Bryce Maddock and the business he almost walked away from

Bryce Maddock was ready to leave. He was about three years into building TaskUs, still living with his parents, and tired of waiting for a business to become a living. In Century City, he told his co-founder Jaspar Weir that he wanted to be bought out, or for them to close the company. Weir’s reply was painfully simple: “Bryce, I don’t want to do this if you’re not doing it with me.” Maddock stayed. Within roughly six months, he recalled, the business was making money and he could finally move out.

That exchange belongs beside the revenue charts. TaskUs would attract Blackstone, list on Nasdaq, and eventually pass a billion dollars in annual sales. At the point when Maddock nearly abandoned it, the argument for continuing came from someone who had known him since school. A business plan might have struggled to compete with that.

A good night’s work, collected by Mom

Maddock and Weir met at Santa Monica High School. At 19, they were running Club Access, an all-ages nightclub venture that lasted three summers. It gave them something more practical than a precocious-founder anecdote: experience persuading people to turn up, pay, and come back. Their future business would require all three, with rather less dancing.

The enterprise also had an unusually reassuring cash-handling department. Their mothers collected the admission money; a father drove it away. Afterward, the founders counted the proceeds at Weir’s house. For all their entrepreneurial confidence, they were young people building something with considerable family assistance. Maddock has never needed to edit the parents out of this story.

He went to New York University, earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations and graduating summa cum laude. His early working life included investment banking at Rodman & Renshaw, a partnership at Smarter Social Media, and co-founding MW Entertainment. The eventual outsourcing chief had tried entertainment, finance, and social media before finding the business that would occupy him for decades.

The forty-page plan meets Buenos Aires

For a while, the next business was going to be frozen yogurt. Maddock left Wall Street and joined Weir in pursuing a shop in Argentina. He had written a forty-page business plan. The enthusiasm was properly documented.

A conversation with an expatriate who had opened a burrito business in Argentina changed the calculation. The advice was to build an international enterprise that earned dollars while paying expenses in a local currency. Maddock and Weir returned home, and the yogurt ambition joined the long, rarely advertised list of businesses that are improved by being abandoned.

There was another idea available. Maddock remembered the repetitive data work he had done as an investment banking analyst. Expensively educated people were spending long days moving information between systems. Somewhere, he reasoned, were people who could do that work well and welcome the opportunity.

TaskUs began in 2008 as a virtual personal assistant service. Busy individuals could submit tasks for someone else to complete. The model proved difficult to grow, and the founders eventually concentrated on helping startups with recurring business operations. They also noticed that the work coming from their Philippine team was consistently good. Those two observations gave the company a more workable direction.

Five computers, and somewhere to stay

In 2009, Maddock went to the Philippines to establish an operation. The budget covered five computers and his return flight. Weir stayed behind to sell. Maddock stayed in the homes of early employees in Cavite because there was no money for a hotel. For a month, the people he was hiring also hosted him.

Living with colleagues made their lives difficult to treat as an abstraction. He heard about their ambitions and concerns at close quarters. Later, he linked the company’s mission of creating meaningful employment to that visit. The relationship began with a degree of dependence that ran both ways.

The first Philippine office was in Bacoor, Cavite. Choosing a location near employees’ homes helped attract people who could avoid a long journey into Manila. Maddock later acknowledged that this had emerged from following the team rather than from an elaborate location strategy. Sometimes an operational advantage starts with the address that happens to make sense.

“I wish I could claim this was some strategic brilliance, but we just went where our employees were.”

Bryce Maddock, on the early Cavite office

There was little glamour in coordinating outsourced work from a small office. Yet the choice of whom to serve mattered. A growing startup might need more support next month than it did this month. TaskUs could grow alongside customers whose ambitions exceeded their available staff.

The employee experience becomes the product

Maddock’s argument for TaskUs developed around the people doing the work. If employees understood a client’s products, cared about the brand, and wanted to remain with the company, customers would receive better service. An outsourcing contract carried the client’s reputation along with its task list.

By 2015, he described a detailed recruitment process with job-specific skills tests and interviews assessing communication, creativity, problem-solving, and alignment with company values. Hiring well was a substantial part of managing well. He also insisted on face-to-face meetings, clear milestones, and written agreements about what would happen next.

The foundation followed a change in the founders’ own circumstances. After years spent trying to afford independent lives, they began thinking about the families depending on the business. Education became a way to extend its benefits beyond a pay packet. The TaskUs Foundation supported employees’ children, and by 2022 the company described tuition assistance in both India and the Philippines.

That year, Maddock received Silver in the Stevie Awards’ People-Focused CEO of the Year category. He was also serving on the board of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. The connection is straightforward: someone who learned by starting businesses was helping make that possibility available to others.

A frequent flyer with room for cookies

The personal details offer some relief from the vocabulary of operations. In an early travel interview, Maddock named Usher’s 8701 as his soundtrack and chocolate-chip cookies as the thing every minibar ought to contain. His ideal travel partner was Weir. The two had traveled through Europe at 17 and continued combining travel with business.

His way of getting acquainted with a city was to put on running shoes and deliberately get lost. He reported taking 76 flights in the previous year. A backpack had to look appropriate for meetings while carrying several days’ belongings, with the shoes attached outside if necessary. International expansion had a fairly literal packing list.

He also competed in marathons and Ironman triathlons. Those interests sit comfortably with the long period before TaskUs paid him enough to leave home, although a race at least tells you where the finish line is. Company building is considerably less polite about that.

Today, his personal website places him in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kathleen, their three children, and their dog, Mr. Carter. It is a domestic destination several stages removed from the single bed at his parents’ house.

The numbers arrive, along with new responsibilities

Blackstone invested in TaskUs in 2018. By 2019, the company had about 18,000 employees worldwide, had opened its first Indian office, and was expanding in Mexico. In 2021, TaskUs became a publicly listed company on Nasdaq. The business that began with personal tasks now required an international organization to run it.

Maddock’s responsibilities expanded too. He had been chief executive since the company’s founding, became a board member and acting chairperson in October 2018, and became chairperson in March 2023. Operating the company and overseeing it were increasingly substantial jobs.

For 2025, TaskUs recorded $1,183.5 million in service revenue, up from $995 million in 2024. Net income reached $102.3 million. The scale is useful context for the early story: a company whose founders once needed enough money for their own apartments had become an employer with tens of thousands of people depending on its decisions.

The next pivot has an AI department

Maddock now faces a more complicated version of the original question about repetitive work. AI can automate activities TaskUs has historically supplied people to perform. It also creates demand for people who can help develop, evaluate, and operate new systems. TaskUs is participating in both sides of that change.

The financial filings acknowledge the tension. Supporting customers’ automation projects can increase revenue in the near term while eventually automating services the company currently provides. A growing AI business does not make that risk disappear. For Maddock, adapting the work is part of protecting the company’s future.

In the second quarter of 2026, TaskUs generated $308.9 million in service revenue, up 5% from a year earlier. AI Services grew approximately 26%. Maddock’s stated focus was combining AI capabilities with specialized human talent. The business remains dependent on finding work where that combination has value.

There is a human continuity beneath the changing service names. In a recent public post, he celebrated colleagues who had started transcribing Phonetag voicemail messages 17 years earlier. Some were now supporting AI labs. Their careers had moved with the company.

That makes the early conversation with Weir worth remembering. Maddock’s career contains several changes of plan, from clubs to an abandoned yogurt venture to outsourcing and AI. Staying with a company has required changing what it does. The friend who persuaded him to continue gave him time to discover how much could change.