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Red Swan Ventures

Led by Thrive Capital, a Startup Raises Seed Funding to Tackle the Tedious Stuff for Freelancers

Teaser ImageIf you’ve ever  worked as a freelancer, you know the last thing you want to do — after lining up gigs, submitting your work, and reworking your project (when that last person on the client side decides he or she wants something entirely different) —  is to handle all the administrative stuff. Think invoicing. Expenses. Other paperwork.

That’s why a year-old, New York-startup called AND CO is creating a system that does it for you, using both software and live chat support. (Every freelancer gets a personal “chief operator” during working hours.)

AND CO was born at Prehype, a four-year-old design and incubation boutique that produces new ideas for corporate customers. Among other companies to come from its team are the subscription business BarkBox and the office cleaning and management startup Managed by Q.

Prehype founder Henrik Werdelin is a BarkBox founder. Managed by Q cofounder Saman Rahmanian is also a partner at PreHype. Meanwhile, Leif Abraham, a former creative director who joined Prehype in 2014 and was an early employee at BarkBox, is the cofounder and CEO of AND CO. (Abraham says his cofounder, Martin Strutz, also a longtime digital creative, was “like an entrepreneur-in-residence” at Prehype.)

AND CO, which charges a flat $60 a month, focuses largely on freelancers with project workflow, like designers, writers, and developers.

It’s also fairly limited in what it can do — for now.

More here.

Filed Under: Fundraising Tagged With: AND CO, BoxGroup, Prehype, Red Swan Ventures, Thrive Capital

A Slick New 401(k) Platform, From TaskRabbit Cofounder Kevin Busque

1485040In recent years, Kevin Busque began to notice something at TaskRabbit, the outsourced jobs marketplace that he co-founded seven years ago with his wife, and TaskRabbit’s CEO, Leah.

The company employs a lot of younger employees, and according to Busque (who was long the company’s VP of Technology but also tackled HR for some time), they weren’t taking advantage of TaskRabbit’s 401(k) program.

In fact, the participation rate was somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 percent — on par with other U.S. businesses, where 401(k) participation is around just 36 percent, Busque says.

According to Government Accountability Office testimony from 2013, numerous reasons explain such low figures. Sometimes, the employer plans of small businesses are too expensive. Sometimes, employees worry they aren’t making enough money to contribute to retirement savings. Often, too, retirement plans are so confusing that employees – younger staffers especially — decide they’re not worth the hassle.

Enter Guideline Technologies, Busque’s four-month-old, San Francisco-based company, which has just raised $2 million in seed funding from New Enterprise Associates, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, SV Angel, Red Swan Ventures, BoxGroup, Xfund and 500 Startups.

Its big idea: To work with small and mid-size employers in making 401(k) plans affordable for employees — as well as dead simple to set up.

More here.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs Tagged With: 500 Startups, BoxGroup, Guideline Technologies, Kevin Busque, Leah Busque, Lerer Hippeau, NEA, Red Swan Ventures, SV ANgel, Taskrabbit, XFund

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