I would've used this 10 times over in each of my last two companies if I'd known if this had existed. This is brilliant.

—AMY VILLENEUVE, FORMER PRESIDENT AND COO OF KIVA SYSTEMS, A DIVISION OF AMAZON, ADVISOR, CATALANT TECHNOLOGIES

It was sunny. Pat remembers that about the day. It was mid‐afternoon, and he was at a café near the office, having an iced coffee with a junior member of the sales force who had requested the meeting. The day was so nice that the two decided to sit at an outside table. The year was 2015, and we were growing at a ferocious pace. The idea of the casual coffee with the boss was something that we encouraged. We tended to attract the aggressive types to our ranks, and we'd grown accustomed to this reverse interview dialectic. This would be her opportunity to pump one of us for information.

“Five years from now,” she asked Pat, “where do you see the company?”

The truth of the matter is none of us would have known how to answer that question. Anything we might have said back then would have been suspect. But leave it to Pat to respond by winging an answer that we're still talking about years later. Our young salesperson had asked about the company's future, but he responded as if she had asked the proverbial “where‐do‐you‐see‐yourself‐in‐five‐years” interview question.

“I think this whole idea of career dictating your life is messed up,” he began in classic Pat style. “It should be flipped on its head. Life first, and then career fits in.” He asked her to imagine what she'd been dreaming about when she was a youngster. She stared at him.

“Everything they told you in school, that thing that all the adults ask,” she replied. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Pat bore down. “It's like you're brainwashed from the time you're a little kid to think about this and then they tell you that you have to go find a career?” He was on a roll.

“You go to college and you graduate and then you get a job with a company that says, ‘Go live in this city.’ So now the job dictates who you're friends with, how close or far away you are from your family, who you end up meeting and marrying—and so your whole life is determined by what city this company happened to tell you to go live in?”

Maybe it was the long hours he had been working that week. Or perhaps it was the contrast between the good feeling of the sun on his face in the middle of a beautiful Boston afternoon and the darkness of the tale he was unspooling. Pat brought up the stories we'd all heard of: people putting off having kids for a job, the relationships destroyed because corporate moved you to Kansas City when the love of your life was in Fort Lauderdale. “It's like every decision you make in your life is dictated by the company. It's this impersonal corporation that creates the framework and barriers you're forced to live with in your life until the day you retire. What about the guy who works at a company for 50 years and drops dead three weeks after his farewell party? How depressing is that?” We'd all grown quiet. Pat really knew how to light up a room.

“There's got to be a better idea for work than that.”

Every company has its legends. And there are moments that get passed down from generation to generation. It's been going on since the days of Henry Ford. It is the stuff of the American workplace. Inside a different company than ours, Pat's soliloquy might have simply been a fun rant that employees shared, likely when Pat was out of town or at least out of the office—at a Red Sox game or doing yoga or whatever Pat did those days to keep his blood pressure down. The boss takes a newish employee out for coffee and welcomes her with a curse‐laden tirade about work not being nearly as important as people think. Next!

But for us, it became a kind of company mantra, or at least the preamble to the closest thing we had to one. Our first step had been to create the platform that liberates the worker. Work hard, sure, but you don't have to sacrifice life and liberty to do so. The next step—the game‐changer—would come about once businesses recognized that the same human cloud technologies that were powering the broader gig economy had the potential to transform the workplace. That's where we figured we were jumping into the game.

Looking back on our humble beginnings, we never set out to change the way people inside large corporations got things done. There were systems in place. We got jobs within those frameworks and we played along for a while, and then we didn't. We thought there might be a better way. We had no great vision about the future of work. We merely stumbled on it while trying to grow our small company. In those early days, we had one goal: convince businesses to post tasks on our website. The rest—the product, the sales pitch, the vision—grew from a rabid belief in listening to customers and learning from what they had to say. It was the customers who pointed the way to a very different view of work that goes way beyond casual Fridays and free snacks. Pretty much everyone inside our growing company spoke to customers. Any one of us could have told you things weren't quite right inside corporate America. But it was Pat who had the idea of taking this window of opportunity we had and digging deeper. Why not ask customers more directly why they use us? We had nothing to lose. Pat was fearless. A little truth, good or bad, could only help our cause. So began our period of customer‐driven, intensive self‐evaluation.

