Before Thumbtack had a product, it had a student campaign. Marco Zappacosta, Jonathan Swanson and Jeremy Tunnell were fellow directors of Students for Saving Social Security, a group that claimed more than 10,000 members on over 300 campuses. They were political organisers first, and none of them was building software for plumbers.
Zappacosta grew up in Atherton, born in Stanford in 1985. His father, Pierluigi Zappacosta, was the Italian engineer who emigrated to the US in the 1970s and co-founded Logitech. A founder's last name like that comes with a question attached: is this the son's company or the father's shadow? Zappacosta graduated from Columbia in 2007 with a degree in political science, not engineering.
A founder's last name like that comes with a question attached: is this the son's company or the father's shadow?
The idea that pulled the group together was plain. Hiring someone locally, whether a photographer, a mover or an electrician, was a mess on Craigslist. There was no way to tell who was real, no reviews, no licences. In 2008 the founders, with Sander Daniels, built a directory to fix that. To get it started they scraped Craigslist for providers, then added photos, licences and reviews.
What almost nobody remembers is how thin the early money was. Thumbtack's first outside round, in June 2010, was only $1.2 million, mostly from angels. A $4.5 million Series A followed in 2012, by which time the site had 250,000 merchants and professionals on it. Then the cheques grew fast: $30 million from Sequoia and Tiger Global in 2014, and $100 million from Google Capital that August.
The model that made it work was to let customers post a job and let professionals pay to quote on it, rather than charging a listing fee. Pros paid for leads they chose. It was a marketplace built on the idea that trust is a product.
The 2021 round put a $3.2 billion valuation on the company, led by Qatar Investment Authority. Fast Company reported $400 million in revenue for fiscal 2024, and Forbes counted about 300,000 active professionals in mid-2025. No newer priced round has been found, so the valuation is over five years old.
The lesson is in the founders' first group project. Organising 10,000 students to care about something taught them how to get strangers to trust a stranger. For a first-time founder, the skills for your company may be the ones you built outside any company at all.