Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor

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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with TaskRabbit CEO Anya Smith. TaskRabbit is one of the original gig worker platforms, really focused on work you might need done in your home. The company has been around for nearly 20 years, and you might be surprised to know that the core product has not really changed all that much over time.

Taskers can sign up to offer services like assembling furniture, mounting TVs, and helping people move, and they get to set their own prices for that work, which makes TaskRabbit more of a marketplace than something like Uber. And as you'll hear Anya say, the difference between TaskRabbit and something like Thumbtack or Angie's List is that TaskRabbit manages the entire interaction from end to end.

It's not just a directory, but also where people can leave reviews, get customer service, and manage all of their payments. Ani describes all of this as matching supply and demand, and we talked a lot about where the supply of labor comes from for TaskRabbit, and what it might mean that there are more taskers on the platform than ever right now.

To me, that feels like a little bit of a recession indicator. That's a lot of people looking for additional income. But Anya had a more measured view and pointed out that there are some taskers earning very comfortable livings on the platform. TaskRabbit was also notably acquired by IKEA several years ago. And the Swedish furniture giant has a lot of interest in how the platform grows and what kinds of services it can integrate into the experience of being an IKEA customer.

Assembling IKEA is a core TaskRabbit service, after all, and I wanted to know if there was any pressure to specialize that service or prioritize IKEA's work over other companies. That's some Real Decoder stuff, and you can tell that Anya is a listener of our show. That means Anya was ready for the heart of this conversation, and what's emerged is a real theme on Dakota recently.

What's going to happen when the next wave of user interfaces hits, particularly the next wave of AI assistants that promise to be able to go and book services like TaskRabbit and DoorDash and Uber for you? Google actually gave a demo of one of its agent projects going through TaskRabbit's website a couple weeks ago. And I'm very curious about how all of these service providers are thinking about having those kinds of agentic tools step in between them and their customers.

After all, if you're just asking a voice assistant to help you get someone to hang up a TV, you're probably not using the TaskRabbit website yourself. That's a big change. And Ani and I talked about it for a while. You'll hear her say that TaskRabbit's end-to-end focus is the differentiator here, and that other platforms will find it quite hard to compete with that.

That's a different answer than we got from Uber CEO Dara Koshashawi and a different answer than we got from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. It's very clear to me that we're in for a bunch of different kinds of negotiations as people adopt new kinds of user interfaces that can do more and more for them.

This one's pretty deep. I think you're going to find it fascinating. One quick note before we start. Decoder is planning for the future, and we want to hear from you to figure out how we can make the show better. You can visit voxmedia.com slash survey to give us your feedback. We'd really appreciate it. Okay, TaskRabbit CEO Anya Smith. Here we go. Bye.

Anya Smith, you are the CEO of TaskRabbit. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you. It feels like there's a lot of change coming to sort of the service economy as expressed on our phones. There's a lot of change in the economy in general that is interesting to talk about. Let's start at the very beginning. TaskRabbit's been around for a while. You've been the CEO for about five years, something like that? Coming up on five years.

How would you describe TaskRabbit today? How should people think about this? It's pretty similar to what it has been. At the end of the day, we connect people who need help around the home. with a vast network of highly skilled and reliable taskers who can help you with

cleaning or mounting your TV or assembling your furniture or just a range of tasks around the home. And I think we do that pretty well. TaskRate was founded in 2008. Many things have happened since then. We've gone from a desktop paradigm to a mobile paradigm.

competitors have shown up. There's Fiverr, which I always think of where you go to get like a cheap logo. Do you think of TaskRabbit as like that expansive into digital services? You're describing hanging TVs. Is it more of a physical services platform?

Today it is, and that's really our focus, and it really is our vision to become the number one marketplace for home services specifically. And so there's a lot of things to get done around the home. It's everything from... putting mulch and cleaning your gutters to you know mowing your lawn and then obviously inside the home there's so much there's a lot to do also when there are moments that happen in your life so when you think about starting a new family or when you think about moving

Moving is a perfect example. You have to clean your old place, clean the new place, packing, unpacking actual moving services, mounting TVs, assembling. So there's a lot of use cases where these services are...

still very much so needed. One thing that's interesting about that market in particular is there's no shortage of gardening companies or moving companies or people who will show up on Craigslist and hang your TV for you, AV installation companies at the high end.

Is that who you want on the platform, the companies who are doing customer discovery, or do you want individuals? Today, we definitely focus on individuals. So in the U.S., today there is we're almost getting to a point where half of the Workers in the U.S. are actually gig economy workers. And that means many things, right? Not all of them are doing furniture assembly, but many are.

Using these platforms to find additional work, to have the flexibility, to transition between different stages of life. And so that's what we focus on. And those are the people that we want to help. We're here to make sure that we're providing. a meaningful income to folks who need meaningful income. And there's a lot of people who...

maybe between jobs or students who have time on weekends or during the summers. And there's a lot of opportunity to make a pretty good living on TaskRabbit, an average hourly. pay is close to $50 an hour. And obviously in some markets, it's well over 50. And so there's a lot of great opportunities to make a meaningful income for yourself and your family. When you say meaningful income,

There's $50 an hour. That's not a full-time work week at $50 an hour, right? That's piece work. How much are people making on the high end on TaskRabbit? I mean, we have people making well over $200,000 a year.

There is a tasker I spoke with. It's been a couple of years now. He was a student at NYU. And as he was moving. Or his roommate was, one of his friends was moving and using TaskRabbit. He had never heard of TaskRabbit. So he looked it up. This was, you know, 2022, 23. and said, hey, maybe I can do this while I look for a job, and really got smart and figured out how to mount TVs fairly quickly just by learning it on YouTube.

