[IsaacL]

I wanted to here more detail about how they want from a curated marketplace to the free-for-all it is today.

TopTal and Matchist have launched in the last few years, and are aiming to be curated jobs marketplaces (TopTal vets coders, Matchist vets clients). When I first saw them, I thought it was a great model, but this article suggests it's something oDesk tried back in the day and didn't work out. Anyone have any deeper insights?

[john_horton]

The short story is that hand-curation does not seem to work at a very large scale, so we need to create tools for automated discovery (e.g., search, recommendations, controlled skill vocabulary etc.) and automated but credible signals of ability and trustworthiness (e.g., feedback system, skills tests, verified identities etc.). In a nutshell, the challenge is trying to take the things Josh was doing by hand and turn them into data-driven features.

Note: I'm the staff economist at oDesk & I'm on the research/data science team.

[startupstella]

I'm also cofounder of matchist.com, and wanted to weigh in here. This is somewhat of a Jason Fried question...do you want to scale as quickly as possible? Should every business strive to be the biggest or greatest? Or is it more important to find a niche and just do that one thing really well. That's our philosophy building matchist...we don't plan to be the one stop shop for freelancers.

[timjahn]

Tim, co-founder of matchist here. Just to clarify, we vet both talent and clients.