YouSaid · the spoken record

Ania Smith

lines on the record: 98
first: 2025-06-09
most recent: 2025-06-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, inside of IKEA, we operate very independently. So I report to a board and a board is made up of IKEA executives and external board members. You know, we have three board meetings a year because IKEA works in tertiels, not quarters.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It may be, I don't know, I've never been the CEO of public company, but I can tell you that we have pretty big goals and pretty high pressure from IKEA as well. Obviously there is a component of stability that comes with having IKEA as a parent. And there are both sort of good and bad things about this, right? The good thing is I'm not a public company nor VC funded and I don't have to sort of worry how things are going to evolve financially in the same way, but also that can make you a little bit more complacent. And so we're trying very hard to ensure that we have very ambitious goals and very big vision so that the teams are working really hard to continue to grow. And there's many ways that we can drive the business forward, that we can actually build growth capabilities. Charging taskers is not one of them, but there are many other ways that we think we have a lot of opportunity in terms of growth.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that brings me to Ikea. So Ikea bought TaskRabbit in 2017. It's a complicated transaction, but the upshot is Ikea now it owns TaskRabbit. Do you think that it's that ownership that protects you from the pressure to increase revenue by charging both sides of the marketplace? Because I feel like if you were a public company, you might feel that pressure much more keenly.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because again, I really feel that we don't need to charge the taskers to make the money that we make. We provide enough services to both sides, but the client is willing to bear that cost. And that has worked for us. You know, it doesn't mean that it's always going to work and that our models are always going to work. So many of the components that we're talking about, we are obviously looking at other ways because we have to continue evolving. But right now this works for us. And so today, we don't see changing the model where we would charge taskers.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You say we're not a legion model, that feels really important, right? That's a principle that you need to hold on to. Because again, every other company that's similarly situated does sort of charge both sides. Substack, they take 10% of everyone's earnings just to send emails. And they would tell you they do a lot more than just send emails, but they have a graduation problem, right? People leave the platform because you can get cheaper email distribution elsewhere. And Substack has to build new services in order to justify their 10% for their highest volume writers. Does that pressure just not exist or does that pressure exist and you keep it away?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go and call each of them and start negotiating on a price or the time. And then, you know, the person comes and does whatever task. But if something goes wrong, it's really just between you and that provider versus for us, we're there all the way through until the job closes.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll just talk about what Tess Rabbit does and then perhaps compare it a little bit to what other platforms do. But TaskRabbit allows you to book a tasker on a platform and then we, I guess one word to think about is maybe shepherd the way this process all the way through. So we make sure that the tasker shows up. We make sure that the task actually gets done. We make sure that there's we collect payment from you, the client. We then distribute that payment to the tasker. And then we make sure that you can write the review for the tasker and so on. And there's just a whole slew of things that happens, including the fact that if something goes wrong, you can pick up the phone call or you can send us a message and say, hey, the tasker's late or hey, like the task are canceled. What should I do next? And so on. And that's different than just getting a name of three or four potential providers. And now you as a client have”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Made a distinction here between platforms you call lead gen platforms where they charge for demand, right? You're a plumber, you want to get some customers, you would charge some service to get you some customers. Describe what you mean by lead gen and describe how task rabbit is different.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gets bugged from the very beginning, and we're there sort of holding together with a client and a tasker all the way through to payment and so forth, as opposed to just giving a client few names and say, go try them out. And so we believe that the service that we're providing is ensuring that that job happens and it's high quality. And for that, we primarily charge the client.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know we haven't found that that's to be fair, we haven't tried this, we haven't experimented with this for the last few years, at least since I've been here. I believe that previously this has been tested. I think that the taskers themselves are keen to provide the best services that they can. And we want to make sure that we are a supply-based marketplace, right? I think, as you well know, this thing doesn't work without supply here. And you kind of have to start with supply. And so for me and for TaskRabbit, it's really important that we have the best quality supply. And we don't need to be charging the taskers. We're not a lead gen model. We are instead making sure that the entire job”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make our money just like many platforms do where we have to charge either one or both sides of the marketplace for the services that we provide. I just explained some of the services for taskers. We also obviously provide a lot of services to the clients. And the way things work on our platform is as a client, when you book a job, pay an additional service fee to Tasrevit for everything from insurance and fraud to just being able to find the tasker and so on. And sorry, and I wouldn't say insurance, I should take that back. It's not insurance. It's quality assurance is more what I would call it.