story candidate goes to: this-edition T town planner
What spending millions on Upwork taught: build the infrastructure first, and the jobs can go back to where people came from
As a CISO and CTO Dinis spent millions on Upwork across the open source projects and the teams he ran, and it was one of the most successful things they did: distributed teams, people as good as or better than those hired the ordinary way, delivered faster and more efficiently. It worked because they invested first in the infrastructure around it, a project management team, a structure team and an onboarding team, and then used Upwork to manage Upwork, so the internal teams carried no overhead. It was never buying the cheapest: it was the right talent at a price fair where they lived, good value for both sides and a real career for the person. A small country that builds the plumbing makes the jobs available everywhere inside it, so people can go back to where the family and the lifestyle are; Romania's technology sector is close to 8% of GDP with more than 250,000 professionals and over ten billion euros a year of service exports.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. The Upwork spend and outcomes are Dinis's own and not independently verifiable from the article. Answers the 2018 Upwork outline from the hiring side rather than the freelancer's.
Where it comes from
- Judo for small countries What I learned spending millions on a distributed workforce (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Upwork unanswered outline, Your CV
- Why diversity matters answered outline, Life Patterns
Where it goes
Chapter The company itself: the UK, Portugal, Lithuania, the European Union, part Start the company (drafting); topic Be a founder (or a one-person service).
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: How to actually do it: a limited company in the UK, Lithuania, Portugal, the European Union, the cloud providers and the programmes, What the newsroom says about Lithuania and the Portuguese company, as of 12 October 2026: two lines.
Node idea:millions-on-a-distributed-workforce in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.