Hooman Radfar is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and the co-founder and CEO of Collective. Hooman co-founded Collective alongside Ugur Kaner and Bugra Akcay to support the largest and fastest growing class of entrepreneurs in the world – businesses-of-one.
My professional mission has been to help entrepreneurs succeed so they can impact positive change on the world.
At my first company AddThis, we helped over 15 million businesses market their websites and increase their traffic to reach over 2 billion people worldwide with our tools and platform. At Expa, and via my personal investments, I’ve had the privilege of working with over 80 companies to build, launch and support category-defining brands across the world.
One takeaway from all those years is that no matter how smart you are, running a business is hard. Accounting, taxes, banking, compliance and other finance-related tasks take up valuable time that could and should be spent building your business.
I met Ugur Kaner and Bugra Han in 2018. We immediately realized we shared the same vision – entrepreneurs should focus on their passion, not their paperwork. As fellow immigrants and serial entrepreneurs, they experienced the challenges of building a small business first-hand. In particular, they realized that it’s even more challenging as a Business-of-One. Excited about our shared vision, we decided to collaborate to build a platform to solve these problems once and for all.
We learned a lot. For designers, developers, marketers, and so many other consultants, time is literally money. And even worse, they’re figuring it all out alone. This pain is not just acute at the business level, it’s massive in scale. Nearly 59 million people in the US run businesses-of-one, that’s 36% of the US workforce.
Today, we’re excited to introduce you to Collective, the first concierge, online, back office platform crafted for businesses-of-one.
Our brand is inspired by the bespoke freelance collectives emerging around the world – groups of entrepreneurs pooling resources and services so they could enjoy the flexibility of running their own business, while enjoying the benefits of being part of a community.
Our goal is to become the first and last collective that businesses-of-one need to join – a trusted partner empowering them with a solution that is tailored to their unique needs, saving them time and money, while connecting them to a community of other members. Collective’s technology and team of financial advisors gives our members the freedom to focus on what matters by taking care of everything from business incorporation to accounting and tax services – all in one platform.
With Collective, we’ve found a way to deliver peace of mind that pays. By taking advantage of the unique tax benefits associated with running a business as an S Corp, we’ve saved the members an average of $10k* per year. That’s real money. And in these uncertain times, that money is needed more than ever.
We’re also happy to announce that we closed our seed round of $8.65M to help us realize this vision. The funding round was co-led by General Catalyst and QED Investors with additional investment from Google’s Gradient Ventures, Expa and prominent investors who have financed and built iconic companies like Uber, Figma, Stripe, Snap, Udemy, Lyft, Instacart and more.
If you’re a Business-of-One, Collective is here to help. Find out how much you can save with Collective. Or learn more about our brand story and our team here.
*Based on Collective members with 2020 tax filings.
Hooman Radfar is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and the co-founder and CEO of Collective. Hooman co-founded Collective to create a better world by supporting the largest and fastest-growing class of entrepreneurs in the world – Businesses-of-One.