THUMBTACK SECURES $150 MILLION GROWTH ROUND LED BY SEQUOIA; THUMBTACK SAYS FUNDING VALUES CO AT $1.7 BILLION
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Thumbtack, which connects service providers with customers, says the company's data shows people who list their services on Thumbtack have seen little negative impact.
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Thumbtack has roots in all fifty states, and not just in the big cities — you can find Thumbtack pros in small towns across the country too.
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Thumbtack just closed a new funding round of $150 million.
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Thumbtack says there are "misconceptions" about all those $30K weddings.
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He joined from Thumbtack where he held the same role.
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In 2015, Schaaf left Google to join Thumbtack as CTO.
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Still, she swallows a thumbtack well before her second trimester.
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Thumbtack now automatically generates quotes based on your needs and your location.
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He's served as a strategic advisor to Ticketmaster, MasterClass, Thumbtack and Honey.
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"The Point" refers to the point of the thumbtack in the logo.
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You could have heard a thumbtack drop -- if they still used those.
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Employers like Uber, Asana, Dropbox, Thumbtack and Evernote have already hired through CodeFights.
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Most recently, it tapped former Thumbtack chief technology officer Mark Schaaf as CTO.
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For example, I went on Thumbtack to see what the job might cost.
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"There's been a lot of talk about portable benefits," Thumbtack Zappacosta told TechCrunch.
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Every year, Thumbtack ranks the U.S. cities that are the friendliest for entrepreneurs.
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Thumbtack operates in every county in the U.S., apart from two, he said.
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Think of it like a TaskRabbit or Thumbtack for remote, more brainy work.
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French startup StarOfService just raised another $10 million for its European Thumbtack alternative.
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Here's a quick recap in case you aren't familiar with the Thumbtack model.
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She's a graduate of Stanford GSB, and previously worked for Thumbtack and Bain.
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She recognizes her small, passing presence ("My face a thumbtack/in the earth.").
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She eventually signed up for Yelp, Porch, Thumbtack, Angie's List, HomeAdvisor and Groupon.
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Now professionals pay Thumbtack a small fee when customers contact them after a quote.
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The company also has found product market fit working with Stripe, Thumbtack and others.
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Thumbtack, an online marketplace for expert services, is soliciting Pokemon experts to guide n00bs.
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The light yellow walls are covered in ornaments, jewelry, and tons of thumbtack holes.
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A few platforms like TaskRabbit, Handy, Thumbtack, and Porch offer a variety of services.
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You've seen the thumbtack on the chair, and the stapler in the Jell-o.
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Companies like the [online services marketplace] Thumbtack we knew for three years before we invested.
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If you can, get in touch with Marco from Thumbtack or anybody in my portfolio.
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Reflektive's current customers include companies like Twilio, Braintree, Thumbtack, CreditKarma, Digital Ocean, Udacity, and Nutanix.
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Thumbtack charges a fee per potential customer that varies with the size of the job.
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Recent data from service site Thumbtack found the project costs home sellers an average $1,141 nationwide.
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The follow-through is what sets Setter apart from directory-style services like Yelp or Thumbtack .
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Angsuwat is the vice president of people at Thumbtack and a former Google human-resources exec.
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Other participating investors include Matrix Partners, Tenaya Capital, Glynn Capital and Thumbtack co-founder Jonathan Swanson.
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Both Thumbtack and The Knot say New York City is the most expensive place to get married.
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And you can solicit for quotes for professional services on a web service like Thumbtack (http:/thumbtack.com/).
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The company operates a marketplace for independent contractors, a sort of Thumbtack for the rest of the world.
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Thumbtack processes about $0003 billion a year in business for its service providers in roughly 2000,22011 professional categories.
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While he gets most of his leads from Thumbtack, he uses other lead generation websites such as HomeAdvisor.
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It is just one of many sites, including Handy, Zaarly, and Thumbtack, that help power the gig economy.
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On one afternoon, I drove to San Francisco's Mission District to meet a Thumbtack caterer in her home.
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The startup is in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase after also receiving interest from Thumbtack.
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Many of these have received further funding from Sequoia itself, including Faire, GenEdit, Guardant Health, Stripe, Thumbtack, and Vector.
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According to The Wall Street Journal, this could be the last funding round before Thumbtack files to go public.
