CEO of freelance platform Upwork shares how she’s helping the next generation build a freelance career.

At Upwork, working from home is not a new phenomenon.

The freelancer platform calls itself the “world’s work marketplace,” helping bridge companies and freelancers together. The practice of working from anywhere has been the company culture since its founding in 1998 when it was “Elance.” And founders, Beerud Sheth and Srinivas Anumolu were working out of an apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey. The company became Upwork in 2015.

Upwork has 539 corporate employees, 1,372 freelancer or contract workers, with workers in over 800 cities. The company’s revenue for 2020 was $373 million and freelancers with profiles on the platform earned $2.3 billion in 2020.

Pre-pandemic, most freelancers worked remotely, while employees in their physical offices had “Work from Home Wednesdays” available.

Hayden Brown became president and CEO in January 2020 after holding positions of senior vice president of product and design and chief marketing and product officer. Three months into her new leadership role, COVID-19 closed offices, but she saw it as an “opportunity.”

“It was really a moment to say, we’re going to leverage the strengths we have as a team that knows how to work remotely and do that really well,” she said. “And lean into my brand as the new CEO around communication, clarity, transparency, and amplify all of that at once and make sure everyone is hearing from me and our leadership team.”

In keeping with her commitment to communication and transparency, Brown, along with her leadership team, did weekly video calls to keep staff well-informed.

“As much as hindsight is 20/20, I don’t have something I wish we had done differently,” she said. “There were so many beautiful things that we were able to put together really quickly to help in the moment of crisis. So I’m not saying we did everything perfectly, but given what was happening, it’s hard to really go back and think, what could we have done [differently]”