Michael McCrary and the Office That Had No Price

Michael McCrary went looking for an office and found a place that had not quite worked out how to be one. The phones went unanswered. He drove over. When he asked what the workspace cost, the answer was that nobody knew yet. Hub101, California Lutheran University’s new startup community, was still taking shape. For an entrepreneur arriving without a product or outside funding, the uncertainty had its attractions.

The arrangement began with four months of free coworking. Later, McCrary would remember paying $100 for a ten-foot-square work area. It was a modest setting for someone who had already held senior jobs in market research. A corner of a shared room offered fewer privileges than an executive office. It also offered the chance to stop discussing the company he might someday start.

PureSpectrum began in 2015. Its marketplace launched in 2016. By September 2026, the business employed close to 400 people around the world. The distance between those points is usually expressed in funding rounds and growth rankings. McCrary’s story becomes more interesting when measured in people who kept turning up: an old boss, a client with a recommendation, students looking for their first work.

Selling the Midwest in Manhattan

Before he sold access to survey respondents, McCrary sold magazine advertising. At Meredith Corporation in New York, he represented Midwest Living. Selling a regional magazine to agencies in Manhattan meant explaining an audience that could be dismissed as living somewhere between the interesting coasts. Attractive pages helped. Numbers about the readers helped more.

He learned to use data in support of a sale. He also began looking toward online business as digital advertising gathered momentum. Print still had weight, but its future looked less comfortable. The next job came through a personal connection to Keith Price at Greenfield Online. McCrary joined in 2003 and eventually became senior vice president of North American sales.

His subsequent work took him to Cint as managing director and Lucid as president. These were useful places to watch online sampling become a technology business. Researchers needed people to answer questions; suppliers had access to those people. Connecting the two efficiently was becoming a business in its own right. McCrary had spent years learning its commercial habits before putting his own name on the risk.

That experience gave him relationships and a view of the market. It could hardly give him the comfort of a salary once he left. He has described his long period of talking about entrepreneurship with the unflattering word “wantrepreneur.” There is a certain professional safety in wanting. Starting requires a different verb.

Fifteen people and a platform that stayed awake

By January 2017, PureSpectrum had 15 people and an operating technology platform. McCrary had discovered how many jobs fit inside the word founder. Raising capital and building a platform were both new responsibilities. His previous titles had prepared him to lead parts of a company; a startup required him to account for the whole thing.

He could already make a joke of it: “you should do a startup, it’s easy, everyone should do it.” The humor depended on the listener understanding how little of that sentence was practical advice. He was writing about small victories and unfamiliar duties, the daily exchanges through which a proposed business becomes an actual employer.

The product addressed a familiar inconvenience. Buying online sample could involve a network of suppliers, emails, pricing conversations and repeated coordination. A marketplace gathered that activity into software. The promise was that a researcher could specify an audience and get work moving with less manual handling. A good deal of complicated machinery would sit behind a less complicated task.

For a former salesperson, the difficult part was discovering that experience did not remove a new customer’s risk. In a later conversation, McCrary recalled how hard the first period of selling had been. Buyers were being asked to trust a young company and adopt a different way of working at the same time. Familiarity with the founder could open a door. Someone still had to take responsibility for walking through it.

“you should do a startup, it’s easy, everyone should do it.”

Michael McCrary, joking about startup life, 2017

A recommendation worth acting on

One early hire began with someone else’s bad day. Andrew Alabada, a project manager at SSI, lost his job during a period of mergers. That same day, his client Tim Talley of SmithGeiger happened to meet PureSpectrum. Talley told McCrary he was upset about Alabada being let go. McCrary found Alabada’s contact details and invited him in.

They met at Hub101. McCrary showed him the product, and Alabada saw how much time it could save. By the end of the meeting, he had an offer. He later remembered being roughly the fifth or sixth employee. The episode has the appealing untidiness of an early company: a client conversation, an introduction, a demonstration and a hiring decision, all without much ceremony.

It also says something about McCrary’s working world. His business depended on relationships before it had much infrastructure. Keith Price, the sales leader connected to his arrival in research, became an early investor. Talley’s recommendation brought in a colleague. Hub101 supplied a setting where students and founders could meet without arranging a conference. The software was being built inside a very human network.