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Over the past couple of years, Guru has brought on big-name clients, including BuzzFeed, Glossier, Intercom and Thumbtack.
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A lot of customers we get through online lead services like Thumbtack are people looking for the best deal.
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He is a Director of AgilOne, Clever, Dropbox, Elevate, Good Eggs, Hearsay Social, Inkling, Qualtrics, Thanx, Thumbtack, TuneIn and VarageSale.
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Thumbtack will be profitable by 2000 and has rolled out a host of new products in the last six months.
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Before that, she was a manager at on-demand services marketplace Thumbtack, where she ran the events and weddings category.
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In his post today, Hartz noted his considerable experience making angel bets, including on Airbnb, Pinterest, Thumbtack, Yammer, and PayPal.
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For companies like Airbnb, Uber, ClassPass, Thumbtack and countless others, partners are mission-critical to their operation and value proposition.
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While still working full-time at a construction development company, Downing signed up as a general contracting "pro" on Thumbtack.
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At Thumbtack I would draw up wire-frames in my sketchbook to bring to 1:1 interviews with our pros.
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For entrepreneurs, online marketplaces like TaskRabbit, Thumbtack or Etsy have become another avenue to generate leads for their own businesses.
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Gusto is expanding in Denver, Thumbtack is adding in Salt Lake City and Metromile is doing it in Tempe, Arizona.
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When I first covered StarOfService, the company didn't even try to hide from me that it was a Thumbtack copycat.
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TaskRabbit's buyer will not be Thumbtack, its chief rival in the home errand space, said several people following the proceedings.
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One in four full-time Thumbtack professionals surveyed say health insurance was a factor in their decision to start a business.
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Thumbtack says average prices range from $60/session in Seattle, Chicago and L.A. to $80/session in N.Y.C and San Francisco.
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For the first six months, Thumbtack will also contribute $25 to each pro (up to $20,000 in total) who joins Alia.
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Thumbtack faces competition from Amazon, Alphabet's Google and Angie's List, but its marketplace is far bigger than its competitors, he said.
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The personal enterprise economy is booming thanks to companies like Uber, Airbnb and Thumbtack supporting a vital new period of entrepreneurship.
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Beyond TaskRabbit, service platforms include Thumbtack, for professional projects; Postmates, for delivery; Handy, for housework; Dogvacay, for pets; and countless others.
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Soomgo – Thumbtack for South Korea Soomgo has created a marketplace that helps local service providers in South Korea find new customers.
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"Thumbtack is a more consumer-focused marketplace with local service professionals and consumers, but Instacart gets even more complex," said Schaaf.
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Other companies in the sector include Thumbtack, which received a $100 million investment from Google Capital in 2014, and Porch, Pro.
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It can even be more hazardous in their gut than "something like glass or a needle or a thumbtack," he said.
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If you&aposre considering the investment, platforms like TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Handy, Amazon Home Services, DoorDash, and Instacart can help you out.
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Make an appointment with a Thumbtack pro hereWhat it is: A service that pairs you with pros in all different fields.
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Here are the state grades for Thumbtack's 2018 Small Business Friendliness Survey: Thumbtack also graded major cities on small business friendliness.
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He doubled down on efforts to find new customers, including on Thumbtack, an online marketplace for hiring people to complete tasks.
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Prior to joining Founders Fund, Cyan was an active angel investor with a portfolio including Uber, Thumbtack, SpaceX, EShares, Postmates and Affirm.
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Thumbtack, one of the first players in what is now known as the gig economy, has hit the fundraising circuit once again.
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PB: I've made a handful of angel investments, including NerdWallet, and I've been a hands-on advisor at Thumbtack, Medallia and Procore.
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Before joining Lightspeed, I led several user research projects for startups including Thumbtack, BetterUp, Fundbox, and a pre-launch Indian beauty brand.
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Woebegone Rick Honeycutt saw a thumbtack on the way to the bullpen and decided to use it to mark up a ball.
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Like Star Cleaning, Rooforia Home Exteriors in Omaha often finds customers through Thumbtack, an online marketplace for hiring people to complete tasks.
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Before joining Founders Fund, Banister was a wildly successful angel investor, with portfolio companies including Uber, Thumbtack, SpaceX, Postmates, EShares, Affirm and Niantic.
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The answer seems to be "yes" as the Thumbtack platform continues to grow and Uber and Lyft show no signs of slowing down.
