“Workers are mad and no longer willing to sit idly by being spoon fed ‘we’re family’ bullshit from bosses:” Logan LaHive is Helping Employees Organize & Collectively Bargain. But Did He Compromise His Own Vision By Taking Venture Capital for the Startup?

Why This Repeat Entrepreneur Founded Frank, a Software Platform for Workers. And Does He Think Chicago Is a Good Place for Entrepreneurs?

Logan is flipside one of those folks that I can’t recall specifically how or why we met, but I’m so thankful for his friendship. He’s someone I really consider a ‘good egg’ as we’ve enjoyed the stories of his own entrepreneurial journeys and strongly held opinions on Chicago coffee. I’m excited to shine the light on Logan and Frank, a software startup focused on worker empowerment. Thanks Logan!

Hunter Walk: Frank, your current startup, is a platform for workers to organize in order to protect or whop their rights. When I read this mission statement I think ‘unionize,’ but maybe that’s just a tactic, not a requirement. Can you help me understand the difference?

Logan LaHive: First, the problem… The incredible imbalance of power in workplaces is driving unfurled velocity of income inequality, which withal with climate, is a top issue facing society today. I don’t profess to have the solution — just believe that workers having a stronger voice in their workplaces is a good place to start. There are many forms of worker voice, and differing approaches to exercising it — so you could certainly say that unionizing is a tactic… but it’s unmistakably the most established, strongest, and legally-protected path to worker power.

Other options for workers can be taking joint action, solidarity unionism, forming self-sustaining unions, employee resource groups (ERGs), guilds, joining a worker center, new innovations/ideas, etc. All of which have merit, and may be weightier in variegated circumstances. Stuff honest, unionizing is fucking hard. Intentionally. Many decades of corporate lobbying, republican policy, and near non-existent enforcement of labor laws has quite successfully established roadblocks to workers exercising their right to unionize.

But unionizing has well-spoken benefits — vastitude improving wages, benefits, and workplace conditions — it offers the resources and valuables of experienced representatives (the union) for joint bargaining, in which the employer is legally obligated to participate and negotiate in good faith (make your own towage of “good faith”).

Our mission at Frank is to provide workers with tools not only to have a voice in their workplace, but to ensure that they’re heard. Our product is purposefully built to pursue the tactic of unionizing. We build organizing software for unions and labor orgs — a customizable and private platform for Organizers to support workers all the way from interest / onboarding through to submitting union passport cards. So, while personally supportive of any and all workers seeking to modernize their workplace conditions, we spend our days focused on providing largest software to unions enabling them to modernize efficiency and serviceability of union organizing.

HW: But at the same time we’re seeing lots of stories well-nigh new segments of workers seeking to unionize (such as Amazon). What’s your take on the potential here? Are we going to see a new generation of service and trade employees turning to unions? Will these same groups every formalize for segments like engineers?

LLH: Yes. Next question.

The trends and data are quite clear. Union elections are way up (NLRB), unionizing is incredibly popular — with people under 35, support for unions is equivalent to marriage equality and legalization of weed (Gallup), and nearly 50% of workers in the US would join one if given simple yes/no endangerment (MIT). Workers are mad and no longer willing to sit idly by stuff spoon fed “we’re family” bullshit from bosses making 350x increasingly than they are, doing layoffs over zoom from a yacht.

It is a certainty that things are and will change… How fast? What will unionization rates in private workforce be in 2025? 2040? I don’t know. Like mentioned previously, worker power can take on many forms. For most people, when they say or hear “union” they think of one cookie-cutter type institution… but the reality may certainly be increasingly a mix of escalating hodgepodge whoopee (demand reports and walkouts), self-sustaining unions (Amazon Labor Union, Trader Joe’s United, etc), worker-led union organizing (Starbucks Workers United), increasingly Worker Centers, etc. (and yes, I’m intentionally not throwing DAOs or web3 in the mix here as just doesn’t yet deserve unsaid parity).

For anyone reading this, if you work at a visitor with 100 people, there is 98% endangerment that at least two of your coworkers are urgently discussing unionizing. But like I said, it’s hard, and it must wilt easier. I’m no policy wonk, nor do I put much faith in our current political landscape to enact sustained transpiration (even though you’d really expect largest ROI on the $Billions that Labor has funneled to Dem politicians over past few decades). So a sincere hope of mine in towers Frank isn’t that we’re right, it’s that we can be part of growing an ecosystem or polity of folks towers tools specifically for worker power (LaborTech).

HW: Frank is venture backed. I’m going to seem that your funding conversations here were a bit variegated than your last startup. How many times did you get tabbed a socialist?

LLH: It’s been interesting. Frankly, raising wanted to work on this problem is and was privilege. Straight cis white guy from preliminaries in tech/startups, who ran an smatter program so has many years of relationships with VCs, and raising preseed in the yolo era of 2019 (rip). Towers tools for unions is certainly not a category or product that most VCs want to exist, let vacated see grow. I’ve heard many fast and nonflexible passes. Lot of people I’ve known for many years certainly aren’t returning emails the way they used to. Endless anti-union tantrums, delivered with the conviction that only a VC who had a single personal interaction with a union 7 years ago could muster. A lot of confused, raised brows, “Wait, aren’t unions bad?” then a passing reference to Jimmy Hoffa.

