Technology

TaskUs, the business process outsourcing service that moderates content, annotates information and handles back office customer support for some of the worldlargest tech companies, has raised $250 million in an investment from funds managed by the New York-based private equity giant, Blackstone Group.

Itbeen ten years sinceTaskUs was founded with a $20,000 investment from its two co-founders, and the new deal, which values the decade-old company at $500 million before the money even comes in, is proof of how much has changed for the service in the years since it was founded.

The Santa Monica-based company, which began as a browser-based virtual assistant company — &You send us a task and we get the task done,& recalled TaskUs chief executive Bryce Maddock — is now one of the main providers in the growing field of content moderation for social networks and content annotation for training the algorithms that power artificial intelligence services around the world.

&What I can tell you is we do content moderation for almost every major social network and itthe fastest growing part of our business today,& Maddock said.

From a network of offices spanning the globe from Mexico to Taiwan and the Philippines to the U.S., the thirty two year-old co-founders Maddock and Jaspar Weir have created a business thatlargest growth stems from snuffing out the distribution of snuff films; child pornography; inappropriate political content and the trails of human trafficking from the user and advertiser generated content on some of the worldlargest social networks.

(For a glimpse into how horrific that process can be, take a look atthis article fromWired,which looked at content moderation for the anonymous messaging service, Whisper.)

Maddock estimates that while the vast majority of the business was outsourcing business process services in the companyearly days (whether that was transcribing voice mails to texts for the messaging service PhoneTag, or providing customer service and support for companies like HotelTonight) now about 40% of the business comes from content moderation.

Image courtesy of Getty Images

Indeed, it was the growth in new technology services that attracted Blackstone to the business, according toAmit Dixit, Senior Managing Director at Blackstone.

&The growth in ride sharing, social media, online food delivery, e-commerce and autonomous driving is creating an enormous need for enabling business services,& said Dixit in a statement. &TaskUs has established a leadership position in this domain with its base of marquee customers, unique culture, and relentless focus on customer delivery.&

While the back office business processing services remain the majority of the companyrevenue, Maddock knows that the future belongs to an increasing automation of the companycore services. Thatwhy part of the money is going to be invested in a new technology integration and consulting business that advises tech companies on which new automation tools to deploy, along with shoring up the companyposition as perhaps the best employer to work for in the world of content moderation and algorithm training services.

Itbeen a long five year journey to get to the place itin now, with glowing reviews from employees on Glassdoor and social networks like Facebook, Maddock said. The company pays well above minimum wage in the market it operates in (Maddock estimates at least a 50% premium); and provides a generous package of benefits for what Maddock calls the &frontline& teammates. That includes perks like educational scholarships for one child of employees that have been with the company longer than one year; healthcare plans for the employee and three beneficiaries in the Philippines; and 120 days of maternity leave.

And, as content moderation is becoming more automated, the TaskUs employees are spending less time in the human cesspool that attempts to flood social networks every day.

&Increasingly the work that we&re doing is more nuanced. Does this advertisement have political intent. That type of work is far more engaging and could be seen to be a little bit less taxing,& Maddock said.

But he doesn&t deny that the bulk of the hard work his employees are tasked with is identifying and filtering the excremental trash that people would post online.

&I do think that the work is absolutely necessary. The alternative is that everybody has to look at this stuff. it has to be done in a way thats thoughtful and puts the interests of the people who are on the frontlines at the forefront of that effort,& says Maddock. &There have been multiple people who have been involved in sex trafficking, human trafficking and pedophilia that have been arrested directly because of the work that TaskUs is doing. And the consequence of someone not doing that is a far far worse world.&

Maddock also said that TaskUs now shields its employees from having to perform content moderation for an entire shift. &What we have tried to do universally is that there is a subject matter rotation so that you are not just sitting and doing that work all day.&

And the companyexecutive knows how taxing the work can be because he said he does it himself. &I try to spend a day a quarter doing the work of our frontline teammates. I spend half my time in our offices,& Maddock said.

