A lifetime ago (~17 years) I pitched Michael Jordan on investing in my tech startup. I got the meeting through someone that had previously run one of his golf ventures. While I pitched to Michael himself, his investment decisions at the time were essentially all made by his money manager, a shrewd and difficult guy named Curtis Polk. I believe he still runs Michael's financial affairs.
At my meeting with Michael and his team, Michael said "you've convinced me, now you have to convince Curtis". I assume that's his standard response, so that he doesn't have to reject anyone and can blame Curtis. But in this case Michael called my contact that setup the meeting after the fact and said he actually wanted to invest, but Curtis told him that he would make him sign a waiver saying he was doing it against his advice if he did. Michael liked what he saw enough that after he turned us down, he setup a pitch meeting with another very high profile potential investor.
The point of this story is that if you see a big celebrity name attached to an investment, odds are that the decision wasn't actually made by that celebrity investor. The smart ones have built very high walls around their fortunes, and the gatekeepers are the people you should be talking to if you want a celebrity investor. My mistake with Michael was spending most of my time talking to him, and barely addressing Curtis, who turned out to be the actual decision maker.
Situational. Sometimes you can ask, "Who needs to approve this decision?" or "Who controls the money?" It helps to have a good rapport with whoever your first contact is. In many ways, today's large enterprise Salespeople have to be good at helping their sponsor navigate their own company to get a sale done.
No but do you think in context of original article I'm not sure a celebrity would openly admit this. This is a power play question so the answer depends on who is in the room.
Gigster has found a sweet spot in providing experts in fields like machine learning and blockchain, where talent is hard to come by — and so too are full-time jobs, Dickey said.
I think that's where it breaks down a bit. Full time jobs seem pretty plentiful even for mediocre devs. Gigster's model (based on their site) is to have top-tier talent that can easily get a very high paying, stable job. What I've yet to find is the pull of Gigster for someone that has options. There are so many full-time jobs for these devs if they are what Gigster is selling.
So, why Gigster? They don't have any mention of compensation levels for devs. They do mention that you only get paid when milestones are reached. What determines if a milestone is reached?
I'm not saying there isn't a "why", but they certainly aren't selling it. "Work remotely on your own schedule on new and interesting projects from top firms while making top money and without having to worry about the business side of things - we'll take care of that for you." That's a pitch. But they seem to have the attitude of "We're Gigster, of course everyone should want to work for us." Their job page doesn't have anything about why one should want to work for them, but mostly about how great the applicant should be. Even Google tries to sell applicants on working at Google and that's coming with a steady, large paycheck.
As a dev, there are certainly concerning parts of Gigster:
Fixed Price: Your project will cost the same amount regardless of who builds it and how it’s built. Once we quote you a price, we’ll stick to it no matter what. . .Guaranteed Work: During the course of a project, our team will gladly make necessary revisions to ensure that you’re going to market with the best product possible.
So, if the client requests major revisions that doubles the workload, am I the one that's working for free or does Gigster cover that? Who determines if it's the dev's fault for building something crappy or the PM's fault for not getting things right or the client's fault for wanting something other than they said they wanted? If there are major revisions, do I not get paid because there aren't milestones set for revisions?
I'm not saying that there aren't answers to those questions, but if they're serious about attracting top talent, I think they need to sell why a dev should work for them. Are they just looking for people who have big names behind them like Harvard and Google, but have been having trouble finding a full-time job?
I think this is a bait and switch for what they are selling. Devs don't take this the wrong way but I think this site is for mediocre engineering talent to get freelance jobs without changing their geographic position. Like you mentioned, why would a great engineer working at a big name company with plenty of options switch to this type of situation.
Freelance world is brutal, milestones are hard to quantify and the constant churn of a project from dev to dev will almost certainly result in poor architectural decisions.
I think there is a small amount of top engineers who might like this option if they wanted some time off but also wanted to work from time to time. Take a few months off, pick up a project, repeat.
However, as someone who works at a big name tech company I see no reason to leave my job and more specifically stocky equity unless they were paying 2x or 3x my base salary.
Ability to work the hours you want, part time, from wherever you want? I assume most people who decide to go freelancing is not for the steady money but for the freedom.
I worked at Gigster and I would say to stay far away. Far far away. I worked there to work on python/django/rails/startup stuff. The move to enterprise is sure to kill them. No good developer wants to do enterprise dirty work and enterprise companies want clunky outdated stuff. They exhausted the startup scene to the point I'm sure they have a really bad reputation among startups.
So many issues that the point is just to screw the clients and take their money. No top talent. They started something called lambda and actually most of the backend is plugged from existing code. Also you won't get paid like they say, you will fight to get paid and still it will be disputes after disputes. They still owe me money and when I disputed with them, they took me off the network. It's all a huge lie. They got sued by someone already. No benefits nothing. You're good though if you're in on the scam. My teammates bullshitted about the client/project we were working on and many people left. Buyer beware!
