Before the marketplace with millions of users, there was a craft-supply shop run from home. Matt Barrie, a Stanford-trained engineer, reportedly ran a small online dropshipping business selling craft goods, the kind of side project that teaches you what a customer actually wants and how small the margin on a parcel can be. It is an odd detour for a man who would end up running one of the largest freelance platforms in the world.
Barrie was born in Adelaide in 1973. He took a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford in 1998, then worked in information security, reportedly at a firm called Securify. Back in Sydney, he began teaching computer and network security at the University of Sydney in 2001, and technology venture creation from 2010. He is still an adjunct associate professor there. That teaching life matters to the story: he was a founder who also lectured on how founders fail.
Cheap bids drew employers; steady work drew freelancers; and each pulled the other in.
In 2009 he launched Freelancer.com. The idea was plain. An employer posts a job. Freelancers bid. The site takes a fee, 10 percent, reduced for paid members, with a five dollar minimum. Later it added contests, where designers and developers compete for prize money.
What made it work was scale on both sides. Cheap bids drew employers; steady work drew freelancers; and each pulled the other in. The company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2013 under the ticker FLN, and then used the market's money to buy its way into new corners. Escrow.com came in 2015. Prolancer and Nubelo followed in 2016, Channel 40 in 2018, and the freight marketplace Loadshift in 2021.
The growth had a cost. In December 2015, Australia's Information Commissioner ruled that Freelancer had breached the Privacy Act by exposing the personal information of a former user who had posted critical comments about the company. It ordered A$20,000 in damages, a written apology and staff training. The company said it intended to appeal. A separate privacy complaint was reported in 2018. For a marketplace built on public reputation, a ruling over how it treated a critic was an uncomfortable mirror.
Where it stands is harder to summarise, since the figures I could verify are older than a founder would like. What is clear is that a marketplace which started as one engineer's bet that talent and work could meet online is still run by him sixteen years on.
The lesson is in the small business before the big one. Barrie learned the mechanics of online commerce on a shoestring. Founders who start with a humble shop often understand the unit economics better than those who start with a vision.