Fountain serves 275 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, but the company's center of gravity is somewhere else entirely - on the loading dock, behind the wheel of a gig-economy van, on the floor of a warehouse three minutes before shift change. Behr's customers don't run quarterly cycles. They run shifts. They hire a hundred people on Monday and lose forty by Friday, and the math has to work anyway. That is the world Fountain is built for, and that is the world Behr has decided is worth a CEO's life.
He took the job in September 2020, mid-pandemic, into an industry that was being asked to do the most counter-intuitive thing imaginable - hire faster while the floor was on fire. He had been a customer first, then an investor, then an advisor, then a board member. The recruiting platform recruited its own boss along the longest funnel imaginable, which is exactly the kind of detail Behr would find funny.
The pivot tables of his career
Before Fountain there was Stratim, which he co-founded - an intelligent mobility and fleet infrastructure platform that ended up inside KAR Global. Before Stratim there was Adap.tv, where he ran global operations through the AOL acquisition, an exit that turned video advertising into something hyperscale buyers cared about. Before Adap.tv there was Shopping.com, picked up by eBay, where Behr did the unglamorous thing of holding jobs across HR, sales, product management, and strategy - the kind of resume that builds operators rather than specialists.
Four companies. Four acquisitions. There is a pattern there, and Behr does not pretend otherwise. "Being optimistic about your ability to build a game-changing company while understanding that acquisition is very likely is very important," he has said. "In no way is an exit a failure - for most, it's a wild success." A History and Political Science major from UNC Chapel Hill who learned to count exits the way other people count rounds.
A hiring stack for the people who don't sit down
Fountain's pitch sounds simple and is not. Most applicant tracking systems were built for white-collar workflows - long applications, multi-week loops, panel interviews, polite rejection. None of that survives contact with the hourly workforce. Hourly applicants come in by SMS. They drop off if the form is longer than a song. They want to know when they start, not what the company's "values" are. The platform Behr inherited was already aimed there. Under him, it leaned in. AI for screening. AI for scheduling. AI for re-engaging the applicant who ghosted you on Tuesday but is open again on Friday. Automated I-9. Automated reference checks. The mundane, ruthless work of getting a real human onto a real shift.
There is a thesis underneath all of it: the hourly workforce, which still moves much of the physical world, has been handed the worst software for decades. Behr has decided that's a market correction waiting to happen. The total funding now sits north of $218 million, including a $100M Series C in 2022 that put the company in the unicorn conversation. The employee count crossed 400. The customer logos read like a tour of how the real economy actually runs.
Speed as worldview
If you press Behr on what he believes about running a company, he will eventually say a version of this: "It's now the fast that eats the slow." Not the strongest. Not the biggest. The fastest. It is a useful belief to hold if your customers are calling about a thousand-person seasonal ramp that starts Monday. It is also a useful belief for a CEO whose competitive set includes legacy HR vendors who treat a six-month sales cycle as healthy.
He is generous with the rest of the playbook. Trust people earlier than feels comfortable, because "people learn faster when they're trusted." Boost morale by delivering success, not by talking about it. Hire better than you, then get out of the way. Listen to your team. Own your mistakes in public. None of this is novel. The fact that Behr actually does it is.
The customer who became CEO
There is a small and slightly absurd story buried in the Fountain announcement that Behr likes to tell. He used the product. He liked the product. He invested in the company. He joined the board. He became its CEO. There are smoother routes to a corner office, but few that come with that kind of receipt history.
The detail matters because it explains the way he runs the place. He is not a financier who parachuted in. He is not a category specialist who has only ever sold into Chief People Officers. He is an operator who already knew what the product looked like when it worked - and what it cost when it didn't. The chip on the company's shoulder, the conviction that hourly workers deserve the same software thoughtfulness as engineers, is a chip Behr put there himself, on the other side of the table, before he was paid to defend it.
Chatbots are not enough
A favorite phrase from Behr-adjacent press tours: chatbots are not enough. It is a swipe at the easy AI demo - the chirpy assistant that asks four questions and books an interview - and a pitch for a deeper layer where AI does the unglamorous compliance, the verification, the scheduling, the re-engagement. The Fountain product map under Behr now lists agentic workflows, automated I-9, sentiment analysis, real-time hiring analytics. The bet is that whoever wins frontline hiring will not win it with a clever interface. They will win it by doing fifty things in the dark that the candidate never has to think about.
Behr is patient about the timeline and impatient about everything else. He shows up on podcasts - The HRchat podcast, The POZcast, Paul Weinstein's "A Perfect Pivot" - and on the Forbes Technology Council masthead. He writes for Inc. He sits with Authority Magazine and talks about onboarding. He's quietly building category authority while the product team builds the moat.
What he says when no one's pitching
"Even when days are cloudy, there are sunny days ahead for all of us. That's a life lesson I've learned." It is not the line a Silicon Valley playbook would draft for a CEO. It is also the line a CEO who has been through four acquisitions and one global hiring shutdown might actually mean. The optimism is not naive. It is a labor cost. He has paid it.
Where this goes next
Fountain's market keeps widening. Logistics. Retail. Food and beverage. Hospitality. Health care. Manufacturing. Anywhere there is a shift, there is a hiring problem. Anywhere there is a hiring problem, there is an AI use case that earns its keep on day one rather than in a future-of-work whitepaper. Behr appears to see the next decade as the moment hourly work finally gets the technology budget it should have had a decade ago. The total addressable market is, in a sense, "everyone with a uniform."
He does not talk about being the biggest. He talks about being the fastest, and about being trustworthy enough that the hiring manager at a 3,000-store retailer hands over the most chaotic part of their week. If that sounds like a modest ambition, sit through one quarter of frontline turnover and call back.