Website Guru.com Founded 1998 | Founder James Slavet Type of business Private | |
Industry Internet
Service Marketplace
Workforce Management
Crowdsourcing Headquarters Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States Profiles | ||
Guru.com is a freelance marketplace. It allows companies to find freelance workers for commissioned work. Founded in 1998 in Pittsburgh as eMoonlighter.com and still headquartered there.
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History
Guru Inc. was founded in 1999 in San Francisco as an online clearing house for high tech workers seeking short-term contracts. The company, led by brothers Jon and James Slavet, raised $3M in angel funding and a further $16M in a full venture round led by Greylock Partners and August Capital. In a May 2000 interview, Paul Saffo cited Guru.com as an example of a company using the Internet to provide new kinds of services where individuals negotiated directly with potential employers.
In May 2001, Ray Marcy, who had been the CEO at Spherion, a Florida staffing company, became CEO of Guru Inc. He hired industrial psychologist Janz and Dan Crow to develop new software.
In February 2002, Guru unveiled its SmartMatch technology, which matched résumés and other information about job applicants to jobs. The company also developed a candidate profiling system using techniques from Industrial and organizational psychology to better understand a candidate's suitability for a particular job.
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.
Merger & Present day
Unicru sold the Guru.com domain name and logo to eMoonlighter.com, and eMoonlighter was renamed Guru.com