What happened in the early days of oDesk?

I didn't care much for Ries' "The Lean Startup", but one thing that did stick with me about it was the example of just doing stuff 'by hand' to see if there's a market for it, without worrying about creating some super-cool highly automated and perfect system from the get go, as would be our inclination as hackers. The oDesk story seems to indicate that they did something similar - putting people in touch very much 'by hand' initially. It'd be interesting to hear about the transition, but I think it's a good concept to keep in mind, as long as you are reasonably sure that, at some point, things <i>can</i> be automated pretty well.

I wanted to here more detail about how they want from a curated marketplace to the free-for-all it is today.<p>TopTal and Matchist have launched in the last few years, and are aiming to be curated jobs marketplaces (TopTal vets coders, Matchist vets clients). When I first saw them, I thought it was a great model, but this article suggests it's something oDesk tried back in the day and didn't work out. Anyone have any deeper insights?

Great essay.<p>This is why founders need to run their companies. CEOs with "Industry Experience" will just copy a pattern they saw somewhere else, and rarely succeed.

Very inspirational story. Especially how they personally worked with the clients and freelancers in the first days.<p>Here at JotForm, Our 15-person support team completely runs over ODesk. We have supporters from Philippines, UK, US, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Kenya and El Salvador. We even promoted one of our supporters as Support Team Manager and had great level of success.<p>The quality of people on oDesk varies, so when we need to hire a new supporter, we choose some of the best applicants and run 5-hour trials with them.<p>The best part is we have people all over the world, so when you contact us even at 3am, you will get a response within 20 minutes on average.

Has anyone found work through oDesk and been satisfied with it?

Storylane appears to be a hosted blogging platform that doesn't offer RSS feeds. Not sure if they're just desperate to get people joined up, or RSS is actually dead.

I think in the end this has result in a lot of cheap and bad work going live every week in the world (what does that say about the quality of the web). I have seen rates so low you can have that guy working all week, and just hope that he finishes before your 100$ budget is over (for a site as big as say an ebay.com clone). There should be minimum wages, per continent if needed.

Yeah, 3 middle men between third world and Oracle - the meta-model of current IT business,) and $5/h - $25/h is also telling.)<p>Self-proclaimed manager's dream.

Everyone has an interesting story to tell and our world ought to celebrate normal people more than it does. Storylane is a brilliant combination of the two. Love it

I guess "People sharing things that matter" is very subjective. A nice story to be sure....but "really matters"?<p>Is storylane curated or just a free for all?

<i>Build a global meritocracy - a person's geographic location should not inhibit the work that they can do.</i><p>Great Quote!

Great story about a startup just getting stuff done in it's infancy. Who are their major competitors now?

This is one of my favorites

Great story