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Comment by Timucin | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I know Fiverr for years but I never thought of it more than as a cheap version of freelancer dot com and now it goes to IPO with $700M valuation? That’s crazy!

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Fiver is great for quick tasks where you just need a decent job done and have clear requirements. It’s optimized for volume. For example I recently needed a voiceover and was able to quickly sample dozens of British male voices then contract one. I got the finished product in a few hours.

I’ve also used Upwork but find it really clunky and time consuming to use. It’s not at all optimized for short one-time tasks, which is what many users want.

Especially crazy given that, as far as I can tell, they have never turned a profit and never will.

I'm surprised Fiverr has 360+ employees. I always figured it was 50 folks max, "craigslist" type of company.

What the hell those 360+ do there?...

Well, some of them are required to manage the others. Those managers need secretaries. Some of them are required to prepare reports for the managers. Some of them provide HR support for such a large workforce. Also, you need IT support for all those secretaries, report-generators, managers, and HR people. Payroll department needs to be larger given how many people work there. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

I work at a warehouse with ~300 employees, selling over 70,000 different skus, etc. We have 3 Programmers, and 3 IT/network people, 1 hr, etc. We're hiring more programmers though.

What the heck are 360+ employees doing? You're right you do need lots of management, but there's no way they need that many people. Like, thats a LOT of people.

They have 7 offices so there's probably a lot of people who have jobs to communicate between offices.

Probably region-specific support and dispute resolution, most likely. Two-sided markets require twice the support, now multiply by country and locale.

Probably marketing, hence why they lost so much money.

The majority of companies that IPO aren't profitable at the time they IPO. This is nothing new.

The fact that it's the case for the majority of tech companies is actually new.

The internet trends slides which were on the front page a couple of days ago showed just this phenomenon.

"never thought of it more than" used to have no bearing on companies accessing the public markets, and obviously it still doesn't whenever someone wants to do the paperwork.

IPO has been improperly elevated to a form of validation, put on a pedestal that doesn't exist, imagined solely because of the improbability of an IPO occurring.

I would point the finger at VCs but they are a byproduct of accounting and securities market regulatory devolution at the turn of the century

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