship at CalcTree excites you, then check out our 

 to see if we have any intern roles open. Alternatively, reach out via our 

. Be sure to share why you’d like to join and what difference you’d like to make to the lives of engineers (as well as your own) through an internship at CalcTree.

We’re a venture-backed ConstructionTech startup, soon to launch the world’s first multi-disciplinary calculation management platform. We help you ensure data, designs, and calculations are always in sync. Freeing you to spend more time creating innovative, sustainable, and modern designs.

Interning at CalcTree

Why? Because culture underpins everything we do. Meaning a good strategy will fail in the hands of a bad culture. But even without a clear strategy, the right culture will pave the way to success. 

At this early stage, the founders' dynamics and behaviours will significantly shape CalcTree. So the front-of-mind questions are:

Tim, Mahan, and I, as founders of CalcTree, have experienced the cost of bad cultures, which include examples such as:

There’s a common thread to the pain points above… leadership. Good leadership is hard to come by. And it’s even harder when the stakes are as high as they are in a startup. Where the company’s life relies on inflows of VC capital, the need to meet and exceed targets is critical, even at the cost of losing the right culture. 

So given the contextual challenges ahead of us, how do we plan to avoid these common leadership pitfalls at CalcTree?

Firstly, by ensuring, we don’t slip into ‘terror territory’ - running out of cash! Just like humans, startups follow Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If your physiological and safety (cash) needs are satisfied, showing up each day with a positive mindset is easier. If safety is threatened, founders are put under a lot of pressure. Under these conditions, it’s unlikely they’ll create a physiologically safe environment for their team. Google’s extensive 

 on physiological safety demonstrates that its vital for a healthy culture. 

We’re tackling this by engaging and building long-term relationships with VCs as early as possible. VCs who are on board with our vision and strategy to achieve it. At CalcTree, we’re building a company that conscientiously considers culture at every turn. We want to realise our values in our actions to create a great place to work.

Secondly, we wanted to capture and build on the strengths of our existing culture. Each individual has strengths and weaknesses. Teams are an aggregation of their individuals. As founders, we found the below values that make up our strengths. 

As a founding team, we know our strengths and weaknesses. We've analysed them and picked the most important ones to focus on and build into CalcTree's DNA. We’re proud of them, and we believe if established well as company values, our strengths can make a lasting impact on CalcTree’s culture. So without further ado, here are our values:

We love the simplicity and power of this value. It’s human, it’s real, it’s no B.S. More than anything, we value authenticity. It’s the source of creating meaningful connections and relationships. We spend a lot of our day at work, so why not create an environment where we’re free to be ourselves?

We balance moving fast with thinking deeply from multiple perspectives.

Yes to ‘move fast and break things’. But not when a further thought could have saved a lot of time and energy. Good strategies are hard to come by. It requires a balance of trial and error and time to consider options and first principles before deciding. We invite your intelligence to solve problems and know when to balance the two operating modalities.

We make evidence-based decisions regardless of where or who the best idea came from.

We value meritocracy over ego. Active listening helps bring out people’s ideas, and logical decision-making criteria allow the best ideas to surface at the top. This is part of the engineering culture we want to create, where introverts and extroverts have equal air time to share ideas.

The best solutions are forged from the collaboration of mixed expertise and experiences.

The wisdom is in the group. It’s a mantra we hold onto closely. No individual has the right answer. The collective effort of rigorous thought and deliberation from diverse people with different life experiences and perspectives adds richness to any solution. We welcome different expertise and experiences in their entirety and do our best to create a culturally diverse workplace. As painful as can be to challenge your viewpoint, these moments present real growth for us individually and collectively. The process enables us to uncover our blindspots and break through habitual thinking.

CalcTree is one big system. As individuals and as a team, we build every aspect of it to run and scale as autonomously as possible.

Systems thinking is a vital skill in the 21st century. The world is more complex than ever before. There are increasingly more variables to consider when designing a solution – whether that’s an internal process or a product feature. Think holistically about the problem, cause and effect of your proposed solutions and the technology needed to drive automation at scale. That is to be balanced with not over-investing in a solution. If the problem is small, building a Ferrari is unnecessary. Start small, and build scalable solutions over time. The hardest job of a startup is to keep all the moving parts in sync and moving forward. Automating more and more pieces of the system frees us up to do creative things, which is where we believe we should spend most of our time.

