The first sale was worth fifty dollars, which is a wonderfully clarifying sum. It is too small to flatter anyone and just large enough to prove that an idea has escaped the classroom. In 2013, Patrick Petitti and his Harvard Business School co-founders were walking into dry cleaners, laundromats, and retailers around Harvard Square, asking owners to entrust a business problem to an MBA student. Most pitches ended with a hard no. One did not. HourlyNerd, the company that would become Catalant, had its first transaction.
There is a tendency to retell startups backward, beginning with the investor list, the funding rounds, and the enterprise logos, as if the founder had simply followed a map printed by destiny. Petitti's route is more useful in the proper direction. It began with irritation, detoured through an ungainly name, and advanced shop by shop. A Boston native educated at MIT, he had already learned how established consulting worked from inside Booz Allen Hamilton and then Vantage Partners. What he saw supplied the grievance that the class project would turn into a company.
“It was clear to me that this was an industry in massive need of disruption.”Patrick Petitti, on his early consulting experience
An expensive way to learn the client's business
At the large firm, Petitti said, teams could arrive without real expertise in the problem they had been hired to solve. Junior consultants were billed at many times their salaries, learning the industry as the engagement proceeded and adapting deliverables previously made for someone else. His description from those years is almost aggressively unromantic: a windowless conference room, a customer site, and a group expected to deliver business value while still mastering the terrain.
Then came the boutique. Vantage Partners specialized in negotiation and conflict management, and Petitti regarded its practitioners as unusually good at their work. Yet he watched that expertise lose bids to larger brand-name firms that charged more. The market appeared to reward the badge before the fit. Between those two jobs, he had seen both sides of the same defect: famous generalists could be expensive and underprepared, while less famous specialists could be overlooked precisely because they were less famous.
The complaint was not that consulting had no value. It was that the machinery for locating, packaging, and buying expertise was clumsy. Rob Biederman, one of Petitti's classmates, supplied a homely example. Biederman's father would ask for help with spreadsheet work that might consume twenty hours of his own time and ninety minutes of his son's. Small businesses had problems worth solving, but the traditional firms were economically absurd for them. MBA students had spare capacity and useful skills. The gap looked less like fate than bad plumbing.
The improbable route from class project to enterprise consultancy
The nerds knock on doors
HourlyNerd was cheeky enough to be remembered and narrow enough to become a problem later. At first, it said exactly what was on the tin. Businesses posted work. Students and independent professionals pitched for it. A matching engine helped connect the two. The founders tested the proposition without ceremony, walking around Cambridge and asking proprietors what they needed. In a later recollection, Petitti remembered leaving a pitch near Veggie Galaxy and walking back across the bridge. The noes were plentiful, but every so often an owner would describe the very problem the founders hoped to solve. Rejection was not the absence of a market. It was the admission price for finding one.
The next validation arrived through email. The founders contacted Mark Cuban cold, secured a meeting, and emerged with momentum toward a $750,000 seed round led by him. They did this without taking an offered route through Shark Tank. It is a neat founder anecdote because it rewards audacity, but the less cinematic detail matters more: they were prepared when the reply came. A cold email opens a door. It does not conduct the meeting.
Within months, HourlyNerd had connected hundreds of businesses with hundreds of consultants. The ambition widened. A service imagined for owners who could not hire McKinsey began attracting the sort of large organizations that already could. Those companies had the same matching problem in formal clothes. They needed pricing expertise, supply-chain help, a post-merger integration lead, or an operator who understood a very particular industry. The procurement process did not guarantee the right person. It merely made choosing the wrong person more orderly.
When the joke name met the Fortune 500
By 2016, HourlyNerd had outgrown the joke. Catalant, a blend of catalyst and brilliant, sounded more at home in an enterprise procurement system. The rename also marked a deeper move. The company was no longer merely a marketplace for spare MBA hours. It was becoming infrastructure for assembling and managing teams of independent consultants and boutique firms. Software handled search, vetting, contracting, project tracking, and payment. Human judgment still had to decide which experience truly fit.
That year, Petitti, Biederman, and Peter Maglathlin shared an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award for New England. In 2017, Catalant announced $41 million in new financing. Petitti also co-authored Reimagining Work, a book arguing that organizations needed a new relationship with talent. The title gave away the larger aspiration. Catalant was not intended merely to make freelance consulting tidier. It was meant to challenge the assumption that serious work required a permanent seat on an org chart or a pyramid of people attached to a famous partnership.
Petitti's public argument about work has always had a personal liberty hiding inside its corporate efficiency. He has described his optimism in terms of choice: people arranging twenty-hour or sixty-hour weeks, selecting a narrow specialty or remaining generalists, traveling or staying put. The company gains flexible capacity. The worker gains authorship over a career. Markets rarely distribute freedom as neatly as their advocates promise, but the principle explains why Catalant's product and Petitti's writing have remained aligned.
“My greatest source of optimism is the strides we've already made to make work better for people.”Petitti on the future of work
A pyramid meets a power tool
Artificial intelligence has now given the old complaint a new target. The traditional consulting pyramid depends on leverage: senior judgment at the top, many junior hours beneath it. AI can compress research, analysis, and production, which makes that economic shape less comfortable. Petitti's answer is not to remove the experienced human. It is to reduce the distance between that person's judgment and the work.
In September 2026, Catalant launched Forward Deployed Experts. The service pairs operators who have run the business function being changed with engineers who can build and deploy AI systems. The company says the design followed an analysis of more than 6,600 data points from client conversations across more than 900 Fortune 500 and private-equity-backed businesses. AI appeared in 52 percent of the conversations Catalant analyzed, while mentions of AI as a top priority had risen eightfold.
Signals behind the 2026 launch
The numbers are Catalant's own view of its customers, not a census of corporate America. Still, the service reveals Petitti's consistent instinct. Start with business KPIs rather than the fashionable technology. Put someone in the room who has carried the relevant operational responsibility. Add engineering talent. Remain through implementation, adoption, and organizational change. In his blunt formulation, technology is not the hard part. Changing the business is.
There is a pleasing loop here. The young consultant objected to arriving at a client without enough domain knowledge. The founder's newest product insists that domain knowledge sit beside the engineer from the beginning. The tools have become more sophisticated, the clients larger, and the acronym newer. The test remains stubbornly plain: did anything improve after the consultants left?
The useful stubbornness
Petitti is now thirteen years into the company born from that Harvard assignment. This is long enough for disruption to become an institution of its own, complete with executive hires, practice areas, and a preferred vocabulary. Catalant calls its model Consulting 2.0. The danger in any sequel is that it begins to resemble the original. Petitti's defense against that drift seems to be the grievance he carried into the business: expertise should be specific, teams should fit the job, and an engagement should reach execution rather than expire at recommendation.
He has said that he keeps quotations on his desk and on scraps of paper. It is an unexpectedly analog habit for a marketplace chief now selling AI execution. Yet it suits him. Petitti's career is full of old-fashioned objects placed inside newer systems: judgment inside an algorithmic match, an experienced operator beside an AI engineer, a useful sentence kept within arm's reach.
The first fifty dollars did not prove that HourlyNerd would become Catalant. It proved only that one real person would pay another real person to solve a real problem. That modest fact is still the cleanest account of Petitti's company. Consulting can become a grand theater of frameworks, decks, prestige, and headcount. He keeps dragging it back to the transaction. Someone has a problem. Someone else knows how to help. The rest is plumbing, branding, and, on a good day, a well-written cold email.