The missing item could be a camera mount. Or a particular cable. Or a pair of shorts in the right size. Ian McHenry’s local-delivery startup, In Stock, could find much of what people wanted in nearby shops and bring it to their doors. The awkward part was the purchase it could not complete. A customer returned to Amazon for that item. After enough returns, the customer stopped bothering with the detour.
McHenry had approached the business with a spreadsheet’s worth of sensible questions. Could the team gather local inventory? Could it deliver cheaply enough? Would customers order often enough, in large enough baskets? Could the company earn a margin? In his October 2021 account of the venture, the answers looked encouraging. The behavior of the customers supplied an altogether less encouraging answer.
That episode sits between two very different ventures. Before In Stock, McHenry co-founded Beyond Pricing, now Beyond, bringing revenue-management software to vacation rentals. After it, he founded Page Turner, a nonprofit helping children catch up in reading. The change in subject is considerable. So is the change in how he talks about success. Along the way, a founder accustomed to calculating better outcomes began reconsidering what gives people the opportunity to reach them.
A hotel ambition, a software answer
McHenry grew up in Claremont, California, and attended Princeton, graduating in 2005. His early career took him into investment banking and consulting for travel businesses. At Oliver Wyman, he worked on pricing and revenue management for airlines and hotels. The apparently ordinary question of what to charge had an elaborate machinery behind it. He had spent time close enough to that machinery to see where it might be useful elsewhere.
His co-founder, David Kelso, arrived with a different kind of preparation: startup engineering experience and years of renting a spare bedroom on Airbnb. Together they began Beyond Stays, a full-service property-management business. Their ambition included a recognizable hospitality brand for short-term rentals. Owners, however, were particularly interested in what McHenry’s pricing work did for their income.
The founders followed that interest. Beyond Pricing launched as software in June 2014. Property management had given them a place to test the idea; software gave them a way to offer it beyond the properties they could personally manage. There is a modest comedy in discovering that the interesting part of your hospitality business is the calculation behind the bed. Someone still has to change the sheets, but that someone need not be you.
He had already tried building something smaller. Wetter Feet was an experiences-booking project developed through Nose Rider Labs. When recruiting a technical co-founder proved difficult, he learned to code and built the initial product himself. The lesson was practical: he could remove a dependency by acquiring the skill. His later account also admitted that he had let that venture continue too long without a firm deadline.
Beyond supplied a more promising meeting of experience and demand. In his December 2019 departure announcement, McHenry described a business with nearly 70 employees, double-digit millions in revenue and more than $45 million raised. Those were company figures, rather than a measure of his personal wealth. They marked how far a pricing idea had traveled in six years.
Software launches
A public postmortem
A reading nonprofit
One home is a very small airline
The attraction of pricing software is easy to understand. A rental night expires. Yesterday’s empty room cannot be held in a warehouse until someone wants it. Demand changes with the season, the day and the place. A host who keeps one rate may charge too little when visitors are plentiful and too much when they are scarce. The calendar makes both mistakes visible, eventually.
Yet a single home complicates the methods used by larger travel businesses. A hotel can spread bookings across many rooms. One host cannot make up for an underpriced stay by charging more for another owner’s property. Homes also differ in location, presentation and amenities. Importing airline experience required McHenry to pay attention to those differences.
He described a model that used demand signals and booking feedback, with data from multiple channels. Watching what nearby listings actually booked helped test whether a price was working. Simply borrowing a neighbor’s advertised rate left an obvious question unanswered: had the neighbor priced sensibly in the first place?
“Play with data and segment a lot.”
Ian McHenry, on pricing
Confidence mattered alongside calculation. In a pricing interview published in 2020, McHenry argued for exposing some of the reasoning behind a recommendation: whether a movement reflected seasonality or an event, for example. A host was being asked to let software influence income from a valuable property. A number with an explanation was easier to accept than a mysterious instruction.
The same taste for making businesses legible appears in his writing. In February 2020, he published a rough method for estimating software-company revenue using revenue per employee. In March 2023, he sorted vacation-rental technology vendors by employee growth. These were working approximations, with stated selection rules. They reveal how he likes to begin an inquiry: find an observable measure, compare it, then see what it suggests.