Now, with the new investment, TaskUs is looking to expand into additional markets in the UK, Europe, India, and Latin America, Maddock said.

&So far all we&ve been doing is hiring as fast as we possibly can,& said Maddock. &At some point in the future, theregoing to be a point when companies like ours will see the effects of automation,& he added, but thatwhy the company is investing in the consulting business… so it can stay ahead of the trends in automation.

Even with the threat that automation could pose to the companybusiness, TaskUs had no shortage of other suitors for the massive growth equity round, according to one person familiar with the company. Indeed, Goldman Sachs and Softbank were among the other bidders for a piece of TaskUs, the source said.

Currently, the company has over 11,000 employees (including 2,000 in the U.S.) and is looking to expand.

&We chose to partner with Blackstone because they have a track record of building category defining businesses. Our goal is to build TaskUs into the worldnumber one provider of tech enabled business services. This partnership will help us dramatically increase our investment in consulting, technology and innovation to support our customerefforts to streamline and refine their customer experience,& said Maddock in a statement.

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2018, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

To hack: to study a systemflaws and emergent properties, and use them for your own ends; to instil your own instructions into a computermemory, and coerce its microprocessor to run them. To pick at the air gaps and missed stitches in the many overlapping layers of software from which our modern world is woven.

Et voilà, an entire industry, employing countless thousands. Information Security a.k.a. infosec. It is said that there are four PR people for every journalist in America, which seems high, but I expect the ratio of infosec people to actual hackers is higher yet, even if you count the proverbial script kiddies.

For a long time it was where the counterculture techies went, the curmudgeons, the renegades, in black boots and leather and tattoos and colored hair. By no coincidence they also tended to include many of the smartest ones. (I&m a CTO and to this day I find interview questions about security are the best way to delineate the merely good from the excellent.) And by no coincidence they also included many angry, wounded, and/or terrible people.

That was when the Internet was something people used from time to time, rather than the fundamental substrate of half of human activity. It was OK, as far as its users were concerned, for its walls to be built and defended (and only very rarely womanned, courtesy of infosecdefault oppressive, exclusionary, and often predatory sexual culture) by a cohort of … well … cranky assholes. Not all of them, I hasten to stress. But definitely a disproportionate number.

That was part of its appeal, in many ways. Bad boys in leather who could spin up hard drives and ransom data from across the planet with a few opaque, wizardly shell scripts, in green text on black, using knowledge they&d won the hard way from online duels and grimoires — that was the Hollywood myth of the hacker, and the much-less-romantic real hackers loved it, as you&d expect, whatever color their notional hats might be.

It was a shitty system and a shitty subculture in many ways — colorful and dramatic, sure, but essentially shitty — and it couldn&t last. Nowadays it is big business, on the one hand, and slowly becoming more equitable and less exclusionary, on the other. Don&t get me wrong, theremuch work to be done, but the trajectory is a hopeful one.

Nowadays the security biz is an iterative process rather than an exploratory frontier. Researchers discover vulnerabilities in software; they disclose them to vendors; vendors grumble and fix it. Security vendors offer a growing arsenal of tools to prevent, detect, log, and attribute attacks, iterating as attackers do the same — and attackers are, increasingly, likely to be 9-5ers paid by a nation state, rather than members of a criminal enterprise.

One of the most respected teams in infosec is GoogleProject Zero, and another is their Chrome security team; both are managed by Parisa Tabriz, who gave the keynote speech at Black Hat today. She pointed out that there has been good and measurable progress in the security world over the last few years. Initially, when Project Zero started giving vendors precisely 90 days to fix their bugs before their exploits were revealed to the world, only 25% complied in time; now that number is up to 98%. Secure HTTPS traffic has risen from 45% to 87% of traffic on ChromeOS, and from 29% to 77% on Android, just over the last three years … and Tabriz attributed this to UI improvements in the Chrome browser as much as to the behind-the-scenes plumbing work.

