THINNING THE HERD
FOR A FEW MONTHS IN early 2016, Handy CEO Oisin (oh-SHEEN) Hanrahan lived in fear of Tuesday mornings. It was then, in the on-demand home-cleaning startup’s weekly leadership team meetings at its New York City headquarters, that Hanrahan had to look at slide after PowerPoint slide showing how badly the strategy he’d championed was backfiring, while doing his best to ignore the I-told-you-so looks of his co-founder.
At the time, Handy was in the midst of a major change in the way it brought on new cleaners, or “pros,” as it calls them, a change that Hanrahan had advocated. He eventually wanted to roll out an online onboarding process in all 28 of its markets.
His co-founder, Umang Dua, had resisted the plan since it was first proposed back in late 2014. His chief concern was that qualified candidates wouldn’t complete the application process unless a human helped. But the two agreed to do a limited test run and see what happened. They rolled out the new system in Miami and Washington, D.C., in January 2015.
The two founders were still debating whether to implement it in all of Handy’s markets when, in November 2015, the company closed its $50 million Series C venture capital funding. The new capital brought some relief—in the form of additional financial cushion—but also caused a new kind of stress. The tone of the meetings with potential investors during Handy’s search for funding had unnerved both Dua and Hanrahan. “A lot of the conversations we had were less around our business and more around whether there would be future funding for businesses in this category,” Hanrahan recalls.
Several VCs told Hanrahan and Dua they worried they’d be plowing money into Handy only to have
