In short: Deiya — his most contrarian call. "We've forgotten how special marketplace businesses are": Upwork is its own economy connecting businesses to high-value freelancers, with network effects that make it "impossible to replicate." The weakness is real but confined — Upwork's own data shows softness only in sub-$500 jobs (logo work, i.e. Fiverr's core) while higher-value consultative work holds, and a marketplace churns its own substrata by creative destruction. Valuation: a little over 1× EV/sales and a little over 6× EV/free cash flow even after SBC. "I don't know where you find a better bargain than that in this market." Pernas is itself a growing Upwork buyer.
Upwork is a marketplace where businesses hire freelancers. Investors have dumped it on the obvious fear that AI does freelance work now. Deiya's counter is that the fear is right about one slice and wrong about the rest — and Upwork publishes the data that shows which. Jobs worth under $500, the "make me a logo for $300" tier, are visibly weakening. Everything above that, where a client wants a person who understands their problem, is not.
His reasoning about why the top end survives: a small business often doesn't know what to ask an AI for. Talking to a human expert who does — and who is himself using AI, so he's faster and cheaper than before — beats writing prompts until something comes out right. And a marketplace isn't a fixed catalogue: when one category of work dies, freelancers move to whatever businesses need next, the way any economy does.
The reason he calls it easy to own is the price. "EV/sales" compares the whole company's value to its annual revenue, and Upwork trades a bit above 1× — roughly the value of one year's sales. On free cash flow (the actual cash the business throws off) it's a bit above 6×, even after counting the shares it hands to staff as a real cost. A genuine network-effect business, which is one of the hardest things in the world to rebuild from scratch, at close to a liquidation-style multiple.
36:41So if a certain substrata of freelancers is no longer being used, that's going to be replaced by whatever needs are in the future. So we're highly bullish on Upwork staying power and especially if you look at it from the perspective of valuation. This thing trades at a little over one times EV to sales.
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