Patrick Hogan grew up in his family’s lumber business, an education in an industry where materials have somewhere to go and money can take its time getting back. Construction produces wonderfully visible evidence of progress. There is a wall where yesterday there was air. The accounts receivable department enjoys fewer such satisfactions. A finished job can leave behind a thoroughly unfinished payment.
That distance between work and payment is the territory Hogan has chosen for Handle.com, the company he co-founded in 2018 and leads as CEO. The company builds software for construction suppliers and finance teams, bringing notices, lien management, waivers and payments into connected workflows. Its subject matter is paperwork. Its stakes belong to the people who have already delivered something.
The family connection gives his choice of industry a particular logic. Hogan had seen construction’s back office at close range before he became a construction software founder. He also arrived with experience from another business devoted to making scattered information useful. Before Handle, there was Tenfold, where the missing context belonged to a customer on the telephone.
The continuity is revealing. Hogan has spent different chapters of his career working on the same practical irritation: someone needs to act, and the information that would help is elsewhere. His businesses have dealt with that irritation in different settings. A call-center agent needs a customer record. A supplier needs the right project information before a payment deadline. In either case, searching consumes time that the actual work cannot spare.
First, the person on the telephone
Hogan co-founded Tenfold before starting Handle. The earlier company connected telephone systems with customer relationship management software. A 2016 integration with 3CX, for example, brought customer profiles into view during calls and let salespeople initiate calls from their CRM. It also captured interactions in the customer record. The attraction was straightforward: less clerical work in the middle of a conversation.
This is a modest-sounding ambition until you imagine the employee doing the navigating. A caller wants attention. The software wants clicks. Each extra window enters the conversation like an uninvited colleague. Tenfold’s integration approach tried to keep relevant information near the person who needed it, while allowing businesses to keep the systems they already used.
Hogan’s public description of the team in 2017 put learning, customer focus and ownership together. He said he wanted people with firm views who could listen, engage and choose “what is right over who is right.” It is an appealing hiring principle partly because it makes office politics sound like an unnecessary software dependency.
Tenfold also had the less photogenic problems of a growing software company. Designer James Tucker describes Hogan bringing him in as the product faced customer cancellations, weak satisfaction scores and competition on features. Tucker’s account centers on researching the employees who used the product most intensively, then redesigning around their working lives. It offers a useful correction to the effortless startup story: someone still has to watch where users get stuck.
LivePerson announced its acquisition of Tenfold in October 2021. By then, Jeff Cotten was Tenfold’s CEO and Hogan was building Handle. The acquisition belongs in Hogan’s career history, with that distinction intact. The more interesting inheritance was a method: connect existing systems, understand the user’s interruptions, and give the next action enough context to be useful.
“What is right over who is right.”
Patrick Hogan, on the people he wanted to hire
A familiar team, a different pile of paper
Handle brought Hogan back toward the industry of his upbringing, alongside people with whom he had already worked. Blake Robertson and Chris Woodard were Tenfold colleagues. Lucas Azevedo joined the founding team too. Handle’s own account names all four as founders. Robertson took the technology role; Woodard led marketing. Familiarity gave the new venture a working relationship before it had a long company history.
There is a pleasingly incongruous photograph from the early period: Hogan, wearing a Handle T-shirt, stands beside investor Joe Montana, Robertson and Woodard. Four people, conference badges, backpacks, sunshine. A business built around construction documents had found its way into the same frame as a celebrated quarterback. The documents, one assumes, remained unimpressed.
Handle joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch. Its early proposition combined software for payment-related administration with financing options. The founders were dealing with a business constraint that software entrepreneurs can underestimate: a contractor may have the skills and demand to take another job while lacking the cash to begin it.
For Hogan, that made the office work part of the building work. A supplier’s ability to follow up, keep records and preserve payment rights affects what the business can do next. The person who understands the paperwork has a place in the construction story alongside the person operating the equipment. Handle built its opening around those administrative tasks.
