AMA: I’m Gavin, founder @ Thirdwork. I’ve worked at the White House and startups, ask me anything 🚀

@xinzhu_chen Hi Carly - I think broadly speaking when in a downturn, the startups that run lean and focus maniacally on finding product market fit are the ones with the highest chances of winning. For one thing, investors are being more cautious about deploying, and are looking for more capital-efficient companies. That has a trickle-down effect on the whole startup ecosystem; most startups are selling to other startups, so when the belt-tightening starts it can really cascade. I guess that's my second point; you need to be selling something people really want or need. If you're a B2B product and you're not an essential tool to someone at the company, you're at risk of getting cut from the budget. It's also important to keep in mind that plenty of incredible companies have been built during downturns (Uber, Square, Airbnb). But you need to prove real value (and do it efficiently) if you're going to convince customers to buy your product and investors to give you money!

@gavin_yerxa Many thanks, Gavin! That's really good sharing!

@reshma_james1 I'd say part of it was borne out of personal experience, which helps. I've hired many freelancers across engineering, design, marketing, and content/writing, and I’ve even spent time working as a freelancer writer. So I understood the pain points on both sides of the freelancer / client relationship. With Thirdwork, we were seeing that there was this huge boom in demand for freelance hiring in web3 startups. It was the fastest-growing job category on LinkedIn, and web3-related posts were growing at triple-digit rates monthly on Upwork. Nearly every job posting said somethign like "web3 experience preferred" or "defi native" or "has worked in crypto before". But there were also real trust and discovery problems. It’s a new and rapidly evolving ecosystem. There are bad actors on both the freelancer and the client side. (Everybody has a hiring horror story in web3). For the speed at which the space is moving, there was a matching problem, which we felt was a problem a marketplace was uniquely suited to solve. But that was just a hypothesis, so we went out and talked to people! We did a whole listening and learning tour before writing a line of code. I’ve talked to hundreds of founders building in web3 over the past few months, and it helped us better understand the problem space. And that led us to what we’re focused on today, which is helping match crypto startups with product, design and marketing talent. We’ve created a community of several hundred freelance builders, and we’ve been able to work with some incredible startups in the space like Rabbithole, Afterparty, Lighthouse to help them achieve their hiring and growth goals. We’re always listening, learning, and iterating. But broadly speaking, I’m excited to sit at the intersection of what I believe are two inevitable trends: fractional/freelance work and web3!

@gavin_yerxa Thank you Gavin for taking your time to respond! Loved reading through your experience!