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Success As A Digital Entrepreneur, With Tim Fung

Building a successful online platform takes vision, persistence, and the ability to easily adapt to a constantly evolving digital landscape. J.R. Lowry speaks with Tim Fung, founder and CEO of Airtasker, who shares all about his journey as a digital entrepreneur. Tim shares the origins of his outsourcing company which connects people with unique skills to those who need them. He talks about the challenges of scaling a startup across multiple countries, the importance of having a community, and the value of creating opportunities in the gig economy. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur or a curious digital explorer, this episode will teach you how to navigate the path of entrepreneurship.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcast/tim-fung

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Success As A Digital Entrepreneur, With Tim Fung

This show is brought to you by Pathwise.io. Pathwise is dedicated to helping you be the best professional you can be, providing a mix of career and leadership coaching, courses, content, and community. Basic membership is free. Visit Pathwise and join our community. In this episode, my guest is Tim Fung. Tim is the Founder and CEO of Airtasker, a Sydney, Australia-based online marketplace, connecting people with skilled helpers in multiple countries.

He is also the Founder of Tank Stream Labs, a coworking space for tech startups located in Sydney. He’s the Founder of a trackday event management business called Circuit Club and an advisor to a number of other startups as well. In our discussion, we’re going to cover Tim’s work at Airtasker, the company’s origins and growth story, his thoughts on what it takes to be a successful digital entrepreneur, and a little bit about his broader career journey. Here we go.

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Tim, welcome. Thanks for doing the show with me. You’re the Founder and CEO of Airtasker. Give us an overview of the business.

Airtasker is a marketplace for local services. We’re doing things a little bit differently compared to some of the other folks who have trodden this path before. The first is that we’ve built Airtasker as an open community model. You could say we’re the YouTube of services. Anyone can be a customer with Airtasker but as a tasker, you can sign up and get started right away.

What we do is provide the platform that helps taskers connect with customers directly, and provide the payments, insurance, and things like that but it’s very much an open community platform. The second thing that’s interesting about the business is what that community platform unlocks is that you can get anything done with Airtasker. There are a lot of things like cleaning, gardening, and things like that.

Let’s say you’ve got a kid’s birthday party and you’re like, “My entertainer has canceled on me at the last minute.” You can post on Airtasker and find someone who can come to a party dressed up as Iron Man. We’ve got someone in London at the moment who’s put up, “I need you to name my second child.” There are lots of different things that you can use Airtasker for. What makes it a little bit magical is that Airtasker helps you do all the things that don’t fit neatly into traditional service categories.

There’s this element of whatever you don’t have time for as a customer of Airtasker, you can hopefully find whatever you’re looking for in terms of somebody able and willing to perform that task for you.

It’s not just, “I don’t have the time for it.” It’s also like, “I don’t have the skill to do it.” One of the things that’s interesting is that at Airtasker, we believe that every single person has unique skills. Some of those skills are traditionally recognized skills like accounting, being a lawyer, or being an architect. We have a lot of those things on our platform as well but there are also skills that aren’t traditionally recognized. We had one person who was good at crocheting fruit. They love the art of crochet. It wasn’t a traditionally recognized skill so it wasn’t something that you could easily procure the services of.

If you want someone to crochet you something, it’s not easy to find someone who can do that. Airtasker enabled all of these people to make money out of skills that they couldn’t monetize on other platforms. Whether that’s being able to assemble IKEA furniture, crochet something, or know a language and you can help someone translate something. These are all skills that weren’t necessarily traditionally recognized. We think that they’re very important. They’re a great way for people to make money from those sales.

Given that it’s an open community, how does a customer get a sense of the quality of the work that the person does?

That’s where Airtasker steps in. Our whole mission is around creating transparency and accountability in the marketplace. The first thing is you’ve got classic things in marketplaces like ratings and reviews. You can look at three taskers and what people have done before with that person. We think that ultimately is the best way to work out if that person’s going to be good for us. What better way to do that than an actual task that happened through our platform, which we saw and were able to see the feedback that other people provided?

We provide things like that. We also provide ID verification. We’ve gone and verified the ID of all the paid tasks. We provide verifications around things like trade licenses. You can look at someone’s profile and see if they’ve got the license that you need. We provide things like payments and insurance. Insurance is great in the case that something doesn’t go quite according to plan. Payment is important.