The view from over the hill
Leaving Beyond in December 2019 gave McHenry another measure to consider: time. His second daughter had been born shortly before the company’s large funding round closed. He wrote that he had taken little time away and was grateful to be spending more of it with his family. He credited his wife’s support as part of what had made building the company possible.
His longtime co-founder and friend Kelso would lead the next phase. McHenry wanted eventually to build again, this time in Santa Cruz. He described talented people who lived there for the ocean, the outdoors and family life, then spent hours commuting over the hill to technology jobs. A local company could make a different arrangement possible.
Santa Cruz had a family history as well as a practical appeal. His grandfather, Dean McHenry, was UC Santa Cruz’s founding chancellor. The family also established McHenry Vineyard in the mountains nearby; Ian has helped with the vineyard. His personal website lists surfing, climbing and making wine among his interests. The place offers rather more than somewhere to put a laptop.
He also planned to invest in other founders. The industries he named included optimization software, enterprise technology, travel, transportation and logistics. It was a way to put experience back into the startup community while deciding what to build himself. He had a set of interests, a family, and a town he wanted to spend more time in. A next company was only one possible use of all three.
The tenth item was the problem
In Stock tried to make local shops competitive with online delivery. McHenry’s team gathered inventory from national retailers and smaller stores, then ran a pilot in Santa Cruz. A concierge service let customers text a link from Amazon. The team would look for the product locally and arrange same-day delivery. Shopping nearby acquired a remarkably convenient front door.
In his postmortem, McHenry reported orders averaging about $40 and delivery costs below $4 during the pilot. Some concierge users ordered about six times a month. But their frequency declined over the following months, toward two orders and then barely one. Attractive operating figures had failed to establish a lasting routine.
The product-selection gap was small enough to look tolerable on paper and large enough to matter in life. Finding a suitable local match roughly 90 percent of the time left the other purchases unresolved. The advantage of getting something a little sooner did not always compensate for searching in another place. An everything store has a considerable advantage over an almost-everything store.
McHenry also reconsidered the pressure to start again. People kept asking what came next after Beyond. In 2021, he wrote that this question accounted for part of his haste to launch another company. He had become more conscious of luck and timing, and more willing to look for someone already solving a problem before deciding to solve it himself.
Publishing that account left the failure available for inspection. It included the figures he had liked, the behavior he had missed and the conclusion he drew. The customer had little obligation to admire a clever delivery route. That was a useful, expensive distinction for a founder to learn.
A different kind of return
On May 29, 2025, McHenry announced Page Turner. Its origin was close to home: he had seen some of his daughters’ friends falling behind in reading. Parenthood had also changed his view of opportunity. He wrote about recognizing advantages his own children had before school began, and the different circumstances surrounding their classmates. Effort alone no longer explained the distance between them.
Page Turner’s stated focus was kindergarten through second grade. His launch described one-to-one reading and phonics tutoring, twice a week for 16 weeks, at a cost of about $500 per child in donor funding. These were the founder’s descriptions of the model and its early experience. They gave the new project a concrete unit of work: a child, a stretch of teaching, a budget.
The nonprofit’s own description emphasizes progress per dollar spent. That language is familiar from McHenry’s business career, but the recipient has changed. The rental owner wanted more revenue. The pupil needs to become able to read the words in front of them. The ambition is personal enough to explain the choice and specific enough to invite scrutiny.
His public profile now also describes a children’s reading tracker, with rewards parents can set and book-series information he has been adding. Even here, some of the seemingly effortless software depends on a founder doing the work by hand. He has compared it with the early Beyond days, when he manually prepared new markets after seeing where users wanted service.
McHenry still looks for a gap between what a system could provide and what an individual actually receives. He has learned that the gap cannot always be closed with a better calculation. Sometimes the purchase is missing. Sometimes the starting line is uneven. In Santa Cruz, his attention is now on a child and a page. There is plenty left to do before the next chapter can be read.