This is Kristen O'Brien, Managing Editor at NFX, and you're listening to the NFX podcast. Today, we're talking with Stacey Brown Philpott and Pete Flint about what it takes to lead a marketplace startup. Stacy is the CEO of Task Rabbit, the company that invented the gig economy. Task Rabbit is a leading marketplace for home services and errands. They were acquired by IKEA in 2017, and they're now available in 6 countries. Let's jump in.
So it's a real pleasure today to have Stacey Brown Philpott, the CEO of Task Rabbit, who is also a dear old friend. So thank you for joining us today on the NFX Podcast. Thank you for having me, Pete. Nice to see you. So I'd love to just kick off and if you think about in 2020, the technologies and the startup ecosystem since those days has exploded. I mean, startups and seed funds. It's like exploding.
So it's almost, on the one hand, is easier than ever to be a a founder and start a company and CEO. But at the same time, you know, perhaps is harder than ever to be a great leader. Can you can you share a little bit about how you think about leadership? And, you know, is there a crisis today in in technology leadership, and what what can we do about it? What does it mean to be a leader in today's times is a really hard question to answer because it's evolving.
I would say in the past, people would say, if you become a CEO of a publicly traded company, then your number one priority is your shareholders. If you become, you know, a founder of a company and you get investors, then your priority is to deliver the value that you said the investors want. And if you create a business and people buy it, you get a return, and that's, like, no longer the case anymore.
The expectations I wake up and I think about not just how much value we're creating in terms of revenue and profitability, but also the team that we're building, we have to not just have a mission, but live that mission every day. We have to focus on the culture, we have to talk about the culture.
And then we have to look at the external environment and be able to respond to the culture outside of task rabbit, there's a lot happening a lot in terms of the treatment of women as a woman who's a founder. I have to come in and have a point of view and maybe not always have the right answer, but create an environment that's inclusive and people can hear it. As the political environment changes, people are asking me, what should task rabbit respond to in these situations?
And that never used to be part of the dialogue anymore. It was always very separate. And so I wouldn't call it a crisis of leadership, I would just say that what's expected of a leader today goes way beyond just profits and profitability and and and extends into how you treat people what kind of person you are and how you lead and not just what you do. For you as a leader, perhaps, I'm I'm curious, you know, you've done a whole bunch of different things throughout your career.
What was there a particular leadership challenge that you that was incredibly sort of challenging and and perhaps share kind of how what was that challenge and and how did you get through that? We had a data breach, 2 years ago. And it was almost 2 years ago at this point, and our site went down. And, we had to come together as a team to really figure out what we were going to do.
And obviously, a lot of the work was going into getting the site back up, figuring out what data, if any, was compromised, making sure that, the people who worked at the company employees were taken care of. And, of course, we were thinking about our taskers, tasks had to be done clients were depending on task prep for somebody to show up and the app wasn't up and it wasn't it wasn't running. And so we scrambled as an operations team to pull all these things together.
We got the crisis response team to manage through it. And one of the things that we were debating was how do we handle it if a tasker can't show up for their job because they can't find out where the client is that day? Do we compensate them for that day, or do we not? And there was this moment where we were trying to do the analysis, but we couldn't do the analysis in enough time that we had to do the press release. And I said forget about the analysis.
Let's just pay everybody for the next 2 days. Like, if you were gonna do a task, we're gonna figure out what you probably would have earned on that task, and we're just gonna pay the taskers because it's the right thing to do. And so sometimes you just don't have your inner crisis and you just don't know what the right thing to do is. And in this case, that was the right thing to do because then we told all our taskers that was gonna happen, You know what they started doing?
They started going on Facebook to find their client. They started figuring out, oh, did I have this person's phone number? Can I text them and see if I can still show up? And many of them, like, went out of their way to get the test done even though the site was down, and we didn't even see a dip at all in our growth or our revenues because of that outage.
