Jenny He and the birthday that became a building company

In 2018, Jenny He went to New York to try to reset her professional life. She had just closed ezhome, the outdoor home-services startup she had led as CEO for eight months. There had been a pivot and a 70 percent layoff. It was her birthday. New York had once been the setting for career highs during her years at McKinsey; now she was returning to friends with a rather different story to tell.

That same birthday, she and Odysseas Tsatalos officially started Ergeon. The coincidence makes a tidy anniversary, but the circumstances give it weight. Starting again meant carrying experience from a company that had ended into one whose prospects were still unwritten. A birthday generally asks you to contemplate the next year. Jenny had given herself a considerably longer assignment.

Years later, when Ergeon began operating in New York, she described the return as a chance to replace those earlier memories. The new venture still had plenty of friction: securing New York licensing had taken more than a year, and launching there required a wider assortment of fence styles than other markets. Even a fresh start, it seems, comes with forms to fill out.

The job she chose was concrete in both senses. Ergeon arranges outdoor construction, with local installers doing the physical work and a technology-supported team managing the surrounding process. A fence is easy to picture. Everything that has to happen before somebody starts putting posts in the ground is a more interesting problem.

Learning to choose the problem

Jenny was born in China to engineer parents. Her father became an entrepreneur while she was a teenager. Later, she would describe his determination to commercialize technology, and his persistence when business became difficult, as an influence on her own approach. Entrepreneurship entered her life through someone she knew, before it became a career choice of her own.

At the University of Toronto, she studied engineering science, majoring in electrical engineering. A co-op placement at a semiconductor company gave her an early encounter with Silicon Valley. She has credited that experience with making a later move to California easier to imagine. Before the business plans and investor meetings, there was the quieter usefulness of having already been somewhere.

She went on to Princeton, completing her electrical engineering doctorate in 2008. Her research concerned computer networking; Jennifer Rexford and Mung Chiang advised her thesis, “Rethinking Traffic Management: Design of Optimizable Networks.” The title belongs to the internet, but its concern with how a system behaves offers a useful way to read her subsequent career.

Graduate school also supplied a less technical lesson. She recalled the difficulty of moving from assigned coursework to choosing research questions, including two thesis directions that led nowhere. Her advisers suggested mentoring an undergraduate. Helping someone else continue became a source of purpose for Jenny, too. She has since described management and mentoring as recurring sources of satisfaction in her work.

That experience gives her academic background a human dimension. A doctorate is often presented as evidence that somebody knows the answer. Research also teaches the discomfort of discovering that the question needs work. For a founder choosing where to spend years of effort, that distinction has practical consequences.

The backyard is a coordination problem

After Princeton came seven years at McKinsey, working with industrial clients. In summer 2015, she joined ezhome as a senior vice president, later becoming COO and CEO. This put her close to the business of maintaining people’s outdoor spaces, alongside Tsatalos. When they founded Ergeon in 2018, their partnership already had a working history.

Tsatalos brought experience from co-founding oDesk, which became Upwork, and Intacct. On Ergeon’s account of its beginnings, conversations with his contractor, Omar, revealed the difficulties skilled installers faced in expanding their businesses. Jenny’s own renovation experience helped direct her attention to the process from the homeowner’s side. Two perspectives converged on the work surrounding the work.

Consider the choreography of a modest home project. Someone needs to understand the request, measure the property, establish a price, arrange materials and labor, communicate changes, and see the job through. The homeowner may encounter that choreography as a succession of unanswered questions. The installer may encounter it as hours of administration surrounding a trade they already know.

Ergeon uses video calls and satellite imagery for remote property assessment, then coordinates projects delivered by local contractors. Its approach brings estimating and customer communication into a system that can be handled at a distance. Physical installation remains rooted in a particular yard, with particular materials. The office work can travel farther.

That division is what makes the company interesting as Jenny’s next act. She had studied networks and worked on industrial operations; now she was dealing with the handoffs between people who need something built and people who can build it. The fence is the visible result. The less visible product is a process that people can follow.

