Upwork Welcomes Melissa Waters as Chief Marketing Officer

With more than a decade of experience building world-class brands for hyper-growth companies, Waters’ appointment will help Upwork capitalize on its $1.3 trillion total addressable market opportunity

Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK), the world’s work marketplace, today announced that Melissa Waters has joined the company as its chief marketing officer.

Waters is an accomplished and award-winning marketing executive with more than 15 years of experience building world-class brands, developing high-performing teams, and driving business impact. She joins Upwork from Meta, where she was global vice president of marketing at Instagram. Previously, she led marketing, merchandising, and business development for telehealth leader Hims & Hers. Prior, Waters served in executive marketing positions at Lyft and Pandora.

We are experiencing a tectonic shift in how work gets done, which shows no signs of slowing down. Covid is causing many people to reevaluate their priorities, innovate their careers, and explore new ways of working. Some are choosing new roles that speak to their passions and hobbies, others are supplementing their full-time jobs, and many are giving up full-time jobs altogether to gain more flexibility as freelancers. For companies that have been hesitant to adopt workforce innovation, these workforce shifts – and the resulting war for talent due to the Great Resignation – are causing companies to experiment more than ever before with new work models and more modern talent sources, both of which Upwork offers.

“It’s impossible to not be deeply inspired by the transformational moment we are in for the world of work,” said Upwork president and CEO Hayden Brown. “In 2022, our strategy remains laser-focused on continuing to innovate, evangelize, and scale the world’s work marketplace – the career platform for every skilled worker, and every business, regardless of employment type and geography. Melissa’s deep expertise in helping high-growth companies scale, establish new categories, and build world-class brands is key to increasing awareness of Upwork and capitalizing on our $1.3 trillion total addressable market opportunity. We couldn’t be more thrilled for her to join the team.”

Upwork is focused on continuing to innovate its market-leading capabilities while increasing awareness of its offering. In May of 2021, Upwork introduced a new industry category, the work marketplace. Later in 2021, Upwork introduced CoLab – a brand partnership program that gives talent an opportunity to work on innovative projects with world-renowned brands. It also launched its "The Perfect Fit" advertising campaign, which debuted on Fox's NFL Thanksgiving Day schedule. To serve the breadth of customer needs for getting different types of work done from $50 to $500,000 projects and more, the company has augmented its flagship product – the Talent Marketplace — with new offerings like Project Catalog, Upwork’s “browse and buy” experience where freelancers post complete work offerings that clients can purchase on the spot, and Talent Scout, the company’s first-class, data-science driven hiring solution where talent are pre-vetted and pre-interviewed by Upwork.

“This is an exciting time to be joining Upwork’s visionary leadership team,” said Waters. “For the first time in decades, people are questioning what we call ‘work’ and how we do it. As the world’s work marketplace, Upwork is uniquely positioned to not only capitalize on this shift but shape what work looks like in the future. I look forward to helping take Upwork’s brand story to new heights.”

About Upwork

Upwork is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to 30% of the Fortune 100 with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and independent talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential. Our talent community earned over $2.5 billion on Upwork in 2020 across more than 10,000 skills in categories including website & app development, creative & design, customer support, finance & accounting, consulting, and operations. Learn more at www.upwork.com and join us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

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