A picture paints a thousand words. We communicate ideas visually to accelerate alignment and shared understanding.

Communication is a value we want to get stronger at. We are solving a complex problem, but the solutions and how we convey them need to be simple. There are limitations to verbal communication when discussing complex problems. A quick mockup or prototype goes a long way to reveal the assumptions we each hold for our solutions. Where possible, we strive to show rather than tell by providing visual representations of the solutions we have in mind. We welcome anyone to jump in and play with proposed solution designs so we can rapidly iterate toward the ideal decision. 

There you have it: the set of beliefs driving CalcTree’s current culture. This is likely to evolve, and perhaps the list will expand or reduce as we gain more focus. The important thing is that as a team, we full-heartedly believe in our values and work hard every day to bring these to life. 

If these values resonate with you, reach out. We always seek bright, ambitious, conscientious people to join us at CalcTree. Let’s create the workplace we want together!

A window into CalcTree’s values and culture

At CalcTree, we’re building a business where technical excellence and culture are at the core of our values. Particularly in a hybrid working business, we know how important work-life balance (WLB) is for the team. Building a culture that supports this has been a key objective from day one.

In the construction sector, this attitude is not the norm, however. So for me, moving to a startup from a consulting engineering firm, the approaches and attitudes we’ve fostered in CalcTree have been new and inspiring.

After building CalcTree for a year now, I’ve realized how important WLB is to build a sustainable and healthy relationship with work personally and for the team. It’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of building CalcTree, but our concerted effort to put WLB front and center has been key to staying healthy and happy.

So it was a pretty awesome surprise to be asked by the team at 

 to interview me about my experiences with WLB while building CalcTree. In the interview, I talk about what WLB means to me and how I balance my personal life with the demands of building a startup. In particular, there are some interesting points regarding how CalcTree’s flexibility helps support me!

Work-Life Balance is a top priority at CalcTree - Check out our Co-Founder Tim Rawling’s ‘Balance the Grind’ Interview for his thoughts on it

Engineers want to optimize their calculations to produce the most efficient designs possible. CalcTree is a platform to help them succeed. We let engineers transform tools they already love into intelligent, trusted calculations. Allowing teams to work more efficiently and consistently without leaving their comfort zones.

Complex processes, misaligned stakeholder groups, and resource constraints make the design difficult. But fragmented software, staff turnover, and regulations make it almost impossible to innovate.

CalcTree integrates engineers' preferred design methods into robust calculation blocks. This allows teams to build verified repositories of tools and workflows. These blocks are indexed and tagged allowing them to stay in sync across projects and teams.

CalcTree lets users adjust and string blocks together to quickly create advanced designs while still achieving rigorous QA. This unleashes engineers to focus on actual design while CalcTree takes care of everything else.

Onur, Tim, and Mahan make up CalcTree's VC-backed founding team. They have a unique set of experiences and skills in tech, product, and construction, making them the perfect team to tackle this challenge.

Our CEO, Onur, is a veteran product leader with experience at Archistar and many other leading Australian startups.

He wants to help engineers overcome data fragmentation and spend more time creating amazing designs. Fragmentation "between digital representations and reality drive confusion on projects". CalcTree is a way to stop this.

CalcTree's COO, Tim, has lived through this problem as a structural engineer and digital leader at Arup. He's "seen it countless times; at every turn, we reinvent the wheel the quality of design suffers".

He sees CalcTree as the solution to this problem. And this drives him to apply his passion for engineering design and efficiency to make it a reality.

Our CTO, Mahan, is a trained Geotechnical engineer and software developer. He has over ten years of experience in the construction sector across the globe. He has a strong desire to overcome the disconnection between construction and underlying calculations.

He's shocked at "how engineering reports and drawings become disconnected from underlying calculations." This disconnection causes design and safety errors time and time again. For him, CalcTree is the solution to this problem.