Kinda walk us through sort of the how you've figured out what the right thing to do is Who do you rely on in times of crisis to help you navigate? We are a very tight team, and so it was my core leadership team that came together, and there were some decisions our general counsel could just make by herself, and there were some decisions that we all had to make as a team. And this was one of them. So we had my VP of ops We have my general counsel, and we had the team there.
The other thing that I did is we had advisors. We had some great advisors who do crisis management. And then I contacted a couple of people who'd gone through this before. And so I have great people in my life who've seen many things that I have yet to see and I'm excited to learn what those things are. This is not one that I planned for, but when it happened, I had a couple of people who'd gone through it before reach out to me and said, hey.
If you ever need Beller, like, around this, like, let me know. And I remember texting one person and said, hey. We're we're trying to decide what we're gonna do here. He said, here's how I would think about it. And ultimately it came down to our values. Our number one value was caring deeply, and that value was more important than anything else that we were dealing with the moment, and we care deeply about our taskers. So he said, if that's the value, fine. We just pay everybody.
Out of that experience, Was there anything that you changed sort of fundamentally from the kind of from the company or yourself or the things that you learned just going through that? I have 2 things. So, you know, one of them is one of my favorite quotes is by Doctor Morgan Luther King, which is the ultimate measure of a man or a woman in today's time is not how he stands in times of convenience, but how he stands in times of challenging controversy.
And we had yet to have something controversial happen. And this was it. And it really was a test of what kind of team have I Beller? Like, is this the kind of team that's gonna stand together and we completely did? So it was a good learning about the importance of building a team of people who are gonna be there with you and through that time of challenge and controversy. Yeah. That resonates with me in in the time of when I was running truly at the 2008 during Lehman Collapse.
It was like, then you're in in the real estate, you're in an online real estate company that financial markets collapse, real estate collapses. And you, you know, we were about three years old then. And so but the but it was just a torturous time. You just Yeah. You do not know what to do, but having built a foundation of a strong culture and values, then people figure it out.
You know, there's a there's a kind of, obviously, they need clear leadership, but I think the culture is one of those things that certain company and values is is one of those things that certain companies leave too late. Yes. And they kind of try to add it in when they need it, and it's It's too late then. Not authentic and it's far too late, but if if you're able to sort of infuse a really strong culture from the outset, then you have no idea what crisis, but there's gonna be a crisis.
And that will kind of, you know, you'll be thankful about the infrastructures there and that culture that will will able you to carry carry through that. Beller there any experiences which you had to, as a company, just get through a certain kind of constraint or challenge that kinda unlock some value.
You know, as you think about scaling the business off, you know, whether I think Ben Horitz calls it the struggle, in that early scaling period, were there any stories about, okay, there was this kind of this hack or this idea or this, insight which enabled the company to prep's scale where it is today? You know, when I joined task rabbit, we were sort of known for, oh, this is gonna be the next eBay for services. Auction model, people bid, people ask, and it sort of matches.
And we were in 9 cities, and it was going fine. The problem that we had is our fulfillment rate, which if you all are learning marketplaces, you know, exactly what I'm talking about, was, like, 50%. And so any investor would look at them and say I'm never gonna put another dollar in because that's just awful. We just couldn't figure out how to move that number. And the struggle, as you mentioned, was like, we tried everything.
We were trying to, like, convince people to, like, set different prices. We were trying to convince clients, pick certain categories, and you just couldn't convince people ultimately, we had to change the product. And when we changed the product to a direct hire model where we listed all the who are available with their hourly rates and, you know, what their skills are. And then you just go in and hire the person. It was, but fulfillment rate went up.
Skyrocketed, it it was successful, but we had to go through that and, like, tweak and iterate and really try really, really hard. To figure out, like, this thing is not gonna work. We actually have to tell people who's available to do what and how much is gonna cost Otherwise, we're never gonna get our fulfillment where it needs to be. So this is a demand side pick. Correct. So and then before, what was it? It was opaque? It was it was, demands I still pick, but you just bid.
You know, I wanna get my house cleaned. Okay. 25 Pete bid and you go back if you want to and pick, but they bid different prices. The problem with that, you pick somebody for $10. You're unhappy. You pick somebody for a $100 and they still don't do a good job, you're unhappy. You pick somebody for $50, you think, is amazing, but they're, oh, but you know what? I'm not available on the day that you want. Then you're still unhappy. So you just couldn't make people happy with an auction model.
So that and that reduced that friction. So enable the matching rate to go up. So it went from each or something. Like, close to 90%. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Way better. So much. You have a business. That was the core pricing change. And what was the reaction from the participants in the ecosystem? Obviously, on the demand side, I think they're probably much happy the supply side. Similarly, it was like, okay, I get what the company is about.
I can easily fulfill orders that supply side was delighted as well. Yeah. So we we launched this as a test in London where no one knew anything about taskrabbit. So when we launched it, super successful. Tasks knew how much they were gonna make. People could hire. The person showed up. Everybody was happy. And then we brought it back to the US. And when we did that, Everyone's gonna be equally as happy. Right? Wrong.
But what we had built was a community that had come accustomed to a certain way of working and behavior. And so our taskers were worried that if I put myself out there and put my calendar, how do I know I'm gonna hired. I used to have so much more agency. I could bid, and now I can't bid. I'm just waiting for somebody to hire me. I don't trust you. There was a trust issue. So they had to believe in us that the work was going to come.
Likewise, clients like to pick from 25 people who is taskrabbit to decide who the best person is? How are we gonna know? How do I trust you? So it really pushed us to create a higher level of trust And initially, the trust was not there. So we had to rebuild that trust for sure. So how that took, like, 3, 6 months to figure out that? Less than 6 months.
Okay. We had a and the reason why I said that answer so fast of how long that took is because we were watching what happened to our revenues over a 6 month period, and they needed to a certain level for us to know if that was the right decision or not and we did. But it's it's I mean, one of the sort of classic I mean, if you've seen the market marketplace businesses are incredibly dynamic, you've seen how an existing business model is incredibly hard to change.
And one of the wonderful things about marketplaces are incredibly sticky, but one of the changes is the participants really hate change. So you see people like Craigslist, which just don't change, but kind of do okay, increasingly less okay, but they do okay. But and then you see in other other businesses which are constantly innovating involving and Amazon is been kind of pioneering its incremental changes over time.
If you were to perhaps do that again, and and change the change, perhaps, the pricing model or business model within a marketplace. What what changes would you do? How would you do it differently or or turn to what was the what was the best thing you did with that change? There was there's a lot that we would have done differently. One of we would have we would have chosen that business model, but we probably would have done a lot more communication about what was about to happen.
We thought we'd do this great press release and tell everybody, and they're gonna be happy And the truth is is we should have brought the community along because it's such a sticky marketplace. People are so invested We didn't tell our taskers until the day before it was happening. We should have introduced the concept to them. We should have got them involved. We should have encouraged them to participate in the development process. And those are all things we could have done.
Even if we ended up with the same decision, on the same tight timeline, we would have brought people along. And that's a unique thing about marketplaces that many other companies don't have to worry about, but the importance of the community and how you interact with them was a huge piece of what we would have done differently for sure. As the marketplace ecosystem has evolved, there's been this sort of tension between horizontal mark marketplaces or increase or increasingly verticalization.
How do you think about, you know, this balance between horizontal versus vertical? That is a tough balance. When we started, we were everything. And so because we were everything, we were nothing to somebody and everything to everybody. Since then, we've actually focused and become a lot more verticals focusing specifically on home services. So a task management network that gives you trusted people to do things around your home, it's a much easier message to communicate.
And so while we haven't specifically said only TV mounting or only furniture assembly, even though we're owned by IKEA or only cleaning, we have put in some boundaries of what we will offer and what we will do and what we won't. And the reason is adjacencies I think it's important to have some adjacencies in a marketplace because a customer comes to you. You spend all that money and all that time to build trust. And now like, they wanna come to you for something else.
So you've gotta look at what are the adjacencies. And so we built our marketplace around what adjacencies actually matter for our target customer, and it tends to be things around the home. And that adjacency is not only important, I guess, to increase the revenue per customer, but also to increase the sort of repeat value, repeat interactions. The more people use this as a kind of like the habit this is my go to, then that increases frequency, increases brand, increase the retention.
That's right. It's all about being this go to team. And so you have to have enough frequency and presence in their mind and in their home for that to really work with services marketplace, one of the big challenges have been disintermediation. How do you go kind of like off platform, you know, with the sort of home care marketplaces has been a real challenge do you do to to overcome that change if transactions happening off platform? Disintermediation is hard to manage.
And, you know, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to keep people on the platform and sometimes get something to come to, you have to actually just let go. So if you say, you know what we're gonna do, we're gonna build the best marketplace that we can We're gonna attract amazing clients who are who have a lot of demand, and we're gonna give our taskers the best opportunities for work they can find. They can set their own hourly rates. They can set their own schedule. And you know what?
We're gonna back them up. Something goes wrong. We're gonna be there for them. And that's the kind of thing we wanna build. And so we built that. And so we've been able to manage this intermediation because you now have a place that you can go where you now trust this platform to do things for you that you might not otherwise choose to do on your own or to validate things in uncertain that you might have about using the experience, and that's how we've done it.
I I have yet to find another company who does anything that prevents anybody from just leaving the marketplace. And we do have success stories. And I like to call a lot of them success stories where people will find a full time job because they went into the chat. They bartended somewhere this this startup was hiring and they got a job. So doing engineering or some other thing, that's great. Right? That's exactly what this community is about.
If we're not growing the community that we're a part of, we're not doing something more than we that we thought we were here to to do. And and is that I guess it's also a function of the rate as well. What is the kind of pricing if you're if you try to sort of if you if you try to kind of, like, charge too much as a marketplace and that creates problems, if you charge too little, then there's, like, it's hard to go a sustainable business and attract supply and demand.
It's like, is that, you know, if you were to if you think about that kind of the evolution of that decision, is there been kind of any insights that you've learned over the evolution of task rabbit in terms of pricing and other other than just fixed price. Yeah. The the the take rate or rake or however you wanna describe it is this weird thing because you can do the bottoms up version, which is, here's our cost. Here's how much we need to cover the cost. This is what it needs to be.
And then you could do the outside in version, which is how much are people willing to pay for this service? And then how much can we make We have really tried to focus on letting our taskers set their own hourly James. And we don't mess with that number at all. So if you wanna charge a $150 an hour, that's your decision. And then we've looked at what does it take to Beller great marketplace, how much do we need to charge?
That price is some people out and it does, but then we educate them on, well, if this how much you wanna make in a week. This is how many tasks you can do at a lower hourly rate, for example. So we try. We do a lot of around the rate. But because we let them set their own hourly rates, it that's the best thing that we do because we're not taking money out of the tasker's pocket.
We may be charging more to the clients, but it equalizes to some degree the experience on the marketplace because the client still has a choice on who she wants to hire at a higher or a lower hourly rate. And you and you've and just as you think about the task robots specifically demand versus supply constraint? Like, what's how is that, and and we'll go into sort of geographic expansion? Like, How do you think about you supply constrained, demand constrained, in general?
And then how do you think about your geographic expansion, what are the kind of gating factors for you to go into to go into different markets? Cause it seems to me that many other competitors have just gone out of business because they've either grown too fast in 2 different too many different markets, or there's been they haven't attracted enough demand or the demands are sticky enough. So task wrapping out raising 6 countries, and each country, including the US, is very different.
We've gone through the cycles of being demand constrained and supply constrained in almost all of them. We just launched Spain last month, so that one's still very new. We have a lot of supply because we always start with a lot of supply and enough to meet what we think the demand is gonna be unless we're way way off. And by and large, investing in not just the quantity of supply, but the quality of supply has been the most important thing to balance the 2 sided marketplace.
So even when we get demand constrained, we still got a great supply. And when we're supply constrained, we can really work with that community and say, hey, things are happening. It's the end of the month. It's New York. People are moving. It's the summer. And nobody wants to do it themselves. So if you wanna earn some extra money, like, this is the time to do it. So we've got that relationship here to manage some of the bikes in demand while we build up the supply that we need over time.
Every country is different. We went into Canada thinking This one's gonna be a slam dunk and we turned out to be way more supply constrained than we thought. And part of that has been working with IKEA as a partner. So after the UK, we launched Encana that was the 1st country we launched with IKEA. And some of our criteria is how how big is the market what's the potential, what does demand look like, readiness for this kind of work independent contractors but it's also where does IKEA operate?
How can they really support our growth? And it turned out that the team in Canada really unlocked a lot of growth for us that we just did not anticipate. It was exciting because we can now go meet that challenge, but it it created a new dynamic for us in how we scale in a new country for sure. And is there is there any frameworks or, like, as you think about geographic expansion, is there any, you know, both sequencing different regions as well as timing?
Are we ready to expand into the other market? Is is you speak to other marketplace founders and CEOs? Like, are there any rules of thumb that you developed to help to understand this geographic expansion? So one rule of thumb is not to even think about it in regions. You gotta think about it, not even at the country level, at the city level.
Make the city, meaning people say make the market, make the market the city, have enough demand in that city where geographically speaking, the people who are doing the work for us are willing to drive as far as that city is, you know, big to go and do the work. And so really focus on making the market and making the city. We launched in London in one store for IKEA in the Wembley store. And we didn't like go to the next store until we figured out that that store was a good store.
It's a neighborhood, not even cities. Just neighborhoods. Yep. It's neighborhoods. And then we didn't launch more cities across the UK for a long time. After we did London because we were looking at the numbers and the potential we weren't yet big enough to do enough brand marketing to cover the country, it was not gonna pay off.
And some of these smaller cities are so small that you're just not gonna generate enough demand from those And so the big cities really make the neighborhood, but for the smaller cities, make sure you have enough coverage to afford the marketing around them. So task fabric is a division of Ikea now? Yes. Yep. How did And, like, how did that, like, how do you get to know the IKEA folks? That's, I mean, it's, it's amazing kind of partnership. I love to how do you get to know them?
This is gonna sound like one of those Silicon Valley stories, and maybe it is. But in December of 2015, the IKEA team came to visit Silicon Valley in Pete a bunch of companies including taskrabbit. There were, like, ten people in the room around the table that was not an IKEA table, which they and sit on the minute they walked in, at our office. And we now have IKEA tables, by the way.
And And we thought it was a great meeting, but one of the most important things we shared with them in that meeting was how many people pay somebody else to get their furniture assembled and on average how much they pay, which is often as much or very a little bit less than the cost of the item. And so with that information and then and we didn't even have a relationship with them.
We're just just so you know, lots of people go to Emeryville Morgan and they then they log in to task, grab it, and they hire somebody to come put it together. So that became the conversation around the partnership. You've done that? I've done that. Exactly. That was the first use case. Of course. Lots of people have, and that started the partnership. And from there, we really focused a lot on what value are we gonna create.
We obviously Pete creating value for customers who wouldn't otherwise shop at IKEA. The only reason why they went is because they know somebody from taskrabbit is gonna put that thing together for them. But the company is very values driven. And so to go from a partnership to an acquisition was not just about how much money we were making for them or for ourselves. It was also about what kind of value we were creating and our own values as a company and alignment of those values.
So a lot of the diligence was hours on values and what matters and what kind of company are we building and why and how can we really do that together? And and just how do you manage the culture? Because you've shared with me privately just the the values and it's really impressive in the Morgan, and it's and it's a remarkable company. How how do you effectively navigate this sort of fast moving, fast charging?
Like, we're a tech driven company in Silicon Valley and And we move a hundred miles an hour because that's what's required, and that's in a DNA versus a, you know, a a European furniture maker. Like, not knowing that. You make it seem so different, Pete. It is very different, but the missions are very similar. So our mission at taskrabbit is to make everyday life easier for everyday people. IKEA is to create a better everyday life for the many people. Ours was written 11 years ago.
There's 76. So because that mission alignment was there, we could then there's some forgiveness that happens on both sides, which is, is this greater mission that we all sort of care about how we get there. We really have been left independent to do that. We're technically a separate legal entity. We have a board that governs the company, and they really didn't wanna, what they say, squash the butterfly. And, like, let's just let this company run independently.
So part of it is that decision as part of doing the deal. The second thing that we did was right after we announced the deal, we announced in October of 2017, and then in January of 2018, we redid our values. And not that we didn't have great values before, but it was a a moment and an opportunity for us to create new values if we wanted to.
Or keep reinforce the same values, but to establish that this is still gonna be a separate entity, we're still gonna have our values And these are the values that are gonna carry us through this next phase for this Morgan. That'll also be around in 75 years. And what and just can you through that period, what's been some of the kind of growth in in geographies or any metrics? It's like from that positioned to where you are today? Yeah. We have seen so much growth.
So we went from two countries to six countries. We Let's see. When we first met with IKEA and started this partnership, our business was about 2% furniture assembly, and now it's 20% furniture assembly. So There's still the vast minority. It's it's a vast minority, but And so it's fueled a lot of our growth. The business is still growing. And at the same time, the customer acquisition from IKEA is is also growing.
And many of these customers are getting something assembled and then coming back and getting something mounted or some other service done. So that's been impressive. I I was IKEA is the world's largest furniture Beller. And so imagine having that customer base to tap into It's the one thing we were hoping for, and it's really paid off.
And and if there was, you know, the it's really unusual that, you know, this sort of big traditional company and this fast moving tech company is hard for them sometimes to work together in this in this environment. Is there any what would have perhaps been some of the biggest surprises? Of the experience?
And then and then what advice would you give, you know, founders that are building high-tech companies who are kind of building either partnerships or M and A with with other perhaps more traditional companies. So one of the biggest surprises is to be the world's largest furniture retailer, you have to be a good business. The business has to be good and has to be well run. Otherwise, you're out of business, but the process by which companies make decisions is often very different.
And so we've got the DNA here of this is the pace. It's really fast. Let's just go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's raise the next round of funny. And now we're gonna be successful. And they're just very patient. They have, like, €40,000,000,000 on the balance sheet. Like, they can just wait And they can test and they can iterate. And so their process of innovation maybe doesn't happen as fast, but they have the capital to invest and they have the time to invest.
And so we had to both get comfortable with how the pace of decision making, for sure. So if you're at all considering a partnership or potential M and A, with a more traditional company. Number 1, the pace is not is probably not gonna be as fast as you want it to be. Number 2, often those things align with the strategy of which you have very little influence over. Meaning, if that company has a strategy that fits with what you're doing, then it's gonna be very easy for you to get that deal done.
If you're trying to sell in your strategy into a company that's 20,000 people, that's exhausting. And so think about where else you should be spending your time. If this is your number one Pete, And for us, IKEA was the company. Like, if we could partner with anybody, we'd love to make sure you set aside some resources, but not all the company resources. To to do it and to focus on it.
So trying to create this sort of nimble team of, navy seals kind of running a million miles an hour, but kind of working with the mothership, but not necessarily, letting them to take the trashy. So it's been, you know, it feels to me like Charles River kind of invented this sort of word gig economy, and it's remarkable.
Like, it's it's pioneer in that category way before kind of Uber And Lyft, I think, in terms of kind of the impact on the economy, but a huge amount has changed as that kind of that segment of the market has expanded. Beller me a little bit about kind of what what's happening on regulation side and how task rabbit thinks about it. You got AB5 and various kind of measures you know, influx.
