Job openings range from entry-level to high-tech at a fast-growing city-hatched company. Does this represent the future for jobs in New Haven?
Higher One, a young company based at Science Park, has been on a hiring spree. Working out of Science Park — fulfilling the complex’s original mission — the company offers colleges and universities across the country an online disbursement and banking service, and online banking for students.
Three Yalies (including Miles Lasater, pictured) founded the company in 2000 while they were undergraduates.
They eventually raised $17 million in private capital, much of it from three firms (Hanseatic Corp., Inter-Atlantic Group, and North Hill Ventures).
All three decided to stick around New Haven to grow their company. They live in the city, and like it here.
What They Do
The company contracts with colleges and universities to help them handle payments to students of any money left over from financial aid grants, loans, or if the student drops a class. Instead of waiting on line at the bursar’s office or waiting for a check that may get lost, students click onto Higher One’s site and get their money directly.
The students can also sign up for a checking account that lets them do all their banking online, at no cost, at any time of day or night; and lets their parents easily deposit money.
Higher One now has 74 universities and colleges signed up from across the country. Some 240,000 students have checking accounts with the company. Higher One handled more than $1 billion in disbursements over the past 12 months. All the work in transacting this business takes place here in New Haven.
Along the way, the three founders found an older, more experienced hand to hire as their boss. Dean Hatton, who’s 47, had held senior banking posts as well as a chief operating officer position at a corporate travel agency where he oversaw a call center.
In the past year Higher One became profitable, earning around $2 million in profit on $16.5 million in revenues. It anticipates revenues to shoot up as high as $30 million in 2007.
So — at a time when the region hears more about companies slashing jobs or closing altogether—Higher One has been hiring. And hiring. And it’s not planning on moving out of town.
Last year it grew to 90 – 95 full-time positions. Since January that number has grown to around 110, according to co-founder Sean Glass. (The third cofounder is Mark Volchek.) The company projects reaching between 120 and 130 by the end of the year. For a glimpse of eight current openings, click here.
The City’s Vision
The jobs run the gamut from skilled computer positions to call-center openings that don’t require more than a high-school education. But applicants can’t have checkered financial histories. “Because we’re dealing with money,” Sean Glass said, “we can’t hire somebody with bad credit. Otherwise, you just have to be friendly and be able to talk to people.” The latter jobs start at $10-$12 an hour; they include health and life insurance as well as 401k contributions (not to mention stock options).
Glass (pictured) — who’s 27 and six-foot-four, with a basketball player’s huge hands (he would have played at Yale, he said, if he weren’t busy hatching this company) — spoke from his desk in HigherOne’s wide-open, bright second-floor bullpen-style main office at 25 Science Park. He had on his work clothes: short-sleeved shirt, shorts, white socks, Reebok sneakers. His seat looks straight out at Winchester Avenue heading northbound through Science Park toward Newhallville. Higher One recently expanded to the third floor to build out its call center, for a total of around 30,000 square.
That’s the kind of growth — and the range of jobs — envisioned when Science Park itself launched in 1982. Organizers and government funders imagined Yale-affiliated entrepreneurs building companies from largely biotech inventions; hatching the ideas in the park; then growing and hiring local people for all sorts of positions, in a part of town devastated by the decline of a rifle factory that once employed upwards of 18,000 people.
It didn’t always work that way. Some companies did succeed, though even then some moved out of town when it came time to hire lots of people without advanced degrees.
Yale’s decision to promote local biotech companies has helped fill some of Science Park’s offices as well as a biotech and health-care focused incubator at 300 George St.
HigherOne represents a different wave of successful company in the latest investment bubble — tech-oriented, Internet-reliant, unrelated to developing new drugs or researching diseases.
“Fast-growing tech-oriented businesses are where the jobs are going to come from,” Glass predicted. “If you help [those companies] start here, some will stay.”
At least one civic business booster, Mike Morand, sees in Higher One a vision of the area’s economic future.
“Sean, Mark, and Miles are leading comrades of a necessary cultural revolution for New Haven to focus on making, not taking,” said Morand, the new head of the Chamber of Commerce board. Morand got to know them through his post as an assistant vice-president at Yale. “Their entrepreneurial spirit and hard work adds to New Haven’s commonwealth and has been a catalyst for Yale to increase efforts to nurture student entrepreneurship in the Elm City. The civic challenge and opportunity is to make and keep New Haven a place that encourages economic growth, not one that adds regulations, burdens, and costs.”
Glass and Lasater said that sometimes the bigger challenge isn’t creating jobs, but finding people to fill them.
One day Glass was at Wal-Mart when an employee there told him he was looking for a new job. Glass told him about Higher One. It turned out the employee had visited the company’s website. “I thought it was a joke,” the employee said, because there were so many openings. Glass encouraged him to apply for real. (He did, but didn’t get the job. Glass said they’re staying in touch.)
How fast can the company keep growing?
Glass acknowledged that bigger, traditional banks will eventually incorporate some of the e‑banking innovations Higher One pioneered. That just means they’ll have to keep innovating.
