Even though Freelancer is four years old, Barrie still wants to attract entrepreneurs.
“The risk takers are harder to get and at 1000 people it’s harder again, so currently a lot of my time is spent finding people and we’re hiring smart grads by the metric ton at this point.
“But I also have to make sure everyone in the organisational hierarchy is good at hiring and the guys below them because I can’t be in charge of finding everyone,” he says.
Leading a team of 330 staff is far from simple, but Barrie says to ensure his team remains focused each person takes on their own responsibilities.
“In the growth team, every single person is in charge of something, either a product or a part of the site. They then have their own dashboard where they look at the metrics and have their own funnel.
“Each quarter we set out goals and I set my own goal, which is usually a revenue goal for the quarter. So I go to my VPs and say I have this goal, what do you need to do in order to achieve this and then they each break it down to their guys. There will be five or six things you want to do in the quarter per team,” he says.
“We also have daily meetings and there is a daily stats email that goes out to each of the heads, which have their own groups.
“Everyone also has their own dashboard, which allows everyone to see all the statistics on the site. They can see revenue, projects, funnels, there is complete visibility within the company. Everybody is responsible for something, that way it’s never the case of something breaks and no one fixes it.”
Barrie says the central premise is de-centralising management.
“There are so many moving parts I can’t capture the whole company. It’s all about finding really, really smart people, putting them in the position of a lifetime they wouldn’t get anywhere else and then working with them so they can go off and achieve,” he says.
One of Barrie’s passions is helping the developing world through his products. This motivates Barrie on a daily basis and drives his activities in his spare time.
Barrie sees the internet as a “transformational force for economic well-being” and he intends to use Freelancer to help people in the developing world earn a sustainable income.
“We’ve seen it in the Western world over the past 20 years and now it’s going to have the same kind of impact on the developing world. But instead of e-commerce and purchasing goods, it’s going to be around services.
“You can’t go online and buy anything if you don’t have a job. We think this is going to be tremendous vehicle for doing a lot of good in the world.”
Barrie says people from across the world have come to him, their hearts in their hands, and thanked him for allowing them to provide for their families.
But he wants to go a step further – he wants to teach hundreds of thousands of people all around the world how to start their own business.
This venture sprang from Barrie’s experience as a student at Stanford University in the US. At Stanford he underwent a rigorous program where groups of four created a business idea to develop.
A previous graduate told his story about how a few years earlier he’d been in the same position and now the business he’d co-founded, with the financial backing of his class professor, was worth $75 million and he pledged to fund four teams in the class $250,000 each.
Barrie has replicated the business development class at the University of Sydney and intends to take it online.
“It’s what Sebastian Thrun did with Udacity. It’ll be an online course where hundreds of thousands of people can take part.
“These online courses are basically online marketplaces. I’m frustrated because all these people want to go university or want to do this course, but they can’t, so I’ve downloaded the edX software which is open source and started technology-venture.com,” he says.
He says it will be open first to final year university students and then eventually people globally.
Barrie has two major goals.
“I’d like to give a billion people on the planet a job. Not full-time, just a job. If we can get to 12 million projects, we probably get to a billion people.
“The other thing is I want to start Australia’s first big consumer internet company. All our companies go overseas because the venture capital model in Australia is completely and utterly broken.
“The traditional model of Australian venture capital is they’ll finance you early on if you can find someone, everyone will write you a cheque for $20,000 or $50,000 and maybe $100,000, but that first $1 million to $5 million is very difficult.
“Even if you manage to attract $1 million or $2 million in funding, the venture capitalist will do all the hard work with you and then tell you to go to the US for further funding.”
