A startup founded by Harvard Business School (HBS) students as part of a required first-year class secured $750,000 in seed funding earlier this week, including $450,000 from angel investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, the Boston Business Journal reports. HourlyNerd, co-founded by Rob Biederman, Peter Maglathlin, David Connolly, Patrick Petitti and Joe Miller, is an online platform designed to connect small and mid-sized businesses with MBAs from top schools willing to provide freelance and part-time work.
The idea was born as part of HBS Professor Clayton Rose’s Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development (FIELD) course, an experiential learning course added as a first-year requirement as part of HBS’s recent curriculum redesign. Through the HourlyNerd platform, businesses can post descriptions of the projects they need help with, and MBAs within the network can bid on work they are interested in by indicating the hourly rate they would charge and the milestones they intend to hit. Within its database, the startup boasts roughly 900 current MBA students and recent graduates from top programs including Stanford, Tuck and Wharton.
The service is geared toward “small businesses that want to access premier quality professionals at reasonable rates and on an ‘as needed’ basis,” its co-founders said in a statement. Once a business chooses an MBA, it then submits its payment, including a small fee to HourlyNerd.
Other investors in the funding round included Accanto Partners and Connect Ventures, according to the Boston Business Journal report. Cuban, in a statement, said that the service “fills a need every entrepreneurial company faces,” adding that he intends to use it “heavily” for his portfolio companies.
Read the complete Boston Business Journal report, “Mark Cuban Backs Harvard Startup HourlyNerd.” Visit HourlyNerd’s website.
