Your Tech Story

freelancer marketplace

TaskRabbit

TaskRabbit’s Platform Helps Getting Done Daily Chores of Household

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By

Platforms that provide the service of freelancing have become very common among us. For the past two decades, we have been receiving an enormous response from the freelancers through these websites. But, these websites are mainly about finding skilled people in the IT sector and related departments. Most of the services are related to the sphere of digital marketing that every company needs for its operations. But, have you ever taken a pause and thought about the daily lives of people? For example, what if you have to leave for office early and had no time to go for grocery shopping? Small chores like these in our daily lives are very crucial yet with every passing day we find it difficult to make time for it. And, especially working women can understand the pressure of this who also needs to take care of a family. Leah Busque, an American entrepreneur founded TaskRabbit in 2008. She created this online marketplace to find us freelancers who are up for doing normal daily chores. The platform connects the user to the freelance labor who is willing to do jobs like cleaning, delivery services, etc. TaskRabbit’s headquarters is currently based in San Francisco, California. To date, it serves more than 60 cities in different countries.

Leah Busque

Leah was born on 15th November 1979. She went to Sweet Briar College to acquire her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. She graduated in 2001. Leah worked at IBM before founding TaskRabbit. She served as the CEO of the company from 2008 to 2016. Leah successfully expanded the company’s services to 44 different cities. In 2016, her position changed to Executive Chairwoman of the company.

She became the General Partner at FUEL Capital in 2017. Currently, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Leah has two children.

How did it start?

The idea of creating such a platform to help common people with their daily life chores is very innovative. It is simple but not everyone thinks of it. When Leah thought about it she was still working at IBM. It was one fine night that she along with her husband was going out for dinner. But, unfortunately, she had a pet dog to feed and was out of dog food.

This is how the idea to create an online network came into her mind. A platform where they can state their needs and someone will take up the job and they will be paid. Both, Leah and her husband were into technology so the later part of the founding story isn’t that tough. Everything happened so quickly that before the couple stepped out for dinner, Leah bought the domain Runmyerrand.com.

The Next Step

Leah started working in it from the very second the idea crossed her mind. She took this seriously and left her job after four months. They applied in an incubator program in 2009 and became one of the 25 companies that were invited to participate. It went well and they were able to raise $1.8 million as the seed funding. It took some time to build everything starting from the UI to the payment platform. After a few tests, the company hired its first full-time employee, Brian Leonard.

The Success

In April 2010, Leah finally changed the name of the company to TaskRabbit. Initially, the office of the company was situated in Boston which moved to San Francisco Bay Area in 2010. Next year, the company raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, etc. By this time the company had 13 employees and nearly 2,000 “runners”. By the end of 2011, TaskRabbit raised another $17.8 million in Series B funding.

In 2012, the company expanded its services to New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Illinois, etc. Next year, TaskRabbit hired Stacey Brown-Philpot as the first COO of the company. In 2016, she became the CEO of the company and currently holds the same position. In 2015, the number of freelance labor turned out to 15,000. Gradually, the services were expanded to 47 cities of the U.S., 4 cities of the U.K., and 1 Canadian city.

In 2017, IKEA Group announced the acquisition of the company. It declared the company would continue to operate independently. Currently, there are 60,000 workers that are finding jobs through the platform of TaskRabbit.

toptal

Toptal : A No-office Startup for the Freelancer Community

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

In the recent wave of start-up fair around the world, many entrepreneurs have dedicated their work significantly to the start-up society. The condition of the freelancers have significantly improved in these past years, and there has been an increase in the number of freelancers worldwide. Moreover, the young generation does want to break the conventional pattern of a daily 9to5 job, but at the same time, a stable and continuous source of income is necessary, too. With all these freelancing platforms coming up, and along with that the increasing number of new start-ups that demand freelancers, are playing an ace for the rising community.

Toptal, a freelancing platform founded in 2010 by Taso Du Val and Breanden Beneschott, headquarters in Silicon Valley, California, US. The startup has brought a revolution for designers, developers, programmers and analysts, who were interested to work as freelancers.

Taso Du Val

Val had already been into different jobs and had enough experience before he co-founded Toptal. He worked as an architect in Fotolog for two years, followed by working for Slide and Art.sy as an advisor.

Toptal founders
Image Source: toptal.com

In the founding year of Toptal, Val was working on his start-up for coming up with a real-time chat engine something absolutely different from what he ended up developing. While working in this project, he needed a freelancer. But it was quite annoying to find a really dedicated freelancer with excellent skills. This was when he decided to bridge the gap between freelancers, the newborn start-ups and business firms that wanted to hire them.

Breanden Beneschott

Beneschott studied chemistry from Stanford University, and while he co-founded Toptal, he was a student in Chemical Engineering, Princeton University. Beneschott stepped into the professional world as an intern for Adam’s Group and then for Morgan Stanley. He also served as the CTO for Zandigo and director of technology for Snafue, LLC. He co-founded smsPREP in June 2007, and then, partnered with Val in 2010 to co-found Toptal.

Behind the scenes

After Val launched the company, he wasn’t really looking for a co-founder. But, he bumped into Beneschott, who was his old neighbour and had signed up in Toptal as a client. Val realized that it would be a nice deal for Toptal if they become partners as Beneschott was more of an expert, loved dealing with customers and strategies. So, Val decided to fly to Princeton as Beneschott was still a student when Val approached him. Both of them worked in a small dorm room in his university, and finally, came up with a bigger plan.