And really optimize his job so he could mount three TVs in an hour sometimes in Manhattan. He was at NYU. And so for his first year after graduation, this is all he did. And he made well over $200,000 a year. Is that sustainable? Because I know a lot of people in the industry who have A-B installation companies, for example, and they go from that to, I'm going to design you a home theater system, and then I'm going to sell you that.

the components of that at some high margin. And that's how you build your business. But I'm going to install a lot of TVs every single day for the rest of my life. Is that totally sustainable on TaskRabbit? No, but how many people have the same job for the rest of their lives? We have taskers who've been here for five, six, ten years, which is great. And sometimes they leave and they come back and they leave again. And it just really depends on us. what's going on in their lives.

We want to make sure that we provide the opportunity that if people do want to come and earn an income, we're here to help them do that. And so for us, that means getting as many jobs as possible so that we can make sure that our taskers have. the jobs that they can do. So 200 is the high end. That's obviously, it's a great shiny number. What's the median?

I don't know that I know the median. I think it really depends on the market. There's obviously liquidity and density questions and so on. And it really depends on the category that you're. trying to get to. And many of our taskers are not working what you would consider full time. They are doing this as a stop measure in between gigs, or maybe they just want to do it in the evenings and so forth.

We don't really track the median earnings because everyone has such a specific and different use case. If you want to be working as much as possible in a week, what are your weekly targets for earning and how can we help you reach those weekly targets? And we find that that's what taskers really resonate with. What are the markets that are the biggest for you? I mean, New York City by far is our biggest market, and it has been.

I think probably since we launched it there. But we have a lot of growth in our secondary and tertiary markets. Also, we're now in eight countries. So London has become a huge market for us, which is really exciting to see. Toronto is a big market as well. Obviously, the Bay Area still is our home. And so we have a really great brand equity in the Bay Area, of course. LA is a big market.

As you kind of understand, we're now in hundreds and hundreds of cities across the globe. So it's fun sometimes we get into competitions to see which city can grow faster.

But they all have different trajectories. Is it mostly cities where the action is? Yes. Today, yes. But we also, as you know, we're owned by IKEA. And so we also definitely think a lot about... how we can support the IKEA business and support IKEA customers who want their furniture to be assembled and want them delivered. So in the U.S., we also do delivery for IKEA. And so we make sure that we can cover all. ikea stores and as you know some of them most of them are not

located in urban city centers. And in Europe, they're much bigger. So when you think about a market like Germany, it has, you know, 50, 60 stores, which is the same as a number of stores in the U.S., but U.S. is...

like triple or quadruple the size of Germany. So it's much more densely populated and we want to make sure that we cover all the IKEA markets. I want to come to the IKEA relationship because I think that is super interesting. It's been several years now and I'm very curious how that has developed.

But just to stay focused on the cities for one second, I always – I mean I lived in New York City for a long time. Now I live in the suburbs. I moved to the suburbs. I just started buying more and more tools. It's just a thing that happens when you move to the suburbs. And it feels like – I didn't have the space to have a bunch of tools and capabilities in my apartment in New York City. Is that why there's the bigger markets in the city so that people just don't have this stuff?

Or the skills? I think it has to do a lot with market density and liquidity, right? You want to be able to... be closer to the jobs. But I would say the suburbs are our fastest growing markets overall, if you look at cities versus suburbs, because there was just a lot of opportunity. And so, you know, when we moved to the suburbs, my husband also was very keen to buy

tools and start doing work around the house. And that didn't turn out very well for us. Maybe it turns out well for others, but in the end, we still have taskers here. Quite often, because there's just a lot of work to do, you have more square footage. And kind of by definition, every single additional square foot will require more work. And so we see a lot of potential in the suburbs as well.

One of the things that is interesting to me just about the broader economy is you're describing people who want to fill their time with work. They want to make more money. They see the opportunity. That liquidity in the market, that supply of effort.

That sort of requires the time, right? Like people's time isn't being filled with their full-time jobs or they're between jobs or they might be out of a job. Do you see a correlation between the health of the overall economy and the amount of supply of taskers that you have? We do. So for the last...

I want to say almost three years, we've definitely seen more supply than almost we can handle on a platform. So now in many cities, we have wait lists and so forth because we don't want to onboard a tasker and then not be able to provide. provide them with jobs. It's sort of a false premise. I want to make sure that if you're on our platform, there's work for you to do.

As the economy has changed over the last few years, and especially over the last couple of years, as we've seen a bit more struggle, we've had thousands and thousands of taskers applying. Every year, it's 15-20% more than the year before. Does that feel like a recession indicator to you? You know, I'm not an economist and I read all of this stuff just like you do. And if you do read.

read that stuff you know we should have had a recession last year and one the year before as well and those predictions turned out to be wrong. And so I think the word is uncertainty. We just don't know because at least the last two years, we kind of understood what was going on a little bit more, I would say. There's just a lot of uncertainty overall. And so it's very hard to predict what's going to happen with terrorists, what's going to happen with...

bond yields, what's going to happen with interest rates, what's going to happen with the housing market. And so all I can say is we see an increase in tasker applications. I'm not sure that that's an indication that a recession is coming.

Do you see an increase in the number of people who are buying services from TaskRabbit? Because that's the other side of the equation, right? Is demand also going up? Of course. So demand is going up, and that's great to see. Now, there's a bit of a caveat, and it's not just TaskRabbit. There are, as you mentioned, multiple players. And for all of us, demand is going up. We're still such small portion of the overall market and the overall possibilities. So most people still.

assemble their own furniture, they put up their own TVs, they clean their own houses. And so there is Even though we see a lot of growth, there's still just so much opportunity to continue to see that growth. It still feels 10, 15 years in that the market is... quite nascent. And services is hard to figure out. There's a lot to think about, especially when it comes to how do we match the perfect tasker to the client. And I talk a lot about mounting.

So we have thousands of taskers who can mount your TV, which is great. But can they be available on a Friday evening and mounted on a brick wall and know how to hide the cables? That's a different skill than... a smaller TV on a normal size wall or a normal wall. And so there's just a lot of variables that go into an actual perfect job. And we still have a lot of work to do there.

And so there's still a lot of growth opportunity. I love that we're talking about mounting TVs so much because one, that's totally my wheelhouse. And two, the Verge audience knows that I love talking about mounting TVs. And this is great. We're just like in the strike zone for me. How do you get that data? How do you evaluate who is good at the harder TV mount above a fireplace versus just on a regular piece of drywall?

There's many ways. So first of all, the tasker, obviously we now have AI models and tools that help us do this even faster, but the taskers themselves tell us what. capabilities they have. And we ask pretty structured questions and they can... actually explain. But then the bigger piece of data obviously comes from their experience and on the platform and having done previously similar tasks. So they tell us that they hung up this type of TV.

obviously can use that data to then match them to exactly that kind of job again and of course the clients provide reviews and so we can search automatically just by words, and obviously there's just structured data and understanding their skill set. And so we take that all into consideration as we build out a more optimal match.

There's a relationship there between what customers are saying and the reviews are leaving and whether or not they're validating the skills and the rates that taskers can charge. Do you find that that's a correlation that you can measure? Taskers do set their own rates on TaskRabbit, which makes us very different than many of the platforms that you see in the market. And it's really why so many taskers actually love coming to TaskRabbit.

We haven't seen that level of sophistication, if I had to summarize, that they fully recognize exactly how... to set their rates. So we provide a lot of guidance to them. And we take into the consideration of the guidance based on where are you based, based on what types of tasks you perform based on your previous reviews. This is based on what the market is doing. This is what we could potentially suggest.

take our suggestions all the time, which is fine. They get to set their own rate. Yeah, I guess to bring it back to TV mounting, again, my favorite topic, you could pay the lower amount of money for someone with less reviews or... more risk, right, that they might not know what they're doing, or you might pay more money for someone who clearly appears to know what they're doing. And that feels like a pricing strategy that should exist on the platform.

Because whenever we talk about the gig economy, I get workers emailing us saying, well, I just want to know how to make more money. And it feels like on TaskRabbit, the best way to do it is to just charge more because they can set the rates.

Of course, they can set the rates, but if they charge too much, obviously the market is not going to reward them in a way they... you know could potentially want so you can definitely set your rates higher than what the market is willing to bear and if you're in a market where there's thousands of other taskers the way that's going to manifests itself on a platform is you may essentially get less jobs if you're overpricing and pricing much higher than what clients are willing to pay.

Do you see that rates over time are going up? Yes. For an individual tasker or an aggregate? An aggregate rates are going up. They definitely have ebbed and flowed. And then it also matters a lot on the market. So in certain markets, they're obviously much higher than in other markets. And as we sort of see trends with inflation and as we see sort of. externally what's going on. The rates tend to follow because obviously...

Even supplies are becoming more expensive for taskers. And then they, their lives are becoming more expensive for them. So they need to charge more as well. So we do see an aggregate rates moving up. Do you know the categories rates have gone the highest? It really depends. Moving is one of our highest categories in terms of rates just because it's a more complex product. And so you have to. Obviously, it can take hours to help someone move. And so...

I see that that's in a total job number. That's obviously one of the higher ones. If you look at per hour numbers, it really varies by market. There isn't sort of a single trend. And then in aggregate, the rates across the platform are going up as well. Yes. And if you're an individual tasker, and I'm there for five years, is it generally true that...

I can just charge more over time because I have more reviews and more data to back up that I know I'm doing. I don't think that that's generally true because. If you have a lot more supply in that market, you're competing all the time. So you can't just assume that you're just going to be able to raise your rates over time. I mean, generally speaking, you know, people start up. It's a little bit similar to I would.

say Airbnb. When you're a brand new host, you come in and you have no reviews, you have no ratings. You want people to stay in your home and you want to do a good job. So you may price a little bit lower just to make sure that you show up on search results and just to make sure that people book your place.

And then as you gain more experience, as you understand what your guests want, and as you are able to provide those things for them and you continue to get really great reviews and really great feedback, you're able to raise the prices. to a limit as there's more and more airbnbs that may be showing up in that market so there's many components that help you figure out how to price and airbnb just like task rabbit also helps host to figure out what the right pricing

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Before the break, we were discussing how TaskRabbit's platform works and what forces dictate how prices are set and where the supply and demand comes from, depending on the task and the market you're in. But now I really wanted to know what separates TaskRabbit from some of its peers in the gig economy, like Airbnb and Uber, and what benefits Anya sees her platform providing that would keep someone from just trying to reach customers directly.

The reason I'm asking this, Airbnb is a perfect example because they do let people set rates and they have all kinds of pricing tools. The other end is Uber. Which doesn't let anyone set a price. And so if you're the best Uber driver or the worst, it kind of doesn't matter. Uber is just pricing for you. And that dynamic has led to a lot of frustration over there. It seems like the challenge in your case.

is that if you get good enough and you're famous enough and you've had enough customers, you might leave the platform, right? Because you can just maybe do more effective marketing and take a higher margin. How do you make sure you don't have that graduation problem? I mean, you...

We could, but it's not just about marketing, but of course, that's one of the biggest services that we provide. It's also about scheduling. It's also about providing some level of protection. So if things go wrong, we're there to help. having consistent work and so yes you can

leave the platform and try to do this on your own. We hope that we provide such great service to our taskers that it's harder for them to manage it outside of the platform, right? So if you're working on multiple platforms or you're doing it on your own, you're managing your own Google.

calendar, for example, it's really hard to sync them all and to try to think about how to manage the time appropriately. We can help and do that for you. We can help and figure out and make sure that the tasks that we are providing are the ones that are

most match to your skill set because we understand your history and we understand what the client wants. We can help and make sure that the tasks that are visible to you are the ones that are closer to your home. So there's a lot of additional services that we provide. and benefits to the taskers where they want to stay on a platform because it is easier.

for them. And also, if they set a rate of $100 an hour, they get to take home $100, which is very different than some of the other platforms. Walk me through that. What's the revenue model for you? How do you make your money? We make our money just like many. platforms do where we have to charge either one or both sides of the marketplace for the services that we provide. I just explained some of the services for taskers. We also obviously provide a lot of services to the clients.

things work on our platform is as a client, when you book a job, you pay an additional service fee to TaskRavit for everything from insurance and fraud to just being able to find the tasker and so on. And sorry, and I wouldn't say insurance. I should take that back. It's not insurance. It's quality assurance is more what I would call it. Right. You're saying these people have invented. They actually know how to hang the TV. Exactly.

Assurance is the right word. There's a lot of temptation in every marketplace like this to charge both sides. Why not charge the taskers? We haven't found that that's... To be fair, we haven't tried this. We haven't experimented with this for the last few years, at least since I've been here. I believe that previously this has been tested. I think that...

The taskers themselves are keen to provide the best service that they can, and we want to make sure that we are a supply-based marketplace, right? I think, as you well know, this thing doesn't work without supply. And you kind of have to start with supply. And so for me and for TaskRabbit, it's really important that we have the best quality supply.

We don't need to be charging the taskers. We're not a lead gen model. We are instead making sure that the entire job gets booked from the very beginning and we're there sort of holding. you know, together with a client and a tasker all the way through to payment and so forth, as opposed to just giving a client few names and say, go try them out. And so we believe that the service that we're providing is ensuring.

that that job happens and it's high quality. And for that, we primarily charge the client. You've made a distinction here between platforms you call lead gen platforms, where...

They charge for demand, right? You're a plumber. You want to get some customers. You would charge some service to get you some customers. Describe what you mean by lead gen and describe how TaskRabbit is different. I'll just talk about what TaskRabbit does and then perhaps compare it a little bit to what other platforms do. But TaskRabbit allows you to book a tasker on a platform and then we...

I guess one word to think about is maybe shepherd the way this process all the way through. So we make sure that the tasker shows up. We make sure that the task actually gets done. We make sure that there's recollect payment from you, the client.

then distribute that payment to the tasker. And then we make sure that, you know, you can write the review for the tasker and so on. And there's just a whole slew of things that happens, including the fact that if something goes wrong, you can pick up the phone call. Or you can send us a message and say, hey, the tasker's late, or hey, the tasker canceled, what should I do next, and so on. And that's different than just getting a name of three or four potential providers.

And now you as a client have to go and call each of them and start negotiating on a price or the time. And then, you know, the person comes and does whatever task. But if something goes wrong, it's really just between you and.

and that provider. Versus for us, we're there all the way through until the job closes. When you say we're not a lead gen model, that feels really important, right? That's a principle that you need to hold on to. Because again, every other company that's similarly situated... Does sort of charge both sides. Substack, they take 10% of everyone's earnings just to send emails. And they would tell you they do a lot more than just send emails.

But they have a graduation problem, right? People leave the platform because you can get cheaper email distribution elsewhere. And Substack has to build new services in order to justify their 10% for their highest volume writers. Does that pressure just not exist? Or does that pressure exist and you keep it away? Of course it exists, right? So taskers definitely need the platform. And clients leave the platform. No, I'm sorry. I meant the pressure to charge both sides of the marketplace. Oh.

No, because again, I really feel that we don't need to charge the taskers to make the money that we make. We provide enough services to both sides, but the client is willing to bear that cost. And that... has worked for us you know it doesn't mean that it's always going to work and that our models are always going to be the same and the way we match is always going to be the same we're constantly experimenting so many of the components that we're talking about

We are obviously looking at other ways because we have to continue evolving. But right now, this works for us. And so today, we don't see changing the model where we would charge taskers.

I think that brings me to Ikea. So Ikea bought TaskRabbit in 2017. It's a complicated transaction, but the upshot is Ikea now owns TaskRabbit. Do you think that it's that ownership that... protects you from the pressure to increase revenue by charging both sides of the marketplace? Because I feel like if you were a public company, you might feel that pressure much more keenly. It may be.

I don't know. I've never been a CEO of a public company. But I can tell you that we have pretty big goals and pretty high pressure from IKEA as well. Obviously, there is a component of stability that comes with having a key as a parent. And there are both sort of good and bad things about this. Right. The good thing is I'm not a public company nor VC funded and I don't have to sort of work.

how things are going to evolve financially in the same way. But also that can make you a little bit more complacent. And so we're trying very hard to ensure that we have very ambitious goals and very big vision. so that the teams are working really hard to continue to grow. And there's many ways that we can drive the business forward, that we can actually build growth capabilities. Charging taskers is not one of them, but there are many other ways that we...

think we have a lot of opportunity in terms of growth. Let me ask you the big decoder question here. I guess it's expressed in two ways. First, how is TaskRabbit structured inside of IKEA? How does that work? Well, inside of IKEA, we operate very independently. So I report to a board and the board is made up of IKEA executives and external board members. You know, we have three board meetings a year because IKEA works in tertials.

quarters um that's very ikea that they've made up their own complicated swedish word it's perfect yeah Yeah, so IKEA. But it works for me. So we meet three times a year and, you know, we set targets together and that's it. Now I do work very closely with IKEA in a different way, more in a business sense. where there is a lot of opportunity for us to ensure that IKEA customers have access to TaskRabbit. And, you know, in some sense, TaskRabbit customers have access to IKEA.