One of the things that we found is that customers didn’t want to prepay the person because occasionally, they wouldn’t turn up or the job wouldn’t be done to their satisfaction. Taskers, people who are doing work on our platform, the thing that they hated the most was having to chase up a customer after work is done and do that. We’re creating an escrow payment system, whereby when a job is booked, the money is securely held with the tasker. Only once the job is completed does the money is released to the service provider. That provides a lot of value, accountability, and transparency to the marketplace.

That sounds like a good construct. You started this back in what, 2012?

That’s right. Unbelievable.

What sparked the idea originally?

There’s a very genesis for the business. I was moving apartments. I asked a friend of mine, who is one of my best friends, to come and help me move apartments. The reason I asked him is because he has a truck that he uses to do deliveries for his business. It’s a frozen chicken business. He sells chicken nuggets and chicken chippy. It’s a great product. We put everything in the back of his truck and he helped me move apartments.

This got us thinking, “Why don’t we ask friends and family to help with all of these kinds of jobs when there are so many people out there who would love to be able to earn a living doing this type of work?” What we worked out is that it’s hard to trust people in your local community like the point that you mentioned before. It’s hard to go on to a Facebook marketplace or Gumtree and find the person who you can trust. We set about trying to create the system and the platform to be able to do that.

It was an interesting point in the history of the internet because it was the point where profiles online were being created. It was moving from pseudonyms where everyone would have like, “I’m Mr. Barbecue123 or Archangel95,” whatever those kinds of pseudonyms. It was migrating more towards Meta and LinkedIn where people were being themselves on the internet. We thought that was a massive trend. We thought the time was right to be able to build that kind of marketplace. That’s where we started.

One of the interesting things that happened throughout the journey was that Jona, my cofounder, and I, would go out and do a lot of the jobs at the beginning of the marketplace. We’d hang out with the taskers. Some of them would tell us these incredible stories about how Airtasker was helping them to be able to make an income and in some cases pay their rent and help them out when they were made redundant from their job or things like that. It was quite profound.

At the same time, there’s a lot of talk the first time around about autonomous driving. I remember the CEO of Uber talking excitingly about how if they didn’t need the drivers, they could have autonomous vehicles. That would be a massive improvement to the business model. About that time, we looked at ourselves and said, “What do we want to do here? Do we think about the world similarly?” What we realized is that creating jobs and getting humans to be able to make money from their skills is the core purpose of the business.

It’s not to say, “What’s the fastest way to get your house cleaned?” It’s more like saying, “Human beings are good at cleaning. People want to be able to make money from their skills as a cleaner. We want to help them be able to get that job experience and earn money from that.” Whether your skill is cleaning, gardening, or something complex like tax consulting, those are all things that we want to help people be able to make money out of.

Doing something and making money from your skills is the foundation of an economy.

It’s the most obvious and straightforward business model you can imagine. In simple terms, it’s like eBay for services. It’s a transactional marketplace for local services.

If you think way back, people would barter. I raise cows. You raise tomatoes. I’ll trade a cow for some number of tomatoes or milk from my cow for your tomatoes. This is a little bit in the same spirit of letting people monetize what they do. You use the example of autonomous vehicles. We’re sitting here having a conversation pretty much every day about AI and what it’s going to do in terms of job elimination. At some point, people do need to earn a living. The computers can’t take all of our jobs in the scheme of things. There’s still going to be a need for people to be able to monetize what they’re good at.

That’s right. We don’t think that that’s a side effect of our business. The mission of the business is to empower people to make money from their skills or realize the value of their skills. One of the things that is exciting and never ceases to be the thing that drives me and gives me motivation to businesses is people are always coming up with new ways and have new visions and dreams of what they can do.

Whilst we can’t see the jobs that are probably going to be lost to automation and AI. That’s a great thing for the economy, growth, and all those things but in the framing of jobs, we can see jobs that are going to be lost to AI, machine learning, and things like that but it’s harder to see and imagine all the things that people could be doing if they weren’t doing those things that are going to be done by machines and AI.

As each day passes, we start seeing it on Airtasker. We start seeing people going, “I used to do that for a living but I’m doing something completely different that didn’t exist before.” I’m hopeful that humans and human skills will always be useful and at the new frontier of the next thing that’s going to be a thing, even if that’s constantly moving and changing.

You talked a little bit about the early days doing jobs yourself, going out, and hanging out with Airtaskers who are performing jobs. What else do you remember about those early days? What were the biggest challenges that you faced?

