Thanks everyone for joining us. My name is Bernie McTernan. I'm one of the internet analysts here at Needham & Company. It's my pleasure to introduce the team from Upwork: CEO Hayden Brown, CFO Erica Gessert. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks, Bernie.
Maybe just to start, you know, beginning of the year, always helpful to look backwards. What were some of the key successes for Upwork as you think about 2024?
Yeah, we had a really strong year. We, I think, are executing on all cylinders right now. Certainly, one of the highlights was the movement on our product strategy with the announcement around Uma last year, which is our AI agent, which is helping clients and talent on our platform really across the entire workflow. We also had a lot of exciting announcements on the enterprise side with the announcement of our Business Plus plan in Q4. And another big highlight for us is all the progress on profitability. We, I think, have had 23 points of margin expansion in the last five quarters. So I think, you know, this business is really performing on all fronts, even in a tough environment. You know, this is not an easy economy for businesses in our space, but we feel good about the leadership that we're demonstrating right now.
Yeah, and I'll just add that, you know, the 23 points of margin accretion that we have achieved as of Q3, that's on the path to our commitment to hit 35% in the next few years.
Right. Terrific. Well, Hayden, you talked about the macro pressure. Certainly, that was a big topic of discussion during the third quarter call. I know you probably don't want to get into fourth quarter results too much, but just how does the macro feel more broadly? And what maybe indicators are you waiting for to see if it, when in fact it does turn? Because I know this is something we've been waiting for for a while now.
Yeah, you know, I think this is an environment that I don't think feels materially different right now than it has for the last few quarters. I think what we see on our platform is customers still feel under a lot of pressure. You know, budgetary pressures are continuing. Interest rates, inflation are impacting their ability to hire and to spend money on employment at this time. And so that is a reality that they're facing. But for us, and in light of that, where we're really executing is around things like our monetization and ad monetization programs overall, which is where we've driven a lot of performance, really helping customers with things like new subscription plans, with different ways that they can really be engaged in our platform. And that's really shown through in terms of our top line revenue.
Then obviously driving the things we can control around things like our margin profile, which is something that we're executing on at this time.
Yeah, I'll just add, you know, with the macro environment, the way it's been, and you asked about kind of leading indicators that we look at kind of with the turn. So we've done a tremendous amount of work on this in terms of how our GSV trends correlate to the macro environment. And what we see as kind of leading indicators are partly the JOLTS report, but also interest rates are a big leading indicator for us on a lagging effect. So we do want to continue to see interest rates go down. We saw some fairly significant top of funnel weakness in kind of mid-2024. And because of the length of our contracts, some of that will continue into 2025. And Q3 of 2024, some of our kind of on-platform leading indicators, contract starts and other things were negative year over year. That continues.
So we do expect that to impact 2025 from a GSV growth rate point of view. Now, that said, we have a lot of irons in the fire kind of on the take rate side with Business Plus plans, which are a take rate accretive plan, as well as adds and monetization products that we expect to benefit us and kind of resume revenue growth in 2026.
Got it. Okay. Okay. So the thought is that we should probably be bracing ourselves to 2025, another difficult year in terms of marketplace GSV, but there are kind of offsets you control as you go further down the P&L.
That's right.
And yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, we've obviously made a lot of progress on margin accretion. We have more that we're doing on that front. So we will continue to cost optimize. And like I said, because of some of the kind of take rate accretive products that are in the early phases right now, that's also a double benefit from a top line and bottom line point of view as those kind of come into the model. So we feel really good about that margin commitment and also that we can start to kind of grow revenues again as we mature some of these strategies.
Okay. Just last on marketplace GSV. Just how to think about the trends in active clients and spend per customer because they can move. But is there one that maybe you're focused on driving more in this kind of environment should be active clients should still be under pressure, but just like as we're thinking about our models and sharpening our pencils on 2025?
Sure. So just a couple of comments there. So we were actually really pleased with our active client year over year growth. It was just 2% in Q3, but that's significantly higher than anyone else in the industry right now. So we feel good about kind of our trajectory and the fact that we've been able to outperform the rest of the industry on this and many other metrics. Now, that said, active clients is a trailing 12-month metric. And so people should expect that over the next few quarters, it will be absorbing some of the kind of top of funnel weakness that we saw in kind of the middle of 2024. But again, as we kind of get into the 2026 timeframe, we expect that to improve. Now, on the GSV per client side, we actually saw a slight uptick sequentially in Q3.