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are visible to you, the ones that are closer to your home. So there's a lot of additional services that we provide and benefits to the taskers where they want to stay on a platform because it is easier for them. And also if they set a rate of $100 an hour, they get to take home $100, which is very different than sort of some of the other platforms.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you could, but it's not just about marketing, but of course, that's one of the biggest services that we provide. It's also about scheduling. It's also about providing some level of protection. So if things go wrong, we're there to help. And having consistent work. And so, yes, you can leave the platform and try to do this on your own. We hope that we provide such great service to our taskers that it's harder for them to manage it outside of the platform, right? So if you're working on multiple platforms or you're doing it on your own, you're managing your own Google Calendar, for example. It's really hard to sync them all and to try to think about how to manage the time appropriately. We can help and do that for you. We can help and figure out and make sure that the tasks that we are providing are the ones that are most matched to your skill set because we understand your history and we understand what the client wants. We can help and make sure that the tasks that”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I'm asking this Airbnb is a perfect example because they do let people set rates and they have all kinds of pricing tools. The other end is Uber, which doesn't let anyone set a price. And so if you're the best Uber driver or the worst, it kind of doesn't matter, Uber is just pricing for you. And that dynamic has led to a lot of frustration over there. It seems like the challenge in your case is that if you get good enough and you're famous stuff and you've had enough customers, you might leave the platform, right? Because you can just maybe do more effective marketing and take a higher margin. How do you make sure you don't have that graduation problem?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To take a quick break, we'll be right back. Back with TaskRabbit CEO, Anya Smith. For the break, we were discussing how TaskRabbit's platform works and what forces dictate how prices are set and where the supply and demand comes from, depending on the task and the market you're in. But now I really want to understand what separates TaskRabbit from some of its peers in the gig economy, like Airbnb and Uber, and what benefits ANIA sees her platform providing that would keep someone from just trying to reach customers directly.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think that that's generally true because if you have a lot more supply in that market, you're competing all the time. You can't just assume that you're just going to be able to raise your rates over time. I mean, generally speaking, people start up, it's a little bit similar to, I would say Airbnb. When you're a brand new host, you come in and you have no reviews, you have no ratings, you want people to stay in your home and you want to do a good job. So you may price a little bit lower just to make sure that you show up on search results and just to make sure that people book your place. And then as you gain more experience, as you understand what your guests want and as you are able to provide those things for them and you continue to get really great reviews and really great feedback, you're able to raise the prices, but only to a limit as there's more and more Airbnbs that may be showing up in that market. So there's many components that help you figure out how”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then in aggregate, the rates across the platform are going up as well. And then if you're an individual tasker, and I'm there for five years, is it generally true that I can just charge more over time because I have more reviews and more data to back up that I know what I'm doing?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really depends. Moving is one of our highest categories in terms of rates just because it's a more complex product. And so you have to obviously it can take hours to help someone move. And so I see that that's in a total job number, that's obviously one of the higher ones. If you look at per hour numbers, it really varies by market. There isn't sort of a single trend.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aggregate rates are going up. They definitely have ebbed and flowed. So obviously, and then it also matters a lot on the market. So in certain markets, they're obviously much higher than in other markets. And as we sort of see trends with inflation and as we see sort of externally what's going on, the rates tend to follow because obviously even supplies are becoming more expensive for taskers. And then they their lives are becoming more expensive for them. So they need to charge more as well. So we do see an aggregate rates moving up.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, they can set the rates, but if they charge too much, obviously the market is not going to reward them in a way they could potentially want. So you can definitely set your rates higher than what the market is willing to bear. And if you're in a market where there's thousands of other taskers, the way that's going to manifest itself on a platform is you may essentially get less jobs if you're overpricing and pricing much higher than what clients are willing to pay.