Strategies

When Val searched for a freelancer during the setup of his start-up, he really found it hard to find a skilled one. So, he wanted a thorough scrutiny process and selected only the top 3% per cent of the skilled freelancers to work on behalf of Toptal. After founding the company, he established a four-round process for selection of the candidates, though it was very time-consuming. He focused mainly on the quality as Toptal provides service to many reputed companies including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

The Success

Since Val and Beneschott lived miles apart from each other, they did not set up an office, but they were still pretty confident to cut through the noise and make it a reputed company. Since they scooped out the top 3% creamy layer amongst all the freelancers, they landed many big clients. They made $1million in revenue in the first year and worked with many talents across the globe, including Russia, Hungary and South America. Since Val was interested in working with the top-class potential stalwarts, he decided to fly to Hungary as the company spotted many excellent software developers from that area. So, in 2011 both of them fled to Budapest and started operating from there.

Initially, the company searched for software developers, business experts, programmers, but from 2015, it expanded and started hiring designers. In 2016, Toptal hired Skillbridge, a freelancer platform that offered services that marketing research, accountant, etc. related to business modelling. It eventually started adding more and more domains, and now, hires freelancers for more than 50+ sub-domains.

Funding Rounds

In the seed round, the company raised $1.4 million, Andreessen Horowitz, Quora and Adam D’Angelo, being the major investors. There was no further news of any other funding rounds since then, and the company has made impressive profits with time. In the year 2016, the company’s annual revenue turned out to be $100million.

peopleperhour

Peopleperhour : Strengthening the Freelancers Community in the UK Since 2007

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

With the emergence of companies like Fiverr, Freelancer.com, Superside and definitely PeoplePerHour, the table has seemed to turn for the freelancer community around the globe. Previously, the majority of the working class didn’t support the idea of freelancing because there wasn’t any job security, no fixed earning and definitely not a long-term job assurance. But, with an increasing number of start-ups and SMEs, the demand for freelancers is escalating very fast. Clients prefer hiring freelancers over hiring an entire agency because the workflow is better, assured delivery of work within time and other factors combined it is pretty amazing for both the clients and the freelancers.

Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris founded PeoplePerHour in 2007 as an online marketplace for the freelances. The company can hire the talents for a minimum of an hour which stretches up as per the need. PeoplePerHour has really increased employment among the students and senior citizens as well.

Xenios Thrasyvoulou

Xenios graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2002 with a degree in engineering, following the conventional way of pursuing business studies at Harvard Business School. Right after he graduated from Harvard, it was the time when dot com boom was becoming history and businesses again started rising. The era of the internet already hit the UK, and Xenios realized that most of the people tend to do their jobs sitting at home and not preferring the daily 9to5. The offline scheduled job was somewhere starting to lose its value. It hit him hard that why not create an entire marketplace for these people. This was like the ultimate turning point in Xenios’s life, and in 2007, he co-founded PeoplePerHour along with Simos Kitiris.

peopleperhour founders
Image Source: thegoodwebguide.co

Xenios has also founded another start-up called TalentDesk.io in January 2017.

Simos Kitiris

Simos also completed his engineering from the University of Cambridge in the same year as Xenios. He joined Amadeus as a Software Engineer, immediately after graduating, followed by working for Accenture as an IT Consultant. He left Accenture in 2006 and started working with Xenios on the PeoplePerHour project. He is the CTO of PeoplePerHour, and apart from that, he worked as an Advisor for SIP-The Tech Investment Club, Hellas Direct and BetaAngels Management LLC. In October 2013, Simos Kitiris founded another UK based start-up, Yumbles.

Founding PeoplePerHour

Dealing with the crisis of freelancers, Xenios realized that there is a huge gap between the service providers, and the clients, which led him to co-found PeoplePerHour with Simos. Founding the company in 2007, it has its office in Athens, with its headquarters based in London, UK. The most unique feature of PeoplePerHour is job or project allotted to the freelancers is hour wise. Unlike other freelancer company, when the project is uploaded along with the deadline, in PeoplePerHour the working hours might extend as long as it needs to complete the work, and the freelancers are paid accordingly.

The Success

The launch of PeoplePerHour turned out to be a great success as the employment of senior citizens in the UK increased by a great number. After retirement, many people still have the zeal to work but maybe not a 9to5. PeoplePerHour worked wonder for them, and according to the report from the UK Office for National Statistics, 358,000 people aged above 65 started working after the launch of this online platform. The mostly the retirees showed a keen interest, and by 2012, the percentage of senior citizens searching for a job increased by 137%. In this journey of 12 years almost, PeoplePerHour has served more than 1million clients and paid over £100 million to its freelancers.

Investors and Fundraising

After the opening of the beta version in 2007, the company kept expanding, and within a year, PeoplePerHour announced that their freelance community comprises of 40,000 freelancers. One of the biggest investors of PeoplePerHour is Index Ventures, and the amount of fundraising in the interim funding round was undisclosed. In 2010, the company raised funding of £425,000 from its founders and Michael van Swaaij. The company secured a fund of £2million from Index Ventures, and along with that, also launched its new iPhone app in October 2012. In the same year, PeoplePerHour was featured in the magazine, Wired UK as one of Europe’s 100 Hottest Startups of 2012.

The company today comprises of around 100 employees, with Xenios as the CEO and Simos as CTO. Even though Simos has recently opened his own start-up, he still keeps serving the community of PeoplePerHour.