Upwork

oDesk

oDesk Logo oDesk Logo
Company type	Private
Industry	Internet Service Marketplace Workforce Management
Founded	Campbell, California 2003
Headquarters	Menlo Park, California
Key people	Gary Swart, CEO Brian Goler, VP Product & Marketing Stratis Karamanlakis, VP of Development & Founder Ed Schaffer, VP Finance & Operations Odysseas Tsatalos, CTO & Founder Bin Xu, VP of Engineering
Website	oDesk.com

oDesk is a company with a global job marketplace and a series of tools targeted at businesses that intend to hire and manage remote workers. Based in Menlo Park, CA, oDesk was founded by Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis. The name is a short version of "no desk" in reference to the company's intent to enable anyone to work anywhere, anytime.

oDesk has raised three rounds of financing. The first was by Globespan Capital and Sigma Partners. The second round was raised in September 2006, led by Benchmark Capital and included the previous two investors. The third round was raised in May 2008, led by DAG Ventures and included the previous three investors. The venture investors on oDesk's board include Greg Gretsch, Venky Ganesan and Kevin Harvey.

Description

oDesk allows employers (“buyers”) to create online workteams coordinated and paid through the company's proprietary software and website. Prospective employers can post jobs for free, and freelance workers (“providers”) may create profiles and bid on jobs, also for free. The company puts potential providers through “a rigorous screening.” The company collects 10 percent of the payment. Payments are made through oDesk, which handles many bookkeeping tasks for the transaction. In addition to the marketplace aspect and the payment/bookkeeping services, the company uses collaborative software, “oDesk Team,” that allows employers to see a provider's progress while he or she is billing time. This aspect of the company's business model has drawn criticism.

The company describes itself as a staffing marketplace and management platform. As of Jan. 10, 2009, the company reports that nearly 37,000 of its 170,000 providers are in the United States. The company's site is entirely in English, and all transactions are made in U.S. dollars. The site does not post statistics regarding locations of buyer companies, but a comment posted by an oDesk employee noted that the majority are U.S.-based. In January 2009, the company's self-reported tally of services paid through its site had passed $55 million.

The specific areas of expertise supported by the site include web development and a wide variety of programming/software development skills, graphic design, writing and administrative support. The company provides voluntary skills tests in various disciplines from English aptitude to specific programming skills, and profiles include a feedback mechanism.

Background

Outsourcing, the trend of contracting out jobs, often to lower-cost regions where labor may more cheaply be employed, has inspired the creation of various online services designed to create a marketplace in which freelance workers and potential employers can connect. oDesk is one among a number of companies, including Elance, GetAFreelancer, Guru, Cogzidel RBS and RentACoder, that create marketplaces in which employers and freelancers can contact one another. These sites often manage the payments, and make money by charging membership fees and/or take a cut of the payment. The cuts can range from 4 percent to 15 percent.

Fee Structures and Payment

Providers set their hourly wages, and receive that full wage from buyers, but buyers see, and pay, a higher wage that includes oDesk's markup, which is 11.11 percent of the provider's set rate, or 10 percent of what the buyer pays. For example, a provider offering her services for $20 an hour would set that as her rate, but a buyer looking at her profile would see a rate of $22.22. For every hour the buyer paid that worker, oDesk would keep $2.22.

oDesk also supports fixed-rate jobs, in which buyer and provider negotiate a price for a completed project, delivered in an agreed-upon timeline, regardless of how many hours it takes to complete. The company does not guarantee payment for fixed-rate jobs. Additionally, while providers can submit bills for time worked outside the Team software's Work Diary function, oDesk does not guarantee payment for such time in the event a buyer balks at paying. The oDesk.com FAQ page claims it will intervene in an ongoing payment dispute, but suggests the company will limit its involvement to reviewing the hourly timelogs.

In February 2008, oDesk started providing detailed statistics about its economy, including hours worked, buyer and provider growth, hourly rates statistics, penetration by country and skill. According to these statistics, during the third quarter of 2008, oDesk providers billed more than 700,000 hours working online at an average rate of $13-$15/hr.

Controversy

The company's Team software, which records a worker's online time and other information in a “Work Diary,” has drawn criticism for being too intrusive. Information recorded in the Work Diary includes keystroke volume (but not keystroke logging), screenshots of a provider's computer taken at roughly 10-minute intervals, and even optional webcam shots of the provider at his or her desk. The software is downloaded by the provider, who voluntarily signs on to log hours. The company also has a posted privacy policy. Nonetheless, this monitoring capability is unusual among outsourcing/freelancing providers, and has generated some outcry from critics who see it as unfairly intrusive. Questions about such a virtual work environment have been raised in articles about oDesk and competing sites. Canada's Globe & Mail newspaper noted that in-house employees may face varying levels of supervision as well, but suggested oDesk's technology smacks of Big Brother, observing that one blogger had likened the site to “eSlavery 2.0.”

The company maintains that the increased “transparency” allows a buyer to have confidence in the billing done by a contractor whom the buyer may never have met and who may be half a world away. In an October 2008 interview with website Web Worker Daily, CEO Gary Swart said the work diaries “give buyers unprecedented visibility into work performed,” and that the Team software's “hassle-free tracking guarantees convenient, safe, and accurate billing for all work performed.”

Awards

• Finalist in PC Magazine’s 2006 Small Business Awards

critical voices

as soon as the journalist is ready, this here will have a better source-link, in the meantime i only can say: yes, now i also "heard about" people´s accounts deleted by staff of odesk, -> stealing their moneay during a chat ("help"/"support"-chat, then -> afterwards deleting the person´s accounts. in the meanwhile i only can give a page where people are documenting stuff like this sometimes. it seems 'confusing' at the first glimpse, but original. the mentioned case down there, the bill demanding the stolen money back ist copy online as .txt but the snapshots and wittness eyes exist. the page is this here.

External links

• oDesk.com
• oDesk Global Economy Beta, Powered by O'Reilly
• oDesk Insider blog