Before Michael Burdick built a company around the freedom to work from anywhere, he became practiced at arriving somewhere new. His father spent three decades at Caterpillar, and promotions moved the family through eight or nine states. Four childhood years unfolded in Switzerland. Burdick played competitive sports, learned the etiquette of fresh starts and discovered that comfort is a temporary address. It is difficult to build a settled worldview while the boxes are still being unpacked.
The mobility stayed with him. At Duke University, he studied economics and psychology, a pairing that later looked almost suspiciously well tailored to his work: prices on one side, people on the other. He went to Deloitte and acquired the reliable habits of the consulting trade. He also received a clarifying lesson. A large firm assigns the project, sets the path and lends its name to your business card. Burdick wanted more authorship over the work itself.
He has never treated that early chapter as wasted time. Deloitte supplied the technical foundation and a close view of how professional services operate. It also gave him something every future founder needs: an irritation specific enough to work on. Burdick did not object to finance. He objected to the narrow corridors through which a finance career was expected to travel.
“I believe in taking small risks and failing often, because that's how you learn.”Michael Burdick
The freelance experiment
At Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, where he earned his MBA between 2013 and 2015, Burdick began freelancing on the side. The available platforms promised flexibility but delivered plenty of friction. Independent workers had to chase leads, establish trust from scratch and guess where the next cheque might come from. Businesses faced a different problem: a vast horizontal marketplace could offer every imaginable skill while providing little confidence about which specialist belonged in a sensitive finance role.
Burdick knew both halves of the complaint. He understood finance and accounting from inside a large firm. Now he understood the unease of the independent worker, too. The pairing became Paro in 2015, founded in Chicago as a marketplace for accountants, controllers, analysts and CFOs who could work fractionally or by project.
There was an unromantic elegance to the idea. Companies often needed expertise without needing another permanent seat. Experienced professionals wanted meaningful assignments without surrendering the control that made independent work attractive. Paro would stand in the middle, vetting one side and translating the needs of the other.
The early acceptance rate was less than two percent, Burdick said in 2018. Applicants could face competency tests, interviews, background and reference checks, and practice projects. The process took roughly 20 hours. Such severity was the business model in plain clothes. Financial work requires access to figures most companies would rather not scatter around the internet. Trust could not be a decorative value on the office wall.
A marketplace with a memory
Burdick was interested in what a vertical marketplace could remember. A conventional resume carries employers, dates and titles. A working marketplace can accumulate evidence about tasks completed, industries understood, rates accepted and clients served. In his view, that record could gradually matter more than a prestigious logo at the top of a page.
This is where his economics and psychology meet again. Price discovery in professional services is untidy. The value of a CFO depends on the problem, the sector, the moment and the person asking. Paro's systems build detailed professional profiles, parse a client's needs, suggest suitable experts and help estimate a rate. Burdick has compared the matching process to a dating platform, though the courtship usually involves cash-flow forecasts rather than candlelight.
The data does plenty of work, but he draws a boundary around the final decision. In a 2024 explanation of Paro's vetting process, his sentence ended where many technology pitches prefer to begin: “The process ends, of course, with the human element making final decisions.” The algorithm narrows the field. A person remains responsible for the choice.
That distinction also answers his older complaint about generic labor platforms. Burdick has argued that freelancers perform better when they are treated as people rather than inventory. A useful match includes goals, schedule and preferred work, not merely an open calendar square. The technology earns its place by making those particulars easier to see.
The founder changes chairs
In 2020, Burdick promoted Anita Samojednik to chief executive and moved his attention toward strategy. It was a notable decision for a founder whose company had been closely tied to his own frustration and ambition. Samojednik brought experience in international marketplaces and operations. Burdick remained responsible for the long view, later serving as interim CFO and, in 2025 coverage, as founder and CFO.
A career built by changing the assignment
Paro raised a $25 million Series C in June 2023, led by Top Tier Capital Partners. The company said it had tripled revenue since its prior round, increased average client spending and helped experts improve productivity. Announced funding reached $67 million. The money was intended for enterprise expansion and further development of the platform's AI tools.
By then, the founder's own job had acquired a pleasing circularity. He had left a finance institution because he disliked having too little control over his projects. He then built a finance company, passed the chief executive role to an operator and took up the strategic and financial assignments that suited his contribution. Autonomy, in this telling, applies to founders as well as freelancers.
The rising-star test
Burdick's hiring philosophy carries the scent of the gym. Competitive athletes interest him because they understand practice, teamwork and defeat without requiring any of those words to be embroidered on a cushion. He looks for rate of growth rather than a sequence of grand titles. What has the candidate done? What do they want to accomplish? Is the trajectory getting steeper?
The preference has roots. Competitive sports were one source. Another was Ed Rapp, the Caterpillar executive Burdick knew while his family lived overseas. Rapp eventually became Caterpillar's CFO. Burdick admired not only the career but the balance: work, values and life held in the same frame. For a child being moved around by the same corporation, the lesson must have felt unusually concrete.
“I'm looking for the substance. What have you done? What have you achieved?”Michael Burdick on hiring
His fondness for failure is similarly practical. He believes discomfort accelerates learning, a conviction strengthened by childhood moves, corporate misfit and the ordinary abrasions of company building. He has described himself as a contrarian at heart. Yet much of his contrarianism consists of asking familiar institutions to measure what they claim to value. If performance matters, examine the work rather than the school crest. If people matter, design the marketplace around their preferences. If AI matters, use it to improve a decision and leave a human accountable for the result.
Freedom, entered twice
Paro's two-sided structure makes Burdick's central idea easy to miss. One side wants flexibility because a permanent hire can be expensive and slow. The other wants flexibility because a permanent job can be restrictive and dull. Both use the same word while meaning different freedoms. The platform works when those definitions overlap long enough to complete useful work.
That is also why income predictability has occupied so much of Burdick's attention. Choice feels romantic until the pipeline goes quiet. Paro's promise to experts has included opportunities, pricing guidance, contracts, customer management and performance insights. The freedom he describes is structured freedom, supported by enough machinery to keep independence from becoming panic.
In recent conversations, his focus has widened to the modern CFO. Burdick sees the role moving beyond reports and controls toward growth, commercial judgment and partnership with the CEO. AI, in his account, should be approached through small experiments rather than ceremonial transformation. Try a tool. Protect company data. Learn what breaks. The advice sounds much like his career: make a contained move, inspect the result and preserve the option to move again.
The child who repeatedly arrived in a new place grew into a founder preoccupied with making professional motion less frightening. The consultant who wanted to choose his assignments built a system for other finance people to choose theirs. The marketplace uses algorithms, but its founding grievance was stubbornly human. People wanted a say in what happened next. Burdick decided that desire belonged in the model.