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When I first saw Uber or Thumbtack or Wealthfront, you could see there was some amount of polish and consideration in their product.
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Still, customers might not be as willing to contribute as Thumbtack hopes they'll be, and Zappacosta understands that other approaches may be necessary.
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The upcoming round comes at a flat valuation to its 2804 Series G funding of $22015 million, which valued Thumbtack at $2125 billion.
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Ahead of filing to raise another nine-digit round, we've heard Thumbtack was exploring M&A opportunities with a competing or complementary companies.
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Between Thumbtack, Yelp, Angie's List and Amazon, it wouldn't appear that the world needs a new platform that matches customers with service professionals.
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There was a lot of news to get to so they started with some quick hits about Thumbtack, Bird, Scoot, Mirror and Looker.
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When making product updates at Thumbtack, I often met with our service professionals in-person to observe them using the product in-situ.
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She said she revamped the thumbtack, examining the proportions and rounding out the edges a bit, for the cafe and the site itself.
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Using a nail or thumbtack (well, probably just a nail, given the size/weight), you can now hang the Mini on a wall.
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Apps and websites like Handy, TaskRabbit, and Thumbtack offer ways to set up this service without even having to talk to another human first.
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In that group were Thumbtack, which I was the second or third investor in after Marco's parents, and Uber and a bunch of others.
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Amplitude also says it now has more than 150 customers —including LogMeIn, Instacart and Thumbtack — with revenue growing by 300 percent year-over-year.
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But Thumbtack has raised some serious money ($273 million to date) and plans to build out a serious business around the professional services market.
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Thumbtack rocketed to a $1.2 billion valuation and had raised $10 million by 2015, some from Sequoia (presenting a curious potential conflict of interest).
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Other entrepreneurs leading their respective Angel Funds include Thumbtack co-founder Jonathan Swanson, Gigster co-founder Roger Dickey, and NOW Ventures founder Shiza Shahid.
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Then down on 9th street, you have companies like Planet Labs, Code For America and Thumbtack, which have beautiful spaces at much cheaper rates.
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The main difference is that Thumbtack is still only available in the U.S. StarOfService has used this opportunity to get customers in untapped markets.
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An article in Quartzby millennial Jake Poses, former vice president of product at Thumbtack, posits that managing millennials comes down to letting them fail.
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Sign up for sites like Thumbtack or Upwork, which allow users to advertise their skills so that employers can hire you for temporary gigs.
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A separate survey done by mobile service company Thumbtack showed a modest sentiment increase in September, but the four months before showed straight decline.
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"Now growth has reaccelerated dramatically, and we have the runway to make Thumbtack the only platform they need to find the right customers," Zappacosta wrote.
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Earlier today, the services marketplace Thumbtack held a small conference for 300 of its best gig economy workers at an event space in San Francisco.
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Then, eventually, the company moved to a subscription model where service providers would pay the company a certain amount for leads generated off of Thumbtack.
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We went from goods marketplace pioneers such as eBay and Amazon to simple service marketplaces such as Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Upwork, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr.
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This week, Thumbtack announced a pilot partnership with Alia, a portable-benefits app, to help some of those pros access benefits like paid time off.
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"It looked like he stepped on a thumbtack," Clancy Barone, Denver's offensive line coach, said in a recent interview at Broncos headquarters in Englewood, Colo.
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Based in San Francisco, Interviewed was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2015 class and provides job assessment tools to customers like IBM, Zillow and Thumbtack.
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It's the latest step in the long journey that Thumbtack took to become one of the last companies standing with a consumer facing marketplace for services.
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Thumbtack, a marketplace for skilled workers, also accepted money from Alphabet, but then watched as the parent company rolled out a competing service, Google Home Services.
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I felt much more confident being very clear with Henry about what I was looking to get out of our time together after talking to Thumbtack.
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Thumbtack, a platform for finding professionals to do anything from home maintenance do DJing a party, is now offering benefits to some of its independent contractors.
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Through the partnership, Thumbtack customers will be able to contribute any amount of money to go toward the professionals' benefits, with the suggested donation being $5.
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User Interviews clients include Eventbrite, Glassdoor, AT&T, DirecTV, Lola, LogMeIn, Thumbtack, Casper, ClassPass, Fandango, NNG, Pinterest, Pandora, Colgate, Uber and REI, to name a few.
