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Kicking off a new series of spotlight interviews with the Torc team with CEO and Co-founder Michael Morris. We chat about his background, leadership strategies, plans for the future, and how he helped set the standard for what a freelance marketplace should look like (long before the world was ready for it).
Q: So the first question I'd like to ask is, can you tell me a bit about your background, pre-Torc?
A: I grew up in Boston, went to Boston College and studied computer science. I graduated, became a software developer and worked for a software company. Then, I got into consulting, so I traveled a lot. I was able to experience different industries, and in that time, it was a boom economy, the dot com boom.
I quickly realized how impactful the access to talent was. There were many companies that wanted to build all these great products and compete with each other, but they were hamstrung by their ability to access talent. What I didn't like about it was that the talent model for consulting was really inefficient. What was good for the consulting company was not necessarily good for the end customer.
Generally, a consulting company is not consistent across the board in terms of developer skill level but still bills a lot on that talent range to make a ton of money. I thought, “We need to find the right way to incentivize the top developers and take skill and productivity into account.”
Firms like the one that I was in pride themselves on having highly technical people, but don’t hold productivity in the same regard. For example, the most technical of us made 20% more than the person sitting next to them, but often was not the most productive. That just didn't add up to me. I didn't like the business model behind hourly based consulting.
The company was being sold and six of us left to start Topcoder, which was one of the first global crowdsourcing models. We thought that the business model was relatively simple: if we can find and identify really great talent around the world, we can build a business on top of that. That was step number one. And then step number two was: okay, we found the talent, so we grew to around 10,000 people in the first year. We had a superb community and positive growth of the business model. Now we had to figure out how to build software for companies.
We came up with the crowdsourcing model, where we put pieces of projects out, people would work on them, and the person that did the best job would get paid. We put a price on the work, and everything was treated as an outcome. As an outcomes based model, we didn't care if it took you five hours or 50 hours. It didn't matter to us, whoever did the work, did a quality job, got chosen as the best solution, got paid for it.
So that was the business model of Topcoder. We scaled that successfully. I ended up leaving in 2011, and went to start another crowdsourcing company in the Salesforce ecosystem called CloudSpokes. It was based on a similar model, but it was just for Salesforce development. I worked on that for about a year and a half before we then ended up acquiring Topcoder and merged them together in 2013.
I was CEO of Topcoder during that period, which later led to another acquisition. Topcoder was acquired by Wipro in 2016. That was the next chapter. I stayed at Wipro for about three and a half years, and then started thinking, I want to go out and do this again. I learned a lot in those last few iterations about what was going to be “the next best thing.” That became Torc.
The thing that stuck with me was, I wanted to do something that was a community based model again, because it's a huge power, being able to access a technology community, but I didn't want to make the business model based on competition. Topcoder was heavily based on competition to do work. It didn't create great results, but there was a lot of work to set the scaffolding. It was really complex to be able to get the work out there. It was a real barrier to entry to teach customers how to do it (leverage the community for projects) themselves.
The idea of Torc was, “How do we build a model that's based on identifying the most productive software developers on the planet? On what do we compensate them?” Since, at Torc, we don't do hours, it's all fixed weekly rates. We don't even have time cards.
It incentivizes a person to be more efficient, they should either be able to get a higher weekly rate, or they can get their work done in less time. Incentivizing productivity is Torc’s business model. We sell that to customers in more of a traditional model, so they just pay for access to contractors on demand for as long as they want. The shortest we've done is around two months. Our average is six to seven months. So that's the idea. That brings us to where we are now.
Q: You’ve partially answered my next question, because I was going to ask how Torc came to be, but could you give some more details on that?
A: The way Torc began was, once we started creating the business plan, I knew I wanted to go build something from scratch again. David Messinger, Torc’s CTO and Co-Founder, and I had already worked at three companies together. So we thought, let's go do a fourth.
When we were selling Topcoder, I met Frank D’Souza, who at the time was CEO of Cognizant, as well as its Founder. We struck up a relationship in 2019, when I started looking for investment. I ran into Frank, and we felt we should go do something together. That's how we got our funding, from our private equity partners, Recognize, as at the time that we started Torc, Frank was starting Recognize after he left Cognizant. That was really what ended up being the genesis for us launching, getting the funding from Recognize.
Q: What was the biggest hurdle that you experienced with Torc?
A: Never in my life have I seen more volatility in the macroeconomic environment. I’ve managed companies…cut my teeth during the dot com bubble…and learned how to deal with a giant downturn. At that point in my life, I never thought it would happen. I thought, “Hey, everything's just going up and to the right.”
Then, I managed through the financial crisis in 2008, and managed through the recession in 2012. By then I had managed through a few boom periods. But because of what I've seen since we started Torc, I'm happy that I have that experience. If I didn't, everything would feel new, it would be like the first time I’d be handling certain events. A recession for example, it'd be the first time handling a global issue, where suddenly you can't work in a sector of the world. Obviously Ukraine was a target for us for the talent. And there was so much disruption, like COVID. I've never seen so much turmoil in the global market.
I will say, companies that are calm and can weather the storm will be fine. The ones that, how I call it, have a “violent shifting of the rudder," they go in one direction, something happens, and they completely change course. Those are the companies that aren't going to survive.
