Josh Bruno took the long way to the corner office

Josh Bruno answered phones. He drove a van. For months, before there was a company to explain or a product to demonstrate, he took on work inside other people’s businesses. These were small agencies, places where a ringing telephone could tell an aspiring founder something a market forecast could not. He had already worked in engineering, consulting and venture investing. Now he was learning what happened when somebody needed an answer before the end of the day.

The detour became Hometeam. Bruno founded the business in 2013 and led it until 2018. Its name was pleasantly untechnical for a venture-backed company. Behind it sat a question about employment: could a business deliver a more dependable service by giving the people doing the work more training, more support and a reason to stay? The question would become a hiring policy, a software project and an expensive operating commitment.

There is an appealingly inconvenient sequence to this story. Bruno had the background to begin with a financial model. He chose to spend time inside the operation first. Watching the work meant encountering the interruptions, handoffs and small decisions that disappear when a business is reduced to a box on a presentation slide. A van, unlike a slide, also has to be parked.

His early research included observing training and listening to calls between workers and their offices. That detail matters. The telephone connects the promise a company makes with the assistance it actually provides. Listening at that junction gave Bruno a way to examine the employer’s side of the bargain. When someone in the field had a question, what did the organization give them in return?

His grandfather was the personal starting point for the venture. Bruno’s professional preparation had been more conventional: an electrical engineering education at the University of Texas at Austin, software work at Yahoo, consulting at Bain & Company and investing at Bain Capital Ventures. The combination supplied several ways to look at a company. Hometeam required him to put those perspectives in the same room.

First the people. Then the platform.

“At first, we were a manual company,” Bruno said in 2016. It is a wonderfully plain admission from someone building a technology business. Hometeam developed its training and employee model before adding the technology platform. The order gives the early company its character: establish how the service works, then decide which parts a computer should handle.

“At first, we were a manual company.”Josh Bruno / 2016

By April 2016, Hometeam was reported to have about 1,000 workers on its payroll. They were W-2 employees. That classification carried a recognizable set of obligations for the business and a recognizable relationship for the worker. Someone had to recruit, train, supervise and support the team. The employer remained in the picture after the initial introduction.

The software tackled scheduling, matching, billing and payroll. These are the administrative nouns that rarely get a standing ovation at a product launch. They are also where hours vanish. An automated schedule can spare someone a round of calls; reliable payroll can spare an employee an argument. The glamour is limited. The usefulness is easier to explain.

Bruno described automation as a way to make room for better compensation. That is a specific use for engineering. Efficiency savings can land in several places on a company’s accounts. His stated intention was to send savings toward the people doing the work. It connected the technical team’s progress to a decision about the workforce, giving the software a purpose beyond its own release schedule.

The model also created a financial constraint. Training and direct employment cost money before they produce any advantage that a customer can recognize. A founder who makes those commitments has to sell two propositions at once: that the service is worth buying, and that the organization behind it is worth financing. Hometeam’s early story contained both arguments.

The company drew backing from investors including Lux Capital, IA Ventures and Recruit Strategic Partners. In 2015 it announced plans for 15 additional offices in nine states. Those were expansion plans, with all the future tense that entails. Opening a new office would mean reproducing an organization, including its recruiting and supervision, rather than merely making a download available in another ZIP code.

The founder hires a people person

In September 2016, Hometeam appointed Elizabeth Schepp-Berman as its first chief people officer. She arrived from Vevo, with earlier experience at Estée Lauder, Nike and Macy’s. That résumé brought a different vocabulary into a startup: employee experience, development, organizational culture. Bruno had made the workforce central to his argument. Now he was hiring someone to take charge of the machinery behind it.

“Our employees and especially our caregivers are what we are all about,” he said at the appointment. It was a public statement with a practical consequence: Schepp-Berman would report directly to him. Her remit included recruiting, benefits and training. The organizational chart put those responsibilities close to the chief executive’s desk.

A company can express concern for its workers at very little expense. Creating an executive position is a more concrete act. It allocates money, authority and someone’s working week. Hometeam’s appointment makes a useful marker in Bruno’s development as an operator: the initial insight was becoming a department, complete with responsibilities that would survive the founder leaving a meeting.

The next year brought another layer. In May 2017, Tom Etergino joined as the company’s first chief financial officer, while Thomas Seaman was appointed general counsel and chief compliance officer. The titles tell their own small story about scale. Finance, governance and legal work were receiving named owners as the business grew more complicated.

For Bruno, building the company increasingly meant choosing people with experience he could draw on. That is a different task from learning every job himself. The early founder collects firsthand knowledge; the growing organization needs people who can act on it without waiting for his instructions. Hometeam’s executive hires show that shift in unusually legible form.

A company has more than one author

Bruno also spoke openly about the people whose judgment he valued. Bryan Sivak was a close early mentor. He named Jeff Kindler and April Anthony as sources of inspiration, and pointed to board members Annie Lamont, Adam Goulburn and Brad Gillespie. The acknowledgments complicate the familiar solitary-founder portrait. This was a business being built in conversation.

There is a difference between collecting impressive names and describing why advice matters. Bruno emphasized the experience advisers brought to decisions and the credibility their involvement gave the company. Both are useful to a young organization. Experience helps a team ask better questions; credibility helps persuade other people to take the answers seriously.

His work received attention beyond the company. In 2016, Inc. included him in its 30 Under 30 class, alongside founders working on transportation, energy and other everyday systems. The recognition placed Hometeam within a broader generation of businesses applying software to work that already existed outside a browser. Bruno’s subject happened to demand a substantial human organization alongside the code.

That chapter had an ending. He served as Hometeam’s CEO through 2018. By February 2024, he and fellow co-founder Gabe Diop were leading a later venture through a change of name from Path to Rula. Today, Rula’s leadership page identifies Bruno as CEO. His current biography places him in Los Angeles. The Hometeam title belongs to his history, even as it remains useful for understanding his approach.

One additional connection links those chapters to the wider startup community. Wonder Ventures lists him among its founder limited partners, identifying him by his Path and Hometeam roles. He had begun on the investing side, moved into operating, and appeared again among founders investing in a fund. The career contains more than one trip across that boundary.

Forty-eight hours, destination undecided

There is another way Bruno has described making decisions: turn up at the airport and inspect the departure board. In a 2017 interview, he explained that relatives who worked as airline pilots gave him access to spare seats. An open weekend could become a short visit to another city or country. His proposed itinerary allowed about 48 hours for the experiment.

He also named snowboarding, scuba diving and trekking among his interests. Taken together, the details give a less corporate picture of his appetite for going somewhere unfamiliar. The airport anecdote is especially good because it includes a constraint. A free seat still has to exist. Even spontaneity, apparently, has an operations department.

It would be too tidy to make the departure board explain the business career. A weekend away and a company are commitments of very different sizes. What the anecdote does supply is a human scale: a person willing to travel for a brief encounter with somewhere new, and willing to count a short visit as worthwhile.

The same profile, years later, can hold an engineer, a former investor, a founding chief executive and a traveler with an opportunistic relationship to flight schedules. Bruno’s public story becomes more interesting when those details stay together. The résumé supplies the institutions. The months spent learning unfamiliar jobs supply the texture.

The lasting question from his Hometeam years is organizational. What should an employer take responsibility for? Bruno gave an answer through training, direct employment, software and executive hiring. Those choices required people to maintain them and money to pay for them. His detour into the daily work made that responsibility visible long before the corner office entered the picture.