Gary Swart is the CEO of oDesk, where he brings more than 15 years of sales, management, and leadership experience in the enterprise software market. Prior to oDesk, Gary was the VP of Worldwide Sales for Intellibank, and a Business Unit Executive for IBM's Rational Software Product Group. Gary holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Maryland. Visit the company blog here .

What is oDesk, and how did it all get started?

oDesk is a global marketplace for programmers and technical talent that lets businesses build and manage remote teams. Hiring managers can search the oDesk network and choose from among thousands of tested, top-rated technology professionals in over 50 countries around the world. Using oDesk web-based collaboration tools, project managers can visually track and verify all work performed, both historically and in real-time. Everyday, oDesk helps people all over the world work together, as if they were seated in the same office. Founded in 2004, oDesk is located in Menlo Park, CA. oDesk got started out of the need for access to talent that was not available in the local market at cost effective rates. In addition to access to the talent, oDesk had a need to manage the remote resources as if they were in the office. This visibility helps to facilitate trust and accountability of the worker, enabling buyers of services to have real time visibility into their work, ensuring better results. Click here to see the way remote work gets done.

You recently raised $8 million. What will this money be used for, and what is your business model?

The new funds will be used to expand our market growth and accelerate our product development. We expect to deliver some very exciting technology this year and to continue to revolutionize the way remote work gets done. Our business model is to add a markup to the direct labor rate of the provider, only for hours worked. For this fee, we help you to hire (screen, rank, rate, test, and enable providers from around the world), manage (Provide a collaboration, management and monitoring solution to manage your provider as if they were in the office next to you), and pay (We pay the provider and take care of all statutory requirements, regardless of country). Already, quite a bit of money is flowing through oDesk to our providers, which is a sign that it is a healthy economy. We have many providers that have made over $50-100K, and a few that have made over $500K working with oDesk.

What were the greatest challenges faced during the early stages of the company?

Like any start up, our key challenges were related to attracting customers and getting the product right. The founders bootstrapped the company for the first few months, and then raised a small seed round. Once the product was right and the network of users started growing, getting funding became easy. Here’s how we overcame our two primary changes in the early days of oDesk:

Building the network. Anyone starting a marketplace faces a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you attract users when you don’t have any? How do you attract demand before you attract supply? We had to attract both in parallel, and this meant doing some early telesales to customers to get them to start building teams through our then-small network. We also reached out to the Russian open source community to find an early group of developers who were talented, used to working remotely, and the network has grown; it’s become very easy to attract new users. Buyers come to oDesk because we have thousands of top-notch providers, and providers come because there are always hundreds of great jobs to choose from.

Incomplete Product. We went to market with an incomplete offering, so we had the blessing/curse of early paying customers. We started before we had feedback, before we had an automated payment system, before we had a nicely integrated web application. The curse is that we had to divide time between satisfying customers and building the platform; the blessing was that serving customers from day 1 helped us build a deep understanding of what it takes to make remote work successful.