Onsite Pro

Overview

Onsite Pro, incorporated as Greenwork Inc. in March 2021, was a San Francisco-based startup that passed through Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch.^[1][2] Over roughly three years, the company executed two full pivots: first from a clean energy workforce training platform ("a Coursera for solar") to a hiring marketplace connecting trade schools with clean energy employers, then from that marketplace to HVAC digital proposal and pricebook software sold under the Onsite Pro brand.^[3] The company raised approximately $2.4 million in pre-seed funding from GV, YC, Kleiner Perkins Scout Fund, and Global Founders Capital — all of it before November 2021.^[4]

The company failed to achieve durable product-market fit across either pivot before exhausting its runway. Two pivots in under three years on $2.4 million left insufficient time and capital to validate each thesis; the final HVAC software bet was still in early stages when co-founder and CEO Sam Steyer stepped down citing personal fatigue in November 2023.

YC now lists Onsite Pro as "Inactive" with a team of four.^[5] No acquisition or formal shutdown announcement has been published. Steyer returned to climate tech at Halcyon; Gautam Jayaraman, who became CEO at the end, has not publicly commented on the outcome.

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Founding Story

Sam Steyer and Gautam Jayaraman incorporated Greenwork Inc. on March 31, 2021.^[6] The two co-founders brought complementary but unusual credentials for a trades-focused startup.

Steyer held an A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard and an M.S. from Stanford.^[7] Before Greenwork, he had co-founded Station A, a clean energy analytics platform, where he served as Head of Analytics. He also worked as a surrogate speaker on Tom Steyer's 2020 presidential campaign — an experience that embedded him in climate policy circles and gave him a macro view of the clean energy transition's workforce bottleneck. That bottleneck became the founding insight: the US was building out solar, EV, and HVAC infrastructure faster than it was training the workers to install and maintain it.

Jayaraman's background was almost entirely inside the YC ecosystem. He held M.Eng. and S.B. degrees in Computer Science from MIT and had co-founded two prior YC companies: Jamglue (YC S06, an online music remixing platform) and Rickshaw (YC W14, a commuter shuttle service). Between those ventures, he worked as an engineer at Amazon and Dropbox, and as an Engineering Manager at DoorDash Labs.^[8] Jayaraman later noted with some pride: "since 2006, I've worked at five YC-backed companies, and zero non-YC-backed companies."^[9] That depth of YC-network embeddedness likely helped the company secure a strong pre-seed syndicate quickly, but it also meant neither founder had deep roots in the trades industry they were entering.

The founding thesis was straightforward: the clean energy transition required a massive skilled-trades workforce, but the pipeline connecting training programs to employers was broken. Greenwork would fix it by building what Steyer called "a Coursera for solar" — a platform where trade schools and workforce development programs could upload curricula and connect graduates directly to clean energy employers.^[10] The timing felt right: the Biden administration's infrastructure bill was moving through Congress in 2021, and the policy environment was explicitly focused on workforce development for clean energy.