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The Nest Mini has a new hook built into the bottom, which you can use to hang it on your wall with a nail or thumbtack.
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She first swallows a marble, then escalates to more dangerous objects — a thumbtack, a chess piece, a battery — all potentially fatal to her and the baby.
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The second misunderstanding is that the breadth of the company let it scale the product that being in one category would have never allowed Thumbtack to do.
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Anyone is now able to share their time and skills with others, in their neighborhood and beyond, thanks to platforms such as Upwork, TaskRabbit, Hopwork or Thumbtack.
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But with this 3D-printed plastic tube you can easily turn a thumbtack, a few sticky notes, and your office's cork board into a game of darts.
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It's possible an acquisition deal fell through and Thumbtack, not yet prepared for an initial public offering, turned back to its investors for a necessary capital infusion.
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Founded by Marco Zappacosta, whose parents were the founders of Logitech, Thumbtack helps professionals find work close by, from home maintenance, to gardening, to DJing a party.
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For its part, Handy is one of the home services players that — like Thumbtack — is hoping to be one of the last men standing, so to speak.
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Then, kind of like Thumbtack or other marketplaces, Emptor matches those projects with qualified contractors and then compares those bids in order to select the best offer.
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In addition to Thumbtack and TaskRabbit, young companies like Handy, Zaarly, and several others — all began by trying to build better marketplaces for buyers and sellers of services.
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Companies like Uber, Minibar, Instacart, Postmates, Thumbtack and Amazon saw massive success in 2015, offering users the luxury of convenience for everyday chores and activities at affordable prices.
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Some would argue that companies such as Upwork, Thumbtack, Fiverr, or TaskRabbit are horizontal B2B marketplaces in the sense that they provide access to suppliers of different services.
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Thumbtack, which matches small-business professionals with customers who need jobs done, has a good vantage point when it comes to the current debate over jobs and automation.
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Gumtree Connect links users with local home services, such as cleaners, machine repairs and more in same way as apps like ThumbTack in the U.S. and ServisHero in Asia.
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Thumbtack, a company that provides an online marketplace for expert services (a Craigslist with more of a tech focus, if you will), just added listings for Pokémon Go experts.
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"The gig economy as we know it will not last," Jon Lieber, chief economist at Thumbtack, and Lucas Puente, an economic analyst at the firm, said in the report.
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Teresa possesses what Fran does not: her Roman Catholic belief — yet what is the spiritual meaning of having stuck a thumbtack into a wall, thereby releasing its lethal fibers?
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TaskRabbit has raised $50 million from venture firms like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures and competes with a lot of vertical players like Washio, Handy, Thumbtack and many others.
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In Salt Lake City, Thumbtack is looking for a customer support agent with two or more years of experience that can help individuals who use the platform grow their business.
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Homeowners shell out an average $15,190 nationwide in the course of offloading a house, according to a new report from home sale website Zillow and Thumbtack, a local services marketplace.
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Look for jobs through local professional organizing companies, which may require you to have previous related work experience, or register to post your services on sites like TaskRabbit and Thumbtack.
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Aaron Blau's tax advisory firm in Tempe, Arizona, has attracted new clients through Thumbtack in the past several years, although he has been too busy this year to participate. 3.
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"At the time, and it still remains one of my biggest passions, I was interested in how software could create new meaningful ways of working," said Banister of the Thumbtack deal.
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Thumbtack, an online service that connects consumers with professionals, just released its Annual Wedding Trends Report, which includes information about the cost of weddings and trends in hairstyles, photography, and more.
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The results were surprisingly considering a number of other surveys on the best U.S. cities to start a business by companies like Wallethub and Thumbtack have not given San Jose high marks.
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For example, Thumbtack, a company that helps consumers find local service professionals, has partnered with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to let customers contribute directly to workers' health care and life insurance.
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It's ranked highly since Thumbtack began surveying in 2012, and rejoined the top 10 because of strong zoning and land-use regulations, as well as helpful training and networking programs for entrepreneurs.
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The so-called gig economy will cease to exist in 20 years, according to a new report from venture-backed start-up Thumbtack, an online marketplace that helps skilled workers find customers.
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The average American homeowner will spend $23,2720 to sell their house, according to a new study by real estate research firm Zillow and Thumbtack, an online site matching local professionals to customers.