It started with customers telling us the obvious: that they used Catalant when they didn't have the right person in‐house to get something done. In the past, they had turned to an expensive consultancy—the usual suspects—but now they were using us.

Our first big surprise came next, when we asked if they thought we were disrupting the consulting business. We expected them to say yes, but that did not prove to be the case. We weren't so much an alternative to established consulting firms, they said, but instead a bright light shining on a deeper problem. “You're disrupting the root cause of why we purchase consulting in the first place,” one customer said. His company viewed consulting as a way of bringing in outsiders to help them think through a problem. He wondered, what if they could skip over the problem and eliminate the need for consulting in the first place?

Our clients were starting to view us as a way to bring a diversity of talent into their company that they couldn't otherwise recruit into their ranks. This particular company was not located in one of the big urban centers known for its cache of knowledge workers, say like a New York or a Boston or San Francisco. They were in a less‐served destination that, frankly, was having trouble attracting and retaining top head count. And here we were providing them with a way of gaining access to those very same people who had proven unwilling to relocate to their corporate headquarters. “We think of you,” one customer memorably said, “as a way of bringing great people into our company that we couldn't otherwise have.”

We had started Catalant thinking we were democratizing consulting services for small businesses. Moving up the stack, we saw ourselves as disrupting consulting inside the enterprise. But larger businesses saw us differently: as a way of tapping into a wider pool of talent. We were providing them with a way to harness the brainpower of those who might not be willing to uproot themselves and move to Indianapolis or Dallas, no matter how lovely or desirable those cities might be. We were giving businesses a way of expanding their workforce without adding to their employee head count or overhead.

We got it. The message was coming through loud and clear. Whenever we dove into our growing pool of experts, we were amazed by the caliber of the resumes people were posting on our site. Our human capital coffers were populated by the sorts of workers we had never thought of as part of the freelance economy. These were men and women who had spent 5 or 10 years at McKinsey. They had earned a PhD or MBA from a top‐tier university yet were choosing to work independently because they could. Maybe they had worked for a few years at a Google or a PayPal or a Facebook, but now they were on the hunt for interesting projects.

Honestly, we've been in awe of our experts since day 1. We seemed to have drawn some of the most interesting, highest‐quality people around. If you dug into their resumes, you discovered that they had been invited to guest lecture at leading business schools and speak at exclusive conferences. Their papers had been published and their professional exploits honored by all sorts of respected organizations. Because of their extensive references, they were able to charge top dollar to the customers who engaged them on our site, but that was still just a fraction of what established consulting firms would have charged for their services, given their overhead and other costs. We were impressed, so it was no surprise that our customers were impressed, too. These were smart companies with an appetite for value, and they could do the math. If you could gain access to the best people in a wide range of professional fields at a fraction of what it would cost to hire someone full‐time or enlist a consultant firm, why not?

“Artisanal” is normally a term applied to cheese. Really good, expensive cheese coaxed from very special, pampered goats leading a life of blissful peace on a hillside in Vermont. The word had spread south, to the hipster communal urban farmer living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who had revived the lost art of distilling hops or brining the perfect pickle. (In fact, plenty of those artisan food makers in Brooklyn had also abandoned the consulting life for a better existence.) But we were discovering there was also a kind of artisanal freelancer making themselves known to the marketplace. These were people with a special skill set (and mind‐set!) that allows them to charge a premium for their services. They sat on top of the job food chain and, because they could generally run circles around most everyone else, had the temerity to live as Pat imagined people should. They used their hard‐earned skills to hang a shingle and enlist with the gig economy, thus buying their freedom and taking control of their life. Maybe they were just born with this supreme confidence and had come of age in an era that did not value long‐term employment. Or perhaps they had been tested by the old economy and circumstance had forced their hand. Either way, they had turned to freelancing because they were talented and confident enough to know they could make it on their own. And they were flocking to Catalant and finding work and satisfaction, which, no surprise, garnered high praise and top ratings from the businesses that had found them through our platform. Maybe there was something to this work/life balance after all, because all of a sudden, both customer and worker were a pretty happy lot.

