2 Billion Reasons We Just Received $15 Million
Time has a funny way of always being right. It always wins. It always gets what it wants and it’s the one commodity that everybody on the planet has an equal supply to work with every day. What we do with it, how we optimize it, and how we try to find more of it is both a delusional game and sophisticated stratagem we play in order to make life work.
I tried to beat time in 1998 in my first attempt to make working an hourly job easier. Time beat me, but it was right. It’s always right. I tried again ten years later. Time was a little more helpful in 2008. Six years ago this summer, When I Work was introduced to a small group of patient businesses counting on three scrappy dudes in St. Paul, MN that were hell-bent on making it easier for employees and managers to schedule and communicate with each other at work.
Nearly two million employees, 50,000+ workplaces, a half a billion hours worked, and over 5 million traded shifts later, time was right again.
Today I’m excited to announce our series B funding led by Drive Capital, Arthur Ventures, and High Alpha. This new funding has infused us with $15 million in new capital so that we can double down on scaling our teams and building communication and collaboration tools that help businesses with an hourly workforce get shi(F)t done.
What we didn’t realize when we started back in 2008 was that 80% of anybody with a job is either an hourly or “deskless” worker. That’s nearly two billion workers worldwide. This is the workforce that makes life work for all of us. This workforce is on their feet, on-the-go, and in front of customers — not on their butts, behind a desk, or in front of a computer. When they work, the world works.
Since realizing that I’ve learned a lot about the logistics of working an hourly job and the complexities of managing an hourly workforce. Those logistics and complexities are incredibly time consuming, daunting, and stressful for both managers and employees. Time so it seems, has a way of creating logistical and planning nightmares for both work and life. Which then begs the question, how do we make work easier so life can be better?
What we’ve found is that if we enable managers and employees to work better together through communication and collaboration on core business operations like scheduling and attendance, then we have an unprecedented opportunity to make businesses more efficient and more successful in what they do. To us, workforce management isn’t first about compliance and control. It’s first about communication and collaboration — everything else comes after that.
We believe the foundation of our customer’s success with When I Work is predicated on our deliberate investment in making sure that communication and collaboration is at the heart of everything we create. We pride ourselves on the fact that nearly 100% of our customer’s employees are active on When I Work every single week. We know the success of any hourly team or business — no matter their size — is predicated on their ability to communicate with one another to ensure the business has the right people, at the right place, at the right time.
Our customers and users have always been the inspiration for what we build and create. It’s their validation that keeps us motivated and looking forward to whatever comes next. We plan to invest heavily in our customer experience and products. We’re going to bring a deeper communication and collaboration experience to our core products — scheduling and attendance — and augment them with new functionality that solves more problems while keeping things simple.
We’re on a mission to help businesses run better so that work life can be better for the people behind them. If you’ve ever punched a clock or traded a shift and remember the hassles that you and your manager dealt with, check out our open positions, we’d love your help.