One of the great things is that as a business, Airtaskers is constantly a startup and in startup mode. As we go to each new city or country, we’re starting again and almost starting from scratch in each new market. The great thing is I get to relieve all of the stress and anxiety of being in an early-stage startup. It was a hard business to start. A two-sided marketplace is one of the harder businesses to start. The early days were characterized by doing a lot of different things and seeing what would work.

You did have to have a pretty thick skin. We would try 20 things and probably 2 of them would work and 18 of them would be like, “That was hard work for not a lot of payback.” In hindsight, what we were searching for predominantly is if you look at product market channel business model fit and you use that framework of you have to have product market fit, product business model fit, and product channel fit, we were looking for product channel fit.

We knew that we had a product that if it could be out there and you could get to network effect scale, it would be useful but how do you get to that network effect scale? When you work back from that, you start to go, “What are the right distribution channels to get there?” In retrospect, that’s what we were searching for every day. What is the right product channel fit to get us there? We’re trying a lot of things and not all of them are working together.

What did you find was most critical in the early days? What did you and the team particularly focus on besides trying to find the channel fit in the distribution mechanism?

One thing is I do think that we had the right directional theory. The directional theory was that there were two things that we were we were building effectively. One was a piece of software and an Apple website that enables payments, two people to talk together, communication of the ratings and reviews, and all those kinds of things. The other was the actual community that would use that software. We had to be building those two things.

The thing that we did do right was know how much effort to put into each one of those two buckets. You have to have a piece of software or an app that works but if you spent all your time building the app and didn’t get out there and start talking to people about the said app, then you’d have a beautiful piece of software with no community. The reverse is also true. You can’t build an amazing community and not have an app.

We did get that theory right but it was a lot about building the liquidity or the network effect into the business model as early as possible. That is counterintuitive because whether it’s an executive, an entrepreneur, or a founder, it’s a natural tendency to want to make something beautiful before you go and tell people about it. Yet in a network effect business model, that’s almost categorically not possible because you need to go and talk about something so that you have a network or community so that you can talk about it more. That’s something that you had to be uncomfortable with. I do think that we got that bit right.

What’s this concept from the lean startup of a minimum viable product and not trying to make it too perfect too early because you need to iterate?

A lot of wisdom about success is written by successful people who only have a limited view of the world. Share on X

People use these words as minimum lovable products. Sometimes people question what viability is. “Is it viable? It’s not beautiful,” and things like that. One thing that I did find to be interesting is a lot of the wisdom about success is written by people who are successful. They only have a limited view of the world as well because their view of the world is, “I’m successful. I’ve done this thing.”

If I tell you about what I did at the beginning, it’s tainted sometimes by many years later and success. If I tried to tell a young founder, “This is what you need to do to be successful or something,” then it comes from a very different place to being there on the battlefield and doing what you need to do at that time. We found a lot of the articles about building marketplaces and themes to forget what was important at the early stages and seem to focus on things that microplastics are working on at the latest stage. That’s not necessarily useful for the early stage.

How did you fund the business when you got started? Did you have backing? Was this you and your cofounder and your own funds?

If you look at the micro of the journey, the first 6 to 9 months was when my cofounder and I were putting in our money and seeding the business in that way, building a prototype, and being able to get a few customers onto the platform at that very early stage. We didn’t know that as a marketplace, you were going to have to do marketing. It’s almost built into the world. We knew that we had to raise capital.

We were very fortunate because before we started Airtasker, we were part of the founding team of a company called Amazim, which was a reasonably successful telco business in Australia. I built a bunch of trusted relationships by being part of that team. When we spun out to do our thing, we immediately tapped all those people and were able to raise a small round.

Back in 2011, it was much harder to raise money, especially in a nascent market like Australia. The depth of venture capital investors was so thin and that has changed a little bit. Whilst Jona and I did have that leg up because we’d started a business model before and done it closely with some experienced entrepreneurs, it was generally a much harder time. In 2025, there were probably a little bit more well-trodden ways and known pathways to be able to raise that kind of money.

How long was it before you felt like you were confident that you had a sustainable business?

I’d say this not with any modesty, fake humble brag, or anything like that but it would have taken ages. I would say probably 7 or 8 years into the business. The thing for me that was massively underrated was getting to cashflow neutral or positive, i.e. not needing to raise money to do business. A lot of people don’t talk about that much because maybe the word profit or being profitable is a little bit dirty. It’s like, “If you focused on the mission, why would you care about that? Grow the business.”

