Founding
In 2010, five MIT classmates set out to change the physical workspace and create fulfilling work from home jobs. They quickly identified the voice market as an industry that would benefit significantly from the shared skills of a network of freelancers. They built a platform for remote voice-to-text jobs that aim to provide both customers and freelancers with better transcription, caption, subtitle, and translation services. Today, Rev serves over 170,000 customers through the work of more than 40,000 freelancers who set their own hours, determine their projects, and work from wherever they choose.
Barron Caster, Director of Growth
From Startup to Middle Market
Rev grew through a hyper-focus on customer needs, and leadership continues to spend a lot of time and energy understanding the value they can add to customers’ lives and businesses through current platform improvements and innovation. “Our customer’s loyalty and appreciation for our service have propelled the company to where it’s at today,” said Barron Caster, Director of Growth at Rev.
Rev competes with other human and automated transcription companies, but their platform won the confidence of the largest freelancer community in the industry and kicked off a virtuous cycle that has made them the market leader trusted by 60% of the Fortune 500. Touting the most, at-the-ready voice-to-text experts, coupled with AI to provide first drafts of a transcript, Rev is strategically positioned to meet customer demand at a faster pace than any other service. The volume of transcription data Rev computes every day continues to help developers improve the company’s AI-powered speech recognition engine at an exponential pace, which in turn improves the accuracy and speed with which Rev can meet customer needs. The platform also serves a wide range of other industries and use-cases, diversifying its capabilities.
A Learning-Centric Culture
Rev's culture centers around core values of learning and constant improvement. The environment is meritocratic and Rev’s leadership stands firmly behind the idea that great ideas can come from anywhere. To that point, employees and leadership alike believe that you can’t improve what you don’t know, so the team practices radical candor and all are encouraged to surface problems as soon as possible.
In line with the company’s mission of creating great work from home jobs, Rev offers flexible work options for employees. These elements of the work environment lead to strong retention for the company, which has headquarters in Austin and San Francisco.
Finding and Retaining Talent
Rev identifies finding top talent as one of the company’s biggest challenges, and leadership invests significant time to ensure they bring on the right people. The recruitment process starts with warm employee referrals before looking to other avenues for expansion in a new area. Interviews include work samples to ensure fit and performance, both for freelancers and for corporate hires.
Rev is committed to their team, and works with each employee to create tailored career paths, including skill development and increasing responsibility. They also provide each employee with a professional development stipend, which can be spent on conferences, seminars, educational events, training sessions, books, or anything else that can help an individual learn and grow.
Eyes on the Future
Rev is deeply committed to serving their customers and finding new ways to provide value. To achieve this, they will continue to focus on hiring and training freelancers that meet the diverse requirements of its current and future customers. Rev plans to utilize the intricate quality system that helps its freelancers improve over time, developed with the help of Austin Ligon, founder and former-CEO of CarMax, in order to continue to achieve 99% precision in its services.