Good morning and thank you for joining us for Upwork's inaugural Investor Day. I'm Evan Barbosa, Upwork's Vice President of Investor Relations. I would like to begin today by thanking our current shareholders, prospective shareholders, our coverage analysts, as well as any other business partners who have joined us today. I would also like to thank the various members of our Upwork team who have contributed to making today's event possible. You will be hearing from several members of our leadership team today, starting with our President and CEO, Hayden Brown.
Sam Bright, our Chief Product and Experience Officer, will then discuss how Upwork is innovating the work marketplace. Lars Asbjornson, SVP of Marketing will follow to talk about our opportunity to increase Upwork's brand awareness. Next, Eric Gilpin, SVP of Sales, will highlight how Upwork is winning the enterprise. Zoe Hart, our Chief People Officer, We'll then discuss the ways we are building a winning culture with remote freelancers at the heart of our business. And we will conclude the presentation with Jeff McCombs, Upwork's CFO, who will highlight how we're investing aggressively for long term value creation.
After the presentation portion, we will host a Q and A session with our analysts. Before I pass it over to Hayden, I would like to direct your attention to our Safe Harbor statement, which says, during this presentation, we may make statements related to our business that are forward looking statements under federal securities law. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward looking statements. In addition, any statements regarding the current and future impacts of the COVID-nineteen pandemic on our business and current and future impacts of actions that we have taken in response to the COVID-nineteen pandemic are forward looking statements and related to matters that are beyond our control and changing rapidly.
For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings on the SEC website and our Investor Relations website as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in the presentation. In addition, references will be made to non GAAP financial measures. Information regarding reconciliation of non GAAP to GAAP measures can be found in the presentation deck that is available on our Investor Relations website at investors. Upwork.com. I'll now turn it over to Hayden.
Thanks.
Good morning, and thank you all for joining us for our 1st Upwork Investor Day. We decided to host this day today because Upwork and work itself Have both changed significantly since our IPO in 2018. In the past 18 months since I became CEO, We have been innovating our products at a rapid clip as we expand from offering a single product, our crown jewel talent marketplace, To being a multi product company with offerings such as Project Catalog and TalentScout. We've also seen acceleration in our business with the last two quarters marking our strongest ever growth quarters as a public company. We've continued to add world class talent to Upwork, including the additions of several experienced leaders to our leadership team, several of whom you'll hear from today.
And in May, we announced that we are defining our The category as the work marketplace to better encapsulate the true breadth and depth of what we see happening on our platform every day. In addition to the changes that we ourselves have been making as we sprint towards the opportunity we see, The conditions in the market have been rapidly evolving as well. COVID has changed work forever And proven what we have always known to be true throughout our 20 year history as a pioneer in the industry. Old models of work were in need of and capable of change. The remote work experiment that companies undertook during COVID Shattered companies' fear of engaging remote talent.
When companies and professionals became more familiar with remote work And experienced the numerous benefits it offers, both parties became more receptive to freelancing. More and more companies incorporated freelancers into their teams And an increasing number of professionals gave freelancing a go. This mindset shift contributed significantly to the inflection in our growth last year. Companies and professionals aren't going back to the way they worked before COVID. Freelancing adoption will continue to accelerate and become more and more core to the way work gets Thanks.
Throughout the course of this presentation, you'll hear why we are uniquely positioned To succeed and to continue our growth, delivering durable returns with a 20% plus growth rate for many years to come. We are the world's work marketplace and we will continue to amplify our strengths as we execute our plan. Our unique strengths include our massive and growing TAM. We are pursuing a $1,300,000,000,000 market With secular trends accelerating in our favor. These trends include the rise of the creator economy, Increasing demands from professionals to have more autonomy and control over when, where and with whom they work And the competitive pressures on businesses everywhere around costs and the need for greater agility in their workforce.
2nd, we operate the world's largest work marketplace. Our 2020 GSV is 3.5 times larger than the next largest talent platform in our immediate market segment, and we have the largest global network of high quality freelancers. 3rd, we have numerous deep and expanding competitive moats, Including the network effects on the supply and demand sides of our work marketplace, which continue to expand as we grow. Also economies of scale where we have a tremendous data advantage leading us to produce better matching algorithms. We have numerous growth vectors for the business and are executing a disciplined strategy to unlock our growth potential over the near, Medium and long term, which I'll explain in greater detail later in the presentation.
And finally, we have an experienced world class leadership team that is highly committed to fulfilling our vision and inspiring on all cylinders. Our mission at Upwork is to create economic opportunity so people have better lives. I joined Upwork over 9 years ago, and I can't count the number of people I personally recruited into this company. But I can tell you that people tend to come to Upwork for our mission. They are thrilled to be part of a company that is changing work for the better And having a deeply positive impact on people's lives.
Early in the pandemic last year, I jumped on a video Call with a customer who has been a freelancer on our platform for more than 10 years to see how her business was doing. She was so thrilled to show me over Zoom That she was speaking to me from the beautiful home office in the house that Upwork built, as she called it. She proceeded to tell me how she had gone from earning $10 an hour, moonlighting as a writer in her early days on the platform while she still worked her full time job at a big publishing agency in New York. She ultimately left that job to work full time on Upwork earning over $100 an hour and running her own freelance agency. It's stories like these that motivate all of us every day.
And when we talk about our vision and our mission, we are thinking about freelancers Like her, our vision at Upwork is independent talent at the heart of every business, not on the margins, but at the heart of every business. Freelancers like the one I just mentioned are highly skilled and bring tremendous value doing core work that goes against Outdated Freelancer Stereotypes. We know it's time to challenge the traditional notions of what makes a workforce And how work gets done. And we aren't the only ones who have figured this out. As more and more companies have been discovering the power of freelancers, They're increasingly discovering that they can build and grow their businesses faster with greater efficiency by incorporating independent into more aspects of their operations.
Every company is trying to do more with less, and more companies are realizing That building a virtual talent bench of trusted highly skilled freelancers makes them more adaptable. They can instantaneously scale up and down their teams Benefiting from agility and cost efficiency to meet the changing demands of their businesses, and they can cost effectively augment employee teams with the needed resources to prevent their teams from burning out. Companies aren't the only ones benefiting from this work model. Professionals working as freelancers have discovered freelancing empowers them to work on their own terms, giving them more control over when, Where, with whom they work and what they work on. The advent of remote work combined with the adoption of online freelancing at greater scale Is why 2020 was a breakout year for freelancing and this is just the beginning.
The new way we work is defined by opportunity, not constraint Flexibility, not restricted by 4 office walls and trusted relationships, not archaic notions of work. With the fear of engaging with the remote talent shattered, the next big impediment to our growth is awareness. This is why we introduced the industry category, the work marketplace, last month and our laser focus on raising our brand awareness and educating the market About Upwork and the transformational solutions we offer. Because far too many companies still have no idea That freelancers can be massive contributors to their business, solve the skill gaps that they are struggling with, Bring cost efficiency and agility to their operations and open up entirely new frontiers for how they get business done. Customers on our platform, both freelancers and companies, are figuring this out already, but they are still in the minority As we know from the huge addressable market that still sits in front of us.
To illustrate how we're depicting this vision for the new world of work, I'd like to share a video.
Work is no longer a place we go. It's a thing we do together From any place at any time. Upwork is the world's work marketplace Where talented companies connect with independent talent, building the relationships that move work forward. A scrappy start up for an army of 1. The world's work marketplace is where a global There's only one way to go.
When you make an impact, when you find your freedom, when you make the impossible possible. Hey, everyone.
As we saw in the video, the freelancing genie is really not going back in the bottle. The new way to work is here to stay. We hear that from customers every single day and the data backs this up. According to the Staffing Industry Association's 2020 buyer survey, The percentage of organizations in the U. S.
With more than 1,000 workers that are using or considering using freelancers jumped approximately 10x Between 2015 2020 to 47%. And this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Adoption of the hybrid workforce, the workforce of full time employees and freelancers truly working programmatically at scale together, In 2020 has opened floodgates to organizations experimenting with new work models. They've realized That their organizations are capable of more change than they thought as they saw the pace of adaptation and digitization That they were able to accomplish last year was so rapid. We expect the pace of corporate experimentation to continue At an elevated rate for the next several years as organizations try to capitalize on the full value of new capabilities and insights that they gained, Grapple with employee demands for greater flexibility and work life balance and aggressively pursue new solutions for age old problems Like skill shortages, operational inefficiencies, the need for agility, all of which our work marketplace uniquely solves.
Against this shift in the work landscape, we believe our total addressable market opportunity has grown to 1,200,000,000,000 Given that we had $2,500,000,000 of gross services volume last year, we know that we have a ton of open road ahead of us. This is just one reason that we are in the very early stages of a massive opportunity. An analogy we look Too often for our own industry is the growth of cloud computing. Had you asked CTOs 10 years ago to place their on premise workloads in the cloud, They would have laughed at you. Today, most question you if you don't have your workloads in the cloud.
Similarly, we are in the early stages of the emergence of the hybrid Workforce. Today, this is a relative rarity in the corporate landscape. In the future, the hybrid workforce Of freelancers and employees working together will be the norm, and most will question you if you don't use freelancers. The early signs in our industry parallel the early signals of cloud adoption. Today, we see project based demand for freelancers on a case by case basis.
Our most successful customers, those spending 100 of 1,000 or 1,000,000 of dollars per year with us, have adopted programmatic usage of freelancers Or are fully building their businesses via Upwork. Like companies that have shifted to cloud first infrastructure, They have shifted to an Upwork First mindset where they start all work on Upwork First. Just like the role of the IT Manager and CTO evolved to encompass cloud infrastructure And cloud engineering teams with the advent of those technologies, our customers are reassessing the core function of their HR and talent roles. Some have even renamed their TA function from talent acquisition to talent access and established freelancer champions and dedicated freelance Program managers specifically tasked with managing Upwork freelancer programs at scale. TA teams being called talent access teams is a significant milestone, underscoring that TA teams are no longer limiting Underscoring that TA teams are no longer limiting hiring their roles to full time employees.
Their mandate has evolved to include finding freelancers. What's also unique and comparable about cloud computing And freelancing adoption is that they both enable organizations to have a more variable cost structure in the same way that Cloud Computing enables organizations to dial up and down their spend based on usage of their applications. Freelancers enable organizations to Scale up and down their teams depending on the needs of their businesses. With these signals all around us, We can envision the full arc of where the ecosystem is headed. Freelancers become part of the workforce infrastructure at companies across the globe As we move closer to achieving our full market potential.
Yes, we've seen freelancer adoption scale materially in 2020 early 2021. But we are still only in Phase 1 or 2 of the adoption curve. What excites me most is the tremendous amount of growth and ecosystem change that is still ahead of us. Upwork is faster, cheaper and better compared to the competition, which is exactly why cloud won over on premise solutions. The analogy is clear.
What AWS did in bringing workloads to the cloud, We are doing to transform workforces in the cloud. We're building the infrastructure that will transform and power the modular, Dynamic next generation workforce for companies around the world. We already have a huge head start over our competition And we know what it takes to unlock the tremendous market opportunity ahead of us. It takes more than being a staffing firm, A gig company or a talent network. To unlock the tremendous potential ahead requires being the work marketplace for the world, The always on solution for all companies of every size engaging freelancers at scale.
Winning as the world's work marketplace requires serving customers the way they want to be served and offering them different solutions that match the requirements Of the type of work they're trying to get done. For this reason, we have developed and will continue to innovate the most comprehensive work marketplace. Different project types and sizes necessitate different solutions for articulating requirements, matching freelancers and companies And getting the work done. We understand that, which is why we have focused so intensely On building out our work marketplaces capabilities, including the recent introductions of Project Catalog, Talent Scout and our ever expanding Enterprise Suite. By building out these capabilities, we are able to create an increasingly elegant and efficient acquisition and retention machine With different onboarding mechanisms tuned to specific work needs and a sticky engaging experience that customers grow with over time As they uncover the full power and breadth of how our platform can serve them.