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I guess to bring it back to TV mounting, again, my favorite topic, you could pay the lower amount of money for someone with less reviews or more risk, right? That they might not know what they're doing, or you might pay more money for someone who clearly appears to know what they're doing. And that feels like a pricing strategy that should exist on the platform. Because whenever we talk about the gig economy, I get workers emailing us saying, well, I just want to know how to make more money. And it feels like on TaskRap with the Eat. best way to do it is to just charge more because they can set the rates.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taskers do set their own rates on TaskRabbit, which makes us very different than many of the platforms that you see in the market. And it's really why so many taskers actually love coming to TaskRabbit. We haven't seen that level of sophistication. If I had to summarize that they fully recognize exactly how to set the rates. So we provide a lot of guidance to them. And we take into the consideration of the guidance based on where are you based, based on what types of tasks you perform based on your previous reviews. This is based on what the market is doing. This is what we could potentially suggest. They don't take our suggestions all the time, which is fine. They get to set their own rate.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A relationship there between what customers are saying and the reviews are leaving and whether or not they're validating the skills and the rates that taskers can charge. Do you find that that's a correlation that you can measure?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were many ways. So, first of all, the tasker obviously we now have AI models and tools that help us do this even faster. But the taskers themselves tell us what capabilities they have. And we ask pretty structured questions and they can actually explain. But then the bigger piece of data obviously comes from their experience and on a platform and having done previously similar tasks. So they tell us that they hung up this type of TV. obviously can use that data to then match them to exactly that kind of job again. And of course, the clients provide reviews. And so we can search automatically just by words. And obviously there's just structured data and understanding their skill set. And so we take that all into consideration as we build out a more optimal match.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love that we're talking about mounting TV so much because one that totally made Wheelhouse and two, the Verge audience knows that I love talking about mounting TVs. And this is great. We're just like in the strike scent for me. How do you get that data? How do you evaluate who is good at the harder TV mount above a fireplace versus just on a regular piece of drywall?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is great, but can they be available on a Friday evening and mounted on a brick wall and know how to hide the cables? That's a different skill than mounting a smaller TV on a normal size wall or a normal wall. And so there's just a lot of variables that go into an actual perfect job. And we still have a lot of work to do there. And so there's still a lot of growth opportunity.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, so demand is going up, and that's great to see. Now, there's a bit of a caveat, you know, and it's not just TaskRabbit. There are, as you mentioned, multiple players. And for all of us, demand is going up, we're still such small portion of the overall market and the overall possibilities. So most people still assemble their own furniture. They put up their own TVs. They clean their own houses. And so there is, even though we see a lot of growth, there's still just so much opportunity to continue to see that growth. It still feels 10, 15 years in that the market is quite nascent. And services is hard to figure out. There's a lot to think about, especially when it comes to how do we match the perfect tasker to the client. And I talk a lot about mounting. So we have thousands of taskers who can mount you to you.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I'm not an economist, and I read all of the stuff just like you do. And if you do read that stuff, you know, we should have had a recession last year and one the year before as well. And those predictions turn out to be wrong. And so I think the word is uncertainty. We just don't know. Because at least the last two years, we kind of understood what was going on a little bit more, I would say. There's just a lot of uncertainty overall. And so it's very hard to predict what's going to happen with terrorists, what's going to happen with bond yields, what's going to happen with interest rates, what's going to happen with the housing market. And so all I can say is we see an increase in task or applications. I'm not sure that that's an indication that a recession is coming.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do so for the last, I want to say almost three years, we've definitely seen more supply than almost we can handle on a platform. So now in many cities we have waitlists and so forth because we don't want to onboard a tasker and then not be able to provide them with jobs. It's sort of a false premise. I want to make sure that if you're on our platform, there's work for you to do. And so as the economy has changed over the last few years and especially over the last couple of years, as we've seen, a bit more struggle, we've had thousands and thousands of taskers applying every year. It's 15, 20% more than a year before.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that is interesting to me just about the broader economy is you're describing people who want to fill their time with work, right? They want to make more money. They see the opportunity. That liquidity in the market, that supply of effort Sort of requires the time, right? Like people's time isn't being filled with their full time jobs or their between jobs or they might be out of a job. Do you see a correlation between the health of the overall economy and the amount of supply of taskers that you have?