Career Sessions, Career Lessons | Tim Fung | Digital Entrepreneur

Digital Entrepreneur: Knowing that you do not have to raise money to be able to keep going was very profound. It is always better to be net alive instead of default alive.

 

There’s some truth in that for sure. It’s not all about money, profit, or anything but being able to know that we don’t have to raise money to be able to keep going was very profound. I can pay our bills. We’re default alive rather than default dead, which was powerful. Probably if you look at how long that takes for different types of businesses, I’d say consumer marketplaces would be right at the end of it will take ages. You’re building a piece of software, investing in marketing, building a brand, and all these kinds of things.

Each transaction comes through and it’s only $20 or £20 to sum up to all of that stuff that you’re going to build. If you want to have a faster path to profitability, it’s probably better to be in a SAS business, services business, or something like that, whereby you can build a piece of software. Once you have maybe 30 enterprise clients on it, you could be making some proper money or even better, a services business where you hire your first person. You go out and find some work. You’re making money straight away. If I was to put them along the spectrum, I would say the marketplace is probably the films along that spectrum of investing a crap load of money, resources, time, and ton of £10 or £20 to get around.

What’s the shape and size of Airtasker? How many countries are you operating in at the moment?

We are focused on three countries at the moment. Australia is our home market. We have been building that for many years. It is fortunately very profitable business that generates cash. What’s exciting about that is we’re taking that cash and investing that into the UK market and the US market to replicate the model that we’ve built in Australia. Within the UK and the US, we’re focused on about three cities each. The reason why I say about three cities each is because as an open community marketplace, you can use and post a job anywhere in the UK or the US. When we focus our marketing efforts, we tend to concentrate on city by city. We’re focused in the UK on Manchester, Birmingham, and London.

How many Airtaskers do you have?

Tens of thousands of weekly earning taskers, which is something that we’re proud of. That number has continued to scale very quickly, particularly during the cost of living crisis that people have been going through over the past couple of years. The consumer side of the marketplace is probably the harder side in this environment because you’ve got consumer confidence.

It was not as high as it was pre-COVID and pre-pandemic. Thankfully, we have this two-sided marketplace, which is quite resilient. In a down market, you’re able to provide a service to more workers, who can find work through our platform but the customer side is harder. We’re probably transitioning or hopefully back into more of an economic growth phase whereby the customer side will grow again with more momentum.

With the people who are providing services, how many of them are doing what they offer on your platform as their full-time job, and how many of them are doing this for an additional source of income?

It’s an interesting stat that about 70% of the taskers on Airtasker do less than 5 jobs a month. What that tells you is you’ve got the upper quartile of people who are earning something towards a full-time income through our platform to anything part-time. Some of our tasks are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, doing jobs through our platform all the way through to a very long tail of people who might do one job because they had a niche skill that somebody needed at that time. Part of the magic of the product is that it’s not all about wanting everyone to be a full-time worker through something like Airtasker.

For example, if it’s me, I can help someone review a startup pitch deck. If someone’s willing to pay $500 for that service, I’m happy to go and do that for them. I’ve got a listing on the platform where you can go do that all the way through to the person who’s like, “I’m a gardener. This is how I make my full-time income. I line up five jobs a day and get all my income through it.” We want to be able to cater to both of those groups and that’s part of the magic of the long tail of all the different jobs that Airtasker can help you out with.

It plays into the gig economy and people having portfolio careers or poly working, which I’ve heard it sometimes called, of having multiple sources of income. What you and other platforms are doing is making that easier for people to make happen.

Career Sessions, Career Lessons | Tim Fung | Digital Entrepreneur

Digital Entrepreneur: Having a permanent full-time job gives you false security that you are totally protected and set up for life.

 

What is maybe unintuitive things is that a platform like Airtasker I believe creates more job security. What I mean by that is when you are in a permanent full-time job, there’s always this false security that it’s permanent and full-time. You’re protected and set up for life. I worked in a bank in the early part of my career. When the global financial crisis came around, it was like, “This whole department is getting shut down. Everyone’s being made redundant.”

There was this irony that permanent and full-time were not permanent and full-time. What platforms like Airtasker help with is when you come out of that kind of work, you’ve got something to turn to and ease yourself out of that work. If you want to take a career break and ease yourself back into work, for example, there are a lot of mothers who take time out of their full-time career and don’t want to go back to full-time work straight away, they want to ease back into work, these platforms allow that to occur.

