“We watched how it went in June and July and Tim texted me saying he was seeing so many random new tasks appear on Airtasker that seemed so obscure. “We were talking about losing almost all revenue and here we are a year later,” Spenceley says. In April, Airtasker’s gross marketplace volume had slipped 14 per cent and Fung was in crisis mode, contingency planning for mass lockdowns. The Post-it Note vote that led to Airtasker listing took place just five months after Fung and the board had been planning for a worst case scenario of the company’s revenue falling by up to 90 per cent as the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The performance is a remarkable departure from where Fung and Spenceley feared the business was heading this time in 2020. On Thursday it lost some of its gains, slipping back to $1.35 as the ASX tapped the brakes on a social media-fuelled share buying plunge.įung, who still has not looked at the the share price, has continued to walk around “swatting” away the phones of any employees he catches looking at the share price in the office. On debut its shares ended the day up 65 per cent and on Wednesday they closed up another 66 per cent - equating to a 170 per cent gain on its 65¢ issue price. On Christmas Eve, the company had a due diligence committee meeting and as the clock struck 12.01am on New Year’s Day, Airtasker’s finance team was already “on the tools”, according to Fung, preparing its first-half numbers for the six months to December 31 to include in its prospectus.īut the late nights over the holiday period paid off when the company hit the boards on Tuesday - a day later than expected thanks to an ASX delay - having raised $83.7 million. He said ‘oh, that’s going to be right over Christmas’.”Ĭhadwick’s fears were well founded. “We’d gone through the options we could assess and all came to the same answer. We were all aligned in wanting the same thing,” Fung tells AFR Weekend. “We like as a board and management team to work collaboratively and to ensure that we’re working together in an objective way, so we wrote on Post-it Notes ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ and stuck them on our foreheads. On September 10, at Spicers in Potts Point, Sydney, Airtasker CEO Tim Fung, chairman James Spenceley and other members of the board and management met to decide whether or not the time had come to list.Įntering the meeting, Fung and Spenceley thought they would be debating whether or not to list in 12 or 24 months, but by the end of the discussion, the “yes” or “no” vote was to decide whether or not to list in just five to six month’s time. In what would have looked like a game of celebrity heads to onlookers, the decision to take gig economy jobs marketplace Airtasker public was decided with a sticky note vote.
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