A restaurant shift has the shelf life of a peach in July. At five in the afternoon, an empty slot behind the bar is an urgent asset. By midnight, it is history. Someone must notice the need, find a qualified person nearby, agree on a wage and establish enough trust to put that person in front of guests - all before dinner arrives with its customary lack of patience.
Sam Mylrea has built much of his career around markets like this: scattered demand, scattered supply and a thick fog between the two. Today he is CEO and co-founder of Qwick, the hospitality labor marketplace that Gigpro joined in 2025. The business connects restaurants, hotels, caterers, event venues and other operators with professionals looking for flexible shifts. Its inventory is not rooms or rides. It is a few hours of a capable person's time.
That sounds like a staffing problem. In Mylrea's hands, it becomes a problem of information, timing and proof. Who is available? Who has done the work? What is the shift worth? Will the business treat the worker properly? Will the worker show up? A marketplace can make the introduction. A durable marketplace must make both parties willing to return.
The investor learns to operate
Mylrea's route to hospitality began in finance. After studying accounting and finance at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, he worked in growth investing, including roles at Oak Hill Investment Management and Aldenwood Group. His published biographies describe six years spent around private equity and growth capital. It was a useful education in what makes a business attractive from across the table. It also gave him reason to cross the table.
At Michigan, he had already tested the founder's chair. He created SimuMarket, a virtual stock-trading platform used by schools and investment clubs, and led two student groups devoted to investing and economics. In 2010 he co-founded dealMobs, a local social-commerce platform. The company was acquired by nCrowd in 2012. One can learn a fair amount about marketplaces in a spreadsheet; one learns a different set of nouns when merchants, customers and code all require attention before lunch.
PureCars supplied the long operating chapter. The automotive marketing and business-intelligence company brought Mylrea in at the end of 2013, after raising initial capital. He later recalled that the founder and board wanted his mix of finance, growth-stage investing, operations and startup experience. The assignment was candid: help grow, scale and professionalize the company, while building enterprise value.
The numbers changed dramatically: published executive biographies put PureCars sales at $8 million in 2013 and $180 million in 2019, a six-year compound annual growth rate of 65 percent, while remaining profitable on an EBITDA basis. Mylrea helped lead the business through its 2015 acquisition by Raycom Media. By 2019, when Diversis Capital and Stage 1 Ventures became strategic investors, PureCars had grown more than fourfold since that sale.
The work was technical, but Mylrea's explanation of it remained practical. Car buyers wandered online, compared inventory, reacted to ads and eventually appeared at a physical dealership. PureCars tried to connect those dots, so a dealer could spend against observed demand instead of intuition. Mylrea spoke about reaching the right customer, with the right message, at the right moment. He called online-to-offline attribution a kind of holy grail.
“In any business, especially early stage, your hardest decision is always what not to focus on.”Sam Mylrea, reflecting on Gigpro's Series A
A resume with a clock attached
Gigpro changed the setting, not the underlying puzzle. Created in Charleston by hospitality veterans in 2020, the platform was designed for an industry already struggling to keep kitchens, ballrooms and dining rooms staffed. Mylrea became CEO and co-founder in 2021. The pandemic had pushed millions of workers out of food service. Restaurants were reopening into a labor mismatch: the demand was visible, the available skill was dispersed and the old recruiting machinery was in no hurry whatsoever.
Gigpro let a business post a shift and experienced professionals apply. Workers set their own schedules and saw the rate before accepting work. Businesses reviewed experience and ratings. Each side rated the other after the shift. Payment followed the job. It was software, certainly, but the more important product was a small, paid test of a working relationship.
In Tampa Bay, where Gigpro launched in September 2022, nearly 2,400 professionals covered 3,283 hours for 72 businesses in roughly six months. Mylrea said the average open shift attracted about 15 applicants. Professionals on the platform averaged $16 to $18 an hour at the time, above a $15 minimum, and were paid after completing the work. Nationwide, more than 160,000 professionals had joined and collectively earned more than $17 million by March 2023.
