Full interview

RS: What is Skillit?

FP: So Skillit is the world’s first data-driven platform for sourcing craft labor, intelligently connecting general contractors and specialty trades with the fastest-growing database of vetted craft workers in America. You know we are addressing the skilled labor crisis in the construction industry by digitizing skilled workers—their skills, both hard and soft, past work experience, pay expectations, and we’re creating a data-driven labor intelligence platform that makes it easy for construction companies and employers to find these workers, connect with them quickly, and hire them in a smart and efficient way.

RS: What was the kernel of the problem that made you think, “This has to exist”? What did you uncover?

FP: There are a couple of threads to it. Fundamentally, I was a GC (general contractor), and I have experience running a construction company. I’ve also worked on the trade side as a carpenter. And so about five years ago, running this GC in New York, I started to realize that I felt differently about what the probThe conventional narrative is that fewer people are entering the trades, and many workers are retiring. But when you dig deeper, the real issue is that there’s no data available on individual workers. They’ve been ignored by technology, forever frankly.

I also think in the last few years, there has been a massive shift where workers now have the power that construction companies used to have due to supply and demand imbalances. So all of the sudden the workers are harder to discover and because of competitive pressures, they’re really hard to connect with and construction companies are trying to combat this while suddenly needing to understand this labor force, which they never had to before, which is of course mission-critical to their business.

So we are solving the problem of finding labor, making that process easy, solving discoverability, and helping companies connect with workers while understanding them as a workforce, right down to the individual level. That’s why we’re building Skillit.

RS: If you are explaining Skillit to a new construction company in an elevator, how would you describe it?

FP: We ask are you self-performing work (so do you hire labor directly) and is it on your critical path? If the answer is yes then we ask, are you able to easily find and connect with these workers and does your organization actually understand them deeply enough as a demographic and a labor force? The answer to this second part is almost always no.

And so Skillit has built a labor and intelligence platform that has fully digitized workers, making them easy to find and we’ve developed custom technology to connect you with them, even when you’re in an office, and they’re in the field. We’ve solved these two major problems. Additionally, we provide analytics and intelligence so your org is no longer shooting in the dark. Construction companies are after all their labor, so it's helping solve their biggest “hair on fire” problem.

RS: What is the technology?

FP: It’s a web-based platform, intentionally designed without apps to avoid complexity and unnecessary hurdles for workers. Workers create highly data-rich profiles that include everything an employer would want to know. These profiles are public, allowing workers to be discovered directly by employers, which incentivizes them to keep their information current.

We’re also building a suite of tools that allow employers to discover workers in both table and map views, so you can see where workers are located, even within a mile radius which is a pretty cool feature. We’ve also got over 1,000 custom filters just for craft workers to really hone in on the exact workers you need. Once discovered, automated cadences handle communication, reducing the busy work that takes up around 70-80% of a recruiter’s day and helps free them up to focus on more important tasks, speeding up the hiring process and ensuring the right people are hired.

RS: What’s next for Skillit?

FP: The process of creating a job in Skillit, as a recruiter, can be done actively by sourcing workers or passively by posting a job and having applicants come to you. This process is now powered by AI and large language models (LLMs), and we’re leaning into that.

In the near future, we’re developing an AI operator—working name, “TK.” It automates the communication process between recruiters and workers. Recruiters can select workers they like, and the AI manages communication, answering questions about pay, company culture, and more. It acts as a co-pilot for the recruiter, guiding the worker through the process and ensuring calls are automatically scheduled at a mutually agreeable time.

This reduces the need for constant phone calls and improves efficiency for both recruiters and workers. Workers are no longer waiting on calls and recruiters are no longer need to be hammering  the phones all day.

This will be launched soon, and we’re excited to see how it enhances the user experience.

RS: Looking five or ten years ahead, what’s your vision?

FP: Well our mission is to fix the skilled labor crisis because as a civilization, we have all these ambitious goals—whether it’s becoming multi-planetary or addressing infrastructure crises in the US and globally or transitioning to green energy—but the consistent bottleneck getting in our way is having enough skilled labor to achieve these critical goals. And if we don’t build the digital infrastructure to solve for this, we won’t be able to meet those demands because the construction sector is growing much faster than the labor supply.

I also believe AI is going to tear through a lot of knowledge work and that as a result we’ll see a resurgence in blue-collar work (we’re starting to see this already). By creating the necessary digital infrastructure for the construction industry, we can help skilled labor be discovered, connected to opportunities, and empowered. Robots certinaly aren’t coming to save us—it’s up to humans to do it, and Skillit wants to power that so we can build a healthier, more sustainable world.

RS: Why did you decide to do this?

