COLLABORATIVE PIONEER: AN INSIDE INTERVIEW WITH TIM FUNG OF AIRTASKER

Tim Fung is the founder and CEO of Airtasker, a peer-to-peer task outsourcing platform that has over 65,000 users across Australia. East Coast Global Curator, Melissa O’Young, interviewed Tim when she visited Australia in November.

1. How is Airtasker disrupting the Australian job market?

 When you look at the structure of the job market today, it’s really quite inflexible. Most jobs are specifically pre-defined like “accounting”, “carpentry” or “removalist”, however, many tasks that people need done are not as defined, for example tasks like “assemble IKEA furniture” or “make decorations for party”. Airtasker is changing this by allowing people and businesses to post a task, and then allowing local community members to earn additional money by completing these tasks. By creating more liquidity in the job market, we can provide our users with opportunities to earn a good living and we’re adding real economic value by making the most of an underutilised resource – people’s spare time, experience and skills.

About 6 months after launching and observing the tasks posted, we saw a clear trend towards “casualisation” of the workforce – with both companies and employees looking for ways to create a flexible lifestyle. At Airtasker, we are providing the platform to facilitate this flexibility which we believe will make the labour marketplace much more efficient.

2. What is the most interesting or unusual task that has been posted up on Airtasker?

 Whilst most of our tasks are fairly common services like house cleaning, handyman work and deliveries, we are seeing some really interesting uses of Airtasker. Last month, we had a user post a task to pick up a very expensive diamond engagement ring in Houston, Texas and deliver it to Sydney. The task was completed in 4 days by an Airtasker that had over 100 five star reviews, which demonstrates what is possible when trust is established between users. When the new iPhone came out, 35 people paid to have Airtaskers line up for them at the Apple store and another guy used Airtasker to help him propose to his wife.

3. Are there any examples of how Airtasker has transformed or impacted the lives of its users?

 Airtasker is improving people’s lives by empowering people to take control of how they earn a living – they can pick and choose jobs that suit their individual experience and skills and work when it suits them. We’ve had quite a few mothers with kids who are now earning real additional income, a truck driver who made a good living after losing his full time job, and we’re also helping entrepreneurs and business owners do amazing things that just weren’t possible before like “taking photos of 1,000+ stores” all across the country.

4. How did you go from consulting model agency Chic Management and investment banking to starting Airtasker?

 Whilst working at Macquarie Bank (an Australian investment bank), I was watching a lot of “Entourage” and thought it would be really cool to be like Ari Gold and work in media/talent representation. At the time, I was helping manage an Australian race car driver so thought I would make a career jump and do some “per gratis” consulting work at Chic Management to learn more about the industry. Chic Management turned out to be a really awesome company and was building some cool tech “side projects” at the time. One of Chic’s founders was a founding director at telecommunications company Optus and had started some successful companies. When he had the idea to start Australia’s first low cost mobile telco, I jumped on board straight away and we started building the foundations of the company together with four very experienced entrepreneurs from Germany. This company became Amaysim which is now one of the biggest MVNOs in Australia. Airtasker co-founder, Jonathan Lui was the first Tech Ops employee at Amaysim and once the company had passed through the first launch phase, we started looking at what the potential new opportunities were in the “app layer” and came up with the idea for Airtasker when we were moving houses and wanted to outsource tasks like cleaning, packing boxes and assembling IKEA furniture.

5. Do you think Australia is a country where collaborative consumption will take off? What makes you think it won’t or it will?

 Australia is a fantastic environment for collaborative consumption and we’ve already seen this with eBay, Gumtree, GoCatch and Airbnb all taking off significantly here. For example, Airbnb said in October last year that Australia made up about 10 per cent of its revenue and with a population of only 23 million, that’s a pretty big proportion! We also have super high social media penetration, huge mobile adoption and a population that really loves to get behind big movements so I’ve got no doubt that useful collaborative consumption platforms are ready to grow quickly from here.

—

Based in Sydney, Airtasker allows for anyone to outsource their everyday tasks such as deliveries, office work or odd jobs to other runners to complete these tasks. In 2012, they raised $1.5 million in funding and recently partnered with recruitment site CareerOne to make short-term work opportunities available to full-time job seekers.