And not just that, but if we look segment by segment underneath the covers in our platform, in each of the business segments, so very small business, small business, up to large business, we actually saw a slight uptick in GSV per active client in Q3. So that was a pleasing green shoot. It's a bit early to call it a trend, but we feel good about that and look to continue to drive that going forward.
What do you think is driving that uptick that you saw?
It's a slight increase in project size. It's not wage increase. So average wage continues to be kind of flattish on the platform, but we have seen project sizes start to increase a bit.
You guys have spoken about AI work increasing its share. Those are probably bigger projects, I'm assuming. Is it things like that that are taking over? What's the best way to think about the tangibles that's driving the project size?
You know, we've seen this across categories. So certainly the AI tailwind is one of the factors here, but I'd say it's not limited to AI-specific work or even the categories that are most impacted by that. It is, I think, just a broader-based trend, which I think is a sign. Again, it's not yet a trend, but it is a sign that customers are leaning in. They are doing some bigger projects, and that is a positive.
Yeah. No, that's great. Maybe let's stick on margins because obviously that's been one of the best driving a lot of estimate revisions for us positively over time. October announced $60 million of cost savings, again, progressing towards the five-year goal. Profitability, we've been also talking about optimizing R&D spend. Can you just talk about some of the actions that you've taken as part of this initiative?
Yeah, sure. So across the P&L, the two areas where we've done the most optimization are in R&D and sales and marketing, which are also kind of our biggest areas of investment as a business. On the R&D side, what we really looked at was just narrowing our portfolio of investments, taking a very hard look at kind of our ROI thresholds and kind of cutting out things that were very low or kind of ambiguous ROI going forward. Really just focusing in on the highest potential, highest ROI investments that we can make and kind of cutting out the rest.
And then on the sales and marketing side, the most important and profound change that we made was really on the enterprise business and really taking a much more segmented, targeted approach to different categories of enterprise clients, focusing our kind of high-end account management support only on the very large mega-cap customers that require that bespoke support and investment, and then moving pieces of our enterprise value prop onto the marketplace at a higher take rate. These are the Business Plus plans. And what it does is it enables actually a lower cost to acquire because customers can self-upgrade into these plans without having to go through a sales motion or sign a contract. And then also a lower cost to serve because we're no longer providing this bespoke account management to customers that don't need it.
They simply get kind of access to premium customer service, which is cheaper and better for everyone.
Okay. And with the $60 million of cost, is the R&D optimization kind of within the $60 million, or is that kind of a separate initiative that's going on?
No, no, that's within the $60 million. I mean, there's continued ongoing cost optimization that we can do in G&A and other places where we have kind of longer-term investments in automation or in third-party and kind of outsourcing to third parties in our payments infrastructure and other things. It just takes longer to execute, but we'll see benefits of those things in 2026 and beyond.
Got it. And then the last one, there's the cost cutting. Should this be kind of like a step function change or how quickly should we expect this to impact the P&L?
Yeah, you'll see a good proportion of it start to impact the P&L immediately in 2025. There will be a little bit of kind of reinvestment that we make through the year, but that'll be relatively minimal as it goes through the year.
As you think about the longer-term targets of 35% EBITDA margins, what needs to happen? How close are you to kind of like controlling what you can control in terms of cost optimization versus okay, we need to get back to growth for this and incremental margins and operating leverage to take off?
I mean, look, we've modeled out a multiplicity of scenarios on this topic. And so we have a lot of levers in our arsenal. Our cost structure is the area where we have by far the most control, of course. And we feel really confident that we honestly can hit that target in a variety of ways. And also through take rate accretion, we have a lot of irons in the fire there as well. Our ads and monetization strategy, which is still in early days in many areas, both on the subscription and on the ad side, Business Plus. And so I think between those two areas, even if GSV takes longer to reignite, we have very high confidence in hitting those targets.
