Miles Lasater has helped build a public company. He has also helped generate an idea called Cluck coin: fractional livestock ownership through crypto. One belongs in a corporate biography. The other belongs in the drawer marked “perhaps leave the chickens out of this.” Both are part of his education in starting things.
In an account of Purpose Built’s first ten months as a venture studio, Lasater and his colleague Taylor Thompson reported brainstorming 1,044 startup ideas. Most were discarded. The rejected ideas were published alongside the process, a small act of candor in a business that usually prefers to display the winners. A yacht lead-generation business made the unwanted list, too.
There is something appealing about an experienced founder keeping that drawer open. Lasater’s career contains the recognizable milestones: Higher One, a New York Stock Exchange listing, venture investing, board seats. Yet the question running through his later work is more ordinary, and more useful. What happens between wanting to build something and having enough evidence to start?
A living room, then a listing
Higher One began in New Haven in 2000, founded by Mark Volchek, Miles Lasater and Sean Glass. Lasater was still a Yale student. He describes the starting place as his living room, a setting considerably less ceremonial than the stock exchange that would follow. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 2001.
The company worked on the movement of money through higher education. It provided financial-aid refund disbursement services and payment technology for colleges, as well as student banking accounts through banking partners. This was a business with several audiences at once: institutions looking to manage payments, students receiving funds, and banks supplying the underlying accounts.
A founder in that arrangement has to learn more than software. The payment has to reach its destination. The institution has to sign a contract. The customer has to understand the account. Higher One’s filings describe Lasater as chief operations officer from its founding, with responsibility spanning operations and marketing. Before that, he had worked on Walker Digital’s invention team, including intellectual property for businesses such as Priceline.
Higher One went public in 2010. The scale became substantial: more than $200 million in revenue and more than 750 employees over its development, with over two million college students served. Those figures describe the company’s growth across years; they are not a snapshot of its first day on the exchange. For a student founder, the distance from living room to public boardroom was considerable.
In 2012, the company announced a succession plan. Dean Hatton would retire as CEO, Volchek would take that role, and Lasater would become president and board chair while continuing his operations responsibilities. The separation of CEO and chairman was deliberate. His career was becoming a study in changing jobs inside the same business.
The account must work for the student
The public-company chapter also includes a harder record. In August 2012, Higher One agreed to provide approximately $11 million in restitution to approximately 60,000 students in a settlement with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It received a $110,000 civil money penalty.
The FDIC found problems in the student debit-card program operated with The Bancorp Bank, including multiple insufficient-funds charges from a single transaction and fees continuing to accrue while accounts remained overdrawn. The settlement required changes to how those fees were imposed. This was action involving the company and its banking partner; it should not be casually rewritten as a personal penalty against Lasater.
It does complicate an easy success story. Moving money efficiently for a college and providing a fair account for a student are connected responsibilities. Revenue and a listing can tell you that a business grew. They cannot, by themselves, tell you how the product felt to the person using it.
Lasater moved out of the president’s role in early 2014. His part-time employment ended that December, while he remained a director. The record offers a more interesting biography than a straight line of triumphs: an operator helped create a large business, took on governance duties, and eventually turned toward the earliest stages of company building again.
Starting closer to the pavement
He also co-founded SeeClickFix and OneUni. SeeClickFix brought technology to the exchange between residents and local government, giving people a way to report neighborhood problems. It was acquired in 2019. OneUni pursued higher education through smartphones. The settings changed, but education and civic life kept returning.
His connection to entrepreneurship at Yale predates the IPO. He was a founding officer of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society in 1999 and later a founding officer and board member of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. He also taught venture capital at Yale’s business school. Building an institution for founders became another way of participating in the work.
Then came time as a venture partner at F-Prime Capital, investment in dozens of early ventures, and a Kauffman Fellowship. Companies he has backed or advised include FreeWill, Balto and Forage. The investor’s work placed him across the table from people confronting decisions he had once made from inside a growing company.