We were a restless management team, however, and we took nothing for granted. We kept probing whenever we had the chance. Listening to customers and understanding their pain points was almost a religion with us. Over time, we heard one familiar lament over and over again. Company workloads vary, but the full‐time employee census stays the same. Adding capacity was almost impossible in today's cost‐cutting environment, and even if it were possible to bump your head count when work demanded, once it slipped off again, paring down during slower times would be painful and demoralizing to the remaining staff.

There was another factor that played to our cause. Polls showed that barely one‐third of the country's corporate executives thought graduates were workforce ready.¹ In other words, we were building an asset that management didn't even know exists. They knew they had a problem, that much was for sure. Workflow fluctuates with the time of year. People go on maternity leave. Others get sick and need a few months to recover. Management wanted access to flexible talent when they needed it, we were told by one stressed‐out executive after another. But instead they were stuck with the troops they had, all of them locked in a rigid, unchallenged system that trapped workers and hurt the bottom line.

Eventually, we figured out that through our database of skilled Nerds, we were in effect digitizing talent on behalf of the globe's businesses. Corporations were desperate for the right mix of people, but they had few options to turn to for a quick solution. Consultants provided an expensive roster of generalists, but the consulting solution was slow, costly, and unwieldy. Consulting firms had big infrastructure to support. They had to charge what they did. Our experts could be making cheese on a hillside one afternoon and then working on a high‐end gig for the next three weeks for a company with a problem that needed solving. That company didn't need to support an expensive network of global offices to land one skilled set of hands with a brain. They didn't need to go through a lengthy interview process. As remarkable as it seemed to our customers at first, we had what they needed, it worked, and it did so at a fraction of the cost.

Transforming ourselves into a true B‐to‐B enterprise that sold into global companies was expensive. It cost money to poach top talent from the globe's top consulting firms to build our burgeoning sales team. There was also the cost of morphing from an open matchmaking website to a platform robust and secure enough for large‐sized companies. The tech team was also expanding, so we had to factor in the price of retooling the platform to make it enterprise‐worthy.

There was no doubt we were taking the business in a more serious direction, and that meant it was time for us to raise a Series B round of venture money.

The good news is that we were in the midst of a giant growth spurt at just the right time. The back half of 2014 had proven a boon for the business. The bad news was the macroeconomic tremors that were spooking the broader market. The stock market dropped nearly 500 points in a single morning in October of 2014.² We were talking about selling to the country's largest companies, and the Standard and Poor's 500 stock index saw a 7 percent drop in value that fall.³

In retrospect, we should have done a much bigger Series A and given ourselves more time. Instead, we were faced with the need to fundraise at a critical strategic moment. This period would need to be about execution. Rich needed to build his staff, but it was even more pressing that he hit his numbers, knowing that VCs would be looking at our books. Once again, we'd need to put thoughtful planning and big‐picture strategic thinking on hold as we devoted our time to fundraising.

There were fun aspects to the B round, no doubt generated by the success we'd been having in our first couple of years. Pat and Rob flew out to the West Coast one weekend on a few hours' notice to have breakfast on a Sunday morning in Silicon Valley with Intuit cofounder Scott Cook. He had used our platform, he told us, and had only good experiences. The breakfast—which was amazing, by the way—ended with Scott telling us, “Whenever you guys are ready, I'm good for $500,000 or a million. Just let me know.” We'd be remiss not to warn beginners: don't try this at home. Not everyone rings up results like this so easily and so early on. Our roll continued with equally great get‐togethers with former Etsy CEO Maria Thomas and Rent the Runway founder Jennifer Hyman, both of whom also wanted to invest in the company. Then, upon our return to home base in Boston, we had the thrill of meeting members of the Kraft family, who owned the New England Patriots. Jonathan Kraft had already let us know that his family was interested in investing next time we raised money. We were now able to invite them into the company.

We announced our Series B financing in February of 2015. Highland Capital again led the round—a great vote of confidence from the first venture firm willing to take a chance with us. Greylock's Bill Helman was also pleased with the progress we were making because his firm, too, put up more money in the B round. All told, we raised $7.8 million. Rounding out our list of investors were GE Ventures, a customer and now partner in building the company, and Semil Shah, who had founded Haystack, a Silicon Valley–based early‐stage investment firm. We may have planted some roots now in the Silicon Valley, but there was no denying the thrill of opening the Boston Globe to find a story about our funding round in the local business pages. The article included a picture of the three of us, but the real excitement was captured by a quote from the Kraft family: “Though pretty active in funding start‐ups, rarely, if ever, publicly, do the Krafts lend its name to its investments. Which says a lot about how highly Jonathan and Daniel Kraft think of HourlyNerd.” In our small‐town minds, we had just taken the field with Tom Brady. Some dreams actually do come true.