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It's a long way from the first version of Thumbtack, which had a "buy" tab and a "sell" tab; with the "buy" side to hire local services and the "sell" to offer them.
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How To Build A High-Performance SEO Engine Hear from Ethan Smith, who has worked with brands like MasterClass, Ticketmaster and Thumbtack, as he shares some of the most effective modern SEO strategies.
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Thumbtack is now leading the pack in pay-per-lead business, and Google recently launched its Home Services division (currently in beta, but looks to soon monetize with a cost-per-lead structure).
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"Humans currently live in cities that are the equivalent of flip phones," said Jonathan Swanson, a co-founder of the company Thumbtack, which connects consumers to professionals like house painters and wedding officiants.
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A study from Zillow, a real estate website, and Thumbtack, a site that matches customers with local professionals, showed that the average homeowner spends $2100,2000 in additional costs associated with selling a home.
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On the easy-to-use app (or online), search for the service you're looking for — Thumbtack offers a huge selection from event DJs to makeup artists, piano teachers to painters, and lots more.
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What starts with her loudly chewing ice during dinner with her in-laws quickly devolves into her ingesting increasingly physically harmful objects: a marble, a thimble, a paperclip, a thumbtack, a battery, a nail.
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Another foray into human-powered services was its Thumbtack-style competitor Amazon Home Services, a marketplace it launched back in 2015 for finding tradespeople and other freelance service providers like masseurs and language tutors.
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Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Marco Zappacosta, a young entrepreneur whose parents were the founders of Logitech, and a crew of co-founders were building Thumbtack, a professional services marketplace from a home office they shared.
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The 31-year-old's dream became reality in 2014, he tells CNBC, when he stumbled upon Thumbtack, a platform that connects customers with professionals for any job they need done, from photography to strength training.
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Thumbtack claims more than 10 million users who use the platform to find workers, and says it sends the more than 250,000 professionals listed on its platform over $1 billion per year in earned income.
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"At Thumbtack, we analyzed data from more than 750,000 price quotes for the most popular wedding services to find out what couples typically pay — for everything from the DJ to the decorator," the study says.
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An unarmed security guard typically costs $15 to $20 an hour, while an armed security guard costs around $20 to $25 per hour, according to Thumbtack, an online company that connects customers with service professionals.
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With a specialization in SEO, and a client list that has included Masterclass, Thumbtack, Honey, Personal Capital, and more, its goal is to help make the difference for an ambitious company with product-market fit.
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Back in 2008, as the global financial crisis was only just beginning to tear at the fabric of the U.S. economy, entrepreneurs at companies like Thumbtack and TaskRabbit were already hard at work on potential patches.
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A number of the other companies I've been involved with in addition to Uber, Dine, Wealthfront, Thumbtack, and a whole bunch of $100 million companies that you probably haven't heard of yet, are doing really well.
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Amazon is beefing up its Home Services business — a marketplace rival to the likes of Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack and Handy for helping people find and hire contractors for everything from plumbers to at-home reflexologists.
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For its annual Small Business Friendliness Survey, Thumbtack, an online service company connecting businesses with local professionals, polled over 7,500 small business owners in all 50 states across a plethora of industries, from electricians to wellness professionals.
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However, I decided to give it one more shot – raising my budget in hopes of getting someone a bit more experienced, and reaching out to Thumbtack for their tips on finding the right fit for something so individualized.
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Coconut Oil When it comes to cleaning stainless steel, Michael Dimopoulos, a house cleaner at Thumbtack and the founder of Lazy Susans Cleaning, sticks to his trusty combination of hot soap, water, and his secret ingredient — coconut oil.
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When American workers decide or are forced to strike out on their own, their most frequent job is handyman, and a lot of the people taking that work are senior citizens, according to Thumbtack, the local services website.
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Often-forgotten and underestimated costs of owning a home — from utility bills to yard care — add an average $9,080 per year to homeowners' tabs, according to a new analysis from real estate site Zillow and service site Thumbtack.
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From your closet to public areas, Mark Winter, a pest control professional at Thumbtack and owner of Bed Bug Solutions, gives us the lowdown on all the preventive measures you can take to steer clear of these unwanted creatures.
