The alternative interpretation of what you have said is that $16B is actually too low and that Slack is undervalued or at the very least it has a lot of room to grow.
Cofounder here. Really appreciate the discussion and all of the feedback. The spirit of the contract's never been intended to be unreasonably restrictive -- though I totally understand the concern. We wanted to include certain terms since as part of our model, we do own the code written specifically for Gigster projects. We certainly don't want to own code folks write outside of Gigster projects.
We've received very similar feedback recently and were going to do a review of the contract with our lawyers highlighting this specific issue. We'll also consider adding an FAQ around any contract nuances. We care about doing what is fair and while a lot of terms here are standard we'll try to review terms to make our position much clearer. Will share important updates.
Gigster | Fullstack Web | Full-Time | San Francisco, VISA
Come work on the problem of delivering high quality software reliably and at scale. We have hundreds of projects running simultaneously and collect data about all aspects of the software development process with the aim of automating repetitive aspects of sales, project management and software development itself.
The web work is mostly done in javascript -- React & Node. Some other languages & technologies we use: Postgres, Mongo, Flask/Python, Redshift, Angular, Docker, RabbitMQ
The company's business is growing pretty rapidly but the team itself is still pretty small and there's a very clear opportunity to make a big impact.
Multiple developers are common on (mobile) apps that require custom backends and larger projects that need to hit a tight timeline. All projects have more than one person on them and typically at least 3 (dev, pm, designer)
We already do this @ Gigster. Except you don't get hired to be full time employees. You get "hired" to work on short term projects (that you can accept or deny) which is arguably more fun.
One of the main developers of the Yahoo weather app is a gigster (developer on the platform). The statement is that it was built by "one of our gigsters" and is intended to showcase the quality of work developers on Gigster have done. Had that developer been on Odesk or TapFame they would have listed Yahoo Weather as part of their portfolio. In this case they actually do list it as part of their portfolio. Definitely do not intend to take away from your hard work and appreciate you for it. Happy to do better in making this clearer but it's a bit unfair to imply that we cant showcase the work of developers on our platform as an indicator of developer quality.
I am one of the cofounders and I'll be emailing you right away. This is absolutely not the way we operate and I'm happy to jump on a phone call with you to answer any questions you have! Very sorry about any issues you had in our chat. Techcrunch is definitely stretching us (in a good way) and so sometimes we mess up. Very sorry once again I'll be in touch!
Hi! Not all clients, just a select few. We collect data on all the projects we do and infer prices automatically :) Generally you can expect a Gigster project to be way cheaper (we've seen 10X in some cases) than what an agency would charge and often times cheaper or on par with similarly curated services like toptal but with the added convenience you get from having a product manager like an agency would provide.
Hi! We don't assign more people blindly. But what do you propose we do if a developer gets sick or has to travel? We are engineers ourselves and are certainly careful to not just load up a bunch of devs on a project. We've done that before and it was painful :) Thanks for the feedback!
Hi! A good developer can expect to make $10K - $20K per month on Gigster :) The developer also can expect to do no sales or management work on the project. You just write code on interesting projects and get paid :) Much like Uber hands drivers rides and they just have to accept them.
We actually do not make you fill out any forms is the great thing and we do have an engine that figures out a pretty detailed cost within minutes of chatting with you. Sorry if this isn't clear! What might you be looking to build?
Gigster (trygigster.com) | Founding Engineer | San Francisco | Onsite
Gigster is building the first distributed firm on the internet. By leveraging the best of human and machine computation, Gigster gives businesses on demand access to elite software engineering teams and enables the best software engineers earn sizable incomes while working on interesting part-time projects from anywhere.
The company is backed by Greylock & Bloomberg and has grown rapidly since its launch at the end of last year (http://producthunt.com/posts/gigster). We count top Silicon Valley companies as customers and pay out $15K per month to great engineers working remotely within and outside the US.
The founders (both engineers) have ported DDR to FPGAs, worked on silicon lasers and built apps used by 100M+ monthly users. As our first engineering hire you will earn sizable equity, own important initiatives and be treated as a partner in all regards. We are hiring for both Fullstack (Web) and Data/Machine Learning roles.
Less an explicit set of questions but more recursively/iteratively asking why/what/when/how at increasingly deeper levels of the problem they're talking about. It requires the interviewer to be at least familiar with the general domain but you don't have to be an expert. It's borrowed from how Elon Musk says he does assessments. People who know their stuff remember everything about every part of something they worked on. They know why they did /didn't do something all the way down to the most trivial level of detail and they have intelligent thoughts about how they would improve and what tradeoffs they made. Most people fail after one or two levels of this "interrogation".