The various kinds of flexible work platforms that exist don’t cover the full range of jobs. It’s not possible for every single person to do that with the exact thing that they want to go and do for sure. Conceptually, rather than making jobs binary, where it’s either 0 or 1 but more so a job can be anything in between 0 and 1. That means that you can ease in and ease out. It creates a lot more jobs.

You’ve had some successful capital raises lately from media partners. I’m curious. What’s the thinking behind seeking funding from media companies?

In Australia, one of the growth vectors that we worked out was that Airtasker needed to build up a brand name. What we’re trying to do is quite similar to what the Yellow Pages did back in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, and became the place that you go to when you needed local services. We were trying to replicate that. One of the things that we did was partner up with Channel 7 in Australia, which is one of the big television networks and they invested in Airtasker.

Instead of giving us money, they gave us a lot of advertising on their television network. Over about five years, we grew our brand awareness to about 60% plus in Australia. We 20X our revenue together with Channel 7. When we listed the business on the Australian Stock Exchange, we gave Channel 7 a very big return on their investment. Everyone was stoked with that. That was one of the big things that helped us become successful in Australia.

We went to the UK and we’re like, “We should do that again.” What we did is we set up Airtasker UK as a separate company. We said, “Channel 4, do you want to come and invest in Airtasker UK? We’ll give you a big chunk of equity in exchange for advertising. You can help us scale the business. We’ll come and buy your equity back later and give you an exit after you help us build a hopefully sizable business in the UK.”

What we’ve worked out is that as we enter each new market, it makes sense to partner up with local media partners, whether that’s in things like television, radio, or outdoor. What’s interesting is the conventional wisdom is moved to digital performance marketing. You can do a greater targeting and have greater reporting on what the media is doing.

That makes sense in some instances but I do feel that the cost of that media is growing at such a crazy growth rate that we are taking the contrarian bet that broadcast media, where it’s more one-to-many and there is less targeting. It is going to have a net better ROI for us than some of the performance media. None of this should be taken to extremes. You shouldn’t do one or the other. You have to do some of both but we’re swinging the pendulum from where we used to be, which was a lot in digital, and moving some of the large chunk of that into broadcast media.

It is contrarian to what everybody thinks about digital media being the future but at the same time, you have a product that pretty much anybody could use. Everybody needs help with some task. The idea of targeting is probably less important to your business model than it would be if you were only specifically offering one kind of service to a particular type of customer then the targeting would make more sense.

That’s right. If you are selling student loans to Hispanic students moving to London, for sure, you don’t want to be advertising on TV. That’s not going to make sense for you to do and it doesn’t have a much broader model. This applies to us more than a very specific niche model. There is an interesting stat that the cost of a Google Ad by CPM or Cost-per-thousand impressions has grown at a CAGR of between 50% and 60%. That’s an extraordinary growth in how much it costs to reach a customer.

Growth marketing is a lot about being a contrarian. You need to be where all the other advertisers are not. Share on X

I do think growth marketing is a lot about being contrarian because you need to be where not all the other advertisers are. If you’re all where everybody else is, you want one message out of thousands of thousands. When you look at a lot of unsuccessful businesses that find a way to scale, it’s because they found some clear air where they could be that someone wasn’t.

If you say, “My growth strategy is to call up every small business and sell them over the phone a product,” that’s going to be hard because that channel got so used. Nobody wants to talk on the phone anymore to a salesperson. A lot of growth marketing is being contrarian and finding something different from what everyone else is doing. Almost ironically or unintuitively, a lot of the digital marketing channels have been mastered and absorbed. A lot of people are trying very unintuitively traditional things.

I invested in a couple of other marketplaces. The most successful was a car-sharing marketplace. One of the most successful things that they had was a handwritten note. They used to find a car, add it to the marketplace, and then drop a handwritten note into the letterboxes to all the homes that were around where that car was parked. That was one of their most successful tactics, more so than Google ads, YouTube ads, and things like that.

What are your goals for the next few years in the business?

One of the things that we’re doing is to continue to grow the marketplace in the home market and prove how deep we can go into the service of the economy that we’ve built. We’re the number one services marketplace in Australia but we want to continue to grow that. One of the things that we are doing to do that is to move from what we do, which is effectively being an amazing dating agency in local services, which is that we help you find your cleaner. A lot of those transactions happen offline.