FP: The truth is, this is a deeply personal, interesting and complicated problem to solve. It’s a nuanced industry with many interesting technical challenges. Fundamentally, I believe humans have a desire to create things of value for others. You know, if you look around this room everything around us was crafted by someone with a high level of skill in either carpentry, masonry, plumbing, electrical work etc and so it's really satisfying to build a solution that has such an obvious and immediate impact in the real world and as someone who’s been both a carpenter and a GC, I feel like everything in my life has led to this moment and given me the chance to solve this problem. It might sound pretentious, in fact polease cut this from the recording after haha, but I believe that if I don’t take a big swing at solving this, no one else will.

You’re not going to want to hear this as a VC but this is going to take time—probably a decade or more —to become a company of consequence but believe and hope I have the resilience and the perseverance to see it through. Yeah I won’t quit until it’s where it needs to be.

RS: What has been the hardest part?

FP: There are tactical challenges, like pricing. Companies haven’t bought labor in this way before, so we’re constantly evolving the value equation. That’s been tough. Another challenge has been hiring the best talent, even if they don’t have industry experience. Many investors and other founders advised me to hire from contech but I’ve taken a different approach, which is to simply find the best people at what they do regardless of industry experience which has made it challenging to help the team consistently understand the audience and market we’re serving.

It’s also incredibly difficult to get a two-sided marketplace off the ground. We’re constantly being pulled in different directions. Large customers want to expand into multiple markets at once, but we have to be geo-constrained due to limited resources. Saying no to top-tier construction companies has been tough, but necessary for focus.

RS: What are some recent milestones?

FP: Reaching 50,000 workers a while back felt like a real milestone because it gave us significant market share in the regions we serve—around 5-10% of the labor supply in certain trades. 

Indeed is our biggest competitor, and every customer uses them, along with LinkedIn and so winning our first public company customer, who now only uses Indeed, LinkedIn, and Skillit, was a huge milestone.

We’ve also achieved a 75% connection rate between workers and recruiters, which is ten times higher than Indeed’s.

Infusing AI into our technology over the past few months has been a game-changer, and we’ve been careful to do it in a way that makes sense for the market. We’re not an AI-first company, and we don’t want to be. We use AI to enhance the experience behind the scenes, rather than lead with it.

Another one is that 20% of the top 50 ENR companies are now Skillit customers, which I think is quite impressive for a company only a few years old. So yeah we’re proud of the progress we’ve made.

RS: Why did you raise money from the funds you did, and why Bow Capital?

FP: Full disclosure—I built a startup before and raised money from the wrong people. It was a 🤬 horrible experience. This time, I was extremely careful about how I constructed our cap table. Early on, I wanted to create a healthy funnel and get to know the people we were bringing in as investors. It was more about the partners themselves than the funds or brand names. I sought out people I could admire, respect, and trust—people with exceptional insight. I’ve also found it’s important to enjoy communicating with people you’re building a company with every day. If I’m not excited to get their call, that relationship probably won’t work. 

With Bow Capital, you immediately understood and had conviction in my vision and understood the shoots and ladders approach I wanted to take to win and build Skillit into a company of consequence in the future. Your Socratic style of questioning and understanding works well for me too, and I think would work for most founders. Bow also has a good thesis around helping companies that are transforming industries and an affinity for marketplaces, particularly labor marketplaces, so it felt like all the pieces were there for a successful partnership.

RS: Give us a fun fact about Skillit.

FP: We’re not a frying pan, despite what spellcheck might think. 

The name came to me when I was on vacation, trying to decompress after selling my last company. I was reading a magazine, and saw an advert for a company called “Design-it” that made me think, “Yeah, the future won’t be about learning something academically, it won’t be diploma-it or experience-it but it will be about skill, and so skill-it.” That’s how the name “Skillit” came about.

Ironically I then hired a brand agency called Manual Labor to help develop the branding. The Skillit “S” logo is actually a boot tread, symbolizing empathy for the workers and walking in their boots. It’s all about recognizing the important work they do every day.

RS: Where is Skillit headed next?

FP: We’re really leaning into the power of the data on our platform and use it in new ways to help our workers and customers. 

For example, when an employer does a search, they are soon going to be able to see how that exact labor pool is growing in a particular region, how much workers expect to be paid, the distribution of commute distance, skill, experience etc

We’re also generating actionable intelligence and insights from this data, which we’ve found to be especially valuable for larger companies. It has the potential to become an entirely new product line for us. These insights go beyond sourcing workers—they provide construction companies with a deeper understanding of the labor market, which is crucial for decision-makers. Many of these companies are building critical infrastructure like data centers, solar farms, roads, and tunnels. By helping them make smarter decisions about where to build and how to develop their labor pools, we can have a significant impact on the labor crisis. We’re excited about the potential for this intelligence to transform how construction companies operate and plan for the future.