Upwork Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Upwork Q2 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Evan Barbosa, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome to Upwork's discussion of its second quarter 2021 financial results. Leading the discussion today are Hayden Brown, Upwork's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Jeff McCombs, Upwork's Chief Financial Officer. Starting this quarter, we are publishing a shareholder letter rather than prepared remarks. If you haven't already read the letter, please find it on our IR website. Following Hayden's brief introductory remarks, we will be happy to take your questions. But first, I'll review the Safe Harbor Statement. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under federal securities law. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. In addition, any statements regarding the current and future impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business and current and future impacts of actions we have taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are forward-looking statements and related to matters that are beyond our control and changing rapidly. For discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and on our Investor Relations website, as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today's press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our quarterly report on Form 10Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2021, when filed. In addition, reference will be made to non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding the reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures can be found in the press release that was issued this afternoon on our investor relations website at investors.upwork.com. As always, reported figures are rounded unless otherwise noted. Comparisons of the second quarter of 2021 are to the second quarter of 2020. All GAAP measures are GAAP unless cited Now, I'll turn the call over to Hayden.

Thanks, Evan, and thank you all for joining us today for our Q2 2021 earnings call. We are pleased to be reporting our record second quarter results with 50% year-over-year growth in GSV and 42% year-over-year growth in revenue, driven by what we believe are permanent changes to how work gets done. The Upwork team is executing well across the board, as demonstrated by our strongest sales quarter ever and 27% year-over-year growth in active clients. We continue to plant critical seeds of innovation as we build the world's most comprehensive work marketplace. In Q2, we continue to innovate with the launch of TalentScout, which offers businesses hands-on recruiting assistance without the expensive price tag of a traditional staffing agency. With each passing quarter, we couldn't be more excited about our progress and about the sustaining long-term potential of our business. Upwork is the world's largest work marketplace as measured by GSE. We are more than a staffing firm, a gig company, a job board, or a talent network. We are where more of the world's highly skilled freelancers and businesses build trusted, long-term relationships so they can achieve more together. We help companies build virtual talent benches of freelancers to augment their in-house teams, fill skill gaps, increase agility, and provide their employees with much-needed reinforcement, helping prevent burnout. And we empower freelancers to work on their own terms, giving them more control over when and where they work, with whom they work, and on what they work. Now more than ever, Upwork is uniquely positioned to serve an expanding $1.3 trillion total addressable market. The remote work experiment undertaken during COVID has changed work forever, shattering the biggest impediment to broader freelancer adoptions by getting companies of all sizes comfortable with engaging team members remotely. Organizations now know they can actually build and grow their businesses with remote talent. At Upwork, we have known this for a long time, and we are leaning into this current opportunity to open our customers' eyes to the dramatically underappreciated potential of what can be gained through working with distributed teams of independent talent. We will continue to execute with discipline against our winning strategy. Our single strategic priority continues to be innovating, scaling, and promoting the work marketplace for the world. In doing so, our goal is to become the de facto, always-on solution for all companies of every size, hiring freelancers and managing freelancer programs at scale, something from which we believe all companies should be benefiting. Thank you for joining us on this journey. We will now open the call to your questions.