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Gigster raises $20M from investors including Marc Benioff and Michael Jordan
- nedwin 9y agoHaving 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.
- ganeshkrishnan 9y agoI 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
- pmorici 9y agoanyone have experience working with them? Is it really different than sites like upwork in terms of client quality and rates?
- dangero 9y agoI found their glassdoor reviews enlightening. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Gigster-Reviews-E1168400.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Gigster-Reviews-E1168400.h...
- throwaway709 9y agoI 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.
- schnevets 9y agoDespite 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.
- colordrops 9y agoSo this is Uber for senior developers.
- _pmf_ 9y ago> So this is Uber for senior developers. Senior in web developer years.
- downandout 9y agoA 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.
- puranjay 9y agoNow I'm curious to know about your startup. Care to share?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- downandout 9y agoNot really, it ended up burning through millions and eventually crashed. This was at the height of the dotcom era. Not my finest accomplishment.
- jazoom 9y agoI like your honesty. It sounds like MJ was right to listen to Curtis. Smart people listen to even smarter people.
- Grustaf 9y ago> 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.
- downandout 9y agoThis 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.
- dangero 9y agoGigster used to give fixed price quotes, but it looks like they may have stopped doing that based on the website copy. Can anyone confirm that?
- danblick 9y agoWeird. I was so sure that "Michael Jordan" would be the Berkeley CS professor in this context. I guess not!
- sperling75 9y agoCurated 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.
- Gustomaximus 9y ago100% 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.
- edoceo 9y agoThey could partner with WeWork
- TorKlingberg 9y agoGigster had some controversy here 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13541162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13541162
- pavlakoos 9y agoThat controversy showed Gigster's big-scale thinking, I'm sure VCs actually liked that.
- yourstruly33 9y agoHow 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?
- appleflaxen 9y agoany time celebrity investors start making news, I automatically raise an eyebrow. the $20 million matters, of course, but what possible relevance does the identity of the investor have?
- jonbarker 9y agoThe 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'.
- dalbasal 9y agoNt 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.
- raides 9y agoHow is this different than work market and the radically less structured fiver or upwork? Are there guarantees I am missing to see?
- mdasen 9y agoGigster 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?
- notyourwork 9y agoI 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.
- jamisteven 9y agoI 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
- ctvo 9y agoHas anyone used Gigster and had a positive experience? How did they compare in costs, schedule and quality?
- nathan_f77 9y agoI applied last year in May, and haven't heard anything since then.
- nfRfqX5n 9y agoanyone know if the part time projects are too time consuming to do with a full time job?
- s73ver_ 9y agoBack 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.
- throwaway9122 9y agoI 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!