At 16, Jarah Euston landed her first job at a Party City—on the better days, as the balloon person.
“It was my first job ever, and I blew up the balloons with the helium,” she said. “But the worst possible job you could have at Party City was called go-backs—take a shopping cart full of tchotchkes that parents didn’t actually want to buy and put them back on the pegboard. You have to find, say, where this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle goody bag goes, and hang it back up.”
Euston, who grew up in Fresno, Calif, is now the CEO and cofounder of flexible labor platform WorkWhile. The startup, which she founded in 2019 after stints at Yahoo and Nexla, focuses on people working the “frontline,” hourly jobs that she says are the norm in places like Fresno.
“I want to build something for the people I grew up with, the people who work frontline jobs in Fresno,” she told Fortune. “And not just the people in Fresno, but the 80 million Americans working hourly jobs. It’s more than half of the U.S. labor force. And globally, 80% of all workers are working these types of jobs. So, how do we apply technology to improve their situation?”
For Euston, part of the solution lay in flexibility—technology that sets up a marketplace where workers can be matched with temporary jobs, adjusting their roles, schedules, and locations to better shape and control their workweek. Six years in, the platform now serves over one million users and employs 63 people.