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If you find human interaction works better for you for technical support, consider hiring a personal computer trainer (Angie's List and Thumbtack are two possible sources for finding help locally) or asking for help in a nearby computer shop.
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Though Angie's List, founded in 1995 by William Oesterle and Angie Hicks, is one of the oldest and most respected review sites, it had difficulty finding its footing against newer rivals like Amazon Home Services, Facebook, Thumbtack, Handy, and Porch.
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It's a development startup founders will be watching closely, no doubt, so we caught up yesterday with Bryan Schreier, a Sequoia partner who sits on the boards of Dropbox, Thumbtack and Qualtrics, among others, to ask how the vehicle works.
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Helping local companies find facilities and maintenance providers like janitors, landscapers and HVAC repair technicians, Emptor bills itself as a Thumbtack for the enterprise and includes a machine learning system that will classify spending and provide recommendations for cost reductions.
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Today, Angie's List competition includes the likes of Amazon Home Services and Facebook, as well as a number of startups like Thumbtack, Handy, Porch and vertically focused offerings at the other end of the spectrum like StyleSeat and Doctor on Demand.
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Commodity jobs in the so-called on-demand economy — such as driving for ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft — are likely to be automated away in the near future and workers are right to be concerned, said Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta.
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"While there could be some initial sticker shock associated with the costs of selling a home, investing in home improvement projects like painting and home staging often proves to be very valuable in the long-run," said Thumbtack economist Lucas Puente.
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" AM In Dunce (Wave Books), Mary Ruefle's latest book, the poet writes, "I am going to die" and then recognizes how small and inconsequential she is, all without asking for the reader's sympathy: "My face a thumbtack / in the earth.
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This morning at TechCrunch SF 2018, Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister shared her inspirational journey from a homeless teen at the age of 15 to now a venture capitalist who's invested in startups like Uber, Thumbtack, SpaceX, Postmates, EShares, Affirm and Niantic.
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" At the time we kept it very quiet — not because we were trying to be sneaky but because we didn't want to have a signaling risk, where people would say, "Sequoia invested in Thumbtack and now Sequoia's not doing the next round.
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Though other platforms likely make sure they have high-quality professionals (like, say, Thumbtack), Naficy said there's a higher quality bar to ensure Minted users that are already coming to the site for those kinds of important life events are getting what they pay for.
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A growing number of them use Checkr, a San Francisco-based company that says it currently runs one million background checks per month for more than 10,000 customers, including, most newly, the car-share company Lyft, the services marketplace Thumbtack, and eyewear seller Warby Parker.
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The idea of acting as a platform for independent contractors or specialists to find new customers sounds similar to a dozen other marketplace businesses — from cleaning/home care services like Handy and Thumbtack, or doctor finders like Zocdoc, through to transport services like Uber.
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A survey by Thumbtack, an online platform where professionals offer their services, found that 85033 percent of their users think the top corporate income tax bracket of 35 percent is "about right" or too low, with 30 percent believing the corporate rate is too high.
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The opportunity to bring instruction manuals into the mobile video era has attracted a $4.5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and joined by strategic angels like Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky and Thumbtack co-founders Marco Zappacosta and Jonathan Swanson.
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"I hope the secretary thinks about all workers and this trend that people are moving toward more independent arrangements," said Marco Zappacosta, co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, an online platform that connects customers to local professionals for tasks like house painting, personal training and voice lessons.
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Among its challengers are: EasyPaint, co-founded by ex-Benjamin Moore CEO Denis Abrams in 2014; Thumbtack, which reportedly raised $125 million in its last round of funding at a $1.3 billion valuation; and Amazon Home Services, which offers home improvement and specifically painting services via Amazon.com.
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As Congress continues to debate how it will repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (if at all), Thumbtack, a marketplace for professional services from plumbing to piano lessons, surveyed 14,393 service providers about the ACA: 55% of service professionals want Congress to keep the ACA in place.
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These Experience Centers will also become places where people can go to arrange for and order home services through Amazon Home Services, the company's Thumbtack-style marketplace that lets people search for and book a range of in-home contractors for cleaning, fixing or helping in other ways.
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First, ridesharing companies like Uber, delivery startups like Postmates and home services providers like Thumbtack all function by virtue of their pools of "gig" workers, self-employed people who choose their own working hours and dip into the platforms for assignments when they have time to fulfill them.
