|
|
From the file
Company: Guru.com
Position: Chief executive officer
Education: Master’s degree in business administration from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Age: 44 |
PITTSBURGH – What’s in a name? If you ask Inder Guglani, chief executive officer of Guru.com, he will tell you: “Everything.”
The Pittsburgh-based online marketplace for freelancers, which connects businesses with freelancers specializing in over 160 categories including Web site design, programming, graphic design, business consulting and administrative support, began as Emoonlighter in 2000. However, in 2003, Guglani bought the domain name of Guru Worldwide Inc.’s Guru.com as part of an acquisition deal. His gamble was banking on the fact that Guru.com had the best name recognition in the industry and had a year head start on Emoonligher, having been founded in 1999. Not to mention Guru.com had received $60 million in venture capital and spent most of it on marketing and branding.
Emoonlighter, on the other hand, had focused modest initial venture capital backing – just $400,000 upon launch – on building infrastructure and services. Guglani believed the combination of the name recognition with best services would be a recipe for success.
And six years later, he has been proven correct.
The 44-year-old Guglani estimates that Guru.com has grown 15 times what is was in 2003, when Emoonlighter first took over the Guru.com name. “It did prove to be a huge thing for us … We were able to take advantage of millions and millions of dollars spent on branding,” he said. “It was almost too good to be true.”
Guglani estimates that approximately 1 million freelancers have registered for the Web site since its launch, with about 100,000 currently active members; 150,000 buyers have used services through Guru.com. The average deal size is $750. The largest single contract was for $125,000. According to Guglani, the largest business client has spent $250,000 on the site over time. Those seeking freelance services range from individuals to small businesses to large corporations. Some of the recognizable clients that have used Guru.com include: Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Century 21 Real Estate Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Motorola Inc., The National Geographic Society, Pfizer Inc., The University of Michigan, The University of Tennessee, The United States Navy and the U.S. Olympic Committee.
Guru.com has approximately 30 employees; 24 of those employees work in Pittsburgh. The company also has a center in Noida, India, and an additional 10 employees work for the company part-time overall.
Last year proved to be a banner year for Guru.com as the company reported an all-time high in projects posted with over 101,000, an 8.7 percent increase over 2007. In addition, the Web site saw a 27 percent increase in financial transactions in 2008 and a 25 percent increase in new freelancers profiles posted, up 45,000 from 2007.
Guglani is being modest when he puts much of the credit on Guru.com’s success on its name because the company’s success in recent years can be traced to a number of moves, which helped to shore up its business model.
First, in 2005, the company launched an escrow service, which helped to secure the payments made between freelancers and businesses. This service allowed freelancers to receive payment through wire transfers, PayPal, e-checks and credit cards.
“That put people at ease,” Guglani said. “We introduced these tools so more and more transactions occur on our platform and people have less and less of a reason not to do transactions on our platforms.”
The next big move came late last year when Guru.com totally revamped the way it rated freelancers’ performance and collected feedback. Previously, freelancers were rated on dollars earned versus the quality of feedback, which is a pretty standard rating model. However, Guglani found that many of the top-rated freelancers were from outside the United States and they were also the ones with the most complaints and mediation cases, but because they were doing so much business volume the numbers worked out in their favor. Guglani traveled and visited some of these vendors. “It just did not seem right. Something was off,” he said.
Originally hatched as an online portal to support smaller businesses and freelancers, Guglani found that the site’s top rated freelancers were actually large foreign shops that had 200-plus workers completing many small projects for small amounts, and totally disregarding negative feedback or mediation for unsatisfactory work.
“Not only is this feedback system porous, it can be abused in so many different ways,” Guglani said. “We went about completely revamping our system and the way you leave feedback on freelancers.
“We took a step back and said, ‘We have to change how we rate these guys and our business model.’”
Now freelancers are rated more on client earnings on a per customer basis and repeat business. Guglani said it is a way to distinguish between freelancers who make $50,000 a month from 100 customers and those who might make just $3,000 a month from one customer. The goal overall is to ensure that those rated in the top position imply they are top quality.
Guru.com also gave freelancers the ability to block negative comments on 10 percent of the work completed, which Guglani said avoided the situation where one or two problems discredited a quality freelancer or blackmail situations would arise regarding non-payment in exchange for positive feedback.
“This is a people business. It is not a scientific process. You are trying to work with people all over the globe. Every match is not going to be perfect,” he said.
Overall the changes, when first implemented in September did result in the loss of some business, but in March Guru.com was above its September numbers and Guglani truly believes the company is all the better for it.
“The best part of all of this is there is a huge change on the customer support front. Now we don’t hear about our top-rated professionals. We don’t hear complaints. We don’t have mediation,” Guglani said. “We built something that is now ready to scale, which has cleared up something that is at the heart of what we are doing.”
Guglani admits that the economy has had some impact and he sees project size scaling back. “People are holding off on larger projects in this economy and doing smaller transactions,” he said. However, he is still very optimistic for the company’s future and plans to continue to add new services such a recent payment deal with Payoneer for a Guru.com Prepaid MasterCard for freelancers to receive payments on and a partnership with ExpertRating to provide skills tests to freelancers for third-party verification.
“There is a huge upward cycle ahead of us,” Guglani said. “This is our time. I believe that. The ultimate truth is the number of transactions that occurred in March is our highest ever [to that point] and that is very comforting to us.”
Stacy Norman, Guru.com’s manager of user support operations, has worked with Guglani for seven years and puts strong faith his abilities as a business leader.
“He has this set of core principles that he always sticks to,” Norman said. “He is always focused on what is best for everybody. … He is very appreciative of all the work that we do and he makes it well known.”
According to Norman, Guglani has personal handed out paystubs to all of his workers since she has been at the company – without fail. She says she, like all Guru.com’s employees, has complete belief in where Guglani will lead the company.
“He is very inspirational and honestly I believe him,” she said. “Everything that he says and he does is backed up with logic and reason.”
“I am here because I believe in his vision,” she added.
Manoj Rawat, Guru.com’s database administrator, came from India to work for Guru.com in Pittsburgh and said meeting Guglani made this an easy decision for him.
“He has an ability to make his employees very comfortable. He feels every employee is part of his family,” Rawat said.
Rawat professes to have learned a lot from Guglani, particularly in terms of coming to do business in another country. “Inder is a hybrid of both cultures, being from India and having been in the U.S. for 20 years,” he said. “He knows the good points of both the cultures and amalgamates it to his leadership style.”
The genesis for what has become Guru.com was co-founded with Kannan Srinivasan, a professor of management at Carnegie Mellon University. Guglani met Srinivasan while studying for a master's degree in business administration from the school. Srinivasan left the company in 2001.
A native of Kolkata, Guglani worked as a certified personal accountant in India before coming to the United States to attend Carnegie Mellon in the late 1980s. After graduating with a master’s degree in business administration he joined Pittsburgh-based shipping company RPS Inc. in 1990 and worked there until 1997, when the company was sold to FedEx Corp. in 1997. At RPS, Guglani helped develop the shipping network, which has now become FedEx Ground.
Reflecting back on his decision to come to the United States and then jump into the startup world, Guglani has no regrets. “That is where good ideas come from. You go out there and try to solve problems,” he said. “It has been a good 20-year ride.” | 
