UpWork

Upwork Global Inc., formerly Elance-oDesk, is an American freelancing platform headquartered in Santa Clara and San Francisco, California.[2] The company was formed in 2013 as Elance-oDesk, after the merger of Elance Inc. and oDesk Corp. The merged company was subsequently rebranded to Upwork in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upwork

In 2020, the company purged 1.8 million freelancers.[18][19] In a 2019 call with investors, CEO Hayden Brown said that Upwork would be focusing more on serving the needs of Fortune 500 companies rather than smaller companies just looking for a quick job with a single gig worker. During this call, Brown also spoke of a "skill gap" between what companies were looking for on the Upwork platform and what they were getting. Many of the freelancers purged were rated as "less skilled" or had lower rankings on the platform.

IPO 2018

Elance

• merged with ODesk 2013, both sites still in operation, can't tell the difference?
• http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/22/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-the-giant-elance-odesk-merger-ensuing-backlash-but-were-afraid-to-ask/
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2013/12/18/freelancers-gasp-and-hiss-at-elance-merger-with-odesk/
• some reason to prefer E Lance (as labor-provider)
• May'2015: merged company renaming itself Up Work (and offering its Software Forge for free, including Slack.com-killer chat app?)