June

Lane Campbell had already sold five companies by age 30, but his biggest insight came from his time running an IT staffing firm. While recruiting top technical talent, he noticed that happy, well-paid engineers wouldn't return his calls. Out of desperation, he tried something unconventional: he offered them $20-50 just to take a phone call. "They said, you know, great. Yeah, OK," Lane recalls. The breakthrough was realizing this was far cheaper than advertising on job boards or paying someone to sit in a chair making calls all day.

June launched in August 2015 as a two-sided marketplace. Recruiters could search for candidates by skill and location, match with them, and pay them $50 for a 10-minute phone call to discuss a job opportunity. June would take a 30% marketplace fee on each transaction. The platform included call recording for dispute resolution and a preliminary vetting process for candidates, though they didn't phone interview everyone. Lane had identified a massive market need: he'd found that the average cost to hire someone for an $80,000-per-year job had ballooned to $26,000, with over half of all job placements in the country filled through recruiters.

The strategy was elegant but hit a fundamental problem: customer acquisition. Unlike traditional staffing firms that make 20-25% of first-year salary, June only made $15 per $50 call (30% of $50). This meant they couldn't afford to advertise to candidates the way traditional recruiting platforms could. They needed the platform itself to be attractive enough that people would sign up voluntarily to get paid for phone calls. Between August and November 2015, the product didn't resonate with the technical community as much as they'd hoped, causing internal fragmentation.

By January 2016, Lane had temporarily put June on hold while managing other ventures—advising several startups, serving as CTO for Venture Ventures in Chicago, and running a consulting side business called Creatively that brought in approximately $500,000 in 2015. However, June remained his main focus in terms of time commitment. Lane planned to relaunch June later in 2016 with new partnerships, which he expected would significantly accelerate growth. The core thesis remained unchanged: June could fundamentally reshape recruiting economics by making the hiring process more efficient, more transparent (with recruiter ratings), and more valuable for candidates who got paid for their interview time.