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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
* 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.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Gigster-Reviews-E1168400.h...
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
Senior in web developer years.
the $20 million matters, of course, but what possible relevance does the identity of the investor have?
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!
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.
Are there guarantees I am missing to see?