Got it. And so maybe moving over to the ads and monetization side and the take rate, just what are some of those products? It seems like there was a lot of growth and a lot of success early. And then the outlook was a little bit subdued for near-term growth, just given what's happened in the marketplace. And we've seen that with other companies who cover like Instacart, where if GTV slows down, then advertising growth slows down as well too. But can you just talk about how those two kind of work together and ultimately what the goal is for how big those businesses can get?
Yeah, I'd say on this front, we've done a lot of really good work building out this ads and monetization business really from the ground up over the last few years. Last year, we launched a number of new products, including client-side advertising, which really didn't exist before in the marketplace. We have now several subscription plans on both the client side and the freelancer side, but they're still relatively nascent. And so for this year, as Erica had referenced earlier, our outlook for further take rate accretion is relatively muted. We don't expect that to be sizable the way it was in the last 12 to 18 months, but there are a lot of things we're doing this year to do further testing and optimization in this area of the business.
There are a number of new features and products in the ads and monetization space that we can be looking to launch both in this year, but actually in years ahead as well. Opportunities exist around new ads and monetization features and products, as well as optimizing the ones that we've recently launched, like client-side advertising, which was a recent addition, as an example, as well as additional subscription plans for both clients and freelancers. For example, we just launched the client-side Business Plus plan, but we still have relatively few subscription plans on the client side. We also have really only one to two freelancer-side subscription plans as well.
So when you look at that lineup on the subscription side and the value-added services that currently clients and freelancers can buy from us, including things through our partners where we can monetize those features and functionality offered through partners, there really is a range of things that we can be doing to enhance the monetization of the platform over time. But it's going to take some time for us to both build those things out, and also, we don't want to be rushing to over-monetize the platform in a way that would dampen GSV growth right now or at any point. We really want to make sure it's really healthy in terms of the balance of how we do that. So that's why this year we expect it to be a bit more muted.
But again, there is a lot of runway for us to be adding on subscription plans, additional features and functionality that do enhance take rate over time. It's just that kind of the pacing of that is going to be probably more out in the 2026 timeframe in terms of when it would be more sizable in terms of what that would be contributing to the business.
Fair enough. Can you talk about the subscription plan a little bit? What do the clients get? Because it seems like a win-win where it would help retention, and also, if you get take rate accretion as well too, so we'd love just to know what the offering is.
Yeah. On the Business Plus side, some of the key features they get are access to a vetted, really curated high-quality talent pool, which is one of the main reasons people are upgrading to that plan. They also get access to some super lightweight account management. It's not at the level of robustness that Erica was alluding to previously that our enterprise clients previously got, but they get some extra support. And they also can get enterprise kind of like billing and some extra reporting, things like that. So it's kind of a lighter-weight version of what the Enterprise plan used to be, but at a price point that is higher take rate for us and very high margin for us to deliver. So it's a really great offering for customers who want something extra beyond what the current marketplace plan offers.
We're continuing to do a lot of testing with customers to see what else is there that they might need and how else might we build out the full kind of range of subscription offerings for clients. Because as you can imagine, our client base, 850,000 clients in the last year, they range from these very small businesses through these large enterprises. There's a lot of needs there. Just having two subscription plans for them, there's a lot more we potentially can do to offer both the features and the functionality and the monetization around what those customers are looking for.
Okay. No, that makes a lot of sense. The other thing on take rate is you guys did put a price increase in two years ago. Just maybe looking back on it, how effective was it and how does that instruct how you think about future just kind of core take rate price increases?
Yeah, this was, I'd say, wildly successful for us. I think when we modeled out and tested kind of in a preliminary way what we thought this could do and then compared that to what it delivered, it absolutely hit or exceeded all of those goals, both in terms of things like customer retention, behavior on both the talent and client sides of the marketplace, and obviously in terms of things like the revenue characteristics and take rate that we were hoping to achieve. So this has been extremely successful. But we know this is one of the biggest levers we have as a business that is also extremely sensitive in terms of driving customer behavior.
And so we're very mindful when we're looking at these metrics and testing and evaluating what we do next that we're going to be very thoughtful and careful about what our next moves are around things like take rate at this level because for a two-sided marketplace, it is a huge driver for us.