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As a one-woman enterprise, she can be considered a card-carrying member of the so-called gig economy, receiving about half her client leads through Thumbtack, an online marketplace that connects consumers with an array of service providers, whether wedding photographers, music teachers, plumbers or organic cleaning services.
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Other participants in the round include Industry Ventures, Joe Montana's Liquid 2 Ventures and XFactor Fund, along with individual investors Jonathan Swanson (who is the chairman of Thumbtack), Sergio Romo (the CEO of Grow Mobility) and Bob White (the founder and a former managing director of Bain Capital).
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Indeed as Handy has shifted to more of a professional services model rather than working directly with consumers and TaskRabbit has been acquired by Ikea, Thumbtack has doubled down on its independence and worked on upgrading its marketplace with automation tools to make matching service providers with customers that much easier.
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Unlike the best lawyers or doctors, who can see only a limited number of people each day, those with exceptional technical expertise can transform a company because they are capable of creating products that are many times more attractive and thus a lot more lucrative, explains Marco Zappacosta of Thumbtack, a digital marketplace.
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So did Pandora after it was bought by Sirius XM. As the game keeps shifting, here's a handy primer to keep the players straight: Web giants and the upstarts: The Internet Association: Represents some of the biggest web platforms — like Facebook, Google and Amazon — as well as startups like Handy and Thumbtack.
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A recent survey by consulting firm Thumbtack on small business sentiment in the United States found that access to health insurance under the ACA gave many new entrepreneurs the confidence to start a business, knowing a preexisting condition wouldn't prevent them from purchasing their own policy once they left their employer plan.
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And since I rely on Zocdoc to find me dentists and TaskRabbit to put my Ikea furniture together, why not use Thumbtack (which matches you to pros in all service fields, from event planners to contractors) to find me a personal trainer to show up at my home and force me to do tricep dips?
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"In a time where it feels like all the stories are about some tug of war between labor and a platform, I hope what this highlights is that there are opportunities for working together and to find solutions that are in service of the broad set of pros and their needs," Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta told TechCrunch.
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Thumbtack is a classic gig-economy success story: Founded in 2008, just in time for the recession, the company eventually reached a billion-dollar valuation by matching professionals like tutors and painters to locals in need of their services, with millions of users across all but two zip codes in the US (both, according to the company, are in Oklahoma).
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Companies like Yelp (flying in pros to HQ) and Thumbtack (public statement) are among the first to explore ways to give pros insights as to what ROI (Return On Investment) their platforms are truly delivering these pros — the thought being that identifying clear ROI will demonstrate the value that pros are realizing, and will motivate them to engage more with the platform itself.
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It seemed unrealistic a couple of years ago, but maybe the startup now has a shot at becoming the global leader in this market — minus the U.S. While Thumbtack has a ton of funding, if the company doesn't expand internationally quickly enough, there might not be enough room to compete properly with StarOfService outside of the U.S. With today's funding round, StarOfService plans to expand internationally more aggressively.
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Their thesis, which flew in the face of the conventional wisdom of the day, was to build a product which offered listings of any service a potential customer could want in any geography across the U.S. Other companies like Handy and TaskRabbit focused on the home, but on Thumbtack (like any good community message board) users could see postings for anything from repairman to reiki lessons and magicians to musicians alongside the home repair services that now make up the bulk of its listings.
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If the situation is not stable or sustainable, what I want to mention is if we did continue farther in— into an atom of the flesh or the metallic fabric of the fork, the micro-weft of the tablecloth, it would be more or less the same kind of utter emptiness— as at the heart of any restaurant there is this dead eye of the sea bass on your plate, its aureole lens, its lightless pupil sunk flush as a thumbtack holding the universe itself in place and I stare at it, and it stares back.
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Startup Capital WorldRemit raises $175M at a $900M valuation to help users send money to contacts in emerging markets Thumbtack is raising up to $120M on a flat valuation Depop, a shopping app for millennials, bags $62M Fitness startup Mirror nears $300M valuation with fresh funding Step raises $22.5M led by Stripe to build no-fee banking services for teens Possible Finance lands $10.5M to provide kinder short-term loans Voatz raises $7M for its mobile voting technology Flexible housing startup raises $2.5M Legacy, a sperm testing and freezing service, raises $1.5M Equity If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch's venture-focused podcast, Equity.
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