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it has to do a lot with market density and liquidity, right? You kind of, you want to be able to be closer to the jobs, but I would say the suburbs are fastest growing markets overall. If you look at cities versus suburbs, because there was just a lot of opportunity. And so, you know, when we moved to the suburbs, my husband also was very keen to buy tools and start doing work around the house. And that didn't turn out very well for us. Maybe it turns out well for others. Know in the end, we still have Task Ros here quite often because there's just a lot of work to do. You have more square footage and kind of by definition every single additional square foot will require more work. And so we see a lot of potential in the suburbs as well.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to come to the Ikea relationship because I think that is super interesting. It's been several years now, and I'm very curious how that has developed. But just to say focused on the cities for one second, I always, I mean, I lived in New York City for a long time. Now I live in the suburbs. I moved to the suburbs. I just started buying more and more tools. It's just a thing that happens when you move to the suburbs. And it feels like people just, I didn't have the space to have a bunch of tools and capabilities in my apartment in New York City. Is that why there's the bigger markets in the cities that people just don't have the stuff or the skills?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, today, yes. But we also, as you know, were owned by Kia. And so we also definitely think a lot about how we can support the IKEA business and support IKEA customers who want their furniture to be assembled and want them delivered. So in the US, we also do delivery for IKEA. And so we make sure that we can cover all IKEA stores. And as you know, some of them, most of them are not located in urban city centers. And in Europe, they're a much bigger. So when you think about a market like Germany, it has 50, 60 stores, which is the same as a number of stores in the US, but US is like, you know, triple or quadruple the size of Germany. So it's much more densely populated and we want to make sure that we cover all the IKEA markets.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, New York City by far is our biggest market, and it has been, I think, probably since we launched it there. But we have a lot of growth in our secondary and tertiary markets. Also, we're now in eight countries. So London has become a huge market for us, which is really exciting to see Toronto is a big market as well. Obviously, the Bay Area still is our home. And so we have a really great brand equity in the Bay Area, of course. LA is a big market. So as you kind of understand, we're now in hundreds and hundreds of cities across the globe. So it's fun sometimes we get into competitions to see which city can grow faster, but they all have different trajectories.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that I know the median. I think it really depends on the market. There's obviously liquidity and density questions and so on. And it really depends on the category that you're trying to get to. And many of our taskers are not working what you would consider full-time. They are doing this as a stop measure in between gigs or maybe they just want to do it in the evenings or and so forth. And so we don't really track the median earnings because everyone has such a specific and different use case what we think about is if you want to be working as much as possible in a week, what are your weekly targets for earning and how can we help you reach those weekly targets? And we find that that's what taskers really resonate with.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, but how many people have the same job for the rest of their lives? We have taskers who've been here for five, six, ten years, which is great. And sometimes they leave and they come back and they leave again and it just really depends on what's going on in their lives. But we want to make sure that we provide the opportunity that if people do want to come and earn an income, we're here to help them do that. And so for us, that means getting as many jobs as possible so that we can make sure that our taskers have the jobs that they can do.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's sustainable because I know a lot of people in the industry who have AV installation companies, for example, and they go from that to I'm going to design you a home theater system and then I'm going to sell you the components of that at some high margin. And that's how you build your business. But I'm going to install a lot of TVs every single day for the rest of my life. Is that totally sustainable on TaskRabbit?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean we have people making well over $200,000 a year. There is a tasker I spoke with, it's been a couple years now. He was a student at NYU. And as he was moving, or his roommate was, one of his friends was moving and using TaskRabbit. He had never heard of TaskRabbit. So he looked it up. This was 2022, 23 and said, hey, maybe I can do this while I look for a job and really got smart and figured out how to mount TVs fairly quickly just by learning it on YouTube and really optimize his job so he could mount three TVs in an hour sometimes in Manhattan. He was at NYU. And so for his first year after graduation, this is all he did. And he made well over $200,000 a year.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today we definitely focus on individuals. So in the US today, we're almost getting to a point where half of the workers in the US are actually gig economy workers. And that means many things, right? Not all of them are doing furniture assembly, but many are using these platforms to find additional work, to have the flexibility to transition between different stages of life. And so that's what we focus on. And those are the people that we want to help. We're here to make sure that we're providing a meaningful income to folks who need meaningful income. And there's a lot of people who maybe between jobs or students who have time on weekends or during the summers. And there's a lot of opportunity to make a pretty good living on TaskRabbit. An average hourly pay is close to $50 an hour. And obviously in some markets it's well over.