The comprehensiveness of our platform is unmatched and delivers a complete ecosystem that empowers companies to Upwork any way they want. And our strong economics and rich customer insights give us advantages in investing and innovating new solutions that continually increase customer value and ensure they never have to leave our platform to build their business. Our product investments will continue to innovate our capabilities based on customer feedback and our own pioneering vision for this space. And our marketing machine will continue to build greater awareness and stronger conversion experiences to funnel customers into our Highly efficient work marketplace. Our Chief Product and Experience Officer, Sam Bright and our Senior Vice President of Marketing, Lars Esbjornson We'll expand on these strategies later today.
Our work marketplace has attracted a customer base whose scope and scale is unmatched. The freelancers on our work marketplace offer over 10,000 skills From software development to video and animation to search engine optimization. As more and more people are vaccinated, economies will further improve, Hiring will increase and the war for talent will rage on like never before. Incorporating freelancers into their teams will enable companies to fill critical skill gaps. 73% of the freelancers on our platform have college degrees and we also have 50 plus skill categories with $10,000,000 in GSV.
Our highest grossing skill is web development with customer service, web and mobile design, graphic editorial and presentation design, Mobile development and content and copywriting rounding out the top 6 with each surpassing $100,000,000 in GSV. And 40% of our clients have hired freelancers in multiple categories. Finally, nearly half of the Fortune 500 are Upwork clients. Our Senior Vice President of Sales, Eric Gilpin, will explain how we plan to convert the remaining half of Fortune 500 Companies to clients during his presentation today. With respect to regulatory questions that have emerged regarding AB5 and the recent Department of Labor announcement, One of the things I want to underscore is that freelancers on Upwork are not gig workers.
They are highly skilled professionals running their own businesses, Choosing whom they work with, when they work and how much to charge for their services. This fundamentally differentiates our work marketplace From Gig Economy Models. AB5 has not impacted our business. It's critical that policymakers Understand the different types of independent talent and we're excited to share our expertise and insights on the freelancer workforce With Secretary Walsh and his team. One of our key competitive moats is the virtuous cycle of our work marketplace.
We have thoughtfully removed friction at every step of the process for freelancers and companies. For example, Freelancers must do 3 things to build their businesses. They need to find work, do great work and get paid. We have made the business development and administrative tasks So dead simple on Upwork that freelancers on our work marketplace are able to increase their billable hours and focus more time and energy on what matters, Doing more of the work they love and growing their businesses. Clients on the other hand need to find highly skilled professionals, onboard them and pay them.
On Upwork, companies find the right person for the job faster, saving them time and money. This dynamic creates a virtuous cycle That increases our GSV and enables more cross selling. Highly skilled professionals do great work, which attracts more companies with great jobs, Which attracts more highly skilled professionals with more in demand skills and so on. That virtuous cycle generates numerous growth opportunities for Upwork. In the near term, in addition to our SMB business growth, we are focused on continuing to expand our enterprise business, Which provides a tremendous opportunity we are executing on.
We're also increasing our brand awareness by shining the floodlights on all the ways that companies can Upwork And further innovating our work marketplace from a single product to a true multiproduct line. You'll hear more about how we are capitalizing on each of those opportunities Later in the presentation from Eric, Sam and Lars. Midterm, we are excited by and see continued runway for further growth, Expanding our international reach even more and increasing the breadth and depth of our talent services and product integrations As we continue our transition from a single product to a multi product line, longer term, we believe there are opportunities for take rate expansion, And we will continue to be opportunistic about M and A to grow our work marketplace, which leads us to our audacious goal. We envision a world where every single company has freelancers at the heart of their businesses. We won't rest until we make that a reality.
We're not there yet. We have quite a ways to go. But we are confident this goal is achievable given the rapid rate of freelancing adoption over the last year, the countless benefits Freelancers and clients are receiving from this model and the retention rates we see with our customers. We have a winning multi pronged plan to capitalize on this tremendous opportunity. 1st, innovating the work marketplace.
We will continue to distinguish ourselves with a truly unmatched set of product capabilities to serve critical customer needs in the freelance economy. 2nd, we are transforming work by showcasing that freelancers and companies can work any way they want on Upwork and building A world renowned brand in the process. 3rd, in addition to nurturing the runway of our SMB customers, We are also relentlessly focused on winning the enterprise business. 4th, we are also building an extraordinary hybrid workforce comprised of Employees and freelancers. This is a competitive advantage that enables us to be more agile and innovative, scaling our teams up and down to meet the demands of our 5th, we are investing aggressively for long term value creation.
Our leadership team will I'll expand upon each of these points throughout the remainder of the presentation. Thank you again for joining us today. I would now like to hand off to Sam Bright, our Chief Product and Experience Officer.
Thanks, Hayden. Hi, my name is Sam Bright, and I joined the Upwork leadership team about 7 months ago as our Chief Product and Experience Officer. When I first met with and then got to know Hayden, Jeff, Lars, Eric, Brian and Zoe, I found a company whose mission resonated deeply with my values and a leadership team that is unified around realizing that mission. My initial excitement has only grown as I've settled in. If we take a step back, We have all been part of an accelerated work evolution for the past 20 years, and I believe that we are currently experiencing a step function change that will forever disrupt and transform the way we do work.
Upwork is playing a leading role in that evolution, And our product experience is core to enabling that change. To start, I would like to share with you some of my early reflections About the moment we're in, the changes this will bring and how our platform and product portfolio are uniquely suited to meet the related customer needs. Remote work has introduced a transformative moment. I've been a student of 2 sided marketplaces for almost a decade, And I've learned to recognize the telltale signs of when macro forces emerge that fundamentally change the rules of the game. We are exactly in such a moment.
For years now, technological advancements coupled with a greater desire for personalization And an increasingly blurred line between work life and personal life have led more and more highly skilled professionals to turn to remote work as their primary mode of working. Some forward looking companies began to learn, adapt and evolve to incorporate remote professionals as part of their teams, while others were more hesitant. Then came the pandemic, and overnight, whatever reservations we might have Had regarding the feasibility of remote work vanished. In fact, within many industries, Remote work provides such powerful benefits that it is quickly becoming a more widely accepted way that work gets done. But this once in a lifetime phenomenon has challenged other assumptions about work and opened the aperture beyond remote work Into the opportunity provided to clients and talent alike from hybrid workforces.
Upwork, as the world's work marketplace, Has a unique leadership role in helping companies and talent thrive in this moment and define what work in this new era will look like going forward. Hybrid workforce is the new MO. Around the world, as vaccinations offer hope We are moving towards a post pandemic state. Both clients and independent talent have clearly signaled that the hybrid workforce consisting of Full time employees and freelancers working in concert to get critical work done is here to stay. Evidence abounds that more and more companies are looking to leverage freelancers to address skill gaps, increase agility, Spur innovation and prevent burnout.
I can see a future where there will be an indiscernible difference Between the impact of the work delivered by full time employees and freelancers, and that opens up a world of possibilities that was previously not available. The hybrid workforce has risen above the rhetoric of augmentation or short term solutions. Instead, it is increasingly clear that the hybrid workforce is becoming a new operating model, and more and more businesses are recognizing that it is a strategic lever That they need to employ in order to remain competitive. Disrupting work is the next innovation frontier. It bears repeating that the work marketplace industry is a $1,300,000,000,000 total addressable market.
We know this is not lost on companies, talent, investors and entrepreneurs alike. We fully expect to see accelerated innovation in the space across the board. While other players may narrow in on verticalization of specific jobs, specific ways to work, Specific flavors of talent networks, even serve as constrained single category providers. We will lead By using the vibrancy of our scaled marketplace to our advantage as a one stop destination for all the different ways In which clients and freelancers want to engage with hybrid work. And we will innovate and launch new ways to work along the way.
Our ability to both lead and disrupt from a position of scale is one of our greatest competitive differentiators and strengths. In anticipation of the vast customer needs in this new way of work, we are transforming ourselves From a single product line company to a multi product line company, adding new product lines such as Project Catalog, TalentScout And solutions such as our enterprise suite, payroll, bring your own talent, direct contracts to our existing crown jewel talent marketplace product line. We believe these multiple entry points for clients and talent to work together will accelerate adoption of the hybrid workforce model and provide unique enduring value to our customers. The clients are already on our platform looking for talent to fulfill their needs, And we have the talent on our platform looking for work. Our focus is to show them all the ways they can connect And develop trusted long term relationships.
In addition to the benefits for customers, we believe this will allow us to unleash innovation at a faster pace, Craft richer customer experiences and surface new R and D channels for investing in the business. As Hayden alluded to earlier, we create a virtuous cycle for our customers and our business through our product experience. We've implemented a corresponding product strategy as reflected in 3 key priorities to guide how we operate, execute and organize. These priorities are to: 1, launch and lead the work marketplace. We will serve our clients with the multiple ways that they want to find and build their virtual Talent Bench and our talent with the multiple ways they want to earn, whether that is through posting or applying for jobs in the talent marketplace, One click models like Project Catalog, recruiting services for connecting clients with pre vetted talent such as TalentScout Or our full enterprise suite or other solutions like payroll, bring your own talent or direct contracts.
I'll go into more detail in a bit on several of these product lines. 2, scale our product fundamentals. We are also focused on the foundational investments that will accelerate product development velocity and enable each of our product lines to scale faster over time. Work in this area includes enhancing our mobile and messaging strategies, Improving our match capabilities and data standardization, continuous efforts to make our platform more safe and trusted, Upgrades to our payments capabilities and new initiatives in pricing, monetization and market design. 3, drive customer growth.
We will also drive end to end improvements throughout the funnel for clients, talent as well as enterprise customers. We're also exploring how strategic integrations can fuel growth and stickiness within the experience. If our vision at Upwork is independent talent at the heart of every business, what does that mean for the kind of product experience we will deliver? What must we build that will become synonymous with economic opportunities that result in better lives for our customers? The answer to those questions is what has become our product North Star, our long range product vision that is our internal rallying cry and operational gut check On what our customers expect from our platform in a world where the nature of work has fundamentally transformed.
That product vision It's for Upwork to be where the world wants to work. We aspire to be the place clients come to first to get work done. The place where talent comes to first to do work. The place that enables people to work exactly the way they want to work. The place that is known for a high quality product and customer experience, the place that independent talent come to build and to find community And the place that exemplifies that the best work is only done in an inclusive, equitable and empowering environment.
As Hayden shared, our goal is for Upwork to provide the most comprehensive work marketplace that empowers clients to reimagine who does the work and how it gets done And for talent to reimagine how they can work and who they can work with. Our core product is Talent Marketplace, where our platform enables hiring managers to post jobs and freelancers from all over the world can browse and apply to those jobs. We also have Project Catalog, a place where talent can now productize repeat projects with upfront pricing And clients can easily browse, discover and buy with just a few clicks. We recently introduced TalentSkep, a product line that connects clients with pre vetted expert talent selected from our platform by specialized Upwork recruiters. We are particularly excited to offer this option to our high specialization talent community and help them identify opportunities that match their skill sets.
Our Enterprise Suite platform offers end to end service to clients for hiring, managing programs and scaling talent that has been cleared for legal compliance. Through this suite, talent now has access to some of the world's most recognizable companies and opportunities to become important members of their teams. I want to take you on a visual tour through our product portfolio So you can see for yourself what we have to offer for clients and talent. So come take a look. Since the beginning of 2020, we have driven an intentional and focused effort to reinvest deeply into our product And increase the velocity of development and releases.
