Elance-oDesk Names Stephane Kasriel Chief Executive Officer

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 20, 2015) - Elance-oDesk, the world's largest freelance talent marketplace, today announced that Stephane Kasriel has been named the company's chief executive officer and appointed to the board of directors. Current CEO Fabio Rosati, who has led Elance-oDesk since launch, named Kasriel as his successor and will remain a member of the company's board of directors.

Since joining in 2012 Kasriel has risen to SVP of Product and Engineering, responsible for Elance-oDesk's full platform and technical team. "Stephane has the business experience and technological brilliance to propel Elance-oDesk. He has already played a decisive role in realizing our ambition to connect freelance professionals with work anywhere in the world in near real-time," said Rosati. "I am excited to see Stephane, the team and our community continue the work we began together."

"With Fabio's vision and leadership we pioneered a new way to work and built a global company with over $1 billion in annual freelancer billings. We now have an enormous market opportunity at our doorstep," said Kasriel. "Independent contractors are billing more than $1 trillion a year globally. Soon, we'll unveil major innovations that make it faster and easier for businesses to engage quality freelancers and work with them via the Internet."

Businesses post more than 3 million freelance jobs and conduct 100 million searches annually on the Elance and oDesk platforms. In 2014 the company secured $30 million in new funding from premier investors to drive further growth. Elance-oDesk recently became the first online company large enough to qualify for inclusion in a ranking of the top U.S. staffing and talent engagement firms.¹

Kasriel brings 16 years of experience to the position, which spans executive roles and multiple entrepreneurial successes. He is a lifetime technophile who holds 15 patents for web-related technologies. Before joining Elance-oDesk, Kasriel held several executive positions at PayPal, including Global Head of PayPal Consumer Products, Global Head of Mobile Business Development and Managing Director of PayPal France. He also co-founded and held leadership roles at pioneering companies including Fireclick, Work4 and Zong.

As SVP Engineering and Product at Elance-oDesk, Kasriel leads a global team of 300 product managers, designers and engineers. He recently published Hire Fast & Build Things, an ebook on how to work with geographically distributed teams. Kasriel holds an MBA from INSEAD, MS in Computer Science from Stanford, and a BS from Ecole Polytechnique in France.

To learn more about Kasriel, please see:

• A recent CareerDean Q&A with him here
• His LinkedIn profile here

About Elance-oDesk
Elance-oDesk is the world's largest freelance talent marketplace. Nearly 4 million clients and 10 million freelancers have tapped into Elance.com and oDesk.com to hire and work online. As an increasingly connected and independent workforce goes online, knowledge work -- like software, shopping and content before it -- is shifting online as well. This shift is making it faster and easier for businesses to connect and work with talent in near real-time and is freeing professionals everywhere from having to work at a set time and place.

Freelancers are earning more than $1 billion annually via Elance and oDesk. Elance-oDesk is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in San Francisco, California, and Oslo, Norway.

¹ According to Staffing Industry Analysts