Once upon a time UX and usability were considered entirely orthogonal to security. This is probably directly attributable to the contemptuous attitudes of infosec at the time. Now, thankfully, the industry knows better. Once &community& was a dirty word among the black-clad lone wolves, and if a &vulnerability& was personal, you didn&t talk about it; now therean entire Community Track at Black Hat, discussing addiction, stress, PTSD, burnout, depression, sexual harassment/assault, among other issues that would have been swept under the collective rug not so long ago.

Conventional wisdom has it that everything is terrible and everything can be hacked, and that &attackers have strategies while defenders only have tactics,& to quote Black Hat founder Jeff Moss this morning. And don&t get me wrong: some things do continue to be terrible. (Border Gateway Protocol, anyone) But there is room for a kind of guarded optimism. Many of the big new hacks of the last few years aren&t catastrophic flaws in widely used essential infrastructure. OK, some are, but some, like Meltdown/Spectre and Rowhammer, are astonishingly elaborate Rube Goldberg hacks.

This is an extremely good sign. In the same way that airline crashes tend to have a baroque set of perfect-storm causes these days, because the simple errors are guarded against with multiple redundancy, the increasingly baroqueness of major bugs suggests that the software we use is getting noticeably more secure. Slowly. In irregular fits and starts. Over a period of decades. Sometimes in devices which cannot be fixed except by complete replacement. And reducing vulnerabilities still doesn&t fix, say, the password reuse problem. But still.

We&ll see if the rise of machine learning causes a new arms race, or whether it gives us new and better tools against attackers, and/or whether convolutional pattern recognition will unearth an entire new crop of previously undetectable bugs. Itadmittedly worrying that adversarial examples are so effective at tricking current AI models. But even so I&m inclined to agree with Tabriz that there is, at long last, cause for a certain guarded optimism, both for the infosec community and their work.

WeWork recentlyannounced a new office space solution called &HQ by WeWork& to provide mid-sized companies the privacy, flexibility, customization and cost-efficiency they need without making a long-term brick-and-mortar commitment.

According to U.S. Census data, the number of mid-sized companies with 11 to 250 employees account for 1.1 million companies in the country and employ approximately 30 million people. In many cases, these companies have begun seeing growth but are not ready (or financially capable enough) to settle into a long-term office space that they may soon outgrow.

&Be it those lifestyle businesses that are going to be 30 people forever, a small law firm, or a tech firm, we believe very strongly in companies of that size and how important they are to their local economies,& WeWork Chief Growth Officer Dave Fano told TechCrunch. &Often times space is still very much a challenge for companies of that size and the way they have to make these [office space] commitments ends up probably being an inhibitor to their growth.&

To better meet the needs of these companies, HQ by WeWork offers private office floors (leased and managed by WeWork) that companies can move into for flexible leasing periods — typically for a minimum of 12-24 months. But, should a company outgrow its space in six months, Fano said WeWork will work to accommodate a move to support its growth.

Unlike WeWorkPowered by We model, which allows companies to bring the management of WeWork to spaces they rent themselves, companies using HQ by WeWork can leave the ins-and-outs of office real estate to the office-sharing company.

HQ by WeWork offers spaces with customizable color schemes and branding incorporation, private entrances and a service-lite model of WeWork management that includes essentials (IT, AV, etc.) but without all the bells and whistles (e.g. full conference rooms, events) that come with a typical WeWork office space. This paring down of amenities allows it to offer these spaces at a lower price per person than a typical WeWork accommodation, Fano told me. That said, HQ tenants can still drop-by any WeWork facility to utilize the features their spaces lack.

So far, WeWork has leased six HQ spaces in New York City and is actively working to expand HQ by WeWork into all the companyflagship cities, such as Los Angles and Toronto.