One description of that relationship is especially revealing. Jeannie Tarkenton, founder and CEO of Funding U, says he brings “equal parts empathy and objectivity.” Her account emphasizes listening as well as direct advice. The combination matters: founders need someone who understands the attachment to an idea and can still ask whether anybody will buy it.
“equal parts empathy and objectivity”Jeannie Tarkenton, founder & CEO of Funding U, on Lasater
A co-founder can be an arrangement
Purpose Built focuses on fintech, upskilling and the future of work. Its offer includes ideas, coaching, operational help and capital. Lasater’s own description of its ambition is compact: “We’re focused on human potential. That means we believe founders can be better leaders.” The founder’s development sits alongside the company’s development.
The studio gives practical shape to that ambition. It works through idea matching, validation, launch and growth. Interviews and prototypes come before a full business. Recruiting, legal work, fundraising and operations become shared tasks. Its published terms describe an initial part-time month and subsequent full-time work, with investment tied to company milestones.
For someone deciding whether to leave paid employment, the stipend is a material detail. Purpose Built presents it as a way to make founding possible for people who cannot afford months without a paycheck. The opportunity to become a founder depends partly on who can carry that interval. An exciting idea does not pay the electricity bill.
There is also an argument about companionship. In writing about solo founders, Purpose Built challenges the assumption that every entrepreneur must find a co-founder before getting underway. It acknowledges what good partners contribute: complementary skills, perspective and shared work. It also recognizes the expense of a poorly matched partnership, especially when equity is divided before the business has done much of anything.
The advice is to spend time talking to potential customers and building traction, then recruit around demonstrated needs. Someone without an obvious partner can still begin testing demand. In that view, the studio supplies a form of support that might otherwise be expected from a co-founder. Lasater, a repeat co-founder himself, is making room for a different route into the job.
Keeping the question open
His public conversations offer another route into his thinking. Startups for Good, the podcast he hosts, explores ventures with both growth ambitions and social aims. Guests have included Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning, Remix founder Tiffany Chu, and Imperfect Foods co-founder Ben Chesler. Their industries differ; the work of making a useful company gives them common ground.
On Forward Obsessed, Lasater discussed early food-service work, his business Help With Home Computers, habits, leadership books and the difficulty of running a public company. The reading list includes David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog. The subjects range from daily scheduling to the consequences of an IPO. A calendar can be a surprisingly consequential piece of business equipment.
His appetite for learning has a domestic counterpart. He describes himself as a husband, father of four and book addict. In his account of family life, answering questions and reading bedtime stories share space with repeatedly cleaning up. The rhythm is familiar to anyone who has attempted to finish one task in a household that keeps generating three more.
There are less predictable entries in the biography, too: improv comedy, dance, scavenger hunts. They make the polished list of company roles feel less complete, in a useful way. A person who organizes things can organize more than a capitalization table. Sometimes the purpose is simply to get people participating.
The next beginning is nearby
In September 2025, Civic Works Department was organized in Connecticut. Lasater co-founded it with architect Ming Thompson and civic leader Caroline Tanbee Smith. Its mission brings neighbors together through community projects and civic participation in Greater New Haven. It calls the ambition the “Civic Century,” a large phrase attached to work at neighborhood scale.
Lasater is also the founder of the area’s Neighbors For Housing and a board member of ConnCORP. At Curious Learning, where he serves on the board, his interest is in literacy’s capacity to change lives across generations. These commitments place the investor’s vocabulary of opportunity beside children learning to read, people finding homes and neighbors meeting one another.
The connection is persuasive without pretending that every project is identical. A college payment system, a startup studio and a neighborhood organization have different customers and obligations. Each asks somebody to build a working arrangement between people who need something and people who can help provide it.
Lasater’s career keeps returning to that space before the finished institution: the living room before the listed company, the customer conversation before the startup, the introduction before a neighborhood project. Starting again means accepting that experience can help without supplying every answer. There is still work to do before the idea deserves a company. And there is usually another question waiting.