Right. But I mean, we always at any one time on the platform have multiple tests running in terms of pricing and alternatives on take rate. And it takes several quarters, many quarters of testing in order to get confident on kind of the next move on a pricing change. And so we've actually had some investors comment that they've been pulled into one of our tests and have asked us if we've increased our take rate. We haven't done it, but we're testing all the time. And so there's lots we can do in terms of dynamic pricing of different project sizes, lots of things that we're testing and that will start to benefit us in 2026 and beyond.
Okay. Makes sense. I mean, how do you think your take rate stands relative to the competition, especially as you're relatively higher up market, so we get that question a lot is just in terms of is this the optimal take rate for you or not? I know lots of A/B testing is probably the answer, but just wanted to ask more directly.
Yeah. You know, I think where we are is a really great place right now, having just made a bunch of important take rate moves. When we look at our average project size of about $5,000 compared to the competition, I think this is a healthy take rate. And as Erica was just mentioning, there are things we can do around pricing different project sizes appropriately. Some of that comes through with value-added services and very surgical pricing around when people are consuming different product offerings or are active in different parts of our marketplace. That is actually how we monetize smaller projects differently or larger projects differently. So some of that exists today already in the marketplace, and we're building some of that out through our ads and monetization program.
So I think it's important to understand there's a lot of sophistication around how we do pricing today and how that shows up with different products. And we're not done yet. That's where our pricing and monetization team is constantly at work, building out and testing out different offerings. So we're in a good place for the size and the heft of the products and projects that are flowing through the platform. And we're going to continue to be really surgical about how we continue to do this again in a way that unlocks more GSV, more share of wallet, more activity from our customers because that is the end game. It's not just about monetizing the work that we have. It's actually about unlocking more spend from the customers who we have today and we're going into tomorrow.
I guess just one other point. You asked about the competitive environment. I think it's important to understand there's really no headwind to take rate for us, right? I mean, from a competitive point of view, we don't feel pricing pressure from kind of the competitive environment. So it's really just about strategies to continue to increase our take rate.
Right. Well, maybe let's pull on that thread on competition. Who do you guys think you compete with? How much are you thinking about offline competitors versus online? How competitive is it generally? The way we hear is that there's a lot of industry-specific verticals for marketplace talent, but we'd love to get your thoughts in terms of how you view the competitive landscape.
Sure. The biggest competitive kind of environment that we're in is kind of offline staffing and offline outcome-based projects. Those are the two markets that we are really kind of entering into or compete against, which is where businesses and enterprises are really going to hire contingent workers or get projects delivered. So that's what we're up against in terms of raising our awareness, making sure companies know that we're an option for them, which is often the biggest hurdle we face is people don't necessarily know that Upwork exists or don't think of us as an alternative to their staffing provider. What we hear from customers is once they start using us, they're amazed by the quality of the talent in our ecosystem, by the liquidity, by the cost arbitrage they can get someone amazing for a price that they didn't even think was possible.
Once we raise that awareness and get into those conversations, it's often a downhill sell for us because it's just become so much easier. People often didn't know that option existed. But that's typically how we think about our competition because those multi-hundred-billion-dollar ecosystems already exist. There's already spend there. We're basically cracking those open.
Right, and where are we in terms of the broader kind of offline to online transition?
It's super early days. I mean, we're the market leader in the online space we're in, right, Bernie? We've got $4 billion of spend as the clear market leader in our existing ecosystem. That has been an amazing journey that we've built our business up to thus far. And now we're really, I think, in the early days of cracking open this offline industry that exists and bringing so much more of it online into our ecosystem. And that is the next frontier for this business.
Yeah. No, great. Maybe talking about another next frontier that's been obviously of note, just Gen AI. So lots of debate out there in terms of the impact on your business. Just what you've seen currently, how you're thinking about in terms of, I guess, A, how it's impacting customer demand, but then also B, what kind of products you're able to bring to those customers as a result of Gen AI. And yeah, you mentioned Uma earlier, things like that that can help your business.
Yeah. So this is really showing up first in two different ways. The first is there's a lot of secular demand that's showing up on our platform for talent that has AI skills. So this is people who can do data labeling, data training, the things that you're hearing about all the time in terms of kind of the core AI skill sets.