I want to highlight some of our accomplishments as a preview of what is to come. On our first product strategic priority of launching and leading the work marketplace. In 2020, We expanded our direct contract solution to offer freelancers comprehensive contract management services, including payment and escrow protection on both hourly and fixed price contracts. For a low fee, freelancers can use direct contracts with their off Upwork clients, knowing that they can leverage Upwork's suite of services for themselves and for their clients. In early 2020, The world started to adjust to the implications of the global pandemic.
The adoption of remote work accelerated and clients look to Upwork for help organizing and managing freelance talent. We invested in our Bring Your Own Talent solution, which allows clients to onboard Preexisting non Upwork freelancers and agencies onto our platform for billing, reporting, spend controls, worker classification and centralized contract management to fill these needs and create their own client specific work marketplaces. As we moved into the second half of twenty twenty, we continue to scale this product as we found traction with more clients opting to work with their talent on Upwork, resulting in a 37% year over year GSV growth rate and significant increased usage Of the Upwork platform in the subsequent months after someone first uses BYO. Then in late October, We released Project Catalog as a new product line to beta clients. And in early January 2021, we made Project Catalog widely available a month ahead of our previously announced schedule.
For new clients, Project Catalog represents an additional pathway to discover the array of work solutions offered by the World of Talent on Upwork. For freelancers, Project Catalog provides them with another avenue for clients to discover their work and potentially test out the working relationship in Project Catalog before engaging them through Talent Marketplace or Talent Scale. And the momentum is continuing here in Q2 with the rollout of another product line to general availability with the May launch of TalentSkep. To double click here, TalentSkep offers hiring managers hands on recruiting assistance Without the expensive price tag of traditional staffing, Upwork's specialized recruiters work with clients to identify their hiring and project goals And then tap into Upwork's vast network of highly skilled freelancers to deliver a short list of top tier talent ready to start working immediately. For freelancers on Upwork, Talent Scout offers flexibility, control and a powerful new way to earn.
With Talent Scout, The most highly skilled professionals can complete submissions to become pre vetted talent and spend less time looking through jobs And more time doing the work they love. Already, we are beginning to see how these new very early stage product lines Our driving improvements to visits, conversions and product engagement. We are also starting to see existing clients branch out And use the different product lines for different needs. On the talent side, the different product lines are attracting talent with brand new skill sets, while also increasing the earnings potential for all talent across the board. On our second product strategy Of scaling our product fundamentals.
We made continuous improvements to our search capabilities as well as our underlying data structure to accommodate the ever expanding categories of work and drive improvements in the rate of hires. In addition, we completed several Key integrations that meaningfully improved workflows within our product experience. In the first half of twenty twenty, we entered into a partnership with Citrix to enable clients to simply and securely provision and deprovision Upwork freelancers and agencies onto their corporate tools using Citrix's virtual desktop solution. Also in 2020, we launched our single sign on capabilities And reduced setup time for new clients by over 65%. We also announced a partnership with Zoom that integrates the company's video and voice communication tools into our work marketplace.
And in 2021, we completed payroll integration with Iwork Global for our onboarding experience. To level set, Upwork Payroll is a technology enabled service where Upwork serves as a connector between freelancers and employers of record providers. When using Upwork Payroll, a client gets all the benefits of the Upwork platform, such as billing, management, communication, reporting, etcetera. Along with the safety of proper classification, documentation and administration of withholding and benefits needed to comply with federal and state laws. The integration with Iwork Global reduced onboarding time from 9 days down to 3 days by providing clients with greater visibility into the onboarding process and eliminated operational overhead stemming from manual tasks and communications.
On our final product strategic priority of driving customer growth. In early 2020, we made modifications to our Connects program, The virtual tokens that are used to submit proposals for jobs in order to help the surge of new freelancers get hired quicker. We evolved this even further late last year with the launch of V3 of our Connects program, where we injected additional Connects Into the marketplace to help new talent get started and rewarded talent that submit targeted proposals with additional connects so they could apply to more jobs for free. We also introduced diversity badges to enable diverse talent to surface their certifications and the experience And help our enterprise clients build more inclusive teams. In the first half of twenty twenty one, We drove strong improvements in our SEO channel due to a systematic set of launches over the course of the year, including a new content management system to develop and deploy new high impact SEO landing pages more effectively.
As Lars will cover in more detail, We also expanded our SEM presence on mobile, increased our international reach and improved our bidding algorithm. This resulted in strong growth in both our U. S. And international client registrations. In closing, I am greatly excited by the momentum we've been building and the opportunities ahead of us to build and scale The products and experiences that make our work marketplace the place where the world wants to work, a world where every single company Has a hybrid workforce with freelancers that they've connected with through our work marketplace that are at the heart of their businesses.
Thank you. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to our SVP of Marketing, Lars Asbjornson.
Thank you, Sam. My name is Lars Sjornsson and I lead marketing at Upwork. Prior to joining Upwork 2 years ago, I spent several years with the world's Largest specialized staffing firm in marketing and business transformation leadership roles. And during this time, it became crystal clear that the staffing Customer needs were changing rapidly and hiring managers wanted much more transparency, flexibility and control Over the temporary hiring process than they were getting from traditional staffing partners. Traditional staffing firms could not evolve fast enough, Which opened up the doors to a new solution.
And we've all seen this movie before in other service industries such as travel, hospitality and transportation. Traditional staffing firms and talent platforms are in a race to deliver a best of both worlds hybrid work marketplace That addresses changing hiring manager needs of added flexibility, transparency and control. And the big question people have been asking me for years is, Well, traditional staffing firms integrate platform capabilities faster and better than platforms can integrate added service capabilities. And our traditional staffing firm is positioned to profitably address smaller transactional projects. And to me this is an easy question to answer.
Traditional staffing companies are not set up to deliver on these changing customer needs for a variety of reasons, including a lack of platform infrastructure and ecosystem, An operating model and scale that's tied to individual books of business not to firms and a transient talent pool versus independent workers having chosen this as their career. And this presents a massive opportunity to disrupt the traditional staffing firms by addressing their customer needs With our work marketplace value proposition versus why I left staffing and why I joined Upwork. Upwork will win this race Ann is in a unique position to capture this $1,300,000,000,000 TAM by providing a work marketplace that capitalizes on the changing world of work, Including traditional staffing firms and agencies. Our most successful clients view Upwork as core to their businesses By providing control and freedom around how work gets done. And the work marketplace delivers tremendous value in that it enables people to build powerful work relationships.
It provides access to a virtual talent bench of trusted independent professionals to clients and it provides access to a virtual roster of trusted clients And a pipeline of quality opportunities to our talent. And it enables businesses of any size to instantaneously scale up and down their teams, Realizing agility and cost efficiency to meet the changing demands of their businesses and prevent their teams from burning out. No other platforms or traditional staffing competitor is in a position to offer this value proposition, as it ultimately helps to drive greater business impact by removing boundaries For scale and growth for both clients and independent talent, all built upon the foundation of trusted relationships. COVID has given us an opening to win customer hearts and minds at a whole new scale, leading with PR and brand messages that redefined work and permanently shift our demand curve up. Specifically, COVID has shattered the fear of engaging remote talent instilled by the traditional contingent staffing industry To counter market challenges to their own industry.
Businesses now know they can grow with distributor talent And talent knows that they don't have to live in an expensive city to get a great job. And companies are realizing that not having a robust strategy And we empower companies within competitive advantage to scale up or down, leveraging a virtual talent bench on the Upwork work marketplace. We have an immediate and long term opportunity to drive growth by simply increasing awareness among the wider world of prospects and clients To begin to imagine what is possible through the many ways of Upwork and projects ranging in size from gig to big. This is why the introduction of our new industry category, the work marketplace, is so important to us. It enables us to increase Upwork awareness and showcase One of our biggest differentiators that prospective customers aren't yet familiar with today.
The unmatched comprehensiveness of our platform empowers companies and freelancers It is all about Upwork putting a stake in the ground, connecting the dots on all of our efforts and going to market in an amplified fashion With a single organizational focus to define and win the work marketplace category and capture our $1,300,000,000,000 TAM. With the Work Marketplace launch, we are tuning and investing our marketing and PR activities to build awareness around the full power All the strategic opportunities associated with accessing independent talent through Upwork. To explain how we will build awareness around our key differentiator from a marketing perspective, We aim to ensure that the lines between the types of work that can be done by full time employees and by independent talent start to blur And the fear of engaging remote talent, which the traditional staffing industry has reinforced, is replaced by a light bulb realization of the power and competitive advantage That comes with scaling up or down, leveraging a virtual talent bench of trusted talent relationships on Upwork for projects of any scale. To build overall brand awareness and drive incremental demand, we are investing $21,000,000 in brand media in 2021, which is a 56% increase year over year.
This includes national advertising, incremental investments in key local markets with strong growth potential And work marketplace brand activation programs, including targeted content and customer events throughout the year. We are also laser focused on building maximum Upwork awareness and interest among our target personas in our key vertical categories, Including Tech, Marketing Creative and Customer Service. We are investing significant resources to build out and deploy highly targeted programs in each vertical to drive demand, including vertically targeted brand advertising and media buys, vertical content and PR strategies, Strategic alliance partnerships, vertical events, sponsorships and influencer programs and brand partnerships with major brands. For example, we recently announced a partnership with Budweiser to champion America's diverse workforce by leveraging freelancers in Upwork to reimagine the design of limited edition Labor Day Canned Packaging. The brand awareness efforts will be buttressed by continuing to bolster our acquisition powerhouse, In particular, expanding the keyword universe in SEM and SEO.
We are building an acquisition powerhouse by investing in new tooling, talent and techniques that pave the way To more growth with strong unit economics as evidenced by our best ever performance in Q1 across the board. While COVID did provide tailwinds, much of the growth was driven by marketing program and product optimization developed over the past 2 years. This includes SEM automated bidding optimization including expanding international mobile opportunities and there's plenty of room for growth. SEO technical and content optimization and keyword expansion driven by our new product lines and category focus. Acquisition and onboarding improvements increased increasing conversion rates, while changing the mix to favor hour versus fixed price jobs, which results in higher GSV and increased awareness through brand campaigns and incremental investments in key markets.
We have launched our work marketplace marketing efforts to build awareness and interest around the many ways to Upwork and unlock a strategic client mindset. Given the breadth and depth of our work marketplace, we are also continuing to aggressively pursue new growth by expanding Our target category verticals and customer personas beyond tech, marketing creative and customer service. And as we continue to develop and optimize our marketing playbooks in our current key category verticals, we will extend these playbooks into new verticals on a continuous basis. So looking ahead at our key marketing strategies in more detail for 2021 and beyond. We're expanding our paid acquisition reach by broadening our SEM Keywords around new product lines such as Project Catalog and Talent Scout and new target category verticals.
We are growing our international presence via further keyword expansion Globally, and we're continuing to optimize SEM conversion, which opens up increased investment. We are expanding our display and social audiences, Leveraging the same LTV to CAC value based bidding approach that we have successfully implemented for SEM and shifting to new brand messaging across the channels We are also improving our conversion rates by matching intent to the best product line And improving the lifetime value model to more accurately predict the value of clients which we use for bidding and investment decisions. We are automating and scaling SEM and social through our proprietary bidding tool, which has proven to be an absolute game changer for Upwork, And we're increasing registration to start conversions through better client onboarding. We are aggressively supporting enterprise sales, land and expand efforts Through effective content marketing, PR, brand events and account based marketing. And lastly, we are optimizing our reactivation and retention efforts by advancing Automation and CRM Programs.
So I trust this I provided you with insight into how we are uniquely positioned Competitively differentiated to win. We have officially begun our work marketplace journey and we know there are years of innovation ahead starting with the product launch we are launching this year To fully realize our work marketplace vision. But we will win. And with that, I would like to transition over to our Senior Vice President of Sales, Eric Kopin. Thank
you.