What what is the right thing for the industry, to help kind of all participants in the ecosystem as well as kind of what do you think is right for task rabbit? Yeah. Leah deciding to start this company 11 years ago. I don't think she went in thinking, I'm gonna create the gig economy or the sharing economy, but she just wanted to have neighbors helping neighbors. And it turned into a phenomenon that the world was actually ready for was 2008 and people were ready for something different.
They needed a way to afford to live today. People need a way to afford to live and more and more people need a way to afford to live. And so whatever regulation that has been passed or is currently in the process of being passed is really, I believe, in service of that, but the process is different than how many of the companies in our space are approaching it. So what matters for the industry and for the sharing economy or gig economy is that We create a way for people to afford to live.
We are creating economic opportunities. We are filling the income gap. We are helping people pay major major Beller. We are doing a lot of the things that a lot of people say they wanna do. It is actually happening because of the companies that we have. And for task you. We want to continue to offer our taskers flexibility to set their own hourly rates. We want them to have the option to set their hours for when they want sure where that is supported and available to them.
And so those are the things that we're advocating for as we navigate some of the regulatory environment. And is there, I mean, if there was is there a holy grail out there? Like, what would be the if if you were, kind of writing these Beller? Like, what would you advocate for? I wish there were a holy grail. It is so complicated because when we have these conversations, everybody has something else in mind about what's important for the group.
When we talk to our taskers, they want to be able to save for retirement like access to a 401 k. They obviously want great health care. Some of them want workers' compensation, but most of them don't because a lot of them are supplementing their income. And they have a job already that provides that. So we would love to be able to offer some way to afford the things that they need when they need it. I don't know what that looks like because we don't have a structure today anywhere.
W two does not allow for that structure. We don't have a today anywhere there. And there's and there's no other international Morgan, which, you've seen that kind of does a good job in navigating this. Some of these socialist European countries now? Six countries and nothing. We found nothing. No. It's an every country has a point of view around independent contractors that some of them whom are different than in the US. Some of them are more accepting some are more stringent.
And so we're having to deal with that as well. You know, here we are in the midst of the corona crisis. What do you think about that? I'm sure you've had conversations with your team. You know, they're sort of on the one hand, there's clearly a travel industry. Is it gonna be really challenged? On the other hand, there's sort of a lease speculation that there'll be certain industries, as I saw this morning that Grubhub was upgraded as a stock.
Because people are gonna be like, you know, getting their door services. Delivery services and DoorDash and maybe it's too early to tell, but, like, How do you think that might if might impact not only just task rabbit, but perhaps kind of this broader ecosystem of the gig economy or shared economy? I I think it's a little bit too early to to call any particular company. Obviously, certain industries where do I think taskrabbit fits in this?
The most important thing that we care about is the safety of our employees, and the community, our taskers, and our clients. And so we focused on what communications do we need to do to make sure that they are protected at this time. Many of them have to go to work. And so we but we want them to be safe. So we've said things like if you have to cancel because you're not feeling well, then we'll waive the cancellation fee.
Something like that, something where they feel like they might be penalized with something, but they won't be. I think over time, the dependency that we have on services is actually gonna go up because now we the things that we used to do ourselves, we're gonna start looking around and figuring out who can do them for us and that may create some value. It may create some or it may be scary to Pete.
But if it becomes more of a norm, then I think for anybody who's running a marketplace for any kind of service has an opportunity to demonstrate what kind of value you can create. We're just trying to be as safe as possible during this time so people can see that this is a valuable service Beller you're in a crisis or not.
But it seems that there will be some sort of lasting impact from this and what we've what we've seen in so many when when you have these economic shocks or of any kind, then there's there's a mismatch between supply and demand. And so and it's the smart nimble marketplaces that can identify these mismatches of supply demand. That can capture market share and then ex use that as a wish to expand it to other markets.
So what I'm just hopeful it will it will pass pretty soon, and we can move we're back on with what we're doing before. Yeah. I hope so too. So thanks again, Stacy. This is an amazing conversation. And, such a wonderful story and such a wonderful leader. So thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me.