ADP announced this morning that they have acquired our portfolio company WorkMarket.
This is a bittersweet moment for me.
WorkMarket has been a big part of my personal portfolio for almost eight years.
USV and Spark seeded WorkMarket in June 2010, backing two serial entrepreneurs Jeff Leventhal and Jeff Wald.
The idea was to create a cloud based SAAS application to allow enterprises to manage their contingent workforces which were growing in size and complexity. It seemed like a timely opportunity at the time and it was. Eight years later the SAAS contingent workforce management market is in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually and WorkMarket is the creator and leader of it.
But like all startups, the WorkMarket story has a number of twists and turns. The market was a bit slower to develop than we had initially hoped and it wasn’t until the last few years that big companies started to include contingent workforce management in their SAAS budgets.
We also lost one of the two founders, Jeff Leventhal, when he stepped aside at the end of 2014 and was replaced as CEO by Stephen DeWitt who was recruited to the opportunity by Jordan Levy, who has been everything you could ask for in a co-investor.
The last few years at WorkMarket have been amazing. The senior team that Stephen and Jeff Wald built is among the best that I have had the opportunity to work with. And the contingent workforce market really exploded in 2016 and 2017.
But like all exploding markets, the expanding opportunity brought a lot of new entrants and buyers interested in getting into it. And one of those big companies, ADP, made us an offer we could not refuse, both in terms of the financial opportunity and the fit with their business. ADP has been helping enterprises, large and small, with human capital management solutions for decades and has the customer base, market knowledge, and capital to lean into this opportunity in a way that a venture backed startup never could.
So WorkMarket is now part of ADP and I am pleased with that outcome. Jeff Wald will take over leading WorkMarket for its next phase and he is well suited and deserving of that role. He has been the one constant for the eight years that I have worked on WorkMarket. Everyone else who was there at the start has come and gone. But Jeff and I saw it through from start to finish and I appreciate that very much.
I also want to acknowledge Stephen and the senior team of Grady Leno, Jim Chou, Marcy Shinder, and Tom Benton. As I said, this is an amazing team and it has been a pleasure to watch them build the product, market, and customer base. They are all superstars in my book.
This is the way of the VC business. You get inspired by an idea and a couple founders. You spend a lot of time helping them build something. You give a piece of yourself to the business. And one day, you are done. That day, for me and WorkMarket, is today and I have enjoyed the ride very much.
