Harry Hurst once found a use for his school lunch coupons that the designers of the programme almost certainly had not intended. He sold a £1.50 coupon to a classmate for £1, bought sweets at wholesale prices and resold them at a markup. In his later telling, it was an early exercise in turning an asset into cash, then putting the cash to work. The inventory was confectionery. The preoccupation would last considerably longer.
Years later, Hurst would co-found Pipe, which offered companies money today in exchange for predictable revenue arriving tomorrow. Institutional investors took the other side of the trade. The connection to the schoolyard is his own: when explaining the business in 2021, he reached back to those coupons. Most fintech explanations require a diagram. His came with sweets.
The appetite for enterprise grew in a household with little room for financial error. Hurst has described his family living on £600 a month in government benefits, while he was surrounded by children whose families could afford private school. He remembered the contrast between their lives and what awaited him at home. Money appeared to confer possibilities before it appeared on a balance sheet.
That background gives his later arguments about founder ownership a personal undertone. The question of who keeps the proceeds of a business can sound abstract when expressed in percentages. It feels less abstract when the original attraction of business was the chance to choose your circumstances. In Hurst’s story, the desire to build something and the desire for financial independence arrived together.
02California, with a stop at the recording studio
His father was a market trader selling clothes, and Hurst travelled around Britain helping set up the stall. He started an eBay business at about 13. A grandmother’s move to San Diego when he was ten had already put California on his mental map; watching Dragons’ Den reinforced the impression that ambitious businesses eventually crossed the Atlantic. He preferred the idea of beginning closer to the destination.
Getting there took time. Fashion distribution and recruitment provided work along the way. In 2014, while finalising his visa application in Los Angeles, he met Josh Mangel. Their meeting had an unusually good supporting cast: a rapper friend signed to Atlantic Records had invited Hurst to a studio to help with a meeting involving technology people. Mangel was among them. Hurst arrived with a phone containing roughly 50 business ideas and found someone willing to hear them.
The anecdote suits Hurst’s stated approach to ideas. He advocates talking about them, testing objections and improving them in conversation. An idea locked away for safekeeping has fewer opportunities to meet its co-founder. The studio encounter also supplies a useful corrective to the immaculate founding story: sometimes the consequential meeting takes place because a friend wants a little help.
Skurt emerged from that partnership. Its proposition was pleasingly physical: order a rental car and have it brought to you, then collected when you were finished. By February 2018, Fair had acquired the business. Skurt’s standalone service was to close, with its team and technology integrated into the buyer. For Hurst and Mangel, the partnership had survived the journey from a conversation to a working company and an acquisition.
03A payroll has opinions about your spreadsheet
Hurst’s earlier recruitment business supplied a less glamorous education. He has recalled hiring too aggressively after winning clients, then finding that seasonal changes left the business unable to meet payroll. He cut it back. Revenue became smaller; the bottom line improved. It was the sort of lesson a spreadsheet will cheerfully decline to teach until the wages fall due.
His advice afterwards was practical: use realistic assumptions, model the finances early and make a credible case for profitability. Those remarks came during his Skurt years, before Pipe’s valuation became a headline. They reveal an entrepreneur who had already experienced the distance between a forecast and money available in the bank.
In that same period, he described success in terms of freedom: doing work he liked, travelling, and spending time with family and friends. He also talked about taking morning walks while calling people back in London. The Atlantic was part of his working life and his private timetable. Building in America did not mean that everyone who mattered had moved there with him.
“My definition of success is freedom.”
Harry Hurst, during his Skurt years
04The gap between a customer and their cash
Pipe was founded in 2019 by Hurst, Mangel and Zain Allarakhia. Its original focus was subscription software. A company could have customers paying reliably every month and still lack the cash to hire or expand today. Selling equity could fill the gap, but would leave existing shareholders owning less of the future business. Pipe offered a marketplace for selling the revenue stream instead.
The appeal rested on timing. A customer’s monthly payment could be quite acceptable to the customer and inconvenient to the supplier. Asking the customer for a year upfront often required a discount. Hurst’s proposal brought another buyer into that arrangement: an investor prepared to pay now for later receipts. The founder could keep the shares while giving up a portion of those future cash flows.
