Guru.com
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| File:Guru.com logo.gif | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Freelancing on the Internet |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Headquarters | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
Key people | Inder Guglani, Founder and CEO |
Number of employees | < 20 |
| Website | www.guru.com |
Guru.com is a freelance marketplace.[1] It allows companies to find freelance workers for commissioned work. Founded in 1998 in Pittsburgh as eMoonlighter.com and still headquartered there, it is one of the tech firms to survive the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. eMoonlighter.com was actually a low budget company, running on only $400,000,[2] and yet becoming extremely profitable due to efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Guru Inc. was founded in 1999 in San Francisco, and the company was acquired in December 2002 by Unicru, a human resources software company based in Portland, Oregon. Guru's technology and staff remained with Unicru, focused on software to help large employers assess and hire job applicants. Unicru sold the Guru.com domain name and logo to eMoonlighter.com, and eMoonlighter was renamed Guru.com.
Guru.com directly connects businesses and employees in 160 different fields. The company remains profitable despite offering some of their basic services for free.
Some customers (freelancers)[who?] are dissatisfied with Guru.com's strong employer bias. "I make sure that my subscribers know that they are not my customer -- the employer is," said Inder Guglani,[2] and Guru.com site policies reflect Mr. Guglani's philosophy.