Stephane Kasriel is the CEO of Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing website. Over 5 million businesses and 12 million freelancers have tapped into Upwork.com to hire and work online.
Stephane co-chaired the Global Future Council on Education, Gender and Work at World Economic Forum in 2016. He has an MBA from INSEAD and a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Tell us about your journey to being the CEO of Upwork.
Stephane: I joined Upwork in 2012 to lead product and engineering, when Upwork used to be oDesk. Later, our Chairman reached out to me for referrals to hire our CEO, and I realized that I really wanted this job. I truly believed that the person could make an unimaginable impact on our society. We want everyone to have the same access to jobs even if they don't live in New York or Silicon Valley and even if their parents didn't go to college. I've been at Upwork for 5 years now, and completely loving the purpose and scale this opportunity has given me to convince companies to be open to this model.
What is this model that you believe in?
Stephane: Well, when I recruited at companies like PayPal, there was a certain flow of hiring employees who looked like us. If I were a middle age, Stanford educated, white man, then I trusted candidates with similar backgrounds and credentials. At Upwork, we say that there are more creative ways to hire by meeting qualified freelancers. This is very much a change of mindset. We show a different way of working. Over 5 million businesses and 12 million freelancers have tapped into Upwork.com to hire and work online. Freelancers are earning more than $1 billion annually via our sites.
What trends have you seen in the workplace that created a need for the freelance model?
Stephane: Fundamentally, knowledge work is different from the assembly line model which was created during the first industrial revolution. Our technology automated tasks for us, but we still didn't change the employer-employee mentality. Companies like Yahoo! and IBM stopped the flexibility to work from home, they wanted their employees to come in everyday and be at their desks. Companies need to be open minded.
Firstly, people don't stay at one company for 25 years anymore. The average tenure of employees in the US is 4 years, and specifically for millennials, it's 2.5 years. Additionally, some people need to take care of their families and flexible working situations are not just a choice but also a necessity for them. Especially with today's technology, your workers don't need to be physically present at their desk to do everything, and the new generation demands a more flexible work lifestyle.
Secondly, if your company is based in SF or NYC, why would you restrain yourself to local talent, or even worse, force talent from other cities to relocate to much more expensive cities like SF or NYC? Smart companies are outsourcing work to qualified talent wherever they live.
How do you ensure that your employees believe this philosophy as deeply as you do?
Stephane: We make it very clear that we do what we preach.We have 300 on-site employees and 700 freelancers across 100 countries who collectively run Upwork. The people who join Upwork are self-selected and are inspired by our mission. They talk to customers and freelancers around the world everyday and hear amazing stories of how Upwork changed their lives. We show the videos of these success stories at our company all hands, and our employees know that each one of them helps create 300-500 jobs for professionals around the world.
What advice would you give to your 22 year old self? What do you know now that you wish you knew then?
Stephane: Two things. Take more risks. Get more mentors.
When we graduate from college, we have so little to lose. As we get older, we have more responsibility, higher opportunity costs and job security, so we often try to mitigate risks. The best career decisions I made were the riskiest ones. For example, after I graduated from INSEAD, my colleagues were chasing after McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, but I decided to join PayPal to help them enter the French market. Every one thought I was crazy because American banks had always failed in France. I nonetheless chose PayPal because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to launch PayPal in a challenging market, whereas I knew that McKinsey would always be around. It turned out to be a good choice. We took PayPal from 0 to $100M in revenue in France.
Similarly, I'd add that it's crucial to find mentors and keep them around. I started my first company in 1998 at the age of 23. There were no blogs, no culture of mentoring, and I ended up making a lot of mistakes. Today, a lot of information exists on best practices and resources for professionals and entrepreneurs. It's your imperative to take advantage of these opportunities that we didn't have just a couple of decades ago.
Follow Stephane at @skasriel, check out the other interviews in Going Against the Flow series at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charu-sharma/ and join this movement to empower 1 million female entrepreneurs on goagainsttheflow.com.