EP46: Freelancer Marketplaces & Building Gupshup for over 16 years {Beerud of Elance & Gupshup}

Stars & Startups

EP46: {Beerud Sheth, Founder of Elance & Gupshup}

On this episode I speak with Beerud Sheth, who was the co-founder & CEO of the poplar freelancing work platform Elance in 1998, that is now Upwork. Beerud went on to found Gupshup a could messaging platform that has seen its share of twists and turns in the messaging and communications space since 2004 and now processes over 4 billion messages a month. Beerud joined us from his home in California for this chat.

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Elance was co-founded by Beerud who moved to the US after graduating from IIT Bombay, to pursue his Masters at MIT followed by a stint in investment banking on Wall Street. Elance was the poster boy of the freelancer economy. Beerud was the CEO and top executive till 2007 and later a board member until the merger with Odesk in 2014.

Gupshup is among the cloud messaging platforms in the world with revenue upwards of Rs. 600 crore and has over 39,000 businesses including Ola, Flipkart, Zomato, HDFC, Google, Paytm. Processes over 4.5 billion messages a month and recently expanded their services to South East Asia, Middle East and Europe.

Hope you enjoy the episode!

Stay tuned & stay Safe!

- V @varunvummidi

Timeline:

00:00 - Introduction

05:08 - Founding Elance

08:00 - Solving for supply

10:33 - Managing challenges building a marketplace

12:45 - Solving for Remote Work

14:20 - Took 6 months to build the business case for Elance

16:02 - Meeting co-founders & raising money

17:51 - Stock Markets were irrational in the 2000s that helped with fund raising

18:23 - Raising over $ 62M for Elance & the Odesk merger

19:50 - Transitioning out of Elance

23:28 - Reasons Gig Work is gaining popularity & the moment is now

27:23 - Gupshup - messaging & communication

30:21 - Messaging is the original super app

36:01 - iMessage Vs RCS

38:45 - Gupshup IP messaging

40:51 - Resident Message apps on OEMs

45:40 - Next phase of Messaging

48:30 - Mobile SPAM

51:25 - Plans & Hiring