"Blockchain has the Ability to Raise Billions out of Poverty" Rahkeem Morris, Syrg Co-Founder & CEO.

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’m a high school dropout with a Harvard MBA… Not exactly the combination you’d expect but it gives me a unique perspective on our business. When I was 14, my mom was asked to work the 6am shift at the local hospital or lose her job. She liked that job so when her schedule changed, so did mine. Someone had to take my 4 year old brother to daycare across town, didn’t they?

This made me late to school, missing 1st and eventually 2nd periods, until eventually I dropped out altogether. I started working a few jobs at a time to help my family make ends meet. I can still remember the weights of each ingredient used for the menu at Taco Bell. Crazy how something like that sticks with you.

I managed to get my high school diploma in a single year and work my way to Cornell where I graduated college. That took me to GE, Google, and eventually HBS where I started Syrg. We’re all about giving back to the people who gave me a chance when my family and I needed it most, while helping the countless folks who grew up like me but haven't been so fortunate.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Syrg is helping hourly employers transition into a world where there are more jobs than people willing to work them. We’re empowering employers to recruit and retain the best team members with a suite of automated tools by putting the needs of workers front and center.

What is the origin story?

Before getting my MBA at Harvard or working at Google, I was a high school dropout working 2-3 hourly jobs at a time. As I bounced from job to job, I realized my employers were always short-staffed and scrambling for hires. I was willing to work for any of my previous employers if I needed some extra cash and found it strange they never reached out to me proactively.

While getting my MBA, I met my cofounder Rob, a former McKinsey consultant who worked in business transformation and turnarounds. He had specific experience optimizing workforce operations for hourly employers and a deep appreciation that there was more to life than making PowerPoints and Excel models. Syrg is the first step in my vision for transforming hourly work and recruiting, and Rob was the obvious match to help make that a reality.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I love our team because we’re all so passionate about making a difference. Syrg is born out of my personal story and it’s been incredible to see my own passion reflected by everyone at the company. This combination of personal experience, intense passion, deep expertise, and commitment to a growth mindset allows us to execute extremely well. I certainly wouldn’t bet against us.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Seriously, looking for a startup to build.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We care more about helping hourly workers and their employers more than anything, so that’s how we measure our success. There are a number of growth related metrics we focus on, but number of satisfied customers, number of hourly workers engaged, and number of jobs filled are towards the top of the list today.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

In Spring 2019, we launched our first product that enabled former employees, primarily W2 union-represented janitors who cleaned commercial buildings, to work shifts on an “on-demand” basis for supplemental income to make ends meet. We completed nearly 10K shifts. When the pandemic hit, we suffered 90% revenue loss and no shifts passed through our platform.

We pivoted and re-launched Syrg in July 2020. Since then, we have signed over 200 paying franchisee customers in 13 months across brands including McDonald’s, Burger King, Domino’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, and Dunkin’. This represents more than 3,000 individual stores and over 3M job seekers on our network who we engage to fill both full-time and part-time permanent positions.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m most excited about Blockchain, but not in a fanboy, dot-bubble, crypto-only superficial kind of way, but because Blockchain has the potential to do for assets what the internet has done for information. Blockchain has the ability to raise billions out of poverty and drive equality. I’m most worried about technology that leaves space debris and pollution. We gotta get out of here!

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

HackerNoon is a place where technologists strut their stuff. Having written most of the code of our initial product and spent years as an arcade junky, it’s an honor to get featured among like minded nerds.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Start a practice in which you sit down and focus on an object, any object. Do it up to 60 minutes long and try not to break your attention from the object. Do this everyday for at least 7 years. You’re going to be unstoppable.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Since we can only perceive a billionth of all of what we experience in any given moment, it makes our reality completely subjective. So then, it’s only worth adopting the perspective to view life as a piece of art and endeavor to paint a masterpiece.