
Gigster raises $20M from investors including Marc Benioff and Michael Jordan - cefthurston
http://www.businessinsider.com/gigster-20-million-redpoint-ventures-marc-benioff-michael-jordan-2017-8
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downandout
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.

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puranjay
Now I'm curious to know about your startup. Care to share?

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downandout
Not really, it ended up burning through millions and eventually crashed. This
was at the height of the dotcom era. Not my finest accomplishment.

~~~
jazoom
I like your honesty.

It sounds like MJ was right to listen to Curtis. Smart people listen to even
smarter people.

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mdasen
_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?

~~~
notyourwork
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.

~~~
jypepin
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.

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throwaway9122
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!

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schnevets
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.

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sperling75
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.

~~~
Gustomaximus
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.

~~~
edoceo
They could partner with WeWork

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nedwin
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.

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
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

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TorKlingberg
Gigster had some controversy here 7 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13541162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13541162)

~~~
pavlakoos
That controversy showed Gigster's big-scale thinking, I'm sure VCs actually
liked that.

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jamisteven
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

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pmorici
anyone have experience working with them? Is it really different than sites
like upwork in terms of client quality and rates?

~~~
throwaway709
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.

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Grustaf
> 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
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.

~~~
throw8888
Any insights on what's better than Gigster? Asking for meself.

~~~
elsewhen
TopTal.

~~~
throw8888
How is it better? TopTal pays 3-5 times less and differentiates rates by
country where contractor resides.

~~~
oldboyFX
So you're saying that Gigster pays their subs ~$180/h? That's over $330,000
per year. So how much do they charge clients then? ~$300/h?

I doubt it. Their prices are probably similar to TopTals.

~~~
throw8888
Gigster offers fixed price projects, based on $100-150/hr rate.

If you manage to get things done faster, which can happen pretty often, you
end up with rate even better.

And yes, it's possible to make that amount of $ on gigster

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dangero
Gigster 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?

~~~
pavlakoos
Which copy do you have in mind? It seems they still give estimates per
project. However they have also increased that esitmate.

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dalbasal
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.

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colordrops
So this is Uber for senior developers.

~~~
_pmf_
> So this is Uber for senior developers.

Senior in web developer years.

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raides
How is this different than work market and the radically less structured fiver
or upwork?

Are there guarantees I am missing to see?

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ctvo
Has anyone used Gigster and had a positive experience? How did they compare in
costs, schedule and quality?

~~~
nathan_f77
I applied last year in May, and haven't heard anything since then.

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appleflaxen
any 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
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'.

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yourstruly33
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?

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nfRfqX5n
anyone know if the part time projects are too time consuming to do with a full
time job?

~~~
s73ver_
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.

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danblick
Weird. I was so sure that "Michael Jordan" would be the Berkeley CS professor
in this context. I guess not!