Thank you, Lars. My name is Eric Gilpin and I lead our enterprise sales efforts and I'm excited to be here with all of you today. You just heard from Sam and Lars about our product and marketing efforts, and I want to share how the sales organization is addressing this tremendous market opportunity in front of us. Personally, I've spent the last 2 decades in the human capital industry and have been at the intersection of 3 major waves of disruption in talent acquisition. In the early 2000s, the first wave moved hiring managers from their local newspapers to the increased distribution opportunity of the Internet.
During that second wave, we saw new online communities and professional networks emerge, connecting businesses directly with specialized talent. And there's that 3rd wave that's cresting right now in front of us. This new shift is truly unlocking our mindset on engaging talent and what work will look like moving forward. Over the past few years, we've seen a growing desire among enterprise organizations to build more agile teams And increased flexibility in their talent supply chain. We launched our Upwork Enterprise offering in 2016 To better position ourselves to move upstream.
As we saw demand and momentum grow, we also started investing in building out our sales organization To support this larger customer opportunity and we've achieved a number of milestones to date. In 2017, we hosted our 1st annual Work Without Limits Summit, Bringing over 100 enterprise executives together to discuss the future of work. In that same year, we also surpassed 30,000 completed project from our enterprise customers and in 2018 achieving the milestone of 100 unique enterprise client accounts, At the same time, co launching the Microsoft 365 Freelancer Toolkit in partnership with Microsoft to help enterprise organizations Build freelance teams at scale. Following our 2018 IPO, we also launched Upwork Business to address the needs of smaller customers Who are also looking for ongoing flexible access to talent. After much data driven analysis focused on unit economics, It led us to the realization that we could acquire and support these types of customers on our business plan more efficiently through our self-service marketplace.
Since then, we've taken the learnings from our Upwork business strategy and narrowed our focus on driving execution and unit economics targeting enterprise clients with the highest lifetime value and return on investment. We've continued to make a number of key investments in the team, which has led to accelerated growth within our Our enterprise platform provides a powerful suite of management and compliance Tools that help enterprise organizations work more strategically and scale independent talent around the globe. As Sam alluded earlier, there are multiple ways To Upwork and all of those are included in our enterprise suite as well as a number of key features that are relevant to larger organizations. I'd like to cover a few of those with you. First, our enterprise billing solution, where we actually provide consolidated invoicing with net 30 terms and handle payments to talent on behalf of our clients.
We also have a bring your own talent capability that gives customers the ability to engage not only in demand talent on Upwork's Work Marketplace, But also their existing contingent workforce programs all in one place. We also provide program management for our enterprise customers to help them build, design and engage their hybrid workforce at scale. These include dedicated account managers to partner with organizations to make that they're getting the best return on their investment, program success managers to help onboard and train teams and users as they navigate our platform, As well as Upwork Professionals to help guide customers through the hiring process from writing job posts and screening talent to even kicking off and managing project delivery. We wrapped this up with worker classification and compliance services to help organizations protect against misclassification risk, While also reducing time to hire, ensuring those compliance governance requirements are met. We provide global payroll support, I handle the administration of the contract labor both domestically as well as in over 160 countries around the world.
And then finally, we also provide work protection to Effective organizations are extending their capabilities by leveraging a hybrid workforce to gain access to a diverse pool of specialized talent. We typically see organizations levering our enterprise platform in 4 key ways. 1st, project based work that includes specific projects or deliverables 2nd, staff augmentation to replace costly staffing firm dependencies they see in their business today. We also help them build strategic teams of flexible talent for high level initiatives that are also tied to business KPIs, As well as full managed services delivery where we can take on full scope of that work product delivery. Over the past 5 years, we've proven our ability to Close new enterprise customers as well as achieving product market fit across a number of industries and we see this reflected in the strong numbers today.
For example, we have very high spend retention in enterprise accounts at 130%, which signals not only customers are not only working with us and buying from us, They continue to come back for more and extend the categories of work that they put through our work platform. We also have 80 accounts today that are already Spending over $1,000,000 a year with Upwork, up from $67,000,000 in Q4. And on average, they're getting to that milestone within their 4th year of leveraging Upwork. We also see an average of 170 spending contracts per enterprise client every year and the average number of users is almost 20x That of our self-service marketplace customers today. And we're achieving customer density with already 200 organizations They're leveraging our enterprise solution today with strong clustering with technology companies, consumer packaged good organizations And really strong examples of our champions now selling on our behalf.
Customers ask me all the time like how does Upwork differ from traditional staffing models? The answer is quite a lot. Today's traditional staffing providers often fall short and they're ill equipped in helping customers navigate the evolving need for transparency, flexibility and control. For example, most traditional models are locally constrained with longer times to fill. They also feature low quality talent because they don't necessarily have the rich reviews based systems that we see on our work marketplace.
As a result, they have higher margins and operating costs that result in a very high price tag to their end customers. The most effective organizations are flexing these operations by using our flexible talent solutions like Enterprise or Upwork Enterprise in addition to those traditional talent providers such as staffing firms, Business Process Outsourcing Consultancies and even Vendor Management Systems. This hybrid approach provides strategic advantage that goes well beyond just cost savings, Including the ability to access a larger pool of high quality talent, scale teams to meet business demands, still achieving increased transparency and efficiencies for their business. Upwork Enterprise differentiates itself amongst all competition by providing a one stop shop solution that covers all of their digital talent needs all under one single login. It is clear that COVID-nineteen has accelerated digital transformation efforts for businesses of all sizes And digital transformation starts with access to skills and expertise, and we are seeing those strong early signs of what's to come as companies begin to rethink how work gets done.
Early adopters are shifting away from the concept of talent acquisition to focus instead on talent access. I'm excited to share three examples of how we see this trend taking shape today. First is Microsoft. Microsoft wanted to extend its mission To empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more to its own employees by offering quick access to skilled resources from around the world. They partnered with Upwork to build and scale a compliant on demand talent platform and program They gave its employees access to experts to help get more work done efficiently with improved results.
In 3 years, they've completed over 10,000 projects across 80 different skill categories. They've improved their time to engage talent by 50%, Still increasing productivity, freeing up time for their employees to accomplish more important work. I'd love to share a video from our partners at Microsoft.
Microsoft's mission is to enable every organization And every person on the planet to achieve more, how they can achieve more with the solutions that they are provided with.
My name is Leanne Scholtz. I'm Microsoft's 1st freelance program manager and I help Microsoft employees get their project We're done using freelancers. My team was really stretched in keeping pace with the amount of content that We needed to create. We needed skilled copywriters, technical writers. We asked ourselves how might we approach A new operating model in responsible and constructive way, while maintaining the quality that my team was Producing by us actually leaning in and trying to use freelancers and having that courage And being open to change was our unlock to better outcomes.
At the very beginning, people did not know what kind of Projects could be a good fit for freelance services. So we have to work with different groups and users to explain To them, how they can utilize the services the best. We decided that our approach has to be ethical and responsible so that we are engaging The freelance services economy in the right way.
We developed a program internally at Microsoft using Microsoft 365 tools to manage Our own internal freelance services program. When we spoke to other customers, we realized that they had similar needs. So we Similarly set up, manage and run their freelance services programs using Microsoft 365 product and Services. And then in addition to the toolkit, we also wanted to make it easy for customers To find great access to Azure experts. And so we partnered with Upwork to create a talent We have certified Microsoft Azure experts that are available on demand through Upwork.
Critical thing that we hear from our users is that They have been able to access very specialized skills on demand and that enabled them to deliver more, either scale up Or free up their times to focus on more strategic and core activities that they need to focus on.
I've worked in Microsoft and 20 years in total and I am amazed at the speed with which my team is now able to just Access talent, we have new projects popping up daily. And now my team often says to No problem, I'll get a freelancer and we'll get right on it and we see results in 24 to 48 hours. And several years ago, that same kind of project would have
Another great example is our partnership with Insight Software. Insight Software is a financial system software company based in Raleigh, North Carolina and they've been rapidly growing through M and A activity as well as organic growth. They needed to integrate, build and service all of these new technologies acquired through that activity, But at the same time, they were having to wait 75 to 90 days for internal full time employee resources to support, Which impeded the rollout of these acquired technologies to both their current and prospective customers. Through the adoption of Upwork Enterprises' work marketplace, the team has been able to independent talent to support all of their individual product lines, enabling them to better support and service their customers and still achieving significant cost savings. As a result, they had $2,300,000 in cost savings that they redeployed to more strategic initiatives to help accelerate business growth and grow the bottom line.
Today, they experienced 8 times faster fill rates across the organization from traditional models, reducing that from 90 days to 11 And are experiencing a 4.9 out of 5 star success rating with the talent they engage on Upwork. Flexera, an Illinois based software company, Also began to evolve how it looks at talent across their organization. And with their company's rapid growth, they knew that emerging areas, they didn't necessarily have the talent available In house to support that growth. On average, it took the company almost 60 days to hire full time employees, which obviously had a significant impact on productivity and go to market. So as a result, Flexera implemented a corporate wide initiative to work with more independent talent using Upwork Enterprise to fill these certain roles in a matter of days Versus Munz.
And in the end, they've been able to engage independent talent 24 times faster than before With double the speed around project turnaround at half the cost of their traditional hiring sources. These examples both with Microsoft And Insight Software and Flexera reinforce that we have the right winning strategy and really showcases what the future of work will look like. As I mentioned before, enterprise continues to be a compelling offering for our customers who want to do more with Upwork. This segment is showing very strong growth as we continue to win and scale new customers, achieving 74% year over year growth in the Q1 of 2021 alone. I'd like to dive a bit deeper into the enterprise opportunity as we see it moving forward.
We do believe there's a significant opportunity to grow the number of enterprise clients through our Sales efforts. Our sales team is currently focused on acquiring and growing clients that have more than 250 employees, as these clients have a high probability of Spending more than $1,000,000 each year on our platform. Starting just with U. S.-based companies, we've identified 51,000 prospects With more than 250 employees, they're a part of our marketing funnel. Of those 51,000, 8,000 reflect our ideal customer profile As they spend in multiple categories, have very strong spend retention potential and a lot of runway for growth as we continue to partner with them.
Which is really exciting is of those 8,000, 1600 are already spending in the self-service marketplace with nearly 70% of all of our enterprise new logos Coming from this bucket. And today, just over 200 of those 51,000 enterprise customers Against a global opportunity that is much larger than the 51,000 that we're targeting here in the United States. To help contextualize the magnitude of this opportunity, For each 1,000 enterprise customers we win and partner with, we would expect to add $1,000,000,000 to $2,000,000,000 of annual GSV in future years. To take advantage of this opportunity, we're building a world class sales organization with rich experience In Marketing and Tech Sales within the Staffing and Human Capital Industry. Our sales leadership team alone brings deep expertise and credibility Within this space, with over 50 years of human capital experience, we've seen as a team firsthand the tectonic shifts that have taken place over the last 2 decades, And we've been at the forefront of industrial change with the rise of the Internet and have worked with organizations around the world and implemented complex solutions To support our changes in our clients' businesses.
And while many of the people we have on the team today have a background in human capital, It's not a bottleneck to growth as we can continue to recruit top talent from these organizations as we scale our enterprise go to market. Speaking of our go to market, our team takes a very much an assembly line approach aligned with the customer journey of onboarding And growing their partnership with Upwork over time, and we divide these into both land and expand roles. Our land team is responsible for acquiring new accounts, targeting those organizations with more than 250 employees, while our expand team helps clients increase their usage and value that they receive from our platform. On the expand side of the business, we have account managers that manage a portfolio of 8 to 10 customers at any given time and their remit is to continue to drive expansion and revenue growth within those accounts. This land and expand strategy helps our clients ramp their usage of our platform, driving more value awareness and adoption over time.