His advice starts before the sale
Hogan’s writing for construction businesses is refreshingly concerned with arithmetic. In a 2022 article, he warned about cutting markups to win jobs without understanding the resulting profit, applying identical markups to very different projects, and failing to track costs carefully. The warning runs against a seductive business habit: admiring a large contract before examining what it asks of you.
He urged attention to the cost of managing work, documenting changes and reviewing performance across the year. These are the details that can make a full order book less reassuring than it looks. A busy company can still make poor decisions if it cannot see which work earns money and which work quietly consumes it.
That advice helps explain the appeal of his software business without turning the profile into a product demonstration. Hogan’s recurring subject is visibility. Before accepting work, understand its economics. While doing it, record changes. While collecting, know the project and the documents. The theme is consistent enough to survive a change of industry.
The memo and the whale
In 2019, Hogan recommended a written narrative memo for proposed projects, borrowing the practice associated with Amazon. His point was that explaining an idea in continuous prose forces clarity. A slide can comfortably accommodate a confident noun and an arrow. A paragraph eventually asks someone to supply a verb.
Another glimpse of his operating style comes from Handle’s work with Endgame. Hogan had a standing request for a current, coherent picture of the company’s biggest accounts. “Give me real time visibility into our whale accounts.” The language is sales shorthand; the problem is familiar. Call transcripts, CRM notes, stakeholder information and competitive research lived in separate places.
Ryan Vanshur, who leads Handle’s go-to-market intelligence work, built connected account views so the team could inspect relationships and risks together. The detail worth keeping is Hogan’s request itself. Here was a CEO selling connected financial workflows to customers while asking his own organization to connect its commercial knowledge. A dashboard is particularly persuasive when it answers a question someone keeps asking.
Read together, these episodes point toward a practical preference: make an explanation coherent enough to support a decision. The memo asks a team to explain an idea. The account view asks it to connect what it already knows. Hogan’s requests give colleagues a defined problem to solve, with a result they can inspect.
The lumber problem grows up
Handle’s $10 million Series A in March 2022 was led by Energize Ventures and Ironspring Ventures. In March 2024, the company announced investments from Amex Ventures and Suffolk Technologies. The latter’s connection to Suffolk Construction placed an industry participant beside a financial-services investor. For Hogan’s company, the relationships matched the two halves of its subject: construction operations and money.
By May 2026, Handle announced a $27 million Series B led by Marbruck. The company said it would invest in payments, compliance automation, receivables and AI-supported workflows. Hogan’s ambition had widened from helping with particular documents to connecting more of the financial work surrounding a project.
Energize’s account of that round put more than $160 billion in construction invoices and financial workflows on the platform. That figure describes the activity represented in the system; it should not be mistaken for Handle’s revenue. Named customers included Ferguson, Cemex, ABC Supply and US LBM. For someone raised around lumber, the presence of building-materials businesses on the customer list brings the career back to recognizable ground.
The challenge grows with that scope. A company serving large credit teams must keep many people, projects and records aligned. Adding artificial intelligence makes the quality of those connections more consequential. A faster answer helps only when it concerns the right project. Hogan’s next chapter therefore depends on the patient work beneath the ambition: reliable records, useful integrations and people willing to use them.
Handle’s Series B, led by Marbruck.
What gets built next
Hogan’s public interests extend beyond the payment screen. His LinkedIn profile describes mentoring young people through City of Dreams SF and donating computers and internet connections to families. He has also argued publicly for more affordable housing. Those activities do not turn every business decision into a social mission, but they add something concrete to the portrait: attention to who gets access to tools and opportunity.
The question connecting his career is what happens when necessary information arrives too late, or remains too difficult to use. Tenfold put customer context closer to conversations. Handle brings construction records closer to payment. His own request for visibility into major accounts applies the same concern inside the company.
A lumber business deals in things that can be counted, loaded and delivered. Software offers less tangible merchandise. Hogan’s work sits between the two: helping the people who supplied something solid make sense of what they are owed. The building may already be standing. He has chosen to spend his time on what still needs finishing.