Unlike the typical venture-backed tech company, TaskUs didn't issue traditional stock options to its employees, because it was originally structured as a limited liability company. "Fortunately our parents didn't charge us rent." "We bootstrapped the business for seven years, living on a shoestring budget with our parents," Weir said, in an interview. Maddock and Weir were each able to maintain substantial ownership - 16% at the time of the IPO - because they'd only taken $15 million in outside funding prior to the Blackstone deal. Including shares sold in the IPO, that stake is now worth about $1.7 billion. In addition to Maddock and Weir, the TaskUs IPO is a big windfall for Blackstone Group, which invested about $250 million in 2018 and eventually controlled about two-thirds of the company. New Braunfels is home to the Schlitterbahn, a 42-year-old water park that covers over 70 acres and is one of the 80,000-person town's largest employers. TaskUs was originally headquartered in Santa Monica but started moving to Texas in 2016 with the opening of a San Antonio office, then to nearby New Braunfels, which became its current headquarters. is its second-biggest country, with over 4,000 employees, followed by India and Mexico. The Philippines is still the company's biggest hub, with more than 19,000, or 70%, of its employees located there. Over time, TaskUs started handling fraud, compliance and customer safety needs for Coinbase. That was in 2017, when "bitcoin became a mainstream obsession, and support volumes spiked through the roof," the filing says. Similarly, TaskUs began working with Coinbase as demand started surging. A year later, TaskUs had more than 2,000 people dedicated to Uber. In 2014, it began helping on rider and driver support. TaskUs started working with Uber in 2013, reviewing and onboarding drivers, according to the prospectus. "They called us back and said that outsourcing sounds like a good idea now," Maddock said. That changed completely the following year. Maddock said the message from Uber at the initial meeting in San Francisco was that the ride-hailing company would never outsource its services. "As we earned their trust, we took on more critical parts of their operations such as advanced technical support and critical content review," they wrote.īy 2012, TaskUs was established enough to hit the radar of Uber, which was still early in its development although expanding rapidly and raising large venture rounds. TaskUs broadened its focus to cover more business processes, and the founders got some venture-backed start-ups on board. In their initial conversations with start-ups, Maddock and Weir said they quickly learned that busy executives didn't want task-based help, but rather needed more thorough support services to assist them as they grew. "We used our combined life savings to rent a one-room office on the side of a highway an hour south of Manila and hire our first few employees," they wrote in the founders' letter portion of the prospectus. They chose to start in the Philippines, one of the top countries in the world for call centers and outsourcing. They moved back in with their parents and invested the $20,000 they'd saved up from the events business into their next venture: a task-based virtual assistant. But the trajectory wasn't always up and to the right. TaskUs soon had 700 employees working on the account.Ĭlients such as Zoom are the reason Maddock and Weir, the company's president, were headed to the Nasdaq on Friday to ring the closing bell. Maddock, the CEO, said TaskUs is most commonly serving companies that "realize their growth is going to be so aggressive that they can no longer do it all themselves."įor instance, Zoom called in early 2020, when the video chat company's pandemic-fueled growth spurred a thirtyfold jump in support requests, according to the online roadshow ahead of the IPO. Revenue climbed 33% last year to $478 million, and TaskUs is profitable - a rarity among newly public tech companies - showing annual net income of $34.5 million last year. Employees are spread across eight countries, and TaskUs dedicates hundreds or even thousands of staffers to its top clients so it can handle all their support-related issues. TaskUs provides customer support services to fast-growing tech companies including Uber, Netflix, Coinbase and Zoom. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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