Guru.com
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet Service Marketplace Workforce Management Crowdsourcing |
| Founded | Pittsburgh 1998 |
| Founder | Inder Guglani |
| Headquarters | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| Website | Guru.com |
Guru.com is a freelance marketplace.[2] It allows companies to find freelance workers for commissioned work. Founded in 1998 in Pittsburgh as eMoonlighter.com and still headquartered there.
History
Guru Inc. was founded in 1999[3] in San Francisco as an online clearing house for high tech workers seeking short-term contracts. The company, led by brothers Jon and James Slavet, raised $3M in angel funding and a further $16M in a full venture round led by Greylock Partners and August Capital.[3] In a May 2000 interview, Paul Saffo cited Guru.com as an example of a company using the Internet to provide new kinds of services where individuals negotiated directly with potential employers.[4]
In May 2001, Ray Marcy, who had been the CEO at Spherion, a Florida staffing company, became CEO of Guru Inc. He hired industrial psychologist Janz and artificial intelligence expert Dan Crow to develop new software.[5]
In February 2002, Guru unveiled its SmartMatch technology, which matched résumés and other information about job applicants to jobs.[6] The company also developed a candidate profiling system using techniques from Industrial and organizational psychology to better understand a candidate's suitability for a particular job.
The company was acquired[7] in December 2002 by Unicru, a human resources software company based in Portland, Oregon. Guru's technology and staff remained with Unicru, focused on software to help large employers assess and hire job applicants.
Merger & Present day
Unicru sold the Guru.com domain name and logo to eMoonlighter.com, and eMoonlighter was renamed Guru.com. Guru.com directly connects businesses and employees in 160 different fields.
Notes
- ^ "Guru.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
- ^ Guru.com puts freelancers to work – PC World
- ^ a b "The New-Boy Network". Inc magazine. 1 January 2000.
- ^ Walker, Leslie (May 18, 2000). "Discussion with Paul Saffo, Director, Institute For The Future". The Washington Post.
- ^ Clifford, Stephanie (July 2002). "Guru's Gamble". Business 2.0.
- ^ Crow, D.; Desanto, J. (2004). "A hybrid approach to concept extraction and recognition-based matching in the domain of human resources". 16th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence. p. 535. doi:10.1109/ICTAI.2004.12. ISBN 0-7695-2236-X.
- ^ Earnshaw, Aliza (4 August 2003). "Unicru expands capabilities with two acquisitions". Portland Business Journal.
