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Yo, technology. What is it all about?

Welcome to another edition of Danny in the Valley, the Sunday Times Tech podcast from Sunny California, where every week we bring you a conversation with someone who is in some way shaping this brave new world we're all living in.

We have a very good one this week. Marco Zappa Costa is here, and Marco is the founder of Thumbtack.

Thumbtack is a marketplace for plumbers and piano teachers and DJs and wedding photographers

and professionals of any stripe.

So it's kind of like what Airbnb is to hotels or Uber is to transport.

Thumbtack is to tradespeople or for anybody who needs a quick job

being done around the house or for an event or whatever.

The company is a unicorn, of course,

so it's worth well over a billion dollars,

and Marco has a great story to tell about getting the company off the ground.

It's pretty torturous.

We had this storage room that we used as people would take calls in there.

Because it's like big enough you could pace in and be private.

And I just went in there and cried by myself for a while.

And of course we'll also get into one of the subjects that is the top of a lot of people's minds these days.

The future of work in the gig economy.

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