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that's interesting about that market in particular is there's no shortage of gardening companies or moving companies or people who will show up on Craigslist and hang your TV for you, AV installation companies at the high end. Is that who you want on the platform, the companies who are doing customer discovery, or do you want individuals?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today it is, and that's really our focus, and it really is our vision to become the number one marketplace for home services specifically. And so there's a lot of things to get done around the home. It's everything from putting mulch and cleaning your gutters to mowing your lawn and then obviously inside the home there's so much, there's a lot to do also when there are moments that happen in your life. So when you think about starting a new family or when you think about moving, moving is a perfect example. You have to clean your old place, clean the new place, packing, unpacking, actual moving services, mounting TVs, assembling. So there's a lot of use cases where these services are still very much so needed.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taskcar was founded in 2008. Many things have happened since then. We've gone from a desktop paradigm to a mobile paradigm. Competitors have shown up. There's Fiverr, which I always think of where you go to get like a cheap logo. Do you think TaskRabbit is that expansive into digital services? You're describing hanging TVs. Is it more of a physical services platform?”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's pretty similar to what it has been at the end of the day. We connect people who need help around the home with a vast network of highly skilled and reliable taskers who can help you with cleaning or mounting your TV or assembling your furniture or just a range of tasks around the home. And I think we do that pretty well.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you. It feels like there's a lot of change coming to sort of the service economy as expressed on our phones. There's a lot of change in the economy in general that is interesting to talk about. Let's start at the very beginning. TaskRabbit's been around for a while. You've been the CEO for about five years, something like that.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A big change, and Ani and I talked about it for a while. You'll hear her say that TaskRabbit's end-to-end focus is the differentiator here, and that other platforms will find it quite hard to compete with that. A different answer than we got from Uber CEO Dara Kashashawi and a different answer than we got from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. It's very clear to me that we're in for a bunch of different kinds of negotiations as people adopt new kinds of user interfaces that can do more and more for them. This one's pretty deep. I think you're going to find it fascinating. One quick note before we start, Dakota is planning for the future, and we want to hear from you to figure out how we can make the show better. You can visit voxmedia.com slash survey to give us your feedback. We'd really appreciate it. Okay, TaskRabbitCEO, Anya Smith. Here we go.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Services it can integrate into the experience of being an IKEA customer. Assembling IKEA is a core task grabbit service after all, and I wanted to know if there was any pressure to specialize that service or prioritize IKEA's work over other companies. That's some real Decoder stuff, and you can tell that Anya is a listener of our show. That means Anya is ready for the heart of his conversation, and what's emerged is a real theme on Dakota recently. What's going to happen when the next wave of user interfaces hits, particularly the next wave of AI assistance that promised to be able to go and book services like TaskRabbit and DoorDash and Uber for you? Google actually gave a demo of one of its agent projects going through TaskRabbit's website a couple weeks ago, and I'm very curious about how all of these service providers are thinking about having those kinds of agendic tools step in between them and their customers. After all, if you're just asking a voice assistant to help you get someone to hang up a TV, you are probably not using the TaskRabbit website yourself.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can sign up to offer services like assembling furniture, mounting TVs, and helping people move, and they get to set their own prices for that work, which makes TaskRabbit more of a marketplace than something like Uber. And as you'll hear Anya say, the difference between TaskRabbit and something like Thumbtack or Angie's List is that TaskRabbit manages the entire interaction from end to end. It's not just a directory, but also where people can leave reviews, get customer service, and manage all of their payments. Annie describes all of this as mashing supply and demand, and we talked a lot about where the supply of labor comes from for TaskRabbit and what it might mean that there are more taskers on a platform than ever right now. To me, that feels like a little bit of a recession indicator. That's a lot of people looking for additional income. But Anya had a more measured view and pointed out that there are some taskers earning very comfortable livings on the platform. TaskRabbit was also notably acquired by IKEA several years ago, and the Swedish furniture giant has a lot of interest in how the platform grows and what kinds of”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I Patel, editor in chief of the Virge, and Decoder is my show about Big Ideas and Other Problems. Today I'm talking with TaskRabbit, CEO, Anya Smith. TaskRabbit is one of the original gig worker platforms, really focused on work you might need done in your home. The company has been around for nearly 20 years and you might be surprised to know that the core product has not really changed all that much over time.”
2025-06-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Taskrabbit CEO Ania Smith isn’t afraid of AI robots replacing human labor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT