Peanut Butter & Rise of the Rest: disrupting employee benefits

A few weeks back, Steve Case and the folks at Revolution announced the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund (ROTR) focused on investments in companies across the U.S. that will disrupt major industries.

As one of first ROTR investments, we are thrilled to partner with Steve, Anna, David, Sapna, Tracy, and team in the next phase of their growth and ours.

Close to the privilege of serving our customers and building our team, partnering with experienced entrepreneurs like Howard Tullman has been one of the greatest honors of building this business. In fact, Howard first introduced me to Steve Case in early 2016 when Steve visited 1871 to share insights from his book The Third Wave.

The Third Wave in this case refers to the third wave of the internet, as the book provides a vision for how entrepreneurs, including many outside silicon valley, will transform real world sectors and change the way we live our lives.

Over the past 3 years, Steve and his team have lived this thesis, traveling more than 8,000 miles through the Rise of the Rest tours to meet, mentor, and invest in startups across 33 different cities.

We were reconnected in 2017 when Peanut Butter was selected to participate in Google Demo Day, an event highlighting North America’s top startups, that Steve has judged for several years.

It’s great to see Steve’s vision, plus he and his team’s hard work, now evolve into a $150M investment vehicle backed by some of America’s most successful entrepreneurs including Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Howard Schultz, Dan Gilbert and many others.

Last year, U.S. employers spent close to $1T on insurance premiums and retirement contributions, but college-educated Millennials would value contributions to their student loans 2x more than either. Peanut Butter is disrupting the employee benefits market by helping companies engage talent with a benefit employees value.

We’re thrilled for the opportunity to partner with the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, to learn from it’s esteemed group of entrenpreneurial stakeholders, and to build our businesses together in 2018.