Our account executives are hitting our long term target of 6 deals per rep per year with an attractive long term value or LTV with a sales cycle of 3 to 6 months. For every 15 reps, we could potentially add $100,000,000 in GSV per year in future years. Upwork is empowering organizations to access in demand talent on demand. And we've learned from our customers and have developed a solution for larger organizations to support hybrid workforces at scale. Today, nearly 50% of Fortune 500 organizations use Upwork, With the time to fill that's 5 times faster than traditional models.
Clients are achieving the speed and quality and also reporting an average cost savings of 30% to 50% Against traditional methods. I'd love to end with one more customer story. A global telecom provider, Digicel, Who is undergoing their own digital transformation efforts. Digicel partnered with Upwork Enterprise over a year ago to help us to help localize Creative content for their holiday campaigns. Based on that success, subsequently they partnered with us on the global relaunch of their entire brand Across 32 markets within the Caribbean, Central America and Oceania regions.
This is where the global depth and breadth of our work marketplace Kim DeBaron, I'd love to share that video with you now.
My name is Amy Grant, and I'm Head of Brand and Consumer at Digicel. So we are a global telecoms provider that are venturing into being more digital. We're Countries in Central America, Panama and El Salvador, and then we're in the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea and Fiji, Tonga, etcetera. We understand that we're in this point in time in which to be digital allows for different ways of Doing things quicker ways, more innovation leads to better ideas, leads to more agility. We as a company started to move We really began to become open to the idea of a global freelance network That allowed us to be exposed and work with more talent.
And then just from a digital standpoint, it really did dovetail with where We were going as a company in terms of digital transformation.
The first marketing project that we started at Digital Group with Upwork was our Christmas campaign in 2019. And we used Upwork to assist primarily with the localization of the creatives, and it was a major success.
It's been fantastic to be able to tap into a global resource and talent pool that all have Something to offer to the project that was at hand.
To give markets that much needed platform where they will see a high Range of cost benefits, they just put them in a position to have the autonomy to create the assets that they need And the assets that they want in quite a fast paced environment.
This past October, we actually relaunched our brand, Which was monumental undertaking. We relaunched our brand globally All had to be operating at the same time, launching at the same time, producing
assets
that in a coordinated fashion.
Head on heart, we could not have completed what we did under the conditions that we were working under Without the support that we have and had from the tariff pool from Upwork.
But looking And in retrospect, I feel like this was the best decision that we could have made as a company.
This is the future. This is digital. COVID has really forced us to pivot and work differently. It is easy. I think the thing
Again, thank you for your time today. And with that, I'll pass the mic over to Zoe Hart, Upwork's Chief People Officer.
My name is Zoe Hart, and I'm Upwork's Chief People Officer. You've spent the day learning about Upwork's business model, Our product vision and the success we're having as an organization. Now I'd like to fill you in on the secret weapon driving our performance, Our team and more specifically, how we've engineered our team for success with nearly 3 quarters of our workforce being freelancers. At Upwork, attracting and retaining top talent is how we deliver the work marketplace that sparks a global movement to reimagine work. We are committed to constructing a talent dense hybrid team that is diverse, inclusive, worldly, Highly productive and engaged and therefore capable of building a truly groundbreaking company and product.
Our talent philosophy is threefold. 1st, extraordinary talent isn't restricted by geography or worker status. 2nd, extraordinary teams aren't homogeneous. A greater diversity of thought and experiences Leads to superior team results. 3rd, independent talent should be at the heart of every business, Including ours.
As the leader in flexible talent solutions, we are uniquely positioned to serve as a role model for our customers. We take pride in building our company with independent talent and a diverse team at its very core, Not on the margins or as an afterthought. When I talk to people about Upwork, what surprises them the most Is that 3 quarters of our workforce is made up of independent talent. With over 2,000 team members In 86 countries around the world, we've intentionally designed our people processes to benefit from the increased agility And innovation that hybrid workforces deliver. We understand that to take on the world, we need a workforce of the world.
Our hybrid workforce consists of freelancers sourced through our work marketplace and corporate team members, Both of whom play critical roles in supporting Upwork and our customers. Every team within our organization is a hybrid team, From Engineering and Communications to Finance and Legal, because we deliver greater results By engaging with expert independent talent and because we use our work marketplace, we can leverage the many ways To engage talent compliantly from short term projects to long term relationships with trusted independent pros And ongoing employment relationship to our Upwork payroll solution. The benefits of this way of working are clear, And I'm going to walk you through how we've been able to achieve extraordinary business results by leveraging our own talent community to support our Top categories of work. The first benefit of having a hybrid workforce is that it gives you access to people who have specialized skills. Nobody knows this better than Upwork's own sales operations team, which extends their capabilities and efficiency Through a hybrid workforce model.
By engaging people with specific skills they don't have in house, yet don't need full time, The team has improved their productivity, increased their sprint velocity and gained budget flexibility, so they can get more out of each and every dollar. By working with outside talent to accomplish important tasks that must get done, but that perhaps are outside of the scope of a team's expertise, We give employees the space to focus on what they do best. We let them lean into their strengths and they're more productive, they're more engaged, they're more And they are happier at work. When I engage with members of my team and others in the company who are doing things at which they are awesome, I can feel it. It's just different when you're playing with someone who is in their sweet spot.
Some leaders If you're adding freelancers to their teams will dilute their company's culture. In our experience, that's unequivocally not the case. Hybrid teams can actually strengthen company culture while fostering increased diversity and inclusion. Freelancers are uniquely motivated to do their best work, which in turn inspires their teammates to perform at the very best of their abilities. As business owners, freelancers' success thrives on repeat and work and repeat clients.
They aim to do their best work every time To build and maintain strong relationships and gain an advantage in the job market. Leveraging hybrid teams Also diversifies the pool of talent from which you can draw, and that makes a tremendous difference when it comes to building an inclusive, flexible and efficient workforce. Take Upwork's customer support team for instance. With independent professionals making up 95% of that function And team members in 40 countries, we've been able to build a team which is global, multilingual And operates 20 fourseven in our top customers' markets. Having a diverse and inclusive customer facing team It's an important way to improve customer experience and to reinforce the message that all of Upwork's customers are valued equally and will receive the Same level of service.
These different perspectives make us stronger as a team and as a result, our company becomes stronger too. Our freelance agents embody Upwork's mission so deeply that they're as passionate as any employee when speaking to our customers. Many members of this freelance team have worked with us just as long as some of our most tenured corporate employees. Having a hybrid team backed by our values of respect and transparency enables us to improve the customer experience, While building a team that people are proud to be part of. Because our product and engineering team Can work with anyone from virtually anywhere, we have access to the best developers in the world.
They're talented professionals With advanced mathematics, data and engineering backgrounds located in places like Russia, Singapore, Toronto and Ukraine, who are often looking For opportunities beyond their local job markets. Even within the United States, there are many talented developers located far from major tech centers. By building a distributed team, not only do we get access to the best talent, we're able to scale our organization Across many time zones, spin up new tactical teams as the need arises and get things done fast, like launching project Catalog in only 3 months. Innovation is at the core of Upwork's agile workplace culture. Because freelancers work with many clients, they're drawing on a bank of experience that just can't be duplicated in house.
They're up for a new challenge, are willing to experiment and are proven in their fields. Not only the hybrid team spark new ideas, They accelerate our impact and allow us to capitalize on opportunities to meet customer needs. Here's an example. We revised more than 900 individual assets as part of our work marketplace launch and rebrand last month. We have full time employees on our creative team, but we added a freelance creative director, project managers, writers, motion and graphic designers to our team, All hired through our platform.
Not only did these team members push us to think bigger, stretch our aspirations and reimagine what was possible, For the industry category launch, which included updated messaging, a new brand identity system and a national ad campaign, Took us less than half the time it takes many organizations to accomplish. Last But not least, programmatically leveraging independent talent helps us stay ahead of workload issues and prevent burnout from taking hold. Upwork employees are empowered to use our platform to find highly skilled freelancers to incorporate into projects if they need to draw on additional resources. This virtual talent bench can be tapped again and again when workloads rise. For example, Long workdays during busy reporting periods are common amongst finance and accounting teams.
To ensure our Teams are operating sustainably while still meeting deadlines. Upwork's finance department has assembled a hybrid team made up of employees and independent Accounting professionals working from different locales. Technology allows the team to partition access, addressing any data security concerns. And working with talent across multiple time zones allows work to get done around the clock. By matching independent talent To deadline oriented work, the Upwork Finance team is able to get critical, high value work done in a sustainable manner, Which takes stress off full time employees to improve retention and morale.
Upwork's mission To create economic opportunities so people have better lives informs decisions at every level of our company, including how we approach environmental, Social and Governance Practices. We believe that in order to be a successful business, we must also be an accountable one. For Upwork, this accountability includes, among other things, improving our people processes to foster diversity, inclusion and belonging, As well as taking an active role in addressing the global climate crisis. The fundamental nature of our business enables remote work, Which substantially reduces greenhouse gas emissions by curtailing the need for transportation and taking vehicles off the road. Beyond the impacts of our unique business model, we must also be accountable for reducing our own emissions footprint.
In 2019, we achieved carbon neutrality by enabling team members to avoid over 1,000,000 commuting miles due to our distributed workforce model. And in 2020, we went a step further by committing to carbon neutrality and adopting a remote first work model Through which working remotely is now the default for nearly every team member moving forward. At Upwork, We change the way our world works, not just by living values, but by taking bold action. This is evident in our commitment to diversity, inclusion and belonging. We believe the ability to create a work marketplace that Serves the various needs of a global workforce, starts with how we embody this in our own culture from top to bottom.
We are committed to creating the most diverse and inclusive culture possible, which starts with our Board of Directors. 4 out of our 8 directors are women and 3 of our directors are from underrepresented communities. Our near term goal is for Upwork's Full time employee base to reflect gender, racial, caregiving and LGBT plus demographics in the U. S. Labor market.
We are currently working towards an immediate term goal for Upwork's corporate employee base to be proportionate With black representation within the U. S. Labor market, with an emphasis on hiring and developing black talent in tech, Management and leadership roles. We'll achieve this goal by bolstering our pipeline of prospective black talent And enhancing training around objective hiring, performance evaluation, promotion and other people processes. Representation data is a critical input in measuring our performance and building a truly inclusive workforce where Every employee is engaged and feels a sense of belonging.
For the first time, we included gender and racial ethnic breakdown For calendar year 2020, as informed by our EE01 data in our annual impact report, which you can find on the Investor Relations site. This year's annual impact report was also prepared consistent with the SASB reporting framework, and we are looking into adopting the TCFD The framework in the coming years. Last but not least, our Board of Directors regularly evaluates our corporate governance practices to ensure the best interest of our stockholders and to protect and grow stockholder value. In 2020, We amended our bylaws to implement both proxy access and majority voting for uncontested director elections. The Nominating and Governance Committee of the Board oversees all corporate social responsibility programs, including our ESG efforts.
So what's next for Upwork? Going forward, working remotely will be the default. While teams will also be able to come together in ways which are safe For highly intentional collaboration and socialization, we win by harnessing the power of our collective Distributed organization and working seamlessly without co location. As pioneers of the hybrid workforce model, We've designed our operations with freelancers at the core and will continue to be a beacon for organizations ready to Thank you. And I am pleased to pass the mic to Jeff McCombs, Upwork's Chief Financial Officer.
Thanks, Zoe, and thank you to everyone for joining today. I'm Jeff McCombs, CFO to Upwork, And I'm excited to share our financial highlights with you. We have a great story to tell. Zoe and the other members of the leadership team talked about our vision at Upwork, How we are changing the way work gets done by putting independent talent at the heart of every business. They also talked about how we're bringing that vision to life for clients and Talent as well as within Upwork itself.