IKEA has millions of people visiting their apps and their sites and, of course, their big stores. And we want to make sure that we have access to those customers in the best way possible. So we've done some great things there. We just recently in the U.S., but we had done so elsewhere before, made it so that it's much more seamless. customers or for IKEA customers to purchase, let's say, a desk at IKEA and assembly all at the same time and pay for it at checkout.

at ikea versus having to go separately on a task rabbit app and then try to put in the very fun article name of ikea furniture names and and then try to figure out how to get it assembled so that's a great

example of how the two companies can really leverage their capabilities. I mean, at the end of the day, IKEA purchased TaskRabbit under a There are some IKEA customers who, or potential IKEA customers, who don't want to be an IKEA customer because they feel overwhelmed by...

the idea of putting together furniture. And so we want to be there to help to solve that problem. And I think we've done a very good job there. Let me connect that to the supply conversation we were just having. I've put together a lot of IKEA furniture in my day. I feel like I'm pretty good at it. That's a relatively specialized skill, right? Like reading an IKEA instruction manual, it's like learning another language in many ways. I think it depends who you ask.

Some people are really good at this. By the way, one of my dream stories is that we go to a conference of flat pack furniture designers, and the IKEA people come in dressed all in black, and everyone's like, it's the IKEA designers. Because it's obviously the easiest to put together, but it's like a whole... It's like a whole thing. But I can tell you, watching our taskers put together IKEA furniture, I mean, it is impressive.

Many of them have done and they know the furniture, right? So they know this and they can do this so well inside and out. They just do it at speeds that you may be good, but like you're never going to be a tasker, an IKEA tasker. who is doing this day in and day out. And that's kind of what I'm getting at. It's a specialized skill.

I would actually say putting together IKEA furniture is different than putting together the furniture you would buy at Target or Walmart. Like, they're different companies with different styles. The way that things fit together, literally different. Again, my dream story is that we... find rival flat pack design gangs and like put them head to head. I don't know if that's how it works. It's just how it works in my brain.

That's a specialized supply, right? Do you keep that pool aside and say these are the people who are best at assembling IKEA kitchens and we're going to make sure they're available to IKEA? They get to choose. So I would say majority of the taskers who assemble IKEA furniture are also really good at assembling furniture for Wayfair and Target and other places. They want to assemble furniture.

The way it works on our platform is there's an IKEA assembly furniture category because, like you said, it's specialized, but then there's just furniture assembly where it could be a piece from anywhere. And those taskers definitely cross. Many of them are also handymen, so they will do minor home repairs, like if your doorknob is loose or other things as well. They have great skills. Some of them want to just focus on IKEA.

furniture only, but I would say that that's minority. I would say many of them cross into multiple categories. And then because IKEA is a parent, do you reserve supply for them or is that just not a problem? It's just not a problem. We have in all the countries that we serve, and of course, I alluded to this earlier on the call, but IKEA is much more sort of...

It's much bigger in Europe. And so we have a lot of taskers. A larger portion of our taskers know how to assemble IKEA furniture in Europe than in the U.S. And so because we get a lot more IKEA jobs in Europe. The IKEA business is much stronger overall. And so, no, we don't keep them separate. They can choose whatever category. We do not have any challenges with finding supply, though, even in Europe.

You mentioned that IKEA has its own pressures on you and its own goals for TaskRabbit. What are those goals? The goals are always about growth, right? How do we continue to grow faster and how do we continue to evolve where we're solving the right problems for the customer overall? And of course, IKEA customer as well. So, you know, just recently. we acquired a delivery company here in the US that does delivery of big and bulky things so that we can help.

Ikea deliver furniture to your home. They want to make sure that we are able to expand to other countries. We're only in eight countries. Ikea is in dozens of countries. And so there's still a lot of opportunity for growth that way.

Definitely pressures, but they're similar to what I would say any other parent or any other sort of investor would have. And then TaskRabbit itself, how many people is TaskRabbit? Right now, we're nearly 500 folks. How is that structured? We are structured, as many other companies today, we're very functionally focused with a matrix overlay. So we have GMs looking over the U.S. market and then GMs looking over the European market and each country.

Of course, there is always a bit of tension, or I would say maybe not a bit. I would like there to be a bit. There's probably a lot of tension between some of the needs that are unique per market or per country versus having... fully functional ways of thinking about the problem. So as an example,

There's different competitive pressures in different markets, and there's different ways that customers go onto platforms and book their tasks. And so there are specific needs that maybe customers in France have that are totally not applicable. to the market in the U.S. And so, you know, how do we make that trade-off? Because, of course, France is a much smaller overall portion of our business than the U.S. But you have to continue growing across the world. And so there's healthy tension.

Cross there, definitely. Put that into practice for me. What TaskRabbit makes most of all is a software product, right? So when you're saying customers in France have some needs, customers in the United States don't have, what are those needs and how do they get expressed in the product? For example, in France, there is some local tax law that allows customers who do work on their house.

to get some tax benefit, which is a great thing. This isn't something we have in the U.S. And so we want to make sure that customers have access to that. But to do that, you have to build out a... different flow and allow them to be able to submit whatever tax documents that sort of say that this is a work that they've done.

And there's dozens of these types of examples across markets. You know, marketing campaigns, they're different because people are different in every market and they resonate with different types of themes and different types of creative and so on. And so how do we... go broad but also have local capabilities ends up causing tension across the world. And that's what makes it fun. Certainly we don't have it figured out yet.

My joke on Decoder is if you tell me the structure of your company, I can tell you 80% of the problems. And if you tell me you're functional with a hybrid overlay, I can definitely tell you 80% of the problems. I mean, here's the thing. I've gone a lot through that, but...

There is no perfect structure. If there was one, then we would all be doing that. And then that would be and we wouldn't have to have this conversation. But, you know, if you have a functional structure, it creates certain sets of problems and then you can sort of fix them by going. to a GM or a business unit type of structure, then, not surprisingly, you create other sets of problems. And so to me, it is not so much about the structure. It's much more about the skills and the capabilities.

