The first useful thing to know about Mark Kasdorf is that he once completed law school and then declined to become a lawyer. He had debt, a wife, a four-month-old child and a software company that was collapsing. The sensible door was open. Kasdorf looked at it and started another company, almost by accident.
That second attempt became Intrepid Pursuits, a mobile design and development studio. It began in 2010, when corporate enthusiasm for apps often exceeded corporate understanding of them. Kasdorf and his team built products for companies including Fidelity, Bose and Procter & Gamble. The business was bootstrapped from zero to $25 million in revenue over roughly six years. In 2017, Accenture acquired it and brought its 150 employees into Accenture Digital.
The résumé version is smooth. Kasdorf's own telling is not. His first company “failed, blew up.” Intrepid started in the ashes. He became a stay-at-home father while finishing law school and trying to find the next move. Years earlier, at Hamilton College, he had studied mathematics. Law added a credential; entrepreneurship supplied the occupation.
The recurring apprenticeship
Intrepid's work was technical, but its durable idea was human. The company used an apprentice-style model to develop mobile talent. That mattered in an industry where demand for capable developers regularly outran supply. Kasdorf learned to manage a services business in which utilization was everything and the scarce asset went home every night.
He also learned to sell. At 29, he described a founder as the person selling products to customers, vision to employees and belief to investors. The observation has aged well because it is less romantic than it sounds. A services company wakes up each morning with payroll, a calendar and a finite number of expert hours. Morale is not decoration. It is part of capacity.
“I have an almost pathologically high-risk tolerance.”Mark Kasdorf, reflecting on entrepreneurship
Kasdorf's side projects during the Intrepid years suggest a mind that likes nearby experiments. He opened Intrepid Labs, a coworking space in Kendall Square. He started a coffee shop. He helped launch Timbre, a live-music discovery app that grew from a hackathon prototype, earned an Apple New and Noteworthy placement and was later sold to Seatwave. He also returned to Hamilton to create a pitch competition for students and alumni who, as he once had, might not yet know what a venture capitalist was.
His management habits could be equally specific. Intrepid served dinner to the whole company on Friday nights, when people might remain in the office talking, listening to music and extending the week by choice. Holiday gifts carried a generous per-person budget and were selected individually. These details can sound like startup folklore, but they reveal Kasdorf's operating instinct: a company is a social system before it is a slide of recurring revenue. He wanted talented people to feel that the institution noticed them.
That instinct connects the polished studios of Kendall Square to Forge's workshop. Apprenticeship works only when the learner is more than cheap capacity. Someone must invest time, define progress, correct mistakes and make the next rung visible. Kasdorf's companies sell very different work, yet both depend on turning inexperienced people into trusted professionals. The technology changed. The obligation to teach did not.
A house refuses to be an app
After the acquisition, Kasdorf stayed at Accenture for several years and worked for someone else for the first time. Then a home-improvement project went badly. The ordinary frustration led him toward a more interesting question: why could his father's generation keep an electrician, plumber, carpenter and handyman on speed dial while homeowners now waited weeks for skilled help?
The obvious software-founder answer was a marketplace. Kasdorf rejected it. The people who could do the work were already busy; another stream of leads would not create another trained pair of hands. Software might improve scheduling, design and communication, but the binding constraint was labor. So the company that became Forge went directly at recruiting, training and employment.
“You can't gigify the trades.”Kasdorf on the limits of marketplace logic
His argument is physical. A heat-pump installation may require two or three trained people, an equipped truck, thousands of dollars in materials and the homeowner's permission to interrupt the machinery that keeps the house comfortable. A driver can join a ride-sharing platform with a familiar skill and a car. An HVAC crew arrives to perform what Kasdorf calls a kind of surgery on a home. Trust, coordination and specialized judgment travel together.
Forge first tried to cover the trades broadly. It experimented with windows, insulation and carpentry. Kasdorf later called the early approach ignorant and arrogant, an unusually economical diagnosis from a founder. The company narrowed to HVAC and then to heat pumps. Focus made the training more repeatable, the equipment set more coherent and the customer promise easier to understand.
Heat pumps are the wedge
Kasdorf calls HVAC a “Goldilocks trade.” It is complex enough to require meaningful training, yet can be expanded differently from electrical and plumbing work, where licensing structures impose other constraints. Heat pumps also sit inside a large energy transition. They heat and cool homes without burning fuel at the point of use, and Massachusetts incentives have helped turn homeowner curiosity into demand.
By the time Kasdorf appeared on the Heat Pump Podcast in late 2024, Forge had gone from its first installation to more than ten field crews in about 18 months. It was installing roughly ten to fifteen heat pumps a week, with revenue still concentrated in Massachusetts. Growth came without buying existing contractors. The people pipeline was the expansion method.
The model carries an old-fashioned bargain inside a venture-backed company. Kasdorf wants Forge to be a long-term employer, offering a visible path from an entry wage to leading a crew and, eventually, a six-figure income. His view is that good pay, benefits, reliable hours and progression remove much of the pressure for a skilled technician to leave and hang out a shingle. Retention and training become two sides of the same operating system.
Build for the next plateau
Kasdorf's most portable idea is about process. Do not design a five-person company's workflow for 500 people. Design it to reach 15, then rebuild it. At 25 technicians, Forge needed systems that could carry 75. Pretending one process will scale forever usually produces elaborate machinery for a future that has not arrived, while today's crew still assembles parts inefficiently at the job site.
This is where the software operator remains visible. Kasdorf divides Forge into customer, job and professional journeys, then looks for places where tools can remove delay or capture useful information. Generative AI can gather field feedback. Remote checks can preserve expertise. Scheduling software can reduce friction. Yet none of it is allowed to pretend the technician is optional.
He is equally candid about the CEO's limits. A person suited to taking a company from zero to $1 million may not be the person for $100 million to $1 billion. Kasdorf knows he has taken one business to $25 million and believes he can lead Forge to $100 million. If it gets there, he has said he will ask whether a different skill set is needed for the next climb. Ambition sounds healthier when it contains an off-ramp for ego.
The long game, measured in careers
Kasdorf talks on two clocks. On a five-to-eight-year horizon, he wants an end-to-end Forge system that can be repeated across much of the United States, with training facilities and installation teams in local markets. On a much longer horizon, he imagines one relationship through which a homeowner can improve a house, starting with HVAC and potentially widening to kitchens, plumbing and service work.
It is an enormous map. The present reality is narrower and therefore more persuasive: a Massachusetts contractor that only installs heat pumps, recruits its own installers and tries to make the route from novice to crew lead shorter without making the craft smaller.
Outside work, Kasdorf's company biography lists cooking, running and chess. The trio fits. Cooking rewards preparation, running rewards repetition, and chess punishes anyone who confuses a grand plan with the next correct move. Forge may have a national ambition, but it advances through intensely local acts: a trainee learning a tool, a crew earning a truck, a homeowner turning on a new system.
Kasdorf left the clean glass of the app economy for basements, attics and winter weather. He did not leave technology behind. He put it in its place: beside the worker, inside the process, useful only when it helps a real crew do real work better.