Now I'd like to explain how our vision for the future of work Will translate into significant growth for the company and strong financial performance over the long term. There are four key reasons for our confidence in the future performance of the business. First, we have a strong financial foundation based on our cash flow generation and balance sheet. 2nd, We have an attractive business model that encourages customers to establish lasting relationships on Upwork, resulting in strong client retention And high GSV predictability. 3rd, we continue to see strong client demand leading to growth of active clients And GSV proactive client.
Finally, we have a compelling margin structure. First, let's talk briefly about our financial position. On an annual basis, we have been adjusted EBITDA positive since 2018 and have seen this figure rise considerably over that time. Upwork has a solid balance sheet with $170,000,000 in cash and marketable securities and debt of just $9,000,000 as of Q1 2021. Now let's dive into Upwork's business model.
Our business model is attractive to a wide range of clients and independent professionals Because it's flexible enough to meet virtually any need. With regard to freelancers, we offer 3 service plans, including Freelancer Basic, Freelancer Plus and an agency plus option for freelancers who wish to collaborate with other freelancers In order to scale their business and take on larger projects. With all of our talent plans, freelancers pay a tiered service fee Starting at 20% of their earnings, reducing to 10% 5% as they build a relationship and continue working with a given client. When they are working with our enterprise clients, freelancers pay flat 10%. There's also a modest subscription fee for our Freelancer Plus and Agency Plus plans.
Now switching gears to our client offerings. Upwork offers our clients 4 plans from which to choose. With our basic and plus plans, we provide easy avenues to entry. For customers with greater needs, we offer our enterprise plans, Through which we provide enhanced support and recruiting solutions, access to expert vetted talent, custom reporting and compliance services. The variety of our 4 client plan offerings allows businesses of all sizes from solo entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 Companies To come to Upwork and find the model that works best for them.
Organizations usually start on our no subscription basic plan Or our $50 a month plus plan. Then as their needs grow, particularly for larger organizations, they can move up to our enterprise offerings, which have higher subscription and client fees. Virtually all of our clients that spend over $100,000 per year with us Started with our no subscription basic plan or our low subscription plus plan. The combination of the strong value proposition that our work marketplace delivers In concert with the attractiveness and flexibility of these client plans tends to lead customers that try Upwork To stick around and continue spending on the platform, that provides us good visibility into future GSV. This can be seen in our client spend retention or CSR rates, which are clearly compelling.
Over the last This year CSR has consistently ranged between 94% 108%. Over the past 7 months, We have seen CSR rates rapidly accelerate from 100% to 109% as of April 2021, The highest level in the last 6 years. The high degree of predictability in our GSV is clearly visible when looking not only at CSR, But also the performance of annual cohorts. As you can see here, clients acquired in previous years continue to contribute Substantially to spend in more recent periods, supporting the growth and long term sustainability of the business. Additionally, their spend levels as a percentage of prior periods is fairly consistent, which is also reflected in our CSR rates.
While we are looking at the performance of these annual cohorts, I wanted to highlight the acceleration in GSV from newly acquired customers. This chart shows the spend from newly acquired clients in the year they were acquired. Essentially, we're taking the top Part of each of the stacked bars on the prior slide and isolating them here. You can see that in 2020, GSV from customers acquired in year grew 37% over the GSV in 2019 from clients acquired in that year. This is a rapid acceleration from the 6% we saw in 2019 as well as the 16% 10% we saw in 2018 2017 respectively.
Now let's look at a similar cohort analysis, but from a quarterly perspective rather than annual. Once again, the consistency in spend is very clear. Quarterly spend from each cohort of clients acquired in a given quarter is highest in the first In 2nd quarters, then dropped slightly in the 3rd quarter due to natural churn. In general, spend remains fairly constant thereafter. In fact, after a year or more in Upwork, client cohorts continue to spend 60% or more Of what they spent in their very first quarter on our platform.
Now let's 0 in again on the spend from clients acquired in a given quarter. You can see the significant acceleration in year over year growth from just 2% in Q1 2020 To 73% in Q1 2021. There is a clear change in customer behavior that began in Q2 2020, When businesses were forced to deal with the practical realities of COVID and began to realize that despite any previous apprehension to utilizing remote talent, They could in fact build and grow their businesses with freelancers. This has resulted in a broad based lift in GSV across all client cohorts, Including those we acquired years before the start of the pandemic. For example, older cohorts are spending 5% more on a quarter over quarter basis Than they were historically and new cohorts are spending over 10% more in their Q2 compared to new cohorts historically.
As the change in these metrics suggest, we believe companies have a fundamentally different view of utilizing remote freelancers today Than they did before COVID and that their increased use of independent talent will be permanent. Our clients are telling us as much. As you can see here in the quote from Kevin Scott, Head of Technology at PGA of America. In an effort to further validate this hypothesis, we have looked at client acquisition and retention in countries where COVID cases have been dramatically reduced, Such as Australia and the UK. While the level of our business activity in these countries decreased a bit shortly after COVID cases peaked, It then accelerated in subsequent months to regain or overtake peak levels.
This trend also seems to be playing out in the U. S. While the data is limited to just a few countries and cannot be taken as conclusive, we feel encouraged that it demonstrates the durability of the change in our clients' behavior. Before moving on to the next section, it's worth repeating what all of the charts I just walked you through clearly show That the majority of spend on our platform is from retained clients and that the amount of business they conduct on Upwork is accelerating. They value the relationships they establish with independent talent on our work marketplace and remain extremely satisfied with their Upwork experience.
Now let's shift to client demand, which is very strong. The continued and strengthening demand for Upwork Services That we have talked about throughout the day is producing solid top line growth for the business. Year over year GSP growth has accelerated every quarter since Q2 2020, Increasing from 12% then to 41% in Q1, 2021. This growth and acceleration has been driven most significantly By growth in active clients. Here, we're showing active clients as defined as those who spent over the trailing 12 months.
You can see that year over year growth has accelerated every quarter since Q1 2020 when it was 7% to 25% in Q1 2021. As of the end of Q1, we had approximately 680,000 active clients. These clients spend approximately $4,000 per year on Upwork. Since Q2 2020, we have seen significant growth in GSV per active client for both retained and newly acquired clients. Given client acquisition has been so strong, combined with the fact that clients increase their spend over time, we have the interesting dynamic that our overall growth in average GSV The per active client does not appear on 1st blush to be growing as strongly as these trends clearly illustrated it.
For example, average GSV per active client across all clients, including both retained and newly acquired, Was only up 2% year over year as of Q1 2021. But when we split all clients Into retained clients and newly acquired clients, the underlying strength is obvious, With GSV per client for each of these segments growing at approximately 10% year over year. The increase in GSV proactive clients and our strong retention rates suggest newer customers will prove even more valuable Over their lifetime than customers we acquired previously. Now let's take a look at our core clients. Among our approximately 680,000 active clients, over 150,000 are what we consider core clients.
They have spent in excess of $5,000 with us over their lifetime and have spent in the last year. These clients account for more than 80% of our GSV. Core clients grew 18% in Q1 2021 and their growth has been accelerating since Q2 2020. Now let's drill into a subset of these core clients and take a look at our high value clients, which we define as those who Spent more than $100,000 with us in the past 12 months. As of Q1, 2021, we had over 3,400 of these high value clients And they grew 27% year over year.
Growth of high value clients has accelerated over the last couple of years. These clients represent a phenomenal source of opportunity for our sales team to engage with and increase annual spend. This overall look of our client segments over the last handful of slides from active to core to high value illustrates the depth And breadth of customer engagements on Upwork. It also helps to highlight how companies often progress from trial users To repeat customers to high value clients as they gain a greater understanding of all that is possible on our work marketplace And the undeniable benefits it provides when building and growing their businesses. A quick note on the charts I've just discussed.
We will be changing the metrics we publicly disclose in order to provide better insight into our business and help you understand how it is performing. In general, on a quarterly basis going forward, we will be providing active clients and GSV per active client and we will be deprecating CSR and core clients after Q2 2021. You will see a summary of all the changes in the appendix of this presentation, including when they will take Now let's take a look at our client growth, investment approach and unit economics. Most of our client growth is organic or from sources other than performance marketing. Year over year growth of these clients Has accelerated since Q1 2020 and reached 56% in Q1 2021.
We see this as evidence of the progress we are making In strengthening Upwork's brand recognition, the quality and relevance of our product and the fundamental shift that is taking place in the way that businesses staff their teams And how they think about utilizing remote freelancing. At the same time, we've seen even greater acceleration with performance marketing, Also starting in Q1 2020, new clients from paid marketing were up 111% in Q1 2021. Strong execution on the marketing front has prompted us to increase our investments in paid acquisition channels. In Q1 2021, We were able to grow our marketing investment by 50% year over year. The significant efficiencies we have driven from an LTV to CAC perspective Have enabled us to increase investments this quickly, and we will continue to explore opportunities to further increase marketing investments.
Paid acquisition is a good example of how we make investment decisions. Our approach to any investment decision is rooted in economic value added or EVA. What that means to us is that we strive to invest as much as possible in opportunities where our internal rate of return is comfortably in excess of our weighted average cost of capital. We view driving growth against these guardrails as our top priority. And while EBITDA is important, it is secondary to this.
In other words, as we find additional investment opportunities to drive EVA, we will do so, Even if it brings down our EBITDA in the short run, because in the long run, this will maximize the value of the business. Let me hit a few of the details in terms of how we think about this. First, because of the strong retention curves of our clients, When looking at the returns from our investments, we generally look at a 5 year revenue attribution window. 2nd, We think of the payback period as a risk management constraint. So in general, we strive to be paid back in no more than 3 years.
Finally, while achieving a specific LTV to CAC is not the primary goal, given our strong retention curves, Target LTV to CAC is often close to 3 times. Here are examples of what our unit economics look like for both performance marketing and our sales team. In each example, we are looking at the economics Per acquired client, meaning these numbers reflect churn of some portion of the cohort of clients acquired. The revenue and growth of an average single account that stays with us is obviously higher than what you see here. A few things to call out.
First, the average GSV per account for clients acquired by our sales team is several orders of magnitude larger than those acquired by our performance marketing efforts. 2nd, the contribution margin excluding CAC is lower for accounts acquired by our sales team, which largely reflects the higher level of support we provide these accounts. 3rd, despite the two differences I just noted, Our investment approach is very similar, with target returns greater than 25%, well in excess of our weighted average cost of capital And payback occurring within 3 years. Because of our organic client growth and our ability to drive further economic value through investments In sales and marketing, we are confident in our belief that we can grow the business at 20% or more per year for many years to come. When we decompose the drivers of this long term growth rate, we break it down between Marketplace and Managed Services.
For Marketplace, We believe active clients will grow between 10% 20% per year and GSV per active client will grow between 0% 10%, Resulting in marketplace GSV growth of approximately 20%. We believe we will be able to grow take rate over the long term, Which will result in revenue growing at a faster rate than GSV. And we forecast our Managed Services business, Which represents approximately 1% of our GSV and less than 10% of our revenue will grow to approximately 10% per year. We have ambitious but achievable goals for the long term growth of clients, spend, take rate and revenue. If we execute against these targets, Upwork will achieve at least $1,000,000,000 in revenue in 2025.
Now I want to shift gears and talk about the 4th reason for our long term optimism, our compelling margin structure opportunity. Let's start with our gross margin, which is high and growing. In the long term, we believe we'll be able to achieve a total gross margin Of 80% to 85%, which will be driven by 2 factors. 1st, leverage in payments, hosting and customer support costs We'll increase marketplace gross margin over time. And second, mix shift of marketplace revenue and managed services revenue.
