We're part job marketplace, part recruiter, and part community, fully on a mission to make the future of work more flexible.
It takes many skills to build a company. To grow a team from 0 to 200 people. To launch a product globally from nothing, or to wrangle a project that involves 6 teams, or to build a financial model for a new type of business. We could go on, listing lots of things ambitious businesses need to do to win.
Startups have always brought together big thinkers. You know the type: the people with curiosity, who are lifelong learners, and who bring a growth mindset to their work. They're the ones you want on your team—as full timers, as part timers, for projects, as advisors. You'll take them in any way you can get them.
At HG, we bring together people who have developed world class, proven depth in a few business areas through the experience of building some of the most successful companies of the last 15 years. We call them Generalists.
Being a Generalist is not about being a "jack of all trades", and we're not the place to find the magical unicorn who does everything (because that unfortunately doesn't exist).
To us, Generalists are really, really good at a few things, and have been exposed to many parts of what it takes to build a company. They're impact-hungry, contrarian, and love to learn—and this generalist mindset is a big reason why our members have made the jump from being an employee for just one company to building independent careers of their own.
Times have changed. Hiring managers have realized they can be more efficient with their budget and get just as much done with contract hires. And the very smartest operators are seeking flexibility, building portfolio careers. But it's a hard for them to find each other, and it's especially hard to scope these non-full-time roles.
That's where we come in. Startups produce generalists, and startups need generalists. We've found the best ones who you can hire to jump in and help.
Founded in 2022, and built with love by a small team from around the world.
Elyse Holladay
Technical Generalist
Design, code, & product generalist on xfn teams at Indeed, Bazaarvoice, RetailMeNot. Ex-founder.
Katie Fleming
Community & Operations Lead
Top 10% enterprise sales at Yelp managing 300+ restaurants, ex-CoS at YC backed Venue.
Shaina Anderson
Founder & CEO
Exec at Nory.ai, ex-Yelp COS, built 7 teams at B2B marketplace Chewse from seed through Series B acquisition
In the summer of 2022, I realized that I needed to reframe my relationship with work. I was 15 years deep building fast growing companies, and felt I was at a juncture. I knew what it was to work full-time for one company at a time, but there seemed to be another route. Around me, my smartest friends were starting to make new choices: combining their jobs with, or quitting their jobs altogether to start profitable internet businesses, write online, build courses, and take paid advisory roles. These routes produced the income they wanted, allowed them to share their skills more broadly than before, and also somehow gave them more free time. That all sounded pretty good to me! I was curious.
So, I did a seemingly stupid thing and quit the best paying job I ever had, with a team that I loved, to take a break for the first time ever. (Ugh, the self-torture over that decision!) A few months into my time off, I went to lunch with a founder friend in San Francisco. We got to talking about the problems her team was having, and I agreed to jump in and help for 10 hours a week on contract. I did great work for their team, it scratched the intellectual itch I needed, and also gave me the time back that I wanted. I was hooked: I wanted more!
It was clear that my smart engineering and designer friends had this figured out already. They were “freelancers.” But that label didn't really fit the business-facing work that I did. I didn't want to be a “consultant” (startups are allergic to the word), and “gig worker” wasn't right either. I wanted to explore a variety of projects, have as much impact as possible with the skills I have, and build income from several sources. I wanted to take all of my early stage startup experimentation skills, and apply it to my professional life.
Turns out, that has a name! Aha! I wanted to build a portfolio career.
That was the unlock for me. I leapt into building a coaching practice for startup ops execs. I played around with teaching online courses. I kept taking on contract work with startups. And funnily enough, the more I told my startup friends about the approach, the more I realized they wanted the same thing too. I remember thinking that maybe the exploration would lead me to another full-time project, or maybe it would be satisfying in and of itself — it didn't matter. The point was the flexibility to try things out.
HG is the home I wish I had when I got started. We're the helper for hiring managers to figure out how to find experienced people without the constraints of a full time role, and we're the lead gen source for people like me who want to build portfolio careers of their own. What a pleasure to bring this thing into the world.
Thanks for stopping in,
