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Gigster raises $20M from investors including Marc Benioff and Michael Jordan

99 点作者 cefthurston超过 7 年前

19 条评论

downandout超过 7 年前
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&#x27;s financial affairs.<p>At my meeting with Michael and his team, Michael said &quot;you&#x27;ve convinced me, now you have to convince Curtis&quot;. I assume that&#x27;s his standard response, so that he doesn&#x27;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.<p>The point of this story is that if you see a big celebrity name attached to an investment, odds are that the decision wasn&#x27;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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mdasen超过 7 年前
<i>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><p>I think that&#x27;s where it breaks down a bit. Full time jobs seem pretty plentiful even for mediocre devs. Gigster&#x27;s model (based on their site) is to have top-tier talent that can easily get a very high paying, stable job. What I&#x27;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.<p>So, why Gigster? They don&#x27;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?<p>I&#x27;m not saying there isn&#x27;t a &quot;why&quot;, but they certainly aren&#x27;t selling it. &quot;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&#x27;ll take care of that for you.&quot; That&#x27;s a pitch. But they seem to have the attitude of &quot;We&#x27;re Gigster, of course everyone should want to work for us.&quot; Their job page doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s coming with a steady, large paycheck.<p>As a dev, there are certainly concerning parts of Gigster:<p><i>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.</i><p>So, if the client requests major revisions that doubles the workload, am I the one that&#x27;s working for free or does Gigster cover that? Who determines if it&#x27;s the dev&#x27;s fault for building something crappy or the PM&#x27;s fault for not getting things right or the client&#x27;s fault for wanting something other than they said they wanted? If there are major revisions, do I not get paid because there aren&#x27;t milestones set for revisions?<p>I&#x27;m not saying that there aren&#x27;t answers to those questions, but if they&#x27;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?
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throwaway9122超过 7 年前
I worked at Gigster and I would say to stay far away. Far far away. I worked there to work on python&#x2F;django&#x2F;rails&#x2F;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&#x27;m sure they have a really bad reputation among startups.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s all a huge lie. They got sued by someone already. No benefits nothing. You&#x27;re good though if you&#x27;re in on the scam. My teammates bullshitted about the client&#x2F;project we were working on and many people left. Buyer beware!
schnevets超过 7 年前
Despite the celebrities, Marc Benioff is easily the most intriguing investor on that list. SalesForce&#x27;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.
sperling75超过 7 年前
Curated odesk&#x2F;elancer&#x2F;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.
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nedwin超过 7 年前
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 &amp; when they expand to new verticals outside of software development.
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TorKlingberg超过 7 年前
Gigster had some controversy here 7 months ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13541162" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13541162</a>
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jamisteven超过 7 年前
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
pmorici超过 7 年前
anyone have experience working with them? Is it really different than sites like upwork in terms of client quality and rates?
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Grustaf超过 7 年前
&gt; the thousand or so tech workers on its marketplace<p>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.
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dangero超过 7 年前
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?
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dalbasal超过 7 年前
Nt really related to gigster specifically or this raise, but…<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I don’t know much about this area, but it would be interesting to hear about it.
colordrops超过 7 年前
So this is Uber for senior developers.
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raides超过 7 年前
How is this different than work market and the radically less structured fiver or upwork?<p>Are there guarantees I am missing to see?
ctvo超过 7 年前
Has anyone used Gigster and had a positive experience? How did they compare in costs, schedule and quality?
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appleflaxen超过 7 年前
any time celebrity investors start making news, I automatically raise an eyebrow.<p>the $20 million matters, of course, but what possible relevance does the identity of the investor have?
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yourstruly33超过 7 年前
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?
nfRfqX5n超过 7 年前
anyone know if the part time projects are too time consuming to do with a full time job?
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danblick超过 7 年前
Weird. I was so sure that &quot;Michael Jordan&quot; would be the Berkeley CS professor in this context. I guess not!