Zince Arlan Hamilton, who founded the startup firm Backstage Capital in 2015, has invested millions in over 195 firms driven by underrepresented entrepreneurs, ranging from a couple tackling car insurance to a group reinventing how we learn electronically. Despite the industry’s diversity, Hamilton says her portfolio firms constantly ask her two questions: “Could you assist us in raising funds?” “Can you assist us with hiring?”
While Hamilton’s fund is a response to the former, her most recent venture is a business that examines the latter, which she established herself. Runner is a labor marketplace that links companies with part-time operational personnel. It aims to alleviate some of the most pressing pressures in early-stage business development, such as determining whether to recruit your first full-time employee, or deciding whether to contract out or create in-house when it comes to hiring. It’s going to start with an emphasis on operational positions.
“If you want to learn how to code or get a career on the more technical side of things,” Hamilton adds, “there are so many places you can go.” “However, where do you go now if you want to be someone’s right hand, COO, or whatever…? Most [businesses] treat it as an afterthought.” Runner isn’t a contrarian in terms of concept. On top of the freelancing economy, Upwork and Fiverr have developed robust companies. What sets the firm apart is who it targets — tech operations professionals — and how it employs them. Every “runner” or part-time professional looking for a new job is classified as a W-2 employee by the employer.
Currently, there are over 200 runners on the platform, including individuals with corporate expertise or those who were previously self-employed and are looking for a new source of income. Many of the company’s current executives started out as runners. Melanie Jones, the platform’s head of customer success, came to the company after working as a product manager at a dental network. She was employed as an executive at the corporation within a month, with a number of other runners-turned-decision-makers. Separately, Dianna Moore, a Boeing executive, arrived as COO only four months ago.
Individuals can receive basic rights and increased employment security by categorizing runners as employees rather than contractors. Blue crew, a Y Combinator alumnus, developed a similar service to supply on-demand workers, but this time employed them as full-time employees with benefits, albeit in areas like bartending, event personnel, security, data entry, or customer support. The runner is a return to a notion Hamilton had before she entered the venture capital world. Hamilton worked as a production coordinator and tour manager for performers before joining Backstage (she continues to pepper music references into her work as an investor).
She would frequently work with runners or persons with local experience who might act as right-hand helpers to make things happen while on the road in that capacity. She started employing runners in her own life while creating Backstage, hiring individuals for one-day help while meeting founders all over the nation. After seeing synergies between this function in the production industry and tech’s love for flexibility, the investor created Runner, complete with a logo.
“We were creating Backstage with no funding since COVID hadn’t happened yet, and people were genuinely perplexed by the concept,” she explained. “It was simply one of those whiteboard ideas,” says the narrator. The market is ready now, over two years into a continuing pandemic. The company’s business strategy is based on a 25% cut of the hourly pay of a runner. In addition, if a client hires a runner full-time, the customer must pay a ten percent recruiting fee based on the runner’s first year’s income.
Unlike Backstage, which seeks to change how and to whom venture funding is dispersed, Runner isn’t developing under the premise of helping firms attract minority talent — a decision Hamilton took because she didn’t want to “pigeonhole” the company. “It would have been quite easy for us to just classify ourselves as a DEI recruiting firm,” she explained, “but we didn’t want to be accountable for that – it should be everyone’s duty.” Runner’s executives, on the other hand, all come from historically underappreciated backgrounds.
