Lessons From The Founder of Upwork
Beerud Sheth is the Founder of Elance (now Upwork). He is also the founder & CEO of Gupshup, the world's leading messaging and bot platform. From immigrating to the US at 20, to founding Upwork (then Elance) in a cramped Jersey City apartment, to creating chatbots for the biggest companies in the world, Beerud’s journey as an entrepreneur and tech visionary has taken a number of surprising turns.
Podcast Highlights
- Who is Beerud Sheth?
Beerud grew up in Mumbai, India in an average middle class family and was blessed with decent analytical skills. He was always good at math and computing but more than that, he had always been driven and determined with whatever he was working on. Those are the traits that have served him well in his life because no matter how hard you work, things don’t always go as planned.
- Elance to Upwork
It took 20 years to take Elance to IPO, this is a reflection of the typical overnight success story in Silicon valley. There were many challenges along the way.
The IPO is not the end goal. In many ways Upwork has barely scratched the surface of the freelance economy. The point is not the IPO itself, it was to build a company that adds value to millions of people and generates a profit. In that, Upwork has certainly succeeded.
Entrepreneurs tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term.
All of Beerud’s skills and experiences culminated in the idea that would eventually become Elance and later on Upwork. The core idea has remained essentially the same even though the business has evolved quite a bit.
Entrepreneurship is a balance of irrational exuberance and a strong realism. When you’re trying to execute something you have to be realistic about what your customers want and how long it will take. The 2001 financial crisis forced Beerud to reevaluate his company and restructure it in a lot of ways. If you don’t have runway, it doesn’t matter what your ideas are because you can’t execute.
- Planning For The Bad Times
Much of it comes down to psychology. Try not to get too excited when things are going great but also try not to get too down on yourself when things aren’t going well. You can’t control what happens in the world, but you can control how you respond to it. Your own psychology can get in the way of your own clear thinking.
Entrepreneurs tend to take on all the stress upon themselves. Focus on what you can control and can do. It’s not the bad stuff that is happening to you it’s how you respond to it that determines the outcome.
Beerud relied on the advice of VC’s and mentors that were involved in the company. Leverage whatever resources you can and people’s willingness to share their wisdom, that’s one of the greatest strengths of Silicon Valley.
When you start a company people rely on you. Beerud always had an immense sense of obligation to the people he worked with so quitting wasn’t an option to him.
- If there was no Upwork, would there be no AirBnB or Uber?
You can’t say for certain but Upwork definitely blazed a trail. In many ways those companies were able to take advantage of the lessons Upwork learned and the validation it provided.
The success of those companies validates the initial idea of Upwork even more.
- What’s coming in the future?
Gupshup is Beerud’s latest project. It’s a messaging platform that enables businesses to communicate with consumers in more intelligent ways. Gupshup basically simplifies your messaging channels by combining them so it’s easier to manage and then allows you to automate a lot of the most common questions.
Businesses have to be where the consumers are but the proliferation of messaging channels is making that much more