One design choice reveals the philosophy. Businesses sometimes used a shift as an audition and offered a professional a full-time role. Gigpro did not charge a placement fee. Mylrea said the company did not want to stand in the way of a professional progressing in a career. The temporary transaction could graduate into something permanent, and the marketplace would permit its own customer to leave the marketplace. Sensible alignment often looks a little like generosity until the retention numbers arrive.
Let the transaction create the credential.
A completed, rated shift shows skill and reliability more vividly than a line on a resume.
Design for both kinds of dignity.
The operator needs reliability. The professional needs clear pay, autonomy and a fair route to repeat work.
Permit the useful exit.
If a temporary match becomes a permanent job, the marketplace has still done useful work.
Growth, with the adjectives removed
By 2023, Gigpro ranked first in the South Carolina 50 Fastest Growing Companies program, which measured revenue and employee growth over three years. Mylrea credited four ingredients: people, customers, focus and partnership. None is exotic. The difficulty lies in practicing them after a chart begins pointing northeast and every adjacent idea develops excellent manners.
His public notes dwell on teams more than personal mythology. He describes sales gatherings in Charleston in terms of collaboration, learning and laughter. When Gigpro received workplace certification, he credited employees for challenging him and one another. When the company won an industry award, he thanked hospitality businesses willing to try a new approach and the professionals working the front line. His short personal description remains almost aggressively unornamented: “I'm passionate about building teams and businesses.”
The financing process offers a sharper anecdote. During the six months before Gigpro's Series A, Mylrea spoke with six companies already backed by Foundry, the prospective lead investor. He was checking what happened after the pitch deck and celebratory photograph. Three qualities stood out to him: integrity, partnership and experience. He valued direct language and the judgment to know where to lean in. An investor by training had become a founder reference-checking his investor.
Foundry led the $16 million round announced in July 2024. Stage 1 Ventures joined, along with existing investors Stage 2 Capital and Detroit Venture Partners. The capital was earmarked for expanding the platform, advancing its technology and serving more hospitality professionals and businesses. The filing carried Mylrea's signature as chief executive. The public message was about a future of work with more flexibility. The operational work remained stubbornly present tense.
Two networks walk into a bar
In April 2025, Gigpro and Qwick announced they were joining forces. The combination promised more than 40 markets, a larger professional network, expanded roles and shared improvements to posting, scheduling and payments. Gigpro subsequently adopted the Qwick name. Mylrea's role became CEO and co-founder of the combined Qwick business.
There is an appealing inevitability to marketplace combinations, at least from the safe distance of a press release. More workers attract more businesses; more businesses create more work. The actual integration is less lyrical. Two products, two communities and two sets of habits must be persuaded that the larger network is also a better one. Speed matters. Continuity matters more. A bartender looking for Saturday work is not especially interested in corporate romance.
The combined company now describes its purpose in plain hospitality language: “Help, Made to Order.” Its mission is to become the trusted marketplace businesses use for immediate support or new talent, and workers use to find work and get paid. The trust word carries the weight. Matching is easy to demonstrate on a screen. Trust arrives one kept promise, one accurate rating and one completed shift at a time.
“Part of our mission has always been that we don't want to stand in the way of any pro progressing in their career.”Sam Mylrea on Gigpro's no-placement-fee approach
Mylrea's career can be read as a sequence of industries: finance, social commerce, automotive software, hospitality staffing. It is more useful as a sequence of matching problems. Capital needs a company. A merchant needs a customer. A dealer needs a buyer. A restaurant needs a line cook by six. Each market produces too much noise and too little confidence. Each rewards the operator who can turn scattered signals into a decision someone is willing to act on.
The shift remains a revealing unit for his latest chapter. It is small enough to understand, urgent enough to expose weak systems and human enough to resist pure automation. Fill it well and a dining room opens, a wedding runs on time, a worker earns money and two strangers have a reason to trust each other again. Then tomorrow's schedule appears, punctual as ever, asking what the marketplace learned.