People have the sort of incentives and and how are they uniquely positioned to work across boundaries and across. functions and are across geographies and that's much harder to do and it really comes back then for to culture and what are our values and how do we get people to really think you know and enroll in the same direction whatever the strategy may be

So those are bigger problems, and I don't really think that changing the structure gets you to an answer closer. I think these type of adaptive problems that are more difficult to solve. are actually more challenging. And I don't think changing structure is the answer. It's interesting. Maybe one of the...

the hottest quiet debates on the show over the past few months is whether or not structure is a proxy for culture. You seem to be very much in the line that it's not. We've had some of the opposite answer, but it feels like the split to me is... whether or not you have multiple kinds of businesses you're running or you have one core product. And once you end up in the multiple lines of business, the structure starts to reflect very different kinds of tensions and trade-offs.

Do you think that TaskRabbit has just like one core business or do you have multiple lines of business that you're trying to operate? I mean, historically, it's been one core business, but with the delivery piece, it's definitely separate. There are many different things that we need to think about. You know, we need to think about A to B. which we didn't have to think about before. We need to think about all sorts of...

components that are different than our core business. Still, it's really important to us. We think it's a great opportunity that is very connected to the moving business and so on. And so we are thinking a lot about what does that mean? We have a separate moving business business unit. And what does that look like? I think, again, at the end of the day.

It's not so much the structure. It is much more about the culture and how can we feel, you know, a sense of shared responsibility across the company and understanding what our priorities are, what is our vision, what is our strategy. it all aligned are we all able to row in the same direction do we have is it very clear have we set the right expectations these again are things that I think are more difficult to answer

The other big question I ask everybody on Decoder is about decisions. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? So I know there are many different answers here, but for me as a CEO, I really think about... The decisions that I get to make are the ones that are, you know, I think there's different ways to describe them. But one way door is decisions that you've, I'm sure, heard of. But the things that are really hard to reverse.

Closing down the office during COVID or opening up an office or acquiring our company. These are sort of bigger decisions. But I really trust my team and then think a lot about how are they empowering their teams to make decisions. spend a lot of my times with customers. I think it's really important, right? So whether it's having taskers at my house or, you know, spending a lot of time with interviewing taskers or interviewing clients, I think it's really important, but still day to day.

I'm not as close to the problem as the people who I want. to have the authority or really the agency to solve those problems, right? And so they are hopefully spending much more time with the customers than even I am and understand that specific problem much better than I do. do and much better than my team does. So for me, it's really important to empower the team to make decisions.

And then most of them are sort of you have to test and try. And the thing that we keep focusing on is making decisions quickly, because really the speed is what I think gets you behind. You can constantly be looking for more data. and more certainty and most of that doesn't exist you have to start using your gut or your instinct or whatever however you define that

To sort of look at your past experience and you have some pattern recognition, you kind of understand how things may go and you weigh them and you make a call. And doing that quicker, I think, is the most important thing. We have to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

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We're back with TaskRabbit CEO Anya Smith. I just asked Anya the decoder questions about structure and decision-making, so now I wanted to dive in a little deeper into her history with the gig economy and discuss what she's actually learned from using the TaskRabbit platform as a regular customer herself.

You just described being close to the customer. It's interesting. Your history at Uber is you were, I think, the head of courier operations, right? That's right. You were on the supply side there working with the couriers and trying to onboard them. Yeah, and same with Airbnb. I definitely have a very soft spot for the supply side of the business. And frankly, this is why I'm doing gig economy. I often talk about when I was younger, I...

My family and I emigrated from Poland. And so, you know, in the 80s, my parents were trying to find jobs with more hours. And it was all hourly work. And it was hard to make ends meet. And I often wish that these types of platforms... platforms existed then, because no matter what, you can hustle and you can make more money. And yeah, I definitely have and can relate to the supply side of the business probably a lot more. How do you make sure that the taskers are happy?

Because that seems like if everyone is doing this kind of work because they're not making enough money, there's sort of an inherent unhappiness there. How do you make sure that they are happy and they're enthusiastic about doing this instead of doing it because... the economy is in turmoil. I don't know that the premise that taskers are unhappy is right. I have so many... I think the premise that supply is increasing because the economy in turmoil is kind of bearing itself out.

Correct. But, you know, I'll tell you, I have taskers showing up at my house every month or week or however often. And these are people who are really striving to. make an incremental income or make the main income. And they love having the opportunity to use their skills to do something to help someone else while making, you know, fairly a pretty good wage.

generally speaking. And so we do, like I said, we've done a lot of things. We try to provide a lot of additional benefits for them. We try to help them and make sure that they can call us. We have a whole team that is focused. just on helping taskers make money. And so this team will help you out to think about how do you price or how do you think about the categories that you're in or how can you make sure that your write-up is correct and so on.

providing a lot of AI tools for taskers to do that as well. But having that humor interaction really helps. And so if you're here on our platform and you want to make money, there's opportunity to make money. And we want to be the...

people who help them do that i'm very curious about what you have taskers at your house to do every couple weeks wow I mean, it's just like, how many TVs are you hanging up on you? No, so it's not TV. Well, but I have had taskers hang TVs. Okay, so, you know, and I don't tell my husband this because, again, he still pretends that he can do these things, but he really doesn't. So, like, he doesn't notice.

that it's broken and then he doesn't notice that it's broken now fix it's just the house runs but this is okay um and so you know i i had someone come in here the other day and mount a bunch of in my son's room a bunch of pictures i have someone coming in to assemble furnitures like these bookcases behind me. I have someone coming in to help with my lawn. There's infinite number of ways to get someone to help you in your home.