What Airtasker does is help you then find a handyman, photographer, lawyer, and all of the different types of services. We want to move into helping manage those relationships. Not only do you find your cleaner on Airtasker but on a recurring basis, you want to manage that through our app. The unlock that we found in doing that is that you can’t charge people 20% or an introduction fee to do that.

They’d say lower-margin business. Frankly, we’re happy to do that to keep you engaged with the platform and to be able to help task, and manage their businesses more conveniently, and build their reputations more holistically on Airtasker. That is a huge challenge and an interesting consumer behavior problem to address. We’ve made some inroads into that and continue to iterate on that. Moving from a dating agency to a relationship manager is one big thing.

We’re also taking our dating agency model, which we’ve proved to be a viable and profitable business, and scaling the hell out of that in the US and the UK markets. That is a nonstop challenge of having to build out and restart a marketplace in each new market. We got our hands full doing that. I love my job but also it’s a lot of work to be able to do that.

You mentioned you worked in a bank way back when you worked for Macquarie if I remember right. When did the idea of starting your company pop into your head and the idea of being an entrepreneur?

I was thinking about this and how small things in life turned into bigger things. Generally, my story is that I was working in investment banking. I didn’t particularly love what I was doing but it was a solid job and a great brand. I was learning a lot. It was a great job for sure. When the GFC happened, our whole team was made redundant. I left investment banking at that point. At the time, I was watching a lot of the show called Entourage, which is about Hollywood and things like that. I was like, “It’d be cool to be like a celebrity agent. I wouldn’t mind doing that. That’d be fun.”

I went and applied to work in a bunch of talent representation agencies. Thankfully, I was picked up by a fashion modeling agency called Chic Management, which manages some of the elite supermodels coming out of Australia and working there. That serendipitously turned into meeting the co-owner of that agency, who was an entrepreneur, and letting me join him on a journey to build that company that we mentioned called Amazim.

It was only after going on that journey that I was like, “That’s a thing that you can come up with an idea, talk about it, people give you money, and then you go do it.” That’s a thing. Don’t get me wrong. There was a tech and startup industry back then but it was a lot more nascent, certainly outside of Silicon Valley. In Australia, it was not a thing. A career choice was not to go and start a business. If you’re going to do that, that’s a fish and chip shop, not a software company. It was only after that journey of seeing someone else do it that I was like, “You can do this.” That lit the spark. We were like, “That looks pretty cool. That’s pretty amazing that you can make something out of a PowerPoint.”

It’s an amazing part of the startup world.

Unless you come out of nowhere or working in a hype cycle, building a business will probably take a ten-year journey. Share on X

It sounds so cheesy or tacky but you can take a vision and then turn it into a reality. I have a crack at doing that. I’m well aware that not every business makes it. If you do want to go through that journey, it’s a long and painstaking journey, unless you’re maybe an AI company that comes out of nowhere in a hype cycle. Generally building businesses outside of a hype cycle is probably a ten-year journey to realize, value, and be compensated for all of that work. It’s a long journey. You’ve got to genuinely like what you do and be interested in it.

At this point, you’re well into it. Where do you choose to spend your time relative to what you delegate to others?

As a fantasy, one of the perks or luxuries of the job is you can define your job and work out where you want to spend your most time. One of the biggest burdens is that you can go and choose to do whatever and spend your time wherever it makes the most sense. There’s the burden of choice that you’ve got to make those decisions. I went through an exercise of writing down everything from what I want to wholesale delegate. I hire someone, let them run it, and only check in and order at the last mile versus the things that I want to be involved in but I still want to delegate versus the things that I want to be directly involved in and still drive and make the decisions.

That last bucket I found is often unique for founders in years. Often, the business is built around the skills that the founder or CEO had. We wanted to retain that. Where I direct that work is on the product side of things. It’s one of the big bets that we want to make in product and research. The second aspect of that is brand. How do we want to represent ourselves? What does Airtasker stand for? It’s all the way down to some of the bigger marketing decisions like what does that billboard look like? What sports sponsorship do we want to do?

You’ve got a good team that you’ve built around you. What do you look for in the people that you hire?

More and more, I would say that we are looking for certain attributes over skills and knowledge. If you use the basic framework of KSA, Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes, it can be a trap if you want to hire people who have done exactly what you’ve done before, have those skills, and are able to do that. Look for a CV. It’s the person who’s going to be successful and is a tasker. They worked at Uber, eBay, Airbnb, and then AirTasker. That has been a bit of a trap for us. We’ve gone too far down that path of hiring for knowledge and skills.

