Iba Masood

So, you know, what we found, so I actually personally was a freelancer on these platforms, me and Sayed, both of us.

So what we did was we were freelancers on those platforms for about two years or so, 1.5 to two years.

We found that the average developer was being paid about $200 on the leading freelance marketplaces like Upwork.

Per hour?

$200 for a small widget project.

And so they would need to take at least 10 to 18 of those projects in a month so that they could make like a sizable income.

And we're like, okay, what if you could make that sizable income with just one project that was typically with like a larger enterprise and had higher payouts.

So that was like our pitch to developers when we were building out the marketplace very early on.

And then the other part of it was also equal pay.

So one of the things we really

build a meritocracy where folks that didn't have, you know, a computer science degree from an Ivy league university could join Tara, but on the basis, purely on the basis of their code.

So we would actually look at their existing GitHub and other platforms to give them a score.

So we launched in 2015 when this was like in the U.S.

We were initially called Gradberry and we were primarily like focusing on full time software positions.

And we found that there was like a much bigger market in terms of on the contracting side.

Plus, we found that companies were more willing to allow AI to make the recruiting decision when it was primarily for freelance positions.

So even with full time, they were still not willing to like allow an algorithm to recruit developers specifically that were, you know, that was meritocratic in nature.

So enterprises, we have about 10.

Total companies, we have about 65.

Okay, 65.