The execs at so-called "gig economy" companies â those companies making apps that let one person hire another to, say, drive you around, or put you up for the night â sometimes go undercover as workers on their own platforms. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi briefly drove an Uber; Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky used to be a host himself.
And Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit, says she was once hired as a "tasker" too. She took a job to clean someone's apartment and found it to be "stressful," she said on stage at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado on Tuesday.
Not only did she have to clean the apartment in two hours â including a surprisingly dirty oven that she didn't know about until she opened it â but the task was for someone who was moving out "and had to get their deposit back."
So she felt pressure because the customer had "money on the line."
She never told the customer that she was the undercover CEO. But she did rise to the challenge.
"He got his deposit back," she proudly said.