Assertion Not checkable as stated
Upwork CEO: CX team is 95% freelancers with under 5% attrition
“It's 95% freelancers, and yet our attrition rate on the team is less than five percent.”
Opinion
Upwork CEO: The Great Resignation is a permanent state
“The Great Resignation is a permanent state. That is my belief.”
Assertion Not yet assessed · timeframe Feb 2022
Upwork CEO: 75% of Upwork's 2,000 team members are freelancers
“And today, fast forward, we're a public company. We have about 2000 team members. 75% of those team members are freelancers. They are distributed around the world. Our team is in 86 countries globally.”
Assertion Supported
Brown: Data Shows Freelancers Upskill More Frequently Than Captive Employees
“And so we also see that in the data, professional freelancers actually do more to upskill themselves constantly than captive employees do. That's just a fact.”
Insight
Brown: Freelancers deliver ROI in hours, whereas employees take months
“Unlike your employees, who might only be onboarded fully and delivering ROI for you after three to six months, your freelancers, you can onboard in a few hours, and they're delivering ROI for you in a few hours, which is amazing, because they are very fast and…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Brown: New tools will make virtual meetings superior to in-person
“I think also as we move towards the future of work, getting better and better, like all the tools that you're probably building will just make, ah, virtual, ah, meetings so much better than in person.”
Insight
Brown: A single annual two-week in-person meetup sustains remote teams
“We have a practice where our virtual teams do get together once every year or so for a two-week agile, like, meetup where the team is, you know, in Czechoslovakia or Mexico City or somewhere, and they do have team building in person. The rest of the year, they…”
Assertion Supported
Brown: Many Remote Workers Report Preferring Quitting Over Office Mandates
“And, ah, there's been this massive change in how workers experience work over the last year plus as so many folks have been working from home and have actually reported that they would rather quit their jobs than be called back into traditional offices, and so…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Brown: Upwork employs over 350 freelance developers on core products
“In fact, we have more than 350 freelancers doing remote development for us on our core mobile app, our web apps, and this has been a huge part of how we've scaled our business over many, many years.”
Assertion Supported
Brown: Upwork launched three product lines in 12 months using freelancers
“When I became the CEO of our company in January of last year, I had a very audacious goal for us to go from being a single product company to having four products, and it was our remote development team that included so many of these freelance developers that …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Upwork Rebranded 900 Assets in Half the Time Using Freelancers
“Last year, we set the goal of rebranding and changing a bunch of our, ah, marketing assets, doing a big launch. We did this in about half the time, changing 900 assets in our company. So much faster than we would have been able to do with just an in-house team…”
Insight
Brown: Company culture is defined by daily decisions, rewards, and punishments
“I think a lot of companies had this idea before the pandemic that their culture was like kombucha on tap and posters on the walls, and I think we've hopefully all learned that culture is so much more than that. It's like the decisions we're making every day. I…”
Disclosure
Brown: Upwork pays freelancers to take company-wide days off
“We've been doing charge up days, which is a day off for the company, or two days off for the whole company, we pay the freelancers to also take that time off.”
Insight
Brown: Hiring Freelancers Forces Companies to Clarify Goals Before Deploying Headcount
“Bringing freelancers in forces that clarity and has forced us to really get good at understanding for every effort, like, what are we trying to achieve? If we can articulate that first, then we need to pause and not just start putting bodies against the effort…”
Assertion Supported
Brown: 20M Americans joined the freelance workforce in 2020
“In twenty-twenty, we saw twenty million Americans join the freelance workforce.”
