Rob Biederman and the value of finishing last

Rob Biederman had found a market that disliked his business. Unfortunately, it was full of people studying business. In a Harvard Business School classroom exercise, students could trade shares in one another’s startup ideas. His team’s venture, HourlyNerd, placed 150th out of 150. For a group selling access to MBA talent, this was an awkward review from the inventory.

The assignment was modest: teams of six received $5,000 and had to start something. Biederman’s group put up a $10 website and knocked on doors. The proposition was that small businesses needed occasional help with business problems, while MBA students had useful skills and hours to sell. A company could buy the work without acquiring a full-time employee or a consulting firm’s entire apparatus.

The classroom verdict made a memorable story. The more consequential experiment happened outside it. Someone had to describe a problem, agree on an assignment, and pay. In Biederman’s account, the first transaction was worth $50. An unglamorous sum, but it represented something the student share price could only imitate: a customer choosing to spend actual money.

By the end-of-term trading session, he recalled, the team had become the most-traded stock. The reversal offers a satisfying ending to a school anecdote. His subsequent career makes the first result more interesting. A room of clever people had assessed the idea. The founders still needed to discover who might use it.

02Before the pitch, a spreadsheet for Dad

The original problem had appeared close to home. Biederman was helping his father’s small business with financial tasks in Excel. Work that took his father many hours took him far fewer. His father understood business; what he lacked was convenient access to a particular skill. Hiring someone permanently would have been an expensive answer to an intermittent question.

Biederman had the background to recognize the mismatch. He graduated from Princeton in 2008 and worked at Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital before Harvard Business School. Those institutions supply a fairly legible career path. Selling a few hours of a student’s time to a shop owner introduced a different kind of transaction, with rather less ceremony.

There was an earlier rehearsal for meeting people where they were. At Princeton, he served as undergraduate student government president. His campaign involved visiting students in dormitories, dining halls and other campus gathering places. After winning, he promised to meet every student over the following year. The claim was ambitious; the reasoning was practical. People might be more comfortable raising concerns after meeting him.

In 2008, he also presented findings from a student survey about socioeconomic differences on campus. The questions concerned access to the experience around an education, including activities and course materials. These were specific obstacles that a university’s impressive aggregate resources did not automatically solve. Years later, his business would likewise ask what a particular person needed to get something done.

03A billionaire answers the email

HourlyNerd launched in 2013 with Biederman, Pat Petitti, Peter Maglathlin and Joe Miller among its founders. Getting the idea onto a website did not make its creators software engineers. They initially outsourced development. The gap between knowing what a product should accomplish and being able to build it became one of the company’s early constraints.

Then came the funding problem. Investors were skeptical, and the young business had little revenue with which to change their minds. The founders sent a cold email to Mark Cuban. Biederman later recalled receiving a positive response within twenty minutes. A message sent without an introduction became the start of an investment relationship.

Cuban’s appeal in this story is partly his accessibility. The advice Biederman remembers is equally direct: “Get out of the office and go sell stuff.” There are elaborate ways to discuss commercial validation. This version was unlikely to require a follow-up meeting.

The instruction fit what the founders were already learning. An early company can spend a great deal of time deciding how to describe itself before it knows why anyone buys. Biederman’s recollections return to conversations with customers, and to the danger of treating strategic discussion as progress in its own right. The door-to-door work gave those discussions something to work on.

“Get out of the office and go sell stuff.”Mark Cuban’s advice, recalled by Rob Biederman

04HourlyNerd grows out of its name

As the business developed, the buyer changed. The early pitch paired students with smaller companies. Demand increasingly came from large enterprises that needed experienced specialists. By 2015, Biederman said, GE and Staples were regular users and the platform had more than 10,000 consultants. The original name began to sound like a description of a company they were leaving behind.

In July 2016, HourlyNerd became Catalant. The new word combined catalyst, brilliant and talent. It was a considerable amount of vocabulary to fit into a name, but it made room for a different enterprise conversation. The announcement followed a $22 million Series C led by General Catalyst. This was now a business selling access to expertise across corporate boundaries.

Its underlying question remained approachable: which person can help with this particular job? A large employer can possess thousands of capable employees and still struggle to find the relevant experience. An independent consultant can possess that experience and struggle to reach the buyer. Catalant made the connection into a product and a commercial process.