Because revenue from marketplace, which is a higher gross margin, is growing faster than managed services, we expect this will further increase total gross margin over time. You can see that since 2018, marketplace gross margins have expanded by 3% from 75% to 78% And total gross margins have expanded by even more, 5% from 68% in 2018 to 73% in Q1 2021 due to the added benefit of the mix shift. Now let's move to operating expenses. It's important to note that our market leading position Provides us the opportunity to invest in R and D at high levels, further extending our competitive moats. Given the size of the opportunity in front of us, We will continue to invest heavily in R and D, which is why we don't call for much margin improvement here.
We are targeting R and D to be 15% to 20% of revenue. With respect to sales and marketing, we will continue to invest aggressively and sensibly, as I discussed in our investment approach. Our goal is to drive growth and maximize economic value added. Over the long run, we would imagine this settles in at a 20% to 25% of Revenue Range, but we are not solving for that at this point in time. In G and A, we will continue to drive leverage And are targeting 4 to 6 points of margin improvement, resulting in G and A being 8% to 10% of revenue.
Transaction losses are already fairly efficient. All in all, this is a business that can deliver extremely healthy EBITDA margins in the 30% to 35% range. Everything I've walked you through today illustrates why we feel confident in the business and why we believe it is well within our reach To achieve at least $1,000,000,000 in revenue by 2025. Given changing clients and talent behavior, Our vision of what's ahead for Upwork and our strategy to win, we see significant opportunity for sustainable long term growth With attractive margins. Thank you for your time and attention today.
And now I'll pass it back to Hayden to close our presentation.
Thanks, Jeff. Throughout the course of the day, you've heard about how the world of work has changed in our favor and learned about our winning Strategy for continuing to lead our industry as the world's work marketplace, delivering durable returns with a 20% plus growth rate for many years to come. We have a massive TAM with secular tailwinds. We operate the world's work marketplace with unmatched breadth and depth, surrounded by deep and expanding competitive moats with numerous growth opportunities and a world class leadership team firing on all cylinders. We will continue to execute aggressively, moving towards our goal of 100% of businesses having freelancers on their teams in the future.
Thank you all again for joining us today. We'll now take questions.
Thank you for joining our Q and A session. We'll be taking questions from our covering analysts. Our first question comes from the line of Nick Jones with Citi. Nick?
Great. Thanks For putting this on and thanks for taking the questions. I'll keep, I guess, the first one to kind of the $1,000,000,000 target by 2025. How should we be thinking about? Is that kind of the low bar from here?
And then as we think about revenue growth and maybe in the context of How is Upwork's platform positioned to, I guess, react with inflation? Will prices go up From sellers, and will buyers be willing to take that on? I guess, just any context on kind of a longer term target? And then, I guess potentially any inflation concerns. Thanks.
Hey, we can't hear you.
Can you
hear me
now, Jeff?
Yes.
Awesome. So Nick, thank you so much for the question. Thanks for joining today. We're definitely excited about answering your questions. I'd say the $1,000,000,000 goal for 2025 is definitely not in our view a low bar.
It is really consistent with what we've been saying all along around a 20% plus growth target for this business, which is consistent and durable as we go after the $1,000,000,000,000 plus TAM that we see ahead of us. So Certainly, this is something that we're executing strongly against. We've had a tremendous last couple of quarters and today discussed the strategy we have for continuing to unlock That, Tam, going forward. In terms of inflation, I'd say, we have seen consistently that as inflation happens over the last years, Presenters are able to increase their prices due to that and also due to their showcasing their skills and ability on their Platform typically they're able to increase their pricing actually well ahead of inflation and they increase their rates as they are able to prove their Skills and abilities and negotiate those rates with clients. So that's part of kind of how the ecosystem on the platform evolves.
That's Kind of baked into the model and typically that's not a gating factor in any way for clients engaging with talent on the platform.
Your next question comes from Brent Thill at Jefferies.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the time. Hamed, one of the questions we get is we go into A more back to normal environment, how you see the demand environment changing? Does anything is anything showing up And what you've seen so far in the countries that have been vaccinated, have you seen any change in demand? Just curious, Hi, Leland.
If you can also speak to the international opportunity, obviously, a lot of these countries are lagging in terms of vaccinations, but as they come back online, are you starting to your expectations for the revenue engines to kick on outside the U. S? Thanks.
Yes. Brent, I think what's so exciting is what we saw with the remote work experiment that happened over the past year plus It is companies really figured out that they could engage with remote talent and that was true kind of regardless of where they were. Certainly, so many companies were working remotely themselves. And as we've talked to customers, even as they're reopening their offices, They really want to retain the gains that they have found around remote work irrespective of their own locations and irrespective of where they and their teams are, They now know they can engage remote talent really successfully. And so the gains that they've picked up over the past year of figuring out this new model Really are sticky.
And in fact, as we've surveyed customers who increased engagements with remote talent over the past year plus, 79% have said those increases in engaging freelancers will be permanent. So what we've seen both qualitatively as we talk Customers as well as in the data as we've looked at markets that have had kind of faster vaccinations or recession of COVID Ahead of other markets has been really encouraging in the sense that the world has just changed and people have realized the benefits Around speed, around agility, around access to skills, the fact that they no longer are constrained to the talent in their own backyards, And that this model really does work for them in solving age old problems that they had in their businesses in new ways. So we are very confident that even as things move forward and customers continue to experiment with hybrid models For reopening their offices, they are going to continue to engage with remote talent on our platform at a much Higher level than what we saw prior to the pandemic and that these remote teams that they have built are going to be extremely sticky. They want to continue to work with these people post pandemic.
So we're very confident about the durability of this model based on qualitative and quantitative indicators that we have. In terms of international, our focus right now is continuing to be the market leader that we are both in the U. S. And globally, which is our current position and something that we're very proud of and going to continue to extend. We have so much runway in the U.
S. To continue to market here, but So internationally where we've seen so much success over the past few quarters with our marketing programs unlocking New keyword expansion, new programs marketing channels that have been so successful with English language Customers in markets globally. So that has been kind of the first frontier for us. We've run down some of background from our marketing campaigns and acquisition performance, but still have a lot more ground we can cover there. So we've had success.
We're going to continue to grow internationally, focused on English language customers that we can reach globally as the first horizon and then there is the And horizon of more localization, local language customization, more local currency work that we can do
Our next question comes from Ron Josey at JMP Securities.
Thanks for taking the question and what a great day. Thank you for the time. I wanted to ask two questions, please. Hayden, I think you mentioned take rate expansion as a potential longer term opportunity. Can you just talk a little bit more on how you see Take rates evolving over time.
And Jeff, you laid out some longer term growth targets. Obviously, we know the $1,000,000,000 in 2025, but wonder can you define that longer term for the growth in cost targets, is that 2025 well or a little bit longer? Thank you.
Yes. So Ron, as we think about our priorities, the first and foremost priority for us is to continue to scale our business At a GSV level against that $1,000,000,000,000 plus market opportunity. So we want to get the coverage, the brand awareness and the adoption broadly in the market Using our work marketplace strategy to make sure that we're really covering the customers and the use cases to get them in the door and adopting our model. That's priority number 1. But certainly, we know there are really many opportunities to expand our take rate through vehicles such as our diverse Product lines such as TalentScout, Catalog and the Enterprise Suite really do each come with different monetization characteristics as an example, Where they have higher take rates, customer sets who potentially are willing to pay premium prices for premium offerings.
So those are examples of ways that over time you can see us anticipating and beginning to build in vehicles for Increasing our take rate in the future, however, that is not the near term goal or the near term priority. Currently, we're expecting more or less a Stable take rate in the near term. But over time, as we evolve our product set and as we look at different monetization, pricing letters and the evolution of our product suite, That does really lend itself to expanding take rates.
With respect to margin structure, We don't have a specific time frame on them. What we're executing against is making sure that we drive leverage in our cost of revenue and G and A functions over time. With respect to product development, we want to continue to execute on building the best platform For the work marketplace for our clients and freelancers. And in sales marketing, we're going to look for every opportunity we can to invest in attractive unit economics. So while we don't have a specific time frame on there, we will be driving improvements on all of those different areas.
But we wanted to note that the sales and marketing, we will look for, we want to increase the investments In support of our approach of driving economic value added, and we'll see how those play out over time. Thanks, Ron.
Thanks, Ron. Our next question comes from Marvin Fong at BTIG.
Great. Thanks, Evan. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for holding this event, very informative. My question is, I just like to drill down a little bit more on that prospect funnel for enterprise that was in Eric's section.
A bit of a multipart question here. So, but how many of those 8,000 prospects that you identified as kind of Sitting your profile, are you actually actively devoting sales force resources to and making contact with? And then help us understand what are these companies using as their solution already? Are they using a staffing company? Are they managing freelancers themselves through an SMS or are they even using one of your online competitors?
That'd be great. And then the last part is just It seemed like you're mostly focused on in terms of enterprise domestically. Perhaps you could just talk about The international opportunity and when you might start devoting more sales force resources there, that'd be great. Thank you so much.
Yes. Thanks, Marvin. So we definitely engage with those prospects through a variety of sales related and marketing related touch points. So we have, depending on the client profile, different marketing channels that are tailored to reaching out to those customers. So In some cases, there's kind of ABM type resources.
In some cases, there's sales engagement. In some cases, Some of those leads may be active actually on our self-service marketplace already and engaging in activity that then our sales team is going out and actually We coming over the top and saying, hey, can we upgrade you, can we help you scale, etcetera, etcetera. So it really it's hard to characterize In a simple way, which percentage of those folks are getting what type of touch, but we're very active and frankly have so much depth there in terms of The size and characteristics of that funnel that we're still running down and just really starting to scratch the surface on that opportunity And the changes that we made in November of last year in terms of reorienting the team around a much tighter ideal customer profile And a set of sales activities to really go after those customer accounts that we felt had the best attributes to really reach that $1,000,000 plus Spend level with us have really been paying the dividends as the team has gotten laser focused on the right types of customers that really do perform for us and have a great fit with Our offering right now.
So it's been a positive story there as the team has been executing so well and that's where we see so much runway ahead for us to continue to open up That opportunity over coming quarters years as we expand the sales team and really continue to build on the successes. In terms of the other parts of your question, I think there was more about international sales. And I'd say right now, as Eric alluded to, We're very focused on U. S.-based accounts, although many of those companies are multinational and they're asking us for more Global support and time zone support and things like that globally even to support existing programs. So we're constantly looking at when will be the right time to do that.
Our current plans are to focus still on the U. S, but we know there is a horizon of growth for us globally as well and we will get to that as it makes sense. So That is in the future for us, although today we still feel there's so much opportunity with our U. S.-based customers, that is the primary focus.
And while Evan is coming back, I'll just add to that that we're excited that we've proven out that we can achieve the new economics of our reps and hit the target numbers that we want. And now our focus is on scaling that. And we'll start focusing on the U. S. And I think it's the right time to expand internationally.
Yes. And I think, Marvin, you had asked more about what are the alternatives that they're using, FMSs, Staffing Solutions, etcetera. And I'd say it really does kind of run the gamut. Certainly, the larger enterprise customers You know, are typically using 1 or more staffing firms. We do see some of them using FMSs, although that's not necessarily the common use case.
Typically, when we come in, we're sitting side by side with whatever other solutions they may have because we're such a differentiated offering. No one really can touch us in terms of The quality of the talent, the speed of the engagement that we can get off the ground, often the cost savings also are just mind blowing for customers in terms of The direct to talent model and how differentiated that is both in terms of cost savings, but also in terms of the control that they get over these relationships, the fact they get to build direct Relationships with the end talent working on their programs, they love that. They love being able to work directly with folks versus going through an intermediary. So regardless of whichever solutions they may already have in house, they really find that Upwork is highly differentiated and something that they want to run side by side and then progressively End up shifting more and more spend from whatever those incumbent solutions may be over to Upwork And or start doing net new things as you heard from Lance Galtz from Microsoft and others in some of the videos from customers today, Sometimes their teams are just so overloaded with inbound requests and video production apps and things like that, that they have this huge backlog.