But also beyond those things, across the 10,000 skills on Upwork, we're also seeing a lot of demand for people in marketing, in technology, in all of the different skill sets where it's just clients coming and saying, "Hey, can I get somebody who knows how to do this traditional skill set, but using an AI tool or the more modern AI skills that maybe my internal team doesn't actually know how to use yet?" So that is where we've seen 35% growth in these AI skills on Upwork. In the last quarter, I think that was on top of more than 250% growth a year ago. So that is a huge tailwind for us where people are looking for a more contemporary workforce that knows how to use and do relevant AI-related work across a bunch of different categories. So that's one area.
The second area for us that you referenced related to Uma is us as a technology platform, a technology-driven business, looking at our own product and saying, "How can we reinvent our own workflows, our own service offering with AI at its core?" And that's where we bought two companies in the last year, Headroom and Objective. We've injected Headroom's technology and that team into our own product offering. That's what enabled us to launch Uma last year to really bring new AI-agentic workflows and experiences into the product on things like how to post a job, how to get actual work done using an AI agent companion, how to have a proposal written if you're a talent proposing yourself for a job. And this is where we all know that the old ways of doing these things have been frustrating, whether it was on Upwork or any other platform.
It's hard to write a proposal for a job, or it's hard to think, "How do I describe my requirements?" Now we have Uma in the mix actually doing so much of that heavy lifting for our customers, and we're hearing amazing feedback around that. We're seeing customers get through these workflows more than 70% faster in some cases, having the work done. We're seeing now more than 73% of job posts on our platform are being written by our AI agent, Uma, so this is really taking so much of the heavy lifting off of our customers and just getting it done through AI, which is transformational, and this is still just in the early innings. This is the V1 of what AI can do in the first year in 2024 with these things launched.
This year, we will be, of course, taking those capabilities further with the AI agent, Uma, doing even more for customers to guide them through the work, to get more done on their behalf, taking more work even off of their shoulders. So we're very excited about how AI can really transform so much of the work that's happening on Upwork because, of course, we're not just the matching platform and AI can help with the match, but we are the work delivery engine. This is where freelancers are delivering the work for customers, and AI is already helping so much in that process, and we're going to be doing even more there with our AI agent.
And so what's the discrete monetization of that? Is that more gross ads coming to the platform because all the customer reviews are so good? Is it driving frequency? How should we think about the?
The nice thing is our monetization engine is already built for this because we monetize on the work delivery today, right? So the more that our AI agent is helping enable work delivery, the way we can monetize that, I mean, there's a variety of ways. But the easiest one is when customers see more great work happening and getting done, that just unlocks more demand for us. More demand means we get more clients in our funnel, they get more work done, et cetera. We don't actually have to change anything fundamental about our business to do that. Of course, there are other things we've done already, like our ads and subscription business where Uma, the agent, is kind of built into the premium product there, et cetera.
There are some things like that we can also inject in when we want to have more premium offerings as part of subscriptions. But intrinsically on Upwork, the better and faster and cheaper that work is getting done, it just unlocks more demand for our ecosystem, and that drives up GSV.
Is Uma helping the freelancers know kind of what Connects to bid and?
Yes. I mean, it is helping them today with things like proposal writing and with work delivery. Uma is not yet directing them in terms of which jobs to bid for specifically, but that could, for example, be a future.
I mean, that's what we're building toward, right? So that Uma can help along every step of the way, including in the future.
Your work agent. Basically, your talent agent. I have a Hollywood talent agent. Uma could be my talent agent representing me on Upwork. Here's what jobs to bid for. Here's how I should be pricing myself. Those types of capabilities would be in the future.
Yeah. Uma's a programmatic Connect buyer.
Coming soon.
Yeah. That's great. So you touched on the Headroom acquisition. So that's what made Uma or helped drive Uma. You announced.
Objective.
Yeah, so what's Objective going to bring to the table?
Yeah. So Objective is really a search company, and that helps with everything that's to do with searching and matching on Upwork, which is, again, a super core functionality in the current business and, of course, going forward. And Objective specifically specialized and specializes in multimodal search. So bringing to the table all of the functionality around when I'm entering a search query or if I'm a client or a talent with a certain intent, how do I surface the answer to my query better, faster, and more fruitfully across video, voice, text, audio files, which, again, as Upwork, we have all of these things. We have people who are doing voiceover talent. We have people who are doing animation and graphics. We have people who have video assets, technology assets. All of this is in our database.