The company moved upstairs

As PureSpectrum grew, it left the shared workspace for its own rooms in the same building. In 2021, McCrary was running the business from 8,000 square feet there. Remaining close to Hub101 had a practical benefit: the community still connected him to people. It also preserved a visible link to a beginning he did not seem keen to put behind him.

“If there’s any way I can help Cal Lutheran and its students, I’m all in,” he said. He had not attended the university. His attachment came from building a business alongside it. That distinction makes the relationship more personal: the institution had become part of his working life through proximity and help, rather than through a diploma.

In October 2018, PureSpectrum surprised Hub101 with a $10,000 donation at an entrepreneurship event. By December 2020, McCrary was serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence, hiring interns, mentoring students, speaking to classes and helping graduates find places in work. His company then employed more than 70 people. The giving back was specific enough to appear on a calendar or a payroll.

Forty-five thousand reasons to simplify

The founder of a business devoted to reducing repetitive work once had more than 45,000 unread emails. There is reassurance in that number for anyone whose inbox has become an archaeological site. In 2022, McCrary described taking it on, unsubscribing from unwanted messages and leaving Slack channels he no longer needed.

A colleague suggested searching for “unsubscribe” to locate the clutter. It was an agreeably ordinary answer to a problem large enough to invite an elaborate system. McCrary wanted fewer interruptions, more attention for substantial work and more time with his family. He wrote that meetings no longer came with the same urge to check email.

The episode makes his taste for simplicity easier to understand. A clean interface has a consequence beyond looking tidy. It can return attention to the person using it. That is an interpretation of his work, but it fits the way he connected his own housekeeping to the platform. Someone who sells saved time had found plenty of his own to recover.

Remember the person answering

By late 2025, McCrary was writing about another person whose time could be taken for granted: the survey respondent. His account of online sampling’s evolution moved through consolidation, marketplaces and increasingly sophisticated matching systems. Beneath the terminology sat a straightforward concern. The people answering questions had finite time and choices about how to spend it.

His argument was that survey length, payment and the likelihood of completing a survey all influence which work gets attention. Buyers cannot assume respondents will accommodate every design simply because research needs doing. A shorter, more workable survey changes the economics for the supplier as well as the experience for the participant. Efficiency has to make sense to everyone involved.

This is where his sales apprenticeship remains visible. He has spent a career considering what makes someone agree to a transaction. First it was an advertiser, then a research buyer. Now the argument extends to the person supplying an answer. A marketplace can automate an introduction. Participation still requires a reason.

A bigger company, a familiar circle

On January 7, 2026, PureSpectrum announced a strategic partnership with TA Associates. McCrary and the wider leadership team would continue leading the business and retain meaningful shareholdings. The stated plans included investment in the platform, expanded capabilities and further work on quality. For McCrary, another stage of growth would begin from inside the company he founded.

PureSpectrum’s quality work includes PureScore, its respondent-level scoring system. A January update described further investment in usability, automation, global delivery and AI-driven quality systems. Those priorities fit the business’s central obligation: researchers need to trust the answers they buy. Moving the work faster is useful only if the resulting decisions have something dependable underneath them.

The people inside the business get their own attention. McCrary has written about the PSX Games as a way for colleagues across continents and departments to build relationships. When Twin Day coincided with a board meeting, the visiting investment partners joined in. Corporate governance rarely promises much by way of costume coordination. On this occasion, it apparently made room.

In July 2026, PureSpectrum moved its headquarters to a new Westlake Village location. By September, five of the six summer interns in that office were Cal Lutheran students. Alumni worked across the organization, including at senior levels, and McCrary continued mentoring and serving on the entrepreneurship center’s advisory council. The company had outgrown its first rooms while keeping the connection that made those rooms useful.

There is a pleasing continuity here. He arrived looking for somewhere to work. Years later, other people were arriving through the same community, looking for their own start. The office that once had no settled price had helped produce something harder to put on an invoice: a place in other people’s careers.