While our aspirations were sky‐high, and even a lot of our management execution was spot‐on, we still were a tiny start‐up selling business services to other businesses—your classic B‐to‐B. There were areas where we needed help, and mining the existing workplace for some crystalline innovation in marketing was no easy feat. Sure, there were plenty of great people out there, but they were full‐time employed and launching and reinventing products for soft drinks and smartphones, killer apps and social networks. It was a challenge for us to dredge the waters for some talent to ignite our feisty little start‐up in the marketing arena. But we had the humility to recognize that we couldn't do everything ourselves.

Our first marketing maven, Devon Petersmeyer Johnson, came to us from a major personal grooming brand where she had been dealing with national campaigns, and frankly, we weren't sure we would close the deal. We still remember what she said during our initial meeting in our conference room in the midst of a classic New England blizzard. “The room was just vibrating with excitement,” she recalled. “A group of smart people struggling with tough questions, working together and getting their hands dirty to build something great. For me that was super‐energizing.”

Peter—a banker by training and our CFO—had been our de facto head of marketing through the first two years of the company. We had hired a junior person to take some of the weight off his shoulders and manage social media and a future‐of‐work blog we had launched. And of course we had the platform for when we needed help developing marketing materials. But finally hiring a tried and tested head of marketing proved to be a great move. We were starting to feel like a grown‐up company, even if at that point each of us was struggling to make sure we had clean socks for work each day.

Reaching into the enterprise had its challenges. The sale that might take a few weeks now took several months, if not longer. The main complaint from our potential enterprise customers was that we were running an open market and not a proprietary network that they, or we, could control. Some weren't comfortable being on the same marketplace as competitors. Others were concerned about doing business on the same platform that neighbored with a local shop down the street. Brian's tech team worked on solutions while our budding enterprise sales force worked hard at convincing big companies to give us a chance. The change in focus seemed to be working. In February of 2014, the goal had been $80,000 in revenue. By June of 2015, we had booked more than $1 million. The numbers were speaking louder than our biggest fears. We might have been doing something right.

That summer, Rich implemented a “pod” structure for his group that had us organizing the sales team by industry. Pat Mascia, who we had poached from the consulting firm Vantage Partners, took over industrials (manufacturing, chemicals), as well as health care. A former McKinsey person would be hired to focus on technology companies. Pat Griffin, a former Bain consultant, took over retail. “A lot of that first year was about crafting our story, so it made sense to enterprise customers,” he said. In a way, his own journey was instructive. When he first heard of us while at Bain, he thought, “That's cute.” At Bain, they assigned a team of four or six people to a problem and charged as much as $1 million a month. In time, Pat came to see us as “the Johnny Appleseed of a different kind of consulting.”

In September 2015, we moved to Fort Point, the epicenter of the tech scene in Boston.⁴ Consistent with our do‐it‐yourself attitude, and our preference to only spend money on growth, Pat and Peter cleaned out our old office themselves and moved everything to the new office (with the help of several other employees).⁵ Our new neighborhood, officially dubbed the Seaport Innovation District, was also where our friends from GE would very soon relocate. Others were following fast afoot. For us, our Summer Street offices meant that for the first time we were in a building with an automated elevator—each of our previous offices had had a manual freight elevator. As luck would have it, the office also came fully furnished. The previous tenant had needed to vacate the space quickly so threw in its desks, chairs, and quite a few accoutrements we would have been far too cheap to buy. It was a nice problem to have, and while we didn't get to pick our own carpeting, we were more than happy to benefit from their largesse. Because the office was pre‐furnished, we were able to spring it on employees as a big surprise one warm September Boston afternoon.