I’ve got much more of a heavy leaning toward, what are the attributes that are required to be successful? A lot of those things are around how hungry you are to learn and have a growth mindset of, “I want to get in there, whatever it is. I want to try and do that.” One of the things that you hear in popular wisdom is if you read the Netflix, Book on HR, they talk about never agreeing with your boss. Challenge your boss if it’s the wrong thing.

That has merit if you’re coming from the perspective of the industrial age where the boss is to come in and say, “Do this and that.” Sure, it was good to challenge and question your boss and stuff but that has created a bit of a culture of not strong collegiate team behavior. A lot of the time, the right behavior is like, “That manager over there said to do this. Let’s go do it.” We don’t need to challenge and push everything.

“That’s your decision. You made that decision. I’m backing your decision. I trust you. Let’s go and do it.” That’s some of the types of attributes that we’re looking for. Everything’s going to have a different fit. In summary, I would say knowledge and skills are changing so fast anyway. If you were awesome at using a certain tool two years ago, that tool is probably not even the main thing that’s being used anymore. It’s moved on. Those things are less important and more important than who you are as a person and how you bring that into work.

You’ve been an entrepreneur for a while. You advise other companies and maybe you’re doing Airtasking work where you’re reading those pitch decks that you talked about. What advice do you give new entrepreneurs on what’s most important to be successful as an entrepreneur?

It is very different depending on business to business but at an abstract level, I do think your mindset is important. I wish someone would have told me when I started the journey to embrace the discomfort of not knowing how something works or for something to be messy as you go on the journey. You have to balance that because you do need to be a founder type constantly going like, “I need to change things. They can’t be the way they are.” You need to be able to know that you need to progress but also to embrace that discomfort and not let it become something that is making you stressed or anxious.

Enjoy being in it. When you start a business, everything’s in disarray by definition. There is no policy for HR or framework for X, Y, or Z. I wouldn’t say be comfortable being uncomfortable but embrace being uncomfortable, get excited about it, be in it, and be present in fixing that thing that you’re fixing. Maybe the physical analogy of that is you’re in a room and it’s totally messy. You know it’s messy and you’ve got to go and clean it but you can only clean one pile of things at a time. Be present and do that and do it with excitement and positivity.

Last question being mindful of your time, what’s your broader career advice for our audience who might be reading and thinking about what they want to be doing with their careers?

It reminds me of the Viktor Frankl quote, “You can’t find happiness by pursuing happiness.” The same thing applies to making money or wanting to be successful. You can’t be out there saying, “I want to make $1 million or $5 million,” or whatever your goal is. You do have to go, “What is the way that I can best serve other people, the community, and customers, and that I enjoy doing, and I’m passionate about doing?” Find that.

Career Sessions, Career Lessons | Tim Fung | Digital Entrepreneur

Digital Entrepreneur: Focus on finding something you genuinely like doing every day and the money will probably come.

 

If you find that, you grind away at it, and you keep going down the path of, “How can I serve other people that makes me satisfied with the work that I’m doing,” you’ll find success. Money and other things will come out of that. In my early career, it was intuitive to me to go, get the experience, and surround myself with industries where there are other smart people and something good will come out of that. You won’t know exactly what it is but it’s never a straight line to where you want to get to. Focus on finding something you genuinely like doing every day and the money will probably come.

Good advice on which to close. Thanks for doing this. I appreciate your time. I’m sure you’ve got many other things you’d be spending your time on. I value that you took a little bit of time to talk about your journey with me. Thank you.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, J.R.

Take care. Good luck with everything, Tim.

‐‐‐

It was great catching up with Tim to discuss Airtasker, how it got started, how it’s grown, what the business is like, and Tim’s role as an entrepreneur. If you need a task done and you’re in Australia, the UK, or the US you can check out Airtasker. If you’re ready to take control of your career, whether it’s an entrepreneurial journey or otherwise, join the Pathwise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the Pathwise newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

 

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About Tim Fung

Career Sessions, Career Lessons | Tim Fung | Digital Entrepreneur Tim Fung is the founder and CEO of AirTasker, a Sydney, Australia-based online marketplace connecting people with skilled local helpers in multiple countries. Tim is also the founder of Tank Street Labs, a co-working space for Sydney’s tech start-ups, the founder of a track day event management business called Circuit Club, and an advisor to a number of other start-ups.

 

 

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