The germ of the idea for HigherMe started in a chain of ice cream shops in Ontario, Canada. Co-founder Rob Hunter was running them and hiring wasn't easy.
“A lot of millennials don’t answer the phone if they don’t know who’s calling," he said. "They don’t respond to email.”
Hunter left the ice cream business and came to Boston to work at Mobee, a retail data company. When he and co-founder Jef Chedeville left there, they started talking about HigherMe and in 2014 they started it with Evan Lodge, one of Hunter's friends from Babson College. The company's offerings include video applications, interview scheduling and apply-by-text. Its most recent customer win is White Castle, with 400 locations.
Two years later, they've been through Y Combinator (2015). Unlike others who have done that, they returned. On Friday, Hunter told me they've raised $1.5 million in a seed round that brought in angel investors from Shark Tank and all over the country, but not many in Boston.
"There’s enough weird behavior here compared to what I’ve seen on the West Coast....The one thing I’m forced to value so much is my time and one nice thing about the West Coast is the decisions tend to get made very quickly," he said. "Investors came on pretty quickly with a couple of meetings. They didn’t give a runaround, didn’t go dark for months at a time."
In addition to YC, HigherMe's investors include Barbara Corcoran Venture Partners, the AngelList syndicate led by the eponymous NY real estate investor and "shark" on the ABC show, Shark Tank. New York-based Gautam Gupta, founder of Naturebox and a former principal at General Catalyst (also a Babson alum) joined the round, as did Austin, Texas-based entrepreneur and angel investor Tucker Max. Hootsuite's founder and CEO, Ryan Holmes, also invested.
Pictured: The HigherMe team, from L: Shannon Cassidy, Jeff Keeling, Evan Lodge (green glasses) Rob Hunter (grey T-shirt), Evan Lodge (green glasses), Jef Chedeville and Claire Dunivan (courtesy photo).
Boston was relatively under-represented. The Unofficial Syndicate, a relatively new angel group based in Boston, participated, as did Doug Bates of the angel group Walnut Venture Associates and a handful of other angels. (The Unofficial Syndicate, despite being "unofficial" and composed of "non-members," did issue a press release about its investment in HigherMe, last fall.)
Hunter said after finishing Y Combinator, it didn't make sense to stay in the Bay Area, where employers like Google hire away line cooks at $30 an hour plus the kind of benefits they don't get in the hospitality industry. Hiring in hospitality and retail in the Bay isn't really like it is anywhere else in the country, he said. "It’s a little bit wacky."
HigherMe's founders needed to go somewhere more representative of the rest of the US, and Boston was home. The fundraising here was what proved difficult. Having a few West Coast connections was helpful, Hunter said.
"Fundraising can be a little bit like Game of Thrones," he said. "Everyone is so focused on getting the iron throne, when in fact there’s a horde of undead zombies up north ready to destroy you."
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