Hourly Nerd

Rob Biedermann was working in private equity at firms like Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital when he noticed a recurring problem: whenever they needed outside expertise, they had to hire massive consulting firms like Bain or McKinsey. The result was bloated teams of seven consultants costing millions of dollars for relatively simple needs. "We rarely had needs that really needed that solution," Rob recalls. The idea hit him during a Harvard Business School class project—what if you could connect business talent directly to companies who needed it, cutting out the consulting firm middleman and its massive overhead?

Rob launched Hourly Nerd in February 2013 with two co-founders, all Harvard Business School students with zero technical ability. "Nobody on our founding team could write a line of code," Rob admits. They had three options: find an MIT technical co-founder (which proved impossible given their lack of credibility), learn to code themselves, or raise money to hire developers. They chose the third path. Out of desperation and ambition, they cold-emailed Mark Cuban after being rejected by 25 VC firms in San Francisco on a mere $9,000 in total revenue. Cuban responded in half an hour saying he loved the concept. They raised $750K at a $3.75M valuation, which Rob later admits was "a bad choice" due to the 20% equity dilution, though it was necessary to get the product built.

The marketplace model required both supply and demand. They built a network of independent experts—MBAs, professors, business school faculty, and industry experts—and connected them with companies. Their first major customer story showcases the model perfectly: GE used Hourly Nerd to find a Boston College Business School professor with a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering to teach them about the commercial robotics market. That initial project was worth low single-digit thousands. By 2015, GE was paying $25,000-$30,000 per project on average, and the company had grown to serve 5,000+ customers with 21,000 "nerds" (experts) on the platform.

The take-rate model worked brilliantly: Hourly Nerd took 15-20% of each project fee, leaving 80-85% for the consultant. This aligned incentives and attracted top talent. The marketplace scaled across the entire American business economy—from Jenny the Juggler (a Cambridge juggler spending $300-900 on customer acquisition) to General Electric (spending tens of thousands per project). They raised a $7.8M Series B in fall 2014 (closing January 2015), bringing total capital raised to $10M+. The one regret: bringing in external development firms rather than hiring a technical co-founder early, which diluted equity more than necessary and slowed iteration. By 2015, they'd grown to 58 employees, all in Boston, with over $5M in annual revenue.

With three rounds of funding totaling $10M+, Hourly Nerd had become the leading online marketplace for business talent by 2015. Rob, now 29, had gone from giving up a $400K-600K compensation package in PE to building something with genuine market fit. The company was actively raising additional capital and had proven the model worked at scale across Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike.