Upwork CEO's journey from Product Development to CEO of a $Bn-marketplace

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  • February 21, 2017
Stephane Kasriel

Upwork, CEO

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How do you go from product development to running a marketplace that creates thousands of jobs and is valued at over $1Bn? Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel shares what he learned along the way, from product manager at Paypal, to SVP of product and then CEO at Upwork. “Getting to product-market fit is only the beginning,” he says “From there, there are even bigger hills to climb, like building a sustainable growth engine, maintaining trust in the platform, expanding to new verticals, and securing funding along the way.” As CEO of Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing website, Stephane Kasriel is driving the company’s vision of connecting businesses with talent faster than ever. At Upwork (formerly Elance-oDesk), he built and led a distributed team of more than 300 engineers, product managers and designers located around the world as SVP of Product & Engineering before ascending to be CEO of the company. Stephane applies his learnings to help people build their own teams so that they can overcome talent gaps, create more job opportunities, and give rise to a flexible work future. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, Master’s from Stanford in Computer Science and a BS from Ecole Polytechnique in France. Check out Upwork _edit_last

About the speaker

Stephane Kasriel
Upwork, CEO

As CEO of Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing website, Stephane Kasriel is driving the company’s vision of connecting businesses with talent faster than ever. At Upwork (formerly Elance-oDesk), he built and led a distributed team of more than 300 engineers, product managers and designers located around the world as SVP of Product & Engineering before ascending to be CEO of the company. Stephane applies his learnings to help people build their own teams so that they can overcome talent gaps, create more job opportunities, and give rise to a flexible work future. He holds an MBA from INSEAD, Master’s from Stanford in Computer Science and a BS from Ecole Polytechnique in France.

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