No one in the organization is servicing those things today. They have literally no alternative for how to get that stuff done as quickly as they need. And that's where they're building these teams programmatically of freelance talent to literally get done things that previously they thought it would take months For years before they could kind of burn through that backlog or get that work done. And so that's where it's also just such a transformational solution when they realize there's an alternative To the status quo that is just totally different. So it's kind of all of the above in terms of how we fit within those companies.
Thanks, Marvin. Our next question comes from Rohit Kulkarni with MKM Partners.
Great.
Thanks, guys. Great presentation so far. As in a couple of ones, one is on products And second is on competitive landscape, as in you have launched a lot of new products over the last 6, 9, 12 months, catalog, talent scout, so on and so forth. Can you just kind of in your mind, which one of them are the most exciting and new initiatives as in especially from what you've seen so far, which Funds are unlocking new and completely incremental parts of demand that you probably did not have access to previously. And then just to touch upon competitive landscape, particularly with what you're seeing with any gig marketplaces that are Kind of specific category focused or any consolidation that you may have seen in kind of hiring kind of job listing places?
Is there any development that you're keeping close eye on or any comments on that?
Yes. So Rohit, to your first question around the different product innovations, I would say, we're really launching The minimum suite of products to serve the maximum number of customer needs and so picking any one of them as a favorite would be Kind of underselling the very specific rationale we've had for launching each one of those products because our strategy of Building the work marketplace is really around having exactly the right number of products that meet exactly the demand that we see With customers in terms of the use cases and the workflows that they absolutely need to be served with to really execute their work well. So with the example of Project Catalog, there's a clear use case of small, fast transactional projects where we felt there was really An opportunity to let customers come in and discover and transact very rapidly around those types of use cases That we're a great discovering and testing ground for clients, especially those new to the freelance ecosystem, Get their feet wet, get a project done quickly and then potentially graduate to some of the other offerings that we have that they would have gotten I'm comfortable with that initial model and then can kind of move on to some of the higher lifetime value offerings that we have.
In the case of TalentScout, A very different use case where this is for people who really are looking for someone that's hand vetted, highly kind of screened and scrutinized already. And we're serving them with that short list of maybe 3 options and they can choose between those options for much longer, larger engagement where the spend is going to be Probably 10x or more what it might be in catalog. So each one of these things is really designed to serve a very specific Use case and customer needs that we saw within our very heterogeneous kind of funnel existed within our existing business and we wanted to service that need More specifically, so what you'll see us doing is continuing to iterate on these offerings and others as needed as we detect Specific use cases that customers really need to be served with as part of this work marketplace strategy to really give them All of the ways that they want to Upwork right here in a single place that is really this always on tab or app on their phone that really gives them Exactly what they need. And so it's through having all of these different ways to Upwork together in one place that they really can build the confidence, The habit of kind of going back again and again to that single destination and knowing that regardless of the size or type of their need, They can find it right here on Upwork.
And so it's really not about any one of these things being superior to the other, but rather each one servicing in need and fitting together in a unified way.
Thanks, Rohit. Our next question comes from Logan Thomas at Stifel. Logan?
Hi, Evan. Thanks for dropping me in. Hi, Hayden and Jeff. Hey, so 2 ish questions. The first question, Jeff, is just on the long term targets.
And you're looking at the sales and marketing bucket as a large source of opportunity. And And obviously keeping in mind that you want to invest aggressively from for growth in the near term, but are there is there a way that you can size the number 1 or 2 strategic priorities for moving the needle And getting the leverage over time to reach the long term target for sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue into The 20% to 25% range from 34% last year. And then the second question, just Sort of a follow-up on the product roadmap and thinking about the transformation from a single product company to a multi Product platform type of company. Said another way, is the current product set Sort of the right place to grow from to reach the $1,000,000,000 by 2025 revenue opportunity Or should we expect further product launches in that cadence to achieve that? And how aggressive would you be willing to be To enter sort of adjacent service areas for both sides of the marketplace.
Thanks.
Thanks. I'll start with the sales and marketing margin question. So we really aren't Solving for the 20% to 25%. Like what fundamentally what we're solving for is, let's find every opportunity we can to invest dollars attractively And EBITDA margin is secondary to that. Obviously, we're going to drive leverage wherever we can, Sales and marketing is not one of those areas we want to do that.
We want to make sure that we have the best unit economics possible to invest as much as we can in sales And in marketing, we don't really view trade offs between those 2. And over the long run, Eventually, we'll have scale that causes our sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue to come down, but we don't see that anytime soon. In terms of strategic priorities in support of that, on the sales side, it's really as simple as we've achieved the unit economics That we need to in order to be able to invest aggressively against this. And now we need to operationalize and do that at scale. So that means building out the supporting functions.
It means expanding into additional customer categories. It means Hiring the reps and making sure that all of the good stuff that has worked for the base of reps we have now works at the next scale. So that's the phase that we're in there. On the marketing side, I think one thing I'd highlight is making sure that we can deliver Making sure that we can suss out let me take a step back. With the work marketplace that Hayden was talking about in terms of Project Catalog and TalentScout Complementing our existing talent marketplace offering, we end up casting a much wider net to be able to acquire clients and have them come in.
We also have the opportunity to increase conversion, if we are able to detect what are they fundamentally trying to solve. And then if we're able to get them to the right thing, to the right product line as quickly as possible, and show them that they can Then they're buying into additional areas, then we should be able to increase our lifetime value from those customers. All of those things coming together Yields a lower customer acquisition cost, a higher LTV, putting us in a really, really good position. So figure out how we suss out the intents of customers and get them to the right place is a really important kind of medium term priority. We'll take There's lots of opportunity to improve that and also personalizing that experience for the different categories or verticals that those customers are coming in.
So that so once again, we're making it as easy as possible for them to get the work done that they want to get done. I think the second question was on the product set. Hien, do you want to take that?
Yes. I think the product that we have is absolutely the right one to be building on. As you see from some of the data that Jeff shared around our incredible client retention rates and how those have actually been improving, the spend per client, The word-of-mouth that we have in the virality, our NPS scores are awesome. They are So much higher than staffing firms or other players that, contend to be in our space. So The product set that we have is a phenomenal foundation for us to be building on.
I think continuing to innovate on our crown jewel, the talent marketplace, Adding these flanking products around catalog, talent scout, this enterprise suite, which really augments these things with These enterprise grade capabilities that enable scale, reporting, compliance, all of these different things that larger companies require, I think we're in this incredible position to just keep going down the path to serve customers with this core offering and then adding to it as we see opportunities To really innovate around the scale of supply and demand signals that we have. I mean, we have the advantage of getting all this data every single day around What types of work people are trying to do? Where they're running into barriers? What are the kind of bleeding edge things that people are trying to do on a marketplace like this and then building Into that as we go. So I think we're in an excellent position to just keep building on the foundation to unlock the market.
Thanks, Logan. And it looks like we have a couple of follow-up questions. So we'll take a follow-up from Brent Thill at Jefferies.
Hey, Jeff. On the take rate, in the mid teens, there's always a lot of questions from the Street about Where you can get that and I'm just curious as it relates to your framework and your margin profile, can you achieve that at 15% or do you have to increase that? Give Give us your sense in terms of the framework of how you're thinking about that long term. Thanks.
Yes. Thanks so much. So our long term margin structure is not Depending upon us meaningfully moving our take rate. We believe there's opportunity to do so relative to where the competition is, relative to the additional value added As TownScout, Project Catalog, Enterprise expands, there should be good opportunities to To increase our take rate, but we can achieve that long term margin, keeping our take rate roughly where it is. And to the extent we can drive that up over time, then there should be additional opportunity.
Thanks. And we have another follow-up this time from Marvin Tong at BTIG.
Great. Thanks for taking some more questions. Just one on the 20% growth target, it's minimum. Just thought we could unpack that a little more. For instance, can you guys achieve that just on the talent marketplace alone or how are you layering in the growth potential From Enterprise, from TalentScout, from Project Catalog, just maybe unpack that a little further that might be very helpful for investors.
Thank you.
Sure. So I'll start. We firmly believe there's a massive opportunity in front of us. And With a $1,300,000,000,000 market and us having $2,500,000,000 GSV last year, there is significant room for us to grow the business. The biggest impediments being the resistance to the belief that remote work can work for companies has been shattered.
It's now time for us to focus on brand awareness. And we think that we have the right product strategy to enable clients to achieve their goals in this moment in time, But we need to help them be aware of this opportunity. We think that the right product strategy of having to work marketplace to enable them to achieve those goals, Leveraging our talent marketplace, our project catalog, our talent scout and additional opportunities will all feed into helping achieve those long term goals. And we're not breaking out what we think the forecast is for each one of those, but all play an important role in delivering And achieving those growth rates, in addition to converting the brand awareness to higher levels. So when we bring all that together, we think that 20 percent for a long term growth rate for many years to come is absolutely within is our focus, is our plan, And that's how we're thinking about that.
Thanks. And we have one final follow-up question from Nick Jones at Citi.
Great. Thanks for taking one more. Maybe for you, Hayden, on the habitual nature Upwork, can you talk about maybe on the SMB side, are you seeing Those businesses come to the site to get an agile development environment where they can kind of find a bunch of different skills in one place or is that kind of what they come for And then does it turn more into a habitual purchase of email marketing, ongoing SEO, blog writing, these other things That they need that maybe they would have had a headcount or they have someone who can now manage significantly more, but it becomes very much more habitual and within a single lane.
Yes, it's a great question because I think a lot of folks do come to our site with this idea of a smaller Project or something that they want to trial, because frankly, we have this awareness in the ecosystem where I think a lot of people think about freelance still as Ancillary or as something that is kind of on the side of their business. And so one of the biggest Things that we're trying to change perceptions around in addition to raising brand awareness for our category and for our company generally, Despite being the number one player in our space, so many customers, target customers out there still haven't even heard of us. And if they have heard of us, They're thinking about Upwork maybe in the wrong way. They're thinking about Upwork for something very small, something transactional, when in fact, to the point of your question, Nick, There's so much more habitual programmatic strategic that they can get done on Upwork that mature customers have figured out, but early customers and prospects Hadn't realized. So customers do typically come with maybe something small in mind.
They want to build Trust that this is a model that can work for them and then over time they realize, oh, wait a minute, I can build real relationships here. I can do something more strategic, more programmatic. And so that is quite a typical kind of maturation curve of a customer. And what you'll see us doing with, for example, the recent brand Marketing efforts and the campaign that we're running right now is to really try to educate the market to think differently about our solution from the outset. So instead of coming to our site and having to go through that discovery curve kind of over time, they should come in with an expectation That this is a place where they can build a team, a programmatic program for their company, can get real big Efforts done that are strategic and core to how they're going to get their business moving forward.
And so this is a real shift that we are trying to bring to the market to understand But we don't think that's well known in the ecosystem. And that is really one of the big points of the brand awareness campaign that we're driving is to really change and educate people around How critical freelancers can be in driving outcomes for businesses and having huge impact and really operating at the heart of businesses, because that is something that We see happening all the time for mature customers on our platform, but is not I think perfectly understood in the world at large and that is a huge way for us to Close the awareness gap and build into that giant TAM that we're going after.
And that wraps the Q and A portion of today's event. On behalf of the entire Upwork team, thank you for joining us today and thank you for your interest in Upwork. We look forward to connecting with you all in the future again soon. Thank you.