Brian Balfour was VP of growth at HubSpot in 2015 when the same question kept landing on his desk. In a 2021 post he describes it plainly: every week someone on his team would ask him about professional development. How do I level up faster? Where do I look for better thinking on monetization? He researched it, asked friends and colleagues, and kept hitting dead ends. He writes that this made him feel like a terrible manager, but it also matched a problem he had run into himself many times. He contrasts it with his first two companies, Viximo and Boundless, which he says he started because the opportunity looked good rather than because he was close to the problem.

The first version of the answer was not a company. It was an eight week lecture series he co-hosted with Andrew Chen under the name SVBR, short for Silicon Valley Business Review. Balfour's own site, archived on October 1, 2015, has the details: the program ran September 26 to November 21, 2015, with one video lecture per week, a weekly interview with a growth leader from a company like Uber or LinkedIn, live Q&A webinars, and an opening and closing dinner in San Francisco. You had to apply to get on the waitlist. The page also notes that Andrew had run a first, smaller version of SVBR on his own in winter 2014, and that Balfour joined for the fall 2015 run.

Looking back at that cohort on LinkedIn in January 2025, Balfour called it scrappy: him and Andrew, a one page website, some keynote slides, a few videos, and meetups on the weekend. He was still employed at HubSpot, flying from Boston to San Francisco late on Friday afternoons and taking the red eye back on Sunday nights. The support of that first group, he writes, is what led him to focus on Reforge full time.

A note on the clock used here. Balfour never states a founding date for Reforge outright. What he does state, on February 24, 2021, is that he had been bootstrapping Reforge for five years, and separately that the first artifact he made for Reforge, before he even incorporated, was a business hypothesis canvas he wrote in 2016. So this story counts from February 24, 2016, five years back from his own statement. The first program run under the Reforge name, the Growth Series Summer '16, started on July 7, 2016 and ended September 1, and the company's own program page from that year lists the price: $3,500 for an individual seat, or $2,895 per seat for teams of three or more. That puts the first Reforge branded paying cohort 134 days after the anchor, with the caveat that paying customers had already been through the 2015 SVBR version before the company existed.

The positioning was deliberate and he has explained the reasoning. In a 2020 post he lists what professional education looked like in 2016: built for entry level people trying to get a job, cheap, open to anyone, promising big results fast, with a certificate at the end. He calls this the X minute abs problem, where the promised result keeps going up and the promised time keeps going down until the claims stop being true. Reforge did the opposite on every line. It was built for people who already had a job, priced at the premium end, advertised the effort required rather than the shortcut, required an application, and gave out no certificates. The result, he writes, was an audience that wanted to be challenged and had the willingness to pay for it, often out of a company training budget.

Distribution came from writing he had already been doing for years. In an October 2016 essay he describes a yearly reflection habit where he asks which twenty percent of activities produced eighty percent of the value. Blogging was the only item on that list every year for seven straight years. He says his first job, his first round of venture funding, his hire at HubSpot and, in his words, the only reason he was in a position to start Reforge, all traced back to his blog.

Much of the work after that was refusing things. In the 2023 essay about his original hypothesis document, he lists the suggestions he kept getting from new hires, outsiders and investors: build a get a job course, sell certifications, do custom courses for individual companies. He turned all three down, and says he used the written hypotheses to protect the original insight from being chipped away. He also names the one hypothesis that mattered most, which was about the audience rather than the product: mid career professionals who already had jobs were underserved, had a higher willingness to pay, and did not arrive with unrealistic expectations. Everything else, from price to format to go to market, followed from that.

On February 24, 2021 he announced a $21M round led by Andreessen Horowitz and wrote that they did not need to raise. Reforge was profitable, earned eight figures in revenue, had cash in the bank, was growing year over year, and he owned the majority of the company before the financing. The reason he gives is timeline: they wanted to expand from a few new topics per year to more than thirty, and cash flow would not fund that pace. In July 2023 he published the original 2016 hypothesis canvas and described it as the foundation of taking Reforge from $0 to $30M.