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TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot announced today that she is stepping down from her role at the freelance labor marketplace.
Brown-Philpot joined TaskRabbit seven years ago as the company’s chief operating officer and was promoted to CEO in the spring of 2016. In the fall of 2017, the company was acquired for undisclosed financial terms in a stock deal by Ikea and has continued to operate independently as a subsidiary of the company.
Brown-Philpot, who began her career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, had previously spent nearly nine years in a variety of roles at Google, beginning as a sales director, later managing a 1,000-person team in India, and leaving as a senior director of global consumer operations.
We’ve reached out to TaskRabbit for more information. In the meantime, in an
interview earlier today
with the New York Times, Brown-Philpot she will remain in her role until August’s end, as the company’s looks to bring aboard her successor.
Brown-Philpot, who is among a small number of Black women who have led tech companies as chief executive — others include former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and Zoox CEO Aicha Evans — tells the outlet that she had planned to leave the company before global protests erupted roughly one month ago in reaction to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
She suggests that they have impacted her deeply nonetheless, saying, “Every time somebody asks me how I’m doing, I process either consciously or subconsciously some form of racism that I’ve experienced. It’s torn apart families and communities. I’m just deeply frustrated by it all.”
Brown-Philpot says she has not yet decided on her next moves quite yet, but will seemingly be busy nonetheless. In addition to director roles with HP and Nordstrom, she recently agreed to serve as an adviser to a new $100 million fund that SoftBank announced two weeks ago to support companies led by people of color.
TaskRabbit, like many gig-economy companies, has been hard hit by the pandemic, but the company has remained opened for business throughout, including connecting “Taskers” with virtual tasks and launching in April
Tasks for Good
, which connects vulnerable individuals in need with Taskers willing to volunteer their time to help.
In 2018, Brown-Philpot appeared on the “Masters of Scale” podcast, hosted by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and recounted memories from her first job, delivering newspapers on a paper route that she shared with her older brother in their home town of Detroit.
As she told Hoffman then, “I grew up on the west side of Detroit. It wasn’t the best neighborhood, it wasn’t the worst neighborhood, but people looked out for each other. Of course, later on, things got worse for a lot of people very, very fast, but it was home for me. . . We would deliver the papers in the mornings, and then on the weekends we had to go collect from people. Of course, there were always people who didn’t want to pay, so I had to make sure we got paid.”
As with many business leaders, that early work experience proved formative for her, suggested Brown-Philpot, who said she was about 10 years old at the time.
“Some people would see us and it’s like, four degrees outside, and they would just give us that extra dollar. That just meant so much,” she told Hoffman, “because I know it came from people who didn’t have a whole lot of money, but they were proud of us for doing real work, good work, legal work, in a community where a lot of people did illegal work to make money. I think that helped inspire me probably later on, that if you do good work for good people, it’ll pay off.”
