The company was founded by Richard Johnson and was based at 24 West 40th Street, 12th floor in New York City, across from Bryant Park. Johnson had previously founded the RBL Agency with Ben Carroccio and Liz Johnson (RBL), a boutique employment agency for technologists. The initial website was launched in early 1996 as RBL Agency which evolved into the Online Technical Employment Center (OTEC) in 1999, and only featured technical jobs. Founding employees Christopher G. Stach II, Earle Ady, and Allen Murabayashi designed and coded the first iterations of the site on Silicon Graphics Indy workstations for C application development, Apple Macs for content creation, and the site ran on Sun and SGI hardware.