It’s standing room only in the Thumbtack cafeteria at the last “all thumbs” meeting of the year. Marco Zappacosta, the company’s bearded, 32-year-old cofounder and CEO, grabs the microphone in front of more than 300 staffers at the San Francisco headquarters, as 300 others stream in from a customer service center in Salt Lake City.
He cues up an emoji-filled graph of his “emo ro-co”—startup pidgin for “emotional roller coaster”—from the past year. Zappacosta’s nine-year-old platform connects customers with local professionals to book everything from landscaping services to math tutoring. The rocky ride over the past year was tied to the company’s development of a new system called Instant Match, which automates the bidding process for pros and algorithmically pairs them with customers’ job requests.
The emojis form a bowl shape: In the early months of 2017, a crest of happy faces marks Zappacosta’s “blissful ignorance,” followed by a mid-year dip into crying and befuddlement, “when we were just crawling through.” At year’s end, though, a series of smiling and lovestruck faces rises triumphantly—that’s when Zappacosta realized, “Holy shit, we actually have a way to do this!” Thumbtack had transformed the process of finding and hiring service providers online for its users.
The mood of the meeting is businesslike but light—a tone befitting a startup now valued as a unicorn with young founders, and, by a scan of the room, few employees over 40 years old. A guy near the front of the room holds a mallet over a toy xylophone to gong off speakers whose updates stretch longer than two minutes. Meanwhile, Thumbtack’s business is thrumming along, as real-time requests for pros and bids for projects bloop up on a digital map of the United States that fills a nearby screen:
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