A doctorate does not waive the licensing exam

Jenny became a licensed contractor herself. Her 2025 conference biography described licenses in 13 states; in a 2023 reflection on founding, she had reported serving as the qualified employee for licenses in ten. Those are dated snapshots of a job that has expanded along with the company. They also make the CEO’s responsibilities unusually tangible.

Licensing brings ambition down to the level of jurisdictions, applications, and exams. A plan to serve more households has to pass through those requirements. You can put a national expansion arrow on a presentation in seconds. Getting permission to carry out the work takes rather more patience. Jenny’s New York account is a useful reminder of the difference.

Her public reflections on the first five years of Ergeon give founding a similarly practical character. She described a stronger sense of responsibility than she had experienced as a hired CEO, including unfamiliar tasks that still needed doing. She also urged founders to resist changing their vision merely to fit investment fashions and to find long-term partners with compatible values.

The company has attracted institutional backing: her construction conference biography reports $83 million raised, with investors including MetaProp, Prysm Capital, and Basis Set Ventures. The money belongs to Ergeon’s financing story. Beside the licenses, it illustrates two different requirements of expansion: persuading people to fund a business and satisfying the rules under which that business operates.

An office spread across the map

Ergeon has operated with a distributed workforce from the beginning. In January 2025, Jenny’s University of Toronto speaking biography described more than 300 staff across more than 40 countries. For a company whose finished work sits in American backyards, its office geography is striking. The team that coordinates a local installation can be an international one.

Jenny has discussed remote management as a question of how to judge the work fairly. In her conversation with Sophie Wade, she considered when productivity should be assessed at the individual level and when the team is the more sensible unit. Different jobs require different comparisons. Customer experience, task complexity, training, and access to suitable tools all matter to that assessment.

This is a practical complication of distributing work. Counting activity is easy; deciding whether that activity helped a customer is harder. A call, an estimate, and a solved scheduling problem are different contributions. An organization needs enough understanding of those differences to avoid rewarding whatever happens to be easiest to count.

Her public interviews also show the social work that accompanies the operational work. In 2023, Ergeon shared fireside conversations with colleagues about startup life, career growth, and staying connected while working remotely. Those conversations make space for employees to explain their experiences rather than appear only as names attached to a function.

Jenny’s own five-year reflection included the surprise of forming close relationships with colleagues she had never met in person. It required making room for personal conversation. A calendar is quite capable of filling every available minute with business; friendship usually needs somebody to interfere with it.

“Lonely at the top is a choice.”Jenny He, reflecting on five years of Ergeon

Making room for the next person

The mentoring thread reaches beyond Jenny’s Princeton years. In a company discussion of gender equality, she described the diminishing availability of women mentors as a career advances. The observation is personal and organizational at once: reaching a leadership role can mean discovering that fewer people around you have taken a comparable route.

Ergeon’s 2021 discussion brought women managers together to talk about those experiences. At the time, the company said women held about half of its management positions. The value of such a conversation is in its specificity. People can describe the obstacles they met, the support they received, and the opportunities they wish had appeared sooner.

Jenny put the visibility problem plainly: “It’s hard to see yourself in a position if you don’t see someone like you in that position.” Her own combination of engineer, executive, and licensed contractor makes that observation more than an abstract statement. It supplies an example that another person can actually point to.

In January 2025, she was scheduled to return to the University of Toronto’s Engineering Science Education Conference to discuss technology in construction services. The subject brought her operating experience back to the place where she learned to structure problems. It is a pleasing loop in a career that has crossed research, consulting, and two home-services businesses.

Ergeon’s current company page reports more than 41,000 completed outdoor projects. That figure describes a business beyond its founding moment, but the birthday remains a useful place to understand Jenny. She started with experience that included an ending, chose another difficult problem, and accepted the paperwork along with the possibility. Somewhere between a research question and a finished fence, there is a great deal of work to organize. She has made that her job.