Despite the celebrities, Marc Benioff is easily the most intriguing investor on that list. SalesForce's customers frequently need tweaks and customizations - and demand for these programmers is unnecessarily high. I wonder if Benioff sees Gigster as a solution to his own growth problems.
Curated odesk/elancer/freelancer is area of strong need. Original thesis around fixed price generic development was a false offering that did not work well for clients or them - logical that they dropped this. Marketing of top tech talent is also a fraudulent statement according to many who have worked with them. They would do better to pursue the real opportunity with out the misleading marketing.
100% this. At Upwork the ratings are clearly setup to make you select people. You see people with top ratings but when you go through the individual they are much worse. Something is going on with their aggregation. I find freelancer is the best platform for getting decent people but still have issues.
I wonder if there is a model for something like freelancer where they set up offices around popular freelance cities, and people have to work in the office with a quality control manager for X years (3?) before they can work wherever, assuming they don't get weeded out.
Having built a marketplace company around digital services I was a massive skeptical of Gigster but their revenue growth is phenomenal. Congrats to the team. Super keen to see how & when they expand to new verticals outside of software development.
I am constantly hiring for my startup and skeptical of gigster. If I wanted to pay top dollars I would rather have the dev work in person and meet at least once a week
Machine learning talent is best recruited from uni directly unless you can pay top dollars. The silicon valley startup mechanics really baffles me, but money over powers everything including mediocre ideas
I was working on something similar, but it was called Giggly. Albeit never launched like most shit i wrench on, the gig based economy is huge. These guys could have it in the bag if they scaled back a bit, all this machine learning may be great for the back-end but not something that needs to be part of the pitch. They are also ignoring the actual problem this service should address, which is the markets where actual gig based jobs reside, photography, dance, web site build outs, seasonal office temps, not just development or tech. Gig based job aggregator categorized by industry is where this would thrive. My .02
I joined about 2 years ago and have probably earned $50K+ on the network. Pros (at least in the past):
* Paid on time.
* Paid pretty well considering no sales, customer service, debt collection.
* They (sometimes) let the developers make decisions on architecture, stack etc.
* On most recent project was able to define deliverables and milestones.
* Met some cool people.
Cons:
* As they move to Enterprise focus, flow of jobs has slowed to a trickle. I expect $20mil will help fill the sales and project pipeline though.
* They are really pushing a subset of tech (Swift, React, some homemade stuff)
* Hard for new developers (who don't know React) to get work. Teams have formed/gelled and tend to work together.
I have more or less moved on to focus on my own startup full-time but haven't ruled out trying to pick up a gig in the future. I'd likely need to level up on React which I don't want to.
> the thousand or so tech workers on its marketplace
That seems rather low for a company with 60 employees and 4 years of history, especially considering that only 30% of them are supplied with fulltime work.
This is mostly a puff piece touting their new investment. The idea of "gig" marketplaces isn't exactly revolutionary, and Gigster is far from the only (or best) one. But you would certainly think it is if the only information you had about this space was gleaned from this article. I actually kept looking for the "sponsored article" disclaimer based on how it was written.
Nt really related to gigster specifically or this raise, but…
I would be curious to hear the “BHG” theses from various companies. At a sufficiently ambitious scale, the thesis would have to be tackle some core (and IMO open) questions in economics, the “theory of the firm” family of questions.
One (not the most ambitious) thesis could focusing on standardised tasks, anything from uber to tax returns. Another would be focusing on well defined tasks, like building an app from good specifications.
More ambitious ideas would need to deal with poorly specified (or completely unspecified) jobs. Jobs with substantial creative elements. Jobs with a risk of failure. It would need to deal with cross collaboration.
I don’t know much about this area, but it would be interesting to hear about it.
The celebrity has large budgets for other projects, and he or she may direct to the other project manager: 'please use my other investment's product, I want to make sure it actually works'.
How is this exactly going to be different from the thousand of other competitors that are now complete garbage marketplaces by the millions of indians and mediocre programmers pouring low-cost offers into it?
Back when I was with them, about 2 years ago, there really weren't any part time projects. The one project I worked on I was the second developer for, and most of my time was spent untangling their spaghetti so I could actually get something done.
At my meeting with Michael and his team, Michael said "you've convinced me, now you have to convince Curtis". I assume that's his standard response, so that he doesn't have to reject anyone and can blame Curtis. But in this case Michael called my contact that setup the meeting after the fact and said he actually wanted to invest, but Curtis told him that he would make him sign a waiver saying he was doing it against his advice if he did. Michael liked what he saw enough that after he turned us down, he setup a pitch meeting with another very high profile potential investor.
The point of this story is that if you see a big celebrity name attached to an investment, odds are that the decision wasn't actually made by that celebrity investor. The smart ones have built very high walls around their fortunes, and the gatekeepers are the people you should be talking to if you want a celebrity investor. My mistake with Michael was spending most of my time talking to him, and barely addressing Curtis, who turned out to be the actual decision maker.