Xuan Yong and the value of going back.

The week Xuan Yong helped close the seed round for his new company, he also had a wedding to attend. His own. The financing closed on co-founder Mike Witte’s graduation day in 2014; Yong married a week later. Then came the move from New York to Austin. Some people ease into entrepreneurship. Yong appears to have booked it between other commitments.

The company was called RigUp. Witte brought petroleum engineering experience; Yong brought a career spent studying energy businesses from the financial side. Both had attended Texas A&M. They were heading back to Texas with money raised, a partnership formed, and an industry whose hiring habits gave them plenty to do.

Witte later described the division of labor simply: Yong contributed financial expertise, while he concentrated more on product and strategy. There was a practical fit between their backgrounds. There was also a considerable distance between knowing an industry and persuading it to use a new service. Their first idea would need the assistance of people who used it rather differently than intended.

Two views of the same oilfield

Yong earned his BBA in Finance at Texas A&M and began at Goldman Sachs. He subsequently worked at D. E. Shaw, Kortright Capital, and Citadel. Energy was the thread through his investment work. He was looking at businesses in which the availability of skilled people could influence whether expensive projects proceeded as planned.

For an investor, a shortage can appear as a cost or a delay. For an engineer, it can be the missing person needed to move a job forward. Witte had worked at Encana and as an engineering consultant. The two founders approached the same problem from different directions: capital on one side, operations on the other.

That combination helps explain why they chose a decidedly practical subject for a technology company. The oilfield already had sophisticated engineering. Its administrative work could still involve calling around for contractors, checking qualifications, and assembling a crew through scattered relationships. A machine could be advanced while the process for finding its operator remained surprisingly old-fashioned.

Yong’s decision was to move closer to that process. He would no longer only assess energy companies. He would have to make something they would choose to use. Financial analysis offers a view of the whole business; a customer, inconveniently, can insist on discussing one task that will not work.

The customers quietly rewrote the plan

RigUp began with a broad marketplace idea: oil and gas companies could find, evaluate, and hire vendors and skilled workers. The founders later acknowledged that the original proposition struggled to attract enough activity. Large suppliers were not particularly difficult for companies to locate. An introduction was less valuable when the parties already knew one another.

Individual workers were responding differently. They used the platform to display their experience and find assignments. The service was doing something useful for them, even while the broader marketplace was having trouble finding its footing. Paying attention meant accepting that the promising part of the product occupied a smaller corner of the original plan.

Reliable payment and access to more work became important parts of the offer. These sound like ordinary requirements because they are. For a contractor, however, the gap between finishing one assignment and finding the next can be the entire business problem. A better directory means little unless it improves that sequence.

The founders followed the activity. Their worker network became more useful to employers looking for particular skills. The attraction ran in both directions: more opportunities brought workers, and a deeper pool of workers gave companies a reason to come. Yong’s investment background had led him to a market inefficiency. Actual users showed him which part to fix first.

The size of the promise

By January 2019, RigUp was announcing a $60 million Series C led by Founders Fund. Andreessen Horowitz announced its investment that October. In explaining the decision, investor David George pointed to the founders’ complementary experience and their persistence in getting a marketplace established. Their ability to connect people was now attracting capital as well as contractors.

The ambition widened. Work in solar, wind, construction, and other industries offered the prospect of reaching more skilled tradespeople. In February 2021, RigUp became Workrise. The name made room for a company whose interests extended beyond a drilling rig. It also carried a proposition about a worker’s career: existing experience might open doors in another part of the economy.

That May, Workrise announced a $300 million Series E led by Baillie Gifford. The reported valuation was $2.9 billion. Its network then included more than 500 companies, and it served more than 70 US metro areas. These were figures from a particular expansion moment, when the company was preparing to invest further in products, training, and new markets.

The funding announcement set an ambition of placing one million workers by 2030. A target that large changes the mood of a business story. It invites the reader to see a platform becoming infrastructure. It remains a target, however. A financing round buys room to attempt something; it does not supply the operating results in advance.

The worker’s version of that ambition was less abstract. Find another assignment. Learn a skill that transfers. Keep earning. Yong’s public arguments for retraining gave those everyday concerns a place inside a much larger discussion about energy and economic change. The appeal lay in giving people more possible destinations for skills they already possessed.

A meeting with dirt on its boots

Inside the company, Yong wanted office employees to understand the work happening outside it. A 2021 account of Workrise’s culture described a planning meeting with several competing priorities. An employee had recently visited a job site and explained the difficulties workers there were encountering. That experience helped the group decide what to tackle.

It is a modest anecdote, which is part of its value. Nobody needed to invent a new company philosophy during the meeting. Someone needed to explain what a worker was trying to do. The visit brought a consequence into a room otherwise occupied by proposals.

“It’s about creating opportunities for employees to have worker empathy.”

Xuan Yong, 2021

Yong’s emphasis on that connection fits the early pivot. Workers had already helped the company identify its useful product. Continuing to listen required more than remembering the origin story. It meant letting the experience of someone in the field influence the next decision made at a desk.

His October 2021 conversation on the Energy Thinks podcast covered similar ground: skilled labor shortages, workers’ marketability, and helping corporate employees understand field experience. These were recurring interests in his public work. A company arranging labor has to understand the person accepting the assignment as well as the business requesting it.

The old name, with more history

The wider business eventually narrowed its focus back toward energy. Yong became chairman of the board in 2022 after serving as CEO. His company’s own account credits him with overseeing restructuring and refocusing. By July 2024, its vendor management offering connected sourcing, onboarding, compliance, invoicing, and payment through software and services.

That product direction reached back toward the procurement ambition present at the founding. Finding somebody to do a job was one piece of a longer commercial relationship. Work still had to be approved and paid for. The administrative details could keep generating friction long after the initial match.

On September 4, 2025, Yong announced that Workrise would become RigUp again. He described a renewed commitment to oil and gas and to the expertise and relationships the company had developed there. The old name now carried more than a decade of operating history.

A return like this is interesting because it complicates the usual picture of progress. The sequence cannot be drawn as a company simply moving into ever more industries. Experience had changed its choices. For Yong, the original opportunity was still worth pursuing, now with a business that had tried a wider range of work.

Another seat at the table

Yong’s career has also acquired another investment chapter. He is co-founder, chief investment officer, and managing partner of MOZAYYX Management, founded in 2024. The firm describes its approach as global macro and semi-systematic. In February 2026, he joined the board of MOZAYYX Acquisition Corp., alongside directors including entrepreneur Nat Turner.

The roles put investing and company building back beside each other. His career began with financial institutions, moved into running a business, and now includes both investment management and chairmanship. Each position asks a different question of the same enterprise: where to commit capital, what to build, and how to govern what has been built.

He remains based in Austin with his wife and children. His public commitments include local public television and Texas youth scholarship funds. The geography has stayed more settled than the company’s branding: Texas A&M, energy, and the move back to Texas remain recurring points in his story.

There is something pleasingly practical about where that story has landed. After the funding announcements and the expanded ambitions, the work still involves helping people and businesses complete an assignment. Somebody has the skills. Somebody needs them. Somebody ought to get paid. Yong has spent years discovering how much company can fit between those sentences.