Jaspar Weir talks about TaskUs’s humble beginnings and unrivaled workplace experience in Texas Business Minds podcast

TaskUs has been providing customer support and specialized services to fast-growing tech companies for 13 years. Despite their humble beginnings as a small virtual personal assistant business in the Philippines, high school buddies Bryce Maddock and Jaspar Weir led TaskUs to become a world-leading provider of outsourced digital services. 

In a recent episode of Texas Business Minds, a podcast series by the Texas Business Journals that features in-depth conversations with local business leaders, Weir revealed that the virtual personal assistant business that they started with proved to be hard and challenging to sustain. But instead of closing the business—which would have been the easier thing to do at that time—Weir and Maddock networked with other startups in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and discovered that a lot of tech companies were in need of outsourced customer support. 

“We thought, ‘Hey, we can help these fast-growing startups and we will take on smaller teams to do the work that these large companies won't do,” said Weir. “We know that these startups will be growing, so we made that bet to focus exclusively on the digital economy and work only with high-growth disruptors that often start very small. That's what works.”

Having a personal connection with employees, as Weir and Maddock learned, was crucial to building an unrivaled workplace environment that would differentiate TaskUs from its competitors.

“We narrowed in and doubled down on our strategy around the employee experience. When we used to go to the Philippines early on, we would stay at the houses of some of our employees because we had no money! We had this amazing connection with our teammates and just knew that if we took care of them, they would take care of our customers,” recalled Weir.

“To this day, those two things—working with high-growth companies and delivering a Ridiculously Good employee experience—are the two factors that make TaskUs what it is.”

TaskUs has three sites in Texas—San Antonio, New Braunfels, and Rio Grande Valley—and Weir said it has been a great state to do business in. “The talent here is excellent. The support from the local community has been fantastic as well,” he said. “So we just continue to see such an opportunity in all of the greater Texas area for work like this.”

Listen to the podcast here: San Antonio: Taken to Task - How Two Buddies Teamed Up to Bootstrap a $2.8 Billion Company