What have you learned about your own platform that you've wanted to improve by using it as much as you do? So much. Make it simpler. Always make it simpler. Make it easier. And sometimes... I may not care to choose who the tasker is. I just want to make sure that it's going to be a person who can do the job really well and do it as affordably as I can. So sometimes having a bit more help.

in choosing would be appreciated. So we're working on that. You mentioned AI several times. I've been asking basically everyone what happens when you have agents and more capable assistants built into your phones. I keep calling this the DoorDash problem, but you could call it the TaskRabbit problem or the Uber problem. The idea that I would just tell Siri, I need to get a TV hung, and then Siri goes off and clicks around the apps for me and brings the TaskRabbit to my house.

is very powerful. There's a lot of companies that are attempting to build their way towards that goal. Google just announced a bunch of stuff. Microsoft just announced a bunch of stuff. That would disintermediate you, right? At the end of the day, you would just become a sort of... commoditized service provider to an assistant that might be collecting all the user interaction and own the customer relationship. Have you looked forward to that problem? Do you know how you want to address it?

Absolutely look forward to the problem. I look at it a little bit differently. I think... If those agents exist, you have to go with a customer. So obviously, we have people that come into our sites every day. But if people want to come to Ikea and book... Tasker via Ikea, we're not going to say no. And if they want to come to Target and do that, we're not going to say no. And if they want to come to Siri and do that, we're not going to say no. I think sort of it's very easy to...

fall behind the, but then I don't own the customer and then I don't know what's going to happen with the customer. The customer will know that this is a tasker or we can make sure that they know that this is a tasker. They can understand that they're working with another party and they can.

come back and go directly or they don't have to. And then there's some economic way that we can figure out a system where it works for both parties. Siri, in this case, wants to be able to provide these types of services and they can't really do it without TaskRabbit. Because only TaskRabbit actually has a network of thousands of taskers. And we've cultivated that network. We know who they are. We understand their skills. They've all been background checked.

going to do that. Or, you know, Apple or whoever, they're just not going to be able to do that. We will always have the strength and supply and we will continue to go where the customer is to make sure as many of them have access to our platform as possible. Isn't the story of the internet, though, that it's the companies and the platforms that have the strength and demand that get to set the terms?

I think it's a little bit different when you look at a gig economy marketplace. I think at the end of the day it takes a lot of work. to bring together a set of taskers or a set of hosts or a set of Uber drivers. It's just really hard. And it's to acquire these folks and to make sure that they provide the quality that you want. And I don't see... other companies being able to do that. And I think it's also too early. There's so many ways.

that we can figure out how to test this and how to make it work. The example that you provide, we're still not quite there, right? Like there's many things that... It sounds great, but there are many things that are still hindering that actually to be a seamless experience. You know, there's payments and how do you, there's logging in, there's accounts, there's all sorts of ways that this is still all.

All of this can be resolved and it will be resolved, but that gives us a chance to test a lot of different models and understand what works best for the tasker, for the client, and then also in this case for the two parties involved. Yeah, I'm with you that it hasn't been proven to work, but I also go to the events and I watch Amazon executives demonstrate the next version of Alexa where the dishwasher is broken and it just...

books an appointment on Thumbtack. And I can see how maybe you want TaskRabbit in that mix, but then you are just next to Thumbtack. And you might, the agent might just pick the lowest price, right? Like, especially if you're charging a customer, you might just... pick the service to the lower toll. I mean, look, we're very different than Thumbtack because Thumbtack is a lead gen.

product that it's very hard to close that, whereas we provide the experience all the way through. So at the end of the day, on the demo that you described, the client still has to go and... work with whoever the provider or the end provider is, in this case, someone to fix your dishwasher. This isn't something that we have to do, right? And our product would look very differently because...

we are able to shepherd the entire experience through. Right, you close the loop. You actually send the tasker to the house. We close the loop. But, you know, again, we're still quite far from where... that could go. But I think the possibilities are endless and we have to go where the customer is. If everyone all of a sudden goes and, you know... talks to their phone and that's how they order things or talks to Siri or whatever. I don't know how we would choose not to be there.

Do you think it's different because you are not a lead gen model? I think about Thumbtack, for example. At some point, they're just there to deliver demand to a bunch of HVAC technicians or whoever was in that demo. And maybe Siri delivers that demand and Thumbtack gets totally disintermediated. You're saying that's not your model and you're not worried about it. You're charging the customer anyway. So would you just charge a higher rate for an agent and that would just solve the problem?

So I think that there are so many different economic structures that can work here. We're very early stages. And I think you don't even, we don't even know. We may all think and guesstimate that. You know, this is the right structure. And then a year in can decide, wow, this doesn't work for us or this doesn't work for the third party or this doesn't actually work for the clients. We're not getting enough people to actually do this.

So there's a lot of trial and error here. And so it's too early to be saying this is the right model and this is the right structure. What do you think are the most promising early flashes you've seen? The concept of having this agent to do many things for you.

is very interesting. And if you kind of take it forward a lot further, you know, eventually In theory, there's just sort of like we don't even have laptops and we don't even have our Kindles or whatever it may be because we just have agents that are constantly doing things for us, maybe on other types of devices or whatever else. And so I think it's super exciting to be a part of that journey. But I think none of it has been proven out and we're still actually.

I think pretty far away, although the technology is changing so quickly. It's quite remarkable, actually, to watch it. It's quite remarkable to be alive during this time.

I mean, I go to all the demos and I have the same reaction as you, which is, does this actually work? Like, they're very convincing demos. They are. They are. And, you know, I was just at a conference where someone was. adamantly telling me that it's only three years before there's a robot hanging up a tv and yeah i don't i don't believe i don't believe that i just i don't believe it

I have hung up a lot of TVs. This person was very adamant. But, you know, anytime that I'm sort of listening to any work that is being done sort of in a physical space, you know, it's still really far. They're working on robots trying to empty the dishwasher, and that's a really complex task. Really complex when you really think about it, and there's still a lot that has to happen.

One of the things that I'm thinking about a lot is where the automation comes, right? Where does it go? It's interesting TaskRabbit doesn't seem easily automatable. from the jump, as you're describing. A lot of these tasks are really, really hard. And even the robotics to begin to try to solve hanging a TV or emptying a dishwasher, many, many, many rounds of innovation to come to make that viable.