Yes, like they overcorrect. It's interesting, some of these situations you mention are also an opportunity, of course, to find talent.
What we’re really doing is getting people hired, we’re helping people find work. My passion is putting the community to work. I find the most joy out of hearing stories about people who would never have had access to work on this project with that technology, with those great brands, and are now getting access to do that.
Our client list is pretty fantastic too. The thing I probably find the most value out of, personally, is how we're able to democratize those job opportunities and get good people. I firmly believe in remote working. It's the right thing to do for many industries, definitely for software.
I agree with that too, especially post COVID, there's so much more opportunity for remote working these days. I think corporate life is more open to it now, which is a good.
Even before COVID, I shut down my office. The last office I had physically shut down was in 2013.
You were quite a few years ahead of the curve then.
We were way, way ahead. It was because we had to be good at it. If we expected our customers to work with our remote community, we had to be good at it.
Q: Interesting, and so my next question is, how do you approach decision-making and leadership within the company?
A: I live and die by a team atmosphere. The leadership team has five people on it, and I almost always include the full group in decision-making. I believe that from good debates and good discussions comes the right answer. I believe that everybody has a particular skill set and a job to do and something they're responsible for. And I look to those people to make decisions in those areas, and then when there’s a larger decision to make, we collectively make it together.
It's similar to captaining a ship. I suppose that’s a somewhat obvious observation, but it is comparable to that. The captain is in charge, of course, but everyone has their job. Everyone has to fulfill a function and everyone works together to keep on course.
I like to think I'm more of a coach. You've got a team to play with. And, you can either go out there, play the game and go to win, or you can complain about not having the right team. You have to put people in the spot where they're going to be the best benefit to the team and themselves. You have to put the team first.
That's the culture of Torc.
Q: And what are some of the future plans for the company?
A: What I really want is to build a brand around this concept of developer productivity, where companies know that, if they want access to the most productive on-demand software developers, Torc is where they go. And from a developer perspective, if I'm going to choose to be a contractor or a freelancer, I want to get paid for how productive I am, not where I live. I want to get paid based on the contribution I'm making, not the hours I'm working on a keyboard.
I think that if we can really do that, and make our brand on both sides of the business (the talent community and customer community), it will generate a gigantic opportunity for the business. We're not quite there yet, but that's why we put so much emphasis on the developer profiles and into recognition for talent. We spend a ton of time trying to stay connected to that talent, even after they've been deployed.
Q: Would you expect the landscape of outsource hiring to change with the impact of AI on the industry?
A: I think it's going to have an impact. I'm an optimist when it comes to technology in general, so I’m an optimist when it comes to AI. I think you have to have guardrails around the use of it, to make sure that it protects things like security and privacy. I think there is an unquenchable thirst for software development and I don't see that going away for the next five to ten years. I think AI is going to speed up our ability to do things.
I don't think it will get to a point where, with AI, we can get everything done. That's not going to happen. I think AI is going to be a huge boost to companies productivity, individual developer productivity, team productivity. In fact, starting in 2024, we are heavily incenting the use of AI in our community. If you get recognized as the developer that's most in the zone for a given month, we're giving you a license to an AI product for 12 months. You can earn these tools that will make you more productive.
We're also giving it to all of our employees. If they’re a developer for example, they have access to Github to get a co-pilot. If they are not a developer, it would an Open AI ChatGPT license. I firmly believe that access to AI will raise the bar for productivity.
I also think of AI as a tool, kind of like a calculator, you know, it is just there to smooth over working processes, speed things up.
Great way to put it.
Q: And what other future trends or changes in technology are exciting you at the moment?
A: Obviously, AI is one of them. I think that there's a lot of hype on these larger language models, and for AI. I think they're going to be impactful. That's what most people are talking about. I'm actually more excited about the improvements in computer vision and NLP.
Take computer vision, for example, I think computer vision can replace a huge amount of what used to be physical sensors. Hardware sensors can now all be done if you have a camera, and you have the ability to process those images in real time.
You could detect water for example, there are so many things you could detect from the software that used to require hardware. I also think that through quantum computing, in the next decade, we’ll see huge advancements in some areas like medicine, personal health, etc. That's also something that excites me.
Q: Looking back on your time with Torc, is there anything you’d change?
One thing would be to focus sooner on Latin America and its tech community. It surprised me how much demand there was. It made total sense once I saw it. I thought, “People are now comfortable working remotely because of COVID, but they do want people in the same time zone, and they want them to speak a similar language.” The alignment makes complete sense.
It’s just kind of funny that it took COVID to make a lot of people realize that. That's something that I probably would have jumped on a little quicker.
Final question, what advice would you give to someone in the industry starting out in tech?
Mentors. Surround yourself with mentors that have different backgrounds to help guide you.
Mike was a pleasure to talk to and a fountain of knowledge and information. His passion for remote work and developer communities truly shined through during our conversation, and as a remote worker for Torc myself, I certainly felt like I was in the right place, working for the right company, and looking up to the right leader for guidance and wisdom. I appreciated his time and I hope you all enjoyed reading our conversation as much as I enjoyed partaking in it.