Injecting Objective's capabilities and technology into Upwork means when customers come in and are searching for someone who can do a certain task or looking for an outcome from us, we will be able to surface much more readily exactly the person or the outcome that they're looking for in terms of these assets so we can connect them exactly into the person or the agency to deliver those outcomes much more readily.
Okay. Understood. And so just wanted to double-click the last one. So the Gen AI related work up 36% in 3Q. And so you say it's talent for AI skills. It's also using the traditional skill set with AI tools. Which of those is more powerful of the two? Just because I'm trying to think of businesses that are more or less indifferent to the skills that people use or more like if there is a lot more people saying, "Hey, we need this big data labeling product or something like that.
Yeah. That's stats specifically around people with AI-specific skills that we shared. And that's kind of specifically what we've referenced. But there is the broader trend around people just looking for talent with a more AI-enabled skill set for a variety of reasons.
Yeah. I think one thing that's relatively misunderstood about our platform is that the talent that comes to our platform, these are quite often people who, for one reason or another, are dissatisfied with the trappings of the corporate world, and they're entrepreneurial in nature. And so the talent on our platform is five times more likely than a captive employee to adopt AI tools. And so I think that people don't quite realize that, that we have a very sophisticated, very advanced stable of talent that is really attractive to the client side who have these AI projects.
And they're using them all the time. They're entrepreneurs who are just super cutting edge.
Yep. Makes sense. I want to touch on enterprise. So you recently hired a new GM for enterprise, Ernesto. I'm not going to butcher his last name . Thank you.
Good for you.
What sort of changes is he making to the enterprise business for the strategy?
He brings a bunch of things. One is he's an entrepreneur himself. He started a business in the past. And so he's bringing a very strong entrepreneurial leadership mindset across sales, across product, across really driving results in this business. And he comes from a digital staffing background. So he knows intrinsically what these customers are looking for. He knows when we talked earlier about how we're winning share from kind of an offline staffing world, which we've been doing for a number of years, but even accelerating that cadence going into 2025 and 2026, he's really bringing this competitive mindset around knowing how to sell into these enterprise customers and kind of sell against kind of the incumbent staffing firms and what the strategies need to be around that, which is super helpful.
And he has a very practical, agile mentality around hyper-discipline and hyper-speed in terms of doing that. So he's bringing a ton of pace and velocity to how we're transforming anything we need to in terms of sales, in terms of product, in terms of the go-to-market, in terms of winning in that space. So he's really a force.
Got it. Has anything, I mean, from the investor day, what was it? Three? It feels like a decade ago, but I mean, obviously.
Every year is like 10, yeah.
But enterprise is a huge focus. Has anything changed in terms of the ultimate opportunity that you think that this business could grow and become?
No. The opportunity is unchanged, and our value prop is basically unchanged. I mean, we are just hammering at this with continuing to modify what the toolkit needs to be, what the product needs to look like in order to win in this space. And I think we're making a ton of progress. We've modified, as Erica mentioned earlier, what the sales team looks like in terms of the account loads, the efficiency of that team. With Business Plus launching in Q4, now we have a stronger product value proposition. I think we're just really up-leveling how we're going after that space. And under Ernesto, we're in a really good situation.
Okay. Great. I want to turn it over to see if there's any questions from the audience. But before, just wanted to hit back on products really quick that you guys are rolling out. You had your fall release. I know we talked about Uma a lot, but any other highlights that you would want to bring to the investors' attention?
There was a lot of product muscle on that release. So definitely check out the release page. Uma was a highlight in terms of advancements there, which is also powering our Managed Services offering on the enterprise side now. We talked about Business Plus. There's a lot under the hood there, but I think we talked about some of the big ones.
Yeah. Okay. Great. All right. And just want to see if there's any questions from the audience at this time. Yeah. Right in front.
So how do you guys view having a verification layer, especially for work that's done perhaps by an agent, considering that that's probably going to be an emerging trend over the next five years?