But other similarly situated competitors you might have or peers you might have like Uber, you can see how automation will change their business, right? The cars will drive themselves. That's going to change their business in radical ways, and we'll see how that goes. Do you see any automation that might change how TaskRabbit works in the near future?

From a software platform perspective, 100%. From an actual what happens in someone's home, I really don't see a robot mowing your lawn just yet, but it will happen. We just reviewed a bunch of robotic lawnmowers that you can buy yourself, and they don't work very well. Right, but they don't work very well. The internet didn't work very well 20, 30 years ago, whenever it started.

You know, the cell phones that we had didn't work very well. So it will evolve. I think we're still quite far. On the software side, what do you see that's going to change? I think for us at TaskRabbit, how we... really optimize the match between the client and tasker is going to change. We can continue to get so much smarter. I think how clients will come to our platform will change.

I think, you know, just the sort of the basic sort of how SEO and SEM works that like, like those terms barely will apply and that will happen much sooner than.

than a lawnmower or a robot that can hang up your TV. So I think that pace of that change, it's much more accelerated. Do you think that's where the growth is going to come from? Absolutely. Absolutely. When you talk to one of the car companies, they think all their growth is coming from the cars driving themselves. They can see the massive margins that come from getting rid of the drivers.

But you don't have that opportunity. Do you think I don't? Not yet. Right. And I see I understand their point. I mean, it's pretty remarkable to take Waymos in San Francisco. And, you know, I remember when seeing these.

I used to be at Walmart many, many years ago. And so Walmart's offices are right across the street from YouTube. When Google bought YouTube and when the whole thing, there was just a lot of Waymos or self-driving cars. They were not called Waymos then. Driving around and they looked so... foreign like and obviously they had drivers in them and now look so this will happen but I and I understand the excitement I just think we're further away from that and

Home services. Have you had any conversations with the big AI companies about being a provider to their would-be agent platforms? We are continually exploring our options. That's very good. That's the only non-answer you've given so far, and I appreciate it. Does Ikea have a plan to build some great Ikea agent? Because Ikea has had many, many software platforms of its own over the years. I'm not sure, so I don't want to sort of...

put words in our mouth. I know that AI is a critical investment for them and I know that they're looking at it in all parts of the business. But I wouldn't be speaking for them to know exactly where they see most innovation. When I talked to Dara from Uber about what I keep calling the DoorDash problem, he said, look, at first we're going to build it and we'll see if it works and if it's cool. And if it works, we're going to charge high rates to make our business work.

Or maybe we'll come to some other arrangement. But that was basically his point of view. I think that's a great answer. And so you're tracking there. You're like, let's just see if this is cool. Absolutely. Let's make sure that we're involved. But I think it is the right answer. You know, we were part of the demo with Google last week. So we're definitely...

More than tipping our toes into it. The way that you're building those integrations, there's a lot of ways to do it. I went to IO and I watched, I think they call it Project Mariner. That's right. And we're part of that. Right. They're running Chrome on a data center. And AI is literally clicking around the website. That's right. And you kind of can see it. I would say that's still somewhat rudimentary. I think you can do better. But again, it's just a first step. It's okay.

I mean, that to me seems like, I don't even know how to describe it. That's a Rube Goldberg machine, right? APIs exist. We know how to make computers and databases talk to each other. This is fully ridiculous. Then there's like new age ways of doing it, right? Like MCP, where the agents have a more structured way of communicating. And it's kind of just APIs, but they're like cooler API. It's more seamless. Right.

Which of those ways do you think is going to be the future for you, or are you just trying them all out? I think whatever's easiest for the customer is going to be the future. Who is the customer? I mean, at the end of the day, it's the people who are paying for these services. So in our instance, it's the clients who need.

things fixed around the home. And I think whatever is easiest for them is eventually what's going to work. Now, I know like Project Mariner, it kind of seems odd. You're kind of just watching this mouse move around. And it's kind of eerie. It is. It is. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think it's just the first step. And I think Google is going to continue to evolve there. And so I don't want to say like which way, because I think eventually.

All of these platforms will build products that will make it much more seamless for the customer to do the things that they want to get done. And so we just want to make sure that we're involved.

Anya, this is great. What's next for TaskRabbit? What should people be looking for? We have some very fun things coming up, but one of the biggest things is, you know, IKEA is a partner and it's been a very successful partner. And so we believe that we can have other very successful partners. So we've just rolled out.

a suite of products that will allow us to speak to those partners via an API and much faster to hopefully be able to ensure that their customers can come in and use TaskRabbit services. So we're really excited about that opportunity. And then the other thing that's really big is continue evolution of how we match the client and a tasker. And so the way you may see that as a client or a tasker on our apps is just a more.

seamless way to know that you're getting the right person in your home to do that mounting tv task that's on a brick wall I'm absolutely going to sign up for TaskRabbit to mount some TVs in my neighborhood. It feels like obviously the thing I'm doing this afternoon. If you love doing it, you should absolutely be doing it. And you live in a neighborhood where, you know, I think there's a lot of people mounting TVs.

There's going to be a lot of crooked TVs here in Westminster. Thank you so much for coming on Decoder. You're going to have to come back soon. Well, thanks so much. I really enjoyed our conversation.

I'd like to thank Anya Smith for taking the time to join Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this show or really anything else, you can drop us a line. You can email us at decoderatheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also email me directly on Threads and Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok and an Instagram.

They're both at DakotaPod. A lot of fun. If you like Dakota, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcasts. Dakota is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Dakota music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

Support for the show comes from Alex Partners. Now in its sixth year, the Alex Partners Disruption Index explores what the best performing and fastest growing companies are doing differently as they anticipate, shape, and respond to disruption. How are the world's top leaders identifying ways to integrate AI into their businesses? disruption.alixpartners.com. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters.

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