Justin Kan’s Exec Starts Running Errands For Companies And Startups Today

You’re paying your developer $150,000 a year plus change. Why let them get distracted by dry cleaning or grocery shopping?

While the very biggest companies like Google and Facebook have figured out that they need to import barbers, car washes and gourmet food onto their campuses to keep their talent focused, smaller companies don’t have the scale for these luxuries.

That’s the reason why Exec, the task-management service from Justin.tv founder Justin Kan, is opening corporate accounts today. Companies will be able to set up an account and allot a certain amount of money every month for employees to delegate errands they don’t want to do. If they don’t use the credits, then they will just roll over into the next month.

Exec is a task-management service that gets people to run errands on-demand like getting keys copied or cleaning for $25 an hour. Unlike other services, it doesn’t make users manage a bidding process and vet offers.

“If you want to have someone do a gig, there are usually a lot of steps involved,” Kan said. “I’m trading mental energy to save physical effort. I want money to replace mental energy and physical effort. I want this to require as little thought as possible.”

Kan said he’s launching corporate accounts because so many startups had asked him to do it. Stripe, a mobile payments processing startup, used Exec to get beer and 50 chairs from Ikea down to their office for a developer meetup. Greplin, a personal search company from Y Combinator, also uses Exec to get food for the office from Trader Joe’s.

Right now, Kan is focused on preserving user experience over growing too fast. He says 91 percent of the app’s reviews are five-star ratings and 98 percent are either four- or five-star ratings. Exec is only available in San Francisco at the moment.

“For an app like this, the first time that it doesn’t work for you is the last time you’ll use it,” he says. He’s hired lots of workers and sent through a multi-step training process to make sure supply outpaces demand for now (just like Uber had to do when it first launched).