Yeah. This is something that we're really building into. And given that we've had this Managed Services business for quite some time now, I think that puts us in a really strong position between both Managed Services and what we have from our legal team in terms of really strong risk and compliance management to really go into the space of owning outcomes for our customers and doing so with an eye towards how we manage the risk, price the risk, et cetera, in a way that we feel really comfortable with.
And again, as a market leader in the space, moving into more of an outcomes-based delivery model, building off of that Managed services business and extending it where we want to and feel comfortable, given that huge multi-hundred billion dollar TAM on the enterprise side, I think is a really exciting opportunity for Upwork to really extend our reach, continue our market leadership, and use both AI and these other assets that we already have to do so. So feel really good about that.
Got it.
Thanks. Yeah.
Anything else from the audience? No? I know we've touched on M&A a lot, but just wanted to make sure we touched on capital allocation. The buyback last year that you blew through pretty quickly. Any priorities? How should investors be thinking about that right now?
Right. So just in terms of capital allocation, we will continue in a disciplined kind of focused set of organic investments, but we're very committed to increasing our EBITDA margin each and every year as we reach to hit that 35%. And then we are looking at inorganic investment. We've made these two really great acquisitions with Headroom and Objective. We'll continue to look in that space and also kind of look at areas where we can continue to advance our roadmap or our product suite, particularly on the enterprise side, but across the board. And then we'll continue to return capital to shareholders. We have a $100 million authorization out right now, and we're very committed to continuing on that path and using our excess free cash flow to return to shareholders.
Right. And so I'm assuming Headroom and Objective, they're probably not generating much revenue on their own, right? So how do you think about what's the right level to spend on it versus kind of build versus buy in that equation?
Well, so I mean, there's a lot that goes into this, but I mean, number one is we look carefully at the technology. I mean, we're not going to maintain these standalone businesses that they started, right? And so what we look at is, can we inject their technology into our platform and get a yield? And so with Objective, for example, we were testing with them for several months before we made the acquisition, and we were able to kind of take their technology and flow through some of our kind of search into our search mechanism and see an uplift of like 10% on our GSV as we were testing with them. So we have very, very high confidence in the ROI there, and it makes it honestly a very easy thing to do.
The other thing that comes into the equation with those types of acquisitions is the stable of talent and how much would we have to pay to go out organically in the market to bring that talent in-house versus what we're paying for that asset, and so those two things in combination make these very, very highly accretive acquisitions for us at the prices that we've paid.
Got it. Because I'm assuming the prices on these companies are only going higher too, right? I mean.
Yeah. I mean, we feel, I mean, you'll be able to see when we publish our 10-K what we paid for it. But I mean, we feel very good about the, I mean, these are relatively very small acquisitions for us. And yes, of course, AI talent continues to be at a premium in the market. But there's a sweet spot there with kind of with these relatively early stage startups where they either have to go back and get more funding or they can kind of go in-house and do what they love to do, which is build product. And so there's a happy medium there that you can find, and we've been really opportunistic.
Great.
And we have a unique asset that they can work on, right? We have an amazing data set with amazing customers. So it's a really big win-win for these teams to work with us and kind of combine their vision with ours in a shared way. So it's super exciting for all of us.
Great. Maybe just lastly, to put a bow on it, what are the few items that would make 2025 a successful year for Upwork?
What are the few items?
Yeah. If you had like.
A handful.
When we're sitting here a year from now and I ask that opening question, was this a good year? What made it a good year for Upwork? What's on the priority list?
Yeah. I mean, our priority this year is to continue to execute our vision around durable profit growth. And I think we're already starting the year. We had our kickoff last week with the team to do this. And that is around driving our GSV growth levers, which include the enterprise strategy we discussed today, include our AI roadmap, which is incredibly exciting, include advancing our AI, our ads and monetization playbook, which again is going to be really driving foundations for this year that will really perform more in 2026 and beyond, and really delivering on the commitments around our EBITDA margin, which is a huge lever for this business that has characteristics for both 2025 and years to come. So that's the playbook for this year. And I think nothing's going to take us off that course. I mean, knock on wood.
These Black Swan events that we've seen over the last few years can be interesting. But this is a business that has incredible characteristics. We're the market leader in our space, and we're excited about the future of this business for sure.
Great. Well, thank you both. That was great. Thanks for everyone.