Nick Huber

Nick Huber
Alma mater	Cornell University
Occupations	Entrepreneur; real estate investor; author
Known for	Bolt Storage; The Sweaty Startup
Website	nickhuber.com

Nick Huber is an American entrepreneur, real estate investor, and author based in Athens, Georgia. He co-founded the student moving and storage company Storage Squad in 2011 while an undergraduate at Cornell University and sold it a decade later, and he is a co-founder of Bolt Storage, a self-storage real estate private equity firm. Huber publishes under the name The Sweaty Startup, an argument that ordinary service businesses are a more reliable route to wealth than venture-backed technology startups, and he is the author of a 2025 book of the same name.

Early life and education

Huber is from Leopold, Indiana. According to Forbes, he was a stronger athlete than student in high school and reached Cornell University after his high school coach cold-called college track coaches on his behalf.

At Cornell he competed in combined track and field events and set school records in the pentathlon, heptathlon and decathlon. In February 2012 he broke his own Cornell heptathlon record with 5,550 points, then the third-best heptathlon score in Ivy League history, and in June he sat in third place after the opening day of the NCAA decathlon. He finished 11th in that competition with 7,632 points and was named a third-team Academic All-American by the College Sports Information Directors of America later the same month, graduating from Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations with a 3.42 grade point average. He and Dan Hagberg, his business partner, were co-captains of the men's track and field team; each won an individual Ivy League championship, and Huber was a two-time NCAA All-American.

Storage Squad

In 2011, at the end of his junior year, Huber advertised his Ithaca apartment for sublet on Craigslist. Rather than a tenant, the mother of another student contacted him about storing her son's belongings over the summer. Huber recruited Hagberg, and the two used their own cars to collect and store other students' possessions, clearing several thousand dollars in the first week. They named the business Storage Squad and expanded it by persuading friends at other universities to run branches, buying cargo vans for roughly $1,500 apiece with student loan money.

The company concentrated on private and out-of-state-heavy campuses whose students were less likely to drive home at the end of term, expanding to cities including Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. In March 2020, when Cornell moved students off campus at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Storage Squad hired about 30 people to distribute roughly 40,000 boxes to more than 2,000 students and store the contents.

Huber and Hagberg sold Storage Squad in January 2021 to an undisclosed company in the storage container business. Reported sale figures differ: Forbes gave the price as $1.75 million, Huber's website says $1.7 million, and the Cornell Chronicle and Inside Self-Storage described it only as seven figures. At the time of sale the company operated on 30 campuses in 15 cities across nine states, according to the Cornell Chronicle; Huber's website says it reached 25 college towns.

Bolt Storage

While still running Storage Squad, Huber and Hagberg moved into self-storage real estate, developing their first facility in 2016 and beginning to acquire existing facilities in 2017. The portfolio was consolidated under the name Bolt Storage, a real estate private equity firm. By April 2021 the partners had purchased 12 facilities, with 10 more under contract, across New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Huber has said Bolt equips the facilities it acquires with technology that lets customers find units, sign leases, pay bills and enter the property without on-site staff contact. In The Sweaty Startup he recounts being turned down by hundreds of investors before raising the money to start the firm.

Forbes reported in December 2024 that Huber held a partial stake in 64 storage locations across 11 states, a portfolio with $15 million in annual revenue and $9.8 million in net operating income that Huber valued at roughly $140 million by comparison with publicly traded storage companies. The magazine estimated his own net worth at about $35 million. According to Huber's website, Bolt Storage owns two million square feet of self-storage across 68 locations in 11 states.

Other ventures

Huber has founded or invested in a series of service businesses, several of them created to serve needs that arose inside his own companies. He started the cost segregation firm RE Cost Seg with Mitchell and Melanie Baldridge in 2022, the web design business WebRun in 2023, the search optimization firm BoldSEO, and the commercial insurance brokerage Titan Risk. He also runs a business brokerage under his own name, co-founded with his father, Tim Huber. Forbes reported in December 2024 that Huber had built or invested in 11 businesses which, by his own account, generated more than $50 million in combined sales the previous year.

In 2021 Huber began using Support Shepherd, an offshore recruiting agency, to staff customer support roles in the Philippines, and bought a 15 percent stake in the company the following year. In 2024 he led a $52 million transaction that gave him and a group of investors majority control of the business, which was renamed Somewhere; Forbes reported that he raised $30 million for the deal, $20 million in equity and $10 million in debt, and brought in an outside chief executive. Huber, who had not previously acquired a company, has described speaking with more than 100 investors while assembling the transaction. According to his website, Somewhere has placed more than 7,000 remote workers with over 4,000 businesses and employs 180 people across nine countries.

Forbes reported that Huber dismisses criticism that hiring overseas workers exports American jobs or exploits foreign labor, on the grounds that large companies outsource routinely.

The Sweaty Startup

Huber began publishing under the name The Sweaty Startup in December 2018, writing that Shark Tank and TechCrunch culture was "ruining the real spirit of low-risk entrepreneurship." The project grew into a podcast, blog, YouTube channel, newsletter and set of paid online courses. Its central claim is that most wealth from entrepreneurship comes from unglamorous local service businesses rather than scalable technology ventures, and that operating a conventional business well beats searching for an original idea; Huber has summarized the approach as "doing common things uncommonly well."

Huber's book, The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things, was published by Harper Business in 2025. It advises prospective owners to compete on price, speed of service or quality of work rather than novelty, surveys lines of work by the skills and capital they require, and recommends delegating routine tasks so owners can concentrate on deals and technology. Publishers Weekly found parts of the advice self-evident, while judging the book a practical account of working for oneself aimed at readers who want a durable small business rather than a large technology company.

Online commentary

Huber's audience is concentrated on X, where Forbes reported he had 385,000 followers in December 2024. Several of his posts have drawn published criticism.

In June 2021 he posted a calculation in which $50 of tomato plants compounded into 3.9 million tomatoes to be sold for $1 each. CoinDesk dissected the arithmetic as an illustration of what it called the fetishization of scale, then concluded that the post was a deliberate parody, noting that it worked precisely because so many online business figures make comparable claims in earnest. In a later post Huber said he had declined to replace his young son's dropped ice cream cone in order to teach him that life is hard; Scary Mommy reported that the post drew more than 19,000 mostly critical replies and that Huber subsequently acknowledged inventing a detail he had asserted in a follow-up comment. In November 2025 India Today covered a LinkedIn post in which Huber argued that speed is the most valuable professional trait, and the pushback it drew from readers who argued that constant urgency erodes focus.