As we added more salespeople, we had more wins to share, and that in turn inspired future customers with our growing and impressive roster. An executive with a Fortune 100 company contacted us on a Friday. They needed a white paper by the end of the following week. By Monday morning, they had connected through the site to a Harvard MBA in Chicago with precisely the right domain expertise to pull off the assignment in five days. These kind of breakneck deadlines looked really good for us if we could nail them. The Nerd who took on the task delivered on time, the client was thrilled, and so were we. No matter that it had been only a $2,000 assignment. It was a baby toe in the water for us with a company with $50 billion a year in revenues. It would prove the first of many projects they posted to our site.

Another multinational in the Fortune 100 received a $2 million bid from one of the big management consulting firms for a data visualization project. Through our site, they found a former McKinsey project manager with a PhD in mechanical engineering now running his own firm specializing in data visualization. Go figure! It was a classic example of our ability to disrupt an age‐old model and provide true value. Ringing up these kinds of wins electrified our sales team and provided a continued boost to our revenue stream.

We were also edging our way into the Fortune 1000 by offering new ways for customers to tackle old problems. In late 2015, a fabled computer manufacturer came to us. In the old days, which is to say the year before they met us, they would have turned to one of the big consulting firms, which probably would have thrown a team of six at the problem and started the meter at $250,000 a month. Instead, the customer opted to divvy the project up into four smaller ones and leverage our platform to find a different consultant for each task. Good news for everyone: they ended up with the right person with precisely the right skill set without paying the whopping overhead of a big firm—and we booked new business.

One of our most dramatic early wins, and certainly one of the largest outside of GE Ventures, came from a global agricultural and industrial giant. They needed to better understand grain production in Eastern Europe and turned to one of the Big 3 for a proposal. However, the consulting firm rejected the assignment, citing local security concerns. Through our site, we connected the customer with several Stanford MBA graduates who had set up a small firm in Romania and were more than happy to take on the task. The MBAs rolled up their sleeves and got to work, delivering the goods in a timely fashion. They delighted the customer and happily earned $40,000 for a month of work on their report. The customer was just happy that someone was able to deliver. And in addition to bolstering our reputation and adding a valuable new client, we gained a shot of confidence. Not only did we now know experts in Eastern European grain production, but we were getting traction in the manner that most mattered. We weren't just booking business. Like Amazon in the early days indexing the world of retailers, we were indexing the world of smart people available for project‐based work.

At an off‐site during the blur of 2015, we debated the utility of Pat's rant about the upside‐down nature of the work/life equation. Rob—the nerdiest of us—understood the potential broad appeal but didn't appreciate the desire for flexibility as much. He liked weekend golf and Patriots games in the fall, but he liked work an awful lot, too. He had been willing to move when Bain Capital offered him a job, and he remained in Boston when it was the deemed the only place HourlyNerd could be built. Peter was skeptical that the market was ready to accept this massive paradigm shift. But we all recognized the power of what Pat was saying.

Some people needed the security of a permanent job. We weren't about to decimate the U.S. workplace, not by any stretch. Others probably didn't have the resume to compete on a platform like ours. And then there were those who might favor the work/life balance we imagined, but they had a personality for a different kind of solution. We all need good cheese.

We knew we weren't for everyone. But as our systems and database ramped up, it became clear we were sitting on a technology that could offer freedom to millions, if not tens of millions of workers worldwide. And just in case we ever doubted it, we had Joe Fuller, the Harvard management professor who serves as a Catalant board observer, to reiterate the truth. We were generating the types of employment opportunities that were so hard for independent professionals to access on their own.

Pat, of course, had his own analysis of the situation: “Imagine an alien came down and visited Earth and could immediately compute all the knowledge in the world of how people live.” We stared at him, like we always did. “That alien would be like, ‘It seems pretty strange to me that employers have all the power here and employees do what they say. Why would people do that? Who are these great big employees? Why would anyone submit to this kind of a life?’”

Pat always got his share of strange looks when offering this kind of analysis. But you had to hand it to the guy, he was genuine. And the customer invariably gets it. We're offering a win‐win for both employee and employer alike. The worker has more autonomy but—courtesy of the Catalant platform—employers get to harness talent when they need it. “With the technology we've already got,” Pat invariably would say to a potential new customer, “How come you need all these employees taking up space in your office, when you can see them over a computer screen wherever and whenever you need them?” Say what you will, Pat's vision was starting to get legs.