Gigster raises $20M from investors including Marc Benioff and Michael Jordan

Having built a marketplace company around digital services I was a massive skeptical of Gigster but their revenue growth is phenomenal. Congrats to the team. Super keen to see how & when they expand to new verticals outside of software development.

Despite the celebrities, Marc Benioff is easily the most intriguing investor on that list. SalesForce's customers frequently need tweaks and customizations - and demand for these programmers is unnecessarily high. I wonder if Benioff sees Gigster as a solution to his own growth problems.

A lifetime ago (~17 years) I pitched Michael Jordan on investing in my tech startup. I got the meeting through someone that had previously run one of his golf ventures. While I pitched to Michael himself, his investment decisions at the time were essentially all made by his money manager, a shrewd and difficult guy named Curtis Polk. I believe he still runs Michael's financial affairs.

At my meeting with Michael and his team, Michael said "you've convinced me, now you have to convince Curtis". I assume that's his standard response, so that he doesn't have to reject anyone and can blame Curtis. But in this case Michael called my contact that setup the meeting after the fact and said he actually wanted to invest, but Curtis told him that he would make him sign a waiver saying he was doing it against his advice if he did. Michael liked what he saw enough that after he turned us down, he setup a pitch meeting with another very high profile potential investor.

The point of this story is that if you see a big celebrity name attached to an investment, odds are that the decision wasn't actually made by that celebrity investor. The smart ones have built very high walls around their fortunes, and the gatekeepers are the people you should be talking to if you want a celebrity investor. My mistake with Michael was spending most of my time talking to him, and barely addressing Curtis, who turned out to be the actual decision maker.

This is mostly a puff piece touting their new investment. The idea of "gig" marketplaces isn't exactly revolutionary, and Gigster is far from the only (or best) one. But you would certainly think it is if the only information you had about this space was gleaned from this article. I actually kept looking for the "sponsored article" disclaimer based on how it was written.

Gigster used to give fixed price quotes, but it looks like they may have stopped doing that based on the website copy. Can anyone confirm that?