Ximena Hartsock and Michelle Rhee, familiar names in the D.C. tech and education scenes, have co-founded a startup meant to help companies address the labor shortage and build a more diverse tech-talent pipeline.
BuildWithin, the company Hartsock launched after leaving Arlington's Phone2Action Inc. following its acquisition, is largely a software platform meant to take apprenticeships and training programs to scale through digitization and modernization. The software offers end-to-end workplace monitoring, learning, task management and real-time feedback. Think task management like Asana, communications like Slack and collaborative design like Figma — all rolled into one.
“If you’re an admin of new hires or you’re an HR person managing an apprenticeship program you have to go to Jira for the tech team, Salesforce for the sales team, ChurnZero if you want to know what the helpdesk is doing,” explained Hartsock, BuildWithin's CEO, about what apprenticeship managers at big companies need to navigate at big companies. “What we tried to do is create software that takes all that complexity and simplifies it."
The launch is a public reunion of Hartsock, a former D.C. Public Schools principal and director of parks and recreation under Mayor Adrian Fenty, and Rhee, Fenty's D.C. Public Schools Chancellor. Rhee gained national prominence, and some controversy, for her strong stance on school reform and her appearance in "Waiting for Superman," the documentary about the state of public schools in the U.S. The duo also worked together at Rhee’s nonprofit StudentsFirst.
“I remember going to events and everybody would be talking to the press and Michelle was talking to kids. That’s always what mattered to me. I was an insider. I knew how she was,” said Hartsock. “I don’t like the headlines and the things people say about her. That’s not who I know.”
Rhee, wife of former Sacramento, California mayor and NBA player Kevin Johnson, now calls Sacramento home.
“For years people would always come to me with ideas for different companies they thought I should start or different roles I should be in and I’m sort of living this semi-retired life,” said Rhee. “But when [Hartsock] came to me with this idea I just thought it was tremendous in terms of potential that it could have. And then with someone that I love and admire so much, I was like alright, let's go.”
BuildWithin has raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding led by Dundee Venture Capital with participation from Black Capital, an early-stage fund focused on investing in underrepresented founders, Atento Capital, Nubian Sage, The Good Impact Fund and Russel Gates, an angel investor. The company also received a $7.9 million grant from the Department of Labor under President Joe Biden’s Apprenticeship Building America program.
There’s another side of the company, outside of the software-as-a-service aspect, that caters to the individual job seeker trying to break into tech.
Through the Labor grant, the company will establish apprenticeship innovation districts from California to the Midwest to Tennessee. The hubs will support job seekers through classes that result in tech field certifications and apprenticeships with local businesses to strengthen the tech talent pipeline in that area.
A partnership with D.C.'s Department of Employment Services acts as a pilot program for what BuildWithin wants to bring across the country. The startup graduated a class of 80 D.C. residents from an eight-week tech accelerator. Every participant now has a CompTIA certification preparing them for tech roles such as software development, IT helpdesk, or project manager with local companies.
BuildWithin also has a free, online tech training platform, techapprectinceships.io, which Hartsock says has 50,000 users that come organically every day.
“We have a part of the business that works with municipalities to train their unemployed or underemployed people or anybody around that wants to get training for a better career,” said Hartsock. “A lot of people are already prepared. A lot of people have taken bootcamps and things but it’s that bridge, that getting ready for an interview, finding an employer that is going to be willing to interview them, especially for minorities, that’s where we have been extremely successful.”
Hartsock is working from a playbook refined from growing and exiting Phone2Action. Nine months in, BuildWithin already boasts $1 million in revenue from customers such as CyanGate Technologies, the Downtown D.C. Improvement District, George Washington University and the Northern Virginia Tech Council. Hartsock said It took three years working on Phone2Action, recently rebranded as Capitol Canary, to generate that kind of growth and revenue.
The company currently has 14 employees, many having left Phone2Action with Hartsock, and offices in Tysons and D.C. She’s looking to hire five director roles for the innovation hubs, five technical managers and three support staff. Hartsock also plans to hire seven people on the SaaS side of the business.
As an approved national intermediary with the Department of Labor, working with BuildWithin allows companies to build and scale a registered apprenticeship program without jumping through bureaucratic hoops, Hartsock said.
“We’re talking to employers every day about their talent needs about their desire to do more,” Hartsock said about conversations she’s had with executives like Debbie Moore, global leader for cybersecurity at IBM. “They want to give back to the community too. They understand they have jobs and that [have] all of these requirements. There are people that could access those jobs if the process was a little bit easier. If there was a bridge to it."