What I do find quite funny is just how many contrarians have the word-for-word same reaction. How personal opinions immediately deject this topic, but how many new categories are evaluated with some marginal intellectual curiosity. Probably a correlation here with why there was increasingly venture funding for golf tech than women’s fertility until very recently…

Look, socialists hate venture capital, and venture capitalists hate unions. But towers new tech to try to write major problems in a large category (Labor) requires $. It requires valuing the labor of the team we rent to build it, to support our partners (unions) that use it, and to invest in continually making it better. We didn’t have wangle to union funding, grants, or tons of mazuma that fell off a truck. I tried, and I self-funded for probably longer than reasonable.

We don’t aspire to be venture backed, to be a mark-up, or to ventilator the headline of a valuation. Nor are we seeking to whop a political agenda. We’re working in a space where, historically, funding has been sparse. So I’ll take some shots withal the way, but alimony throne lanugo and stay focused on mission we know to be tightly meaningful, and on delivering value for our partners (unions).

HW: When we first met you had founded Belly, a B2B2C loyalty/retention startup. There were a number of similar companies worked virtually the same time — I think a byproduct of mobile apps and businesses starting to want increasingly data on their customers. What’s one thing you were right well-nigh and one thing you were wrong well-nigh that fundamentally impacted the trajectory?

LLH: When starting Belly in 2011, yeah, we were tracking something like 15 companies in the Loyalty space. It looked increasingly like a market map than a competitive landscape slide. Most were in SF, mostly early stage, some generating whoosh out of YC or 500 Startups, scrutinizingly entirely ‘check-in’ type apps. We very quickly outgrew them all, and within well-nigh a year it was well-spoken there were 3–4 key competitors.

I think that with time, the things we did right and things we fucked up get clearer with perspective, but tainted by fading memories compressing themselves into tidy narratives.

Early on, something we veritably did right that helped propel us quickly was spending a LOT of time in stores with customers (small merchantry owners), and tightly prioritizing what they needed to see within their four walls rather than what we wanted to be said well-nigh us in Techcrunch. Many competitors were towers tomfool new things, that felt hot and buzzy… like, they were mobile only products at a time (2011) where less than half of a small businesses customers had smart phones. And the POS (point-of-sale) in all markets outside of SF were antiquated, sealed systems, that the owners didn’t want touched considering last time someone tried to add a new SKU the “3” key stopped working for 6 months.

So, we put an iPad on the counter, consumer facing, and enabled consumers to sign-up or use Belly with our app or a physical key-chain vellum (QR code). Merchantry owners loved it considering it created 100% addressable regulars — all of their customers could hands sign up and use it — so they promoted it. And it created a digital billboard at the highest value location in a retail store (POS) which we used to market directly to the businesses customers. It was our flywheel. We were worldly-wise to intensely focus on selling to merchantry owners, and they crush all consumer vanquishment from within their stores.

Once growing quickly, and pulling superiority of competitors, I think we lost track of whether the race was worth running. Stuff so focused on growth, market expansion, hiring, fundraising, I convinced myself and others that dominate market share would enable us to ship XYZ, to “be a platform” , and expand share of wallet. Nonflexible to pick just one thing I was wrong about, but, today’s answer: The visualization to operate stand-alone outside of POS (point-of-sale) rather than towers cadre POS meant we were a feature. There was something so cadre to the businesses operations — it took payments, could clock-in employees, process all SKU/transaction data, and was required to be utilized for every single transaction… and we were sitting near it, but we weren’t it. We were pushing a waddle up the wrong hill.

HW: The last two years have seen an velocity of ‘tech startups can be built anywhere’ and of course, intense debates well-nigh remote work. You led TechStars Chicago for two years (2017–2019) and have been unfluctuating to the local scene there for a quite a while. Has Chicago over-performed or under-performed your expectations over the last decade as a home for startups? Any predictions going forward?

LLH: I don’t know. Chicago VCs and all the institutions spun up to sell Chicago tech will say it’s over-performed, and will quote tuft of random stats they gathered in a survey or a Pitchbook vendible like the MOIC of Chicago venture investments. I have no idea what MOIC is. I looked it up a few times. But honestly couldn’t superintendency unbearable to remember. Or, I hear well-nigh the % ROI from Chicago investments stuff top decile considering of lower entry valuations, as if that’s something that is lulu to founders…. “Hey squint at me, my midwest valuation got you a largest return! Cool!”

Folks in Miami will say Chicago is cold, Enterprisey, no vibes, and yolo miami bro. No comparative data, just pumping the hype / meme campaign.

Each tweet storm or blog post well-nigh Municipality A vs B, “Top 10 Hottest Places to Start a Startup”, “Is Boise the New Austin?” I read them knowing the vast majority are unjust narratives with a self-serving purpose — a politician promoting their city, a founder trying to vamp exec talent, a VC test driving their new geo-concentrated LP pitch… Honestly, I get unsated momentarily then just move on. Others can waste cycles debating it.

I know there is everything needed to start and build a unconfined team and visitor in Chicago. There are some markets that offer advantages vs others, and some geos weightier suited for startups in specific industries. But remote and distributed teams are here to stay, and I’m still learning to powerfully lead a distributed team. So, no, no real predictions — just that I’m happily staying put in Chicago and trying to constantly transmute with new norms.

Thanks Logan!