Hurst was hardly campaigning for the abolition of venture capital. In his 2020 conversation with Alex Danco, he argued that equity made sense while a company was still experimenting and discovering a market. The calculation changed once growth became repeatable and cash flows more predictable. His objection was to treating successive fundraising rounds as an automatic itinerary. A financing instrument ought to suit the job.
The distinction matters when considering his subsequent move into investing. Helping a young company test an uncertain proposition and financing the expansion of an established revenue stream are different tasks. Hurst’s argument allowed room for both. Even as Pipe challenged a familiar way of financing growth, the company itself raised equity to build its own business.
05Ten months, two billion dollars
Pipe’s public launch came in June 2020. In May 2021, it announced a $250 million equity round led by Greenspring Associates at a $2 billion valuation. Its announcement listed more than 4,000 company signups and over $1 billion of tradable annual recurring revenue connected to the platform. Those figures describe different things: interest in a service, revenue eligible for trading and investors’ valuation of the company. They should not be added together like receipts.
The backers included Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, alongside existing investors such as Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. Pipe was also expanding beyond software into other businesses with recurring income. Hurst’s pitch had found an audience on both sides of the marketplace and among the people financing the marketplace itself.
The setting changed too. In September 2020, Hurst and then-COO Michal Cieplinski moved from California to Miami. They cited the time zone and international airports as advantages for a business dealing with Europe and the Middle East. A photograph outside their Miami office captures the practical relocation in unusually cheerful colours. Even capital markets can have a pink building.
Crossing the Atlantic remained less frictionless. In 2021, Hurst said a trip to England for routine visa processing left him facing an appointment backlog that prevented his return to the United States. He continued working remotely. The episode put an awkward limit on the freedom entrepreneurship was supposed to provide: a company could attract international money faster than its founder could obtain a consular appointment.
May 2021
in that round
06Building it, then handing it over
In 2022, Hurst was among the winners of EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year Florida award. Later that year came a more complicated milestone. On November 22, Pipe announced a leadership transition involving all three founders. Hurst’s explanation was succinct: “We’re 0-1 builders, not at-scale operators.” Starting an institution and running its later stages, he was saying, called for different strengths.
The announcement also attracted scrutiny. Questions circulated about financing involving crypto-mining businesses. Pipe confirmed providing access to financing for hosting companies while denying claims that it had issued and written off $80 million in loans. That distinction belongs in the story alongside the fundraising. A financial marketplace has obligations to people supplying capital as well as people seeking it; growth brings those obligations into sharper view.
In February 2023, Pipe named Luke Voiles, previously general manager of Square Banking, as its next chief executive, effective February 20. His background included building QuickBooks Capital. The appointment made the proposed shift toward experienced financial operations concrete. The company Hurst helped launch would continue under a different leader, with a different set of professional experiences.
07The other side of the founder’s table
Today, Hurst is co-founder and managing partner of Protagonist, where he co-leads investments. His public biography lists Miami and London as bases and says he has invested as an angel and fund manager since 2017. Investing therefore overlaps his company-building years; it did not begin only when his executive role at Pipe ended.
Protagonist describes a practice of working with founders on products, routes to market, partnerships and fundraising, while also incubating businesses. Its partners invest their own capital alongside their investors. The firm’s stated premise is that another founder can be a useful companion when the decisions get difficult. It is a proposition Hurst can approach with experience of hiring too quickly, selling a company and sharing responsibility for a leadership transition.
Away from work, his biography names golf and trips to Europe with his wife and two children to see family. These are modest details beside a billion-dollar valuation, but they give substance to the freedom he talked about much earlier. The public career has changed shape. The attraction of time with people back home remains recognisable.
The most revealing measure in Hurst’s story may be the one he offered before Pipe existed: whether he could wake up and choose how to spend his day. It is a demanding test for anyone whose work involves other people’s money, employees and expectations. The coupons, the rental cars and the revenue contracts all belong to a career spent trying to improve the terms of a transaction. The personal transaction underneath them is time.