Biederman, Petitti and Maglathlin expanded the argument in their 2017 book, Reimagining Work. Its chapters move from HourlyNerd and the gig economy to the flexible workforce and the relationship between work and life. The scope had widened from a student earning extra money to experienced people choosing how to deploy their skills. The transaction was becoming an argument about how companies organize work.

05The costs of learning while growing

Biederman’s accounts of building the company include some refreshingly ordinary regrets. He thought the team had underinvested in graphic design. A website’s appearance affected whether buyers took it seriously, yet the lost business was difficult to measure. The customers who left before calling did not submit a useful report explaining their departure.

He also described protecting the first hour of his working day for its most important task. There was a simple defensive purpose: whatever interruptions followed, at least that work would be done. Alongside fundraising and market expansion, the company required mundane decisions about what deserved attention on a Tuesday morning.

By June 2022, he wrote that Catalant generated more than $100 million in annual gross revenue. That is a statement about the business’s scale, with “gross” doing necessary work. It should not be mistaken for profit or the founder’s personal wealth. He had spent eight years as co-CEO before moving to the chairman’s role in 2021.

His notes from that period became advice for other founders. Some of it concerns reversibility, customer proximity and choosing investors realistically. One admission carries particular weight: an early Greylock investor kept asking what the team had learned about customers, and Biederman wished they had given the question greater priority. Growth could be visible long before the organization understood enough about what was producing it.

06Changing sides of the table

Asymmetric Capital Partners gave him another way to work on those problems. He launched the firm with Sarah Unger Biggs and Sam Clayman; Nancy Chou was also part of the founding team. Its debut fund was reported at $105 million. After years of asking investors to back his company, he was helping decide which founders would receive that backing.

The change complicated his view of venture capital. He acknowledged that, as a founder, he had underestimated the competing demands on an investor’s time. He also came to see how much a financing decision depended on the people entering a long relationship. Spreadsheets could establish whether an investment made sense. They could not complete the introduction.

His own description begins with curiosity: “I’m fascinated by the mechanics of business.” He wants Asymmetric involved in the practical work around a company, including recruiting, commercial strategy and financial questions. That ambition places a burden on the investor as well as the founder. Being available when the news is difficult is part of the job he says he wants.

He has also returned to Harvard Business School as an executive fellow, working with Jeffrey Rayport on Scaling Technology Ventures. The classroom that once provided a cheap environment for testing an idea now receives someone who has lived through the expensive version. A venture can be discussed in an afternoon. Its consequences tend to keep longer hours.

“I’m fascinated by the mechanics of business.”Rob Biederman · 2023

07An overlooked business, and four more mountains

By 2026, Biederman was making a more specific argument about where to invest. In his May annual-meeting essay, he favored industry insiders applying AI to practical operations, including home services, manufacturing and vertical marketplaces. He argued for a deliberately constrained fund size and concentrated ownership. These are his investment preferences, rather than a guarantee about the companies’ eventual returns.

An August investment made the preference tangible. Asymmetric led an $8 million seed round for Reservoir, which develops predictive water heaters, alongside Founder Collective and MCJ. Biederman also announced that he had joined its board. It is a product whose usefulness can be tested at a kitchen tap, a pleasingly concrete destination for a discussion of artificial intelligence.

In an October 18 interview, he again described wanting to work in areas without excessive competition for investments. The continuity with HourlyNerd is suggestive: start with an identifiable need, then examine whether the prevailing way of meeting it leaves an opening. He now has capital to deploy as well as an operating history to bring to the question.

Away from that work, his biography records a second set of unfinished projects. He has climbed 44 of the White Mountains’ 48 peaks above 4,000 feet, and wants to turn more fully to ski touring once the list is complete. There is also a claim about making spicy rigatoni that can compete with Carbone. Some propositions are best assessed over dinner.

The mountains supply an appropriately modest ending for someone whose career began with an unfavorable ranking. Forty-four completed climbs leave four to do. The list makes progress visible without declaring the work finished. Biederman’s professional story has a similar useful tension: plenty of evidence that an idea can travel, and another specific problem waiting beyond the next door.