Former newspaper carrier brings Taskrabbit to Sioux Falls, SD
She’s a famed senior manager with AirBnB and UberEats, a former eCommerce leader with Walmart and a well-known ex-strategist for Expedia.
But before all that, tech business mogul Ania Smith was an early-morning newspaper carrier for the Argus Leader at 12 years old.
Today, as CEO of the worldwide home service marketplace Taskrabbit, her heart is home again.
Taskrabbit launched in Sioux Falls last month.
“I have been pushing this for a long time,” Smith says.
Her parents, Les and Agnes Pietruszkiewicz, still live here today and still receive the daily newspaper.
“People in Sioux Falls truly care about one another and the community,” she said. “Sioux Falls is going to be a great win for Taskrabbit.”
A family reunion in Sioux Falls
Smith was on the cover of the Argus Leader on Feb. 11, 1986, when she and her family momentously arrived to Sioux Falls from Poland.
A reporter came to the house, she said, and asked questions about her family’s arrival.
“It was so surreal to be in the newspaper," she said.
Her father fled their homeland first, in hopes of relocating his family anywhere else “from a hard life in Poland” before receiving a visa to move to the states.
“When I came to America, I had $10 in my pocket and spoke no English,” Les says today.
Although “retired” now, he still runs his own taxi and realty companies in Sioux Falls.
It took three long years, but on the morning of Feb. 6, 1986, his wife, Agnes; 12-year-old daughter, (then) Anna; and 11-year-old son, Adam, got off the 20-hour flight from Warsaw to see Dad again.
“I’ve waited for this day a long time,” Les told reporters then. “It’s like being married a second time.”
Smith, who also didn’t yet speak English but had the same work ethic as her father, was quick to put her innate sales acumen to work.
She and her brother ran a paper route for a couple years while also selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door, where she learned to “accept rejection with grace” and “get to know your customer.”
By age 14, she was helping at her family’s restaurant, Polish Plate, and had begun a job at Burger Time on the east side before serving at TGI Fridays and Applebee’s.
Les says he watched her daughter seek more and more experience, never slowing down.
“I wanted to figure out how to make money quickly,” Smith says. “I loved having that control and being able to afford anything I could call my own. It was really powerful.”
Business related: Breadico returns to downtown Sioux Falls with cafe.
While Smith’s dad was working at John Morrell's pork processing plant (now Smithfield Foods), and her mother at the former Falcon Plastics, she and her brother went to St. Therese Catholic School and then O’Gorman High School. After finishing her undergraduate work at the University of South Dakota, her global career went from Philadelphia to New York City, Kenya to Chicago, and London to Northern California, just to name a few stops.
Smith was head of courier operations at UberEats and a senior leader at AirBnB before becoming CEO of Taskrabbit in 2020.
“I came from a lot of experience in global business operations and strategic planning, but this was my first time as CEO,” Smith says. “It was a lot of learning and excitement.”
She lives in the Bay Area today with her husband and three children.
A leader in mobile service connects ‘taskers’ with errands
Taskrabbit is an online, dual-sided marketplace – just like UberEats or AirBnB, which offers more than 700 homes in Sioux Falls today – that connects folks who need help with daily tasks. You want your lawn clipped, your house cleaned, your walls painted, your faucet fixed or your belongings packed up before a move?
Smith said some customers even hire “taskers” to stand in line for cupcakes in NYC.
Maybe not here, but the school pick-up line could even seem an apropos time for Taskrabbit to save the day.
South Dakota is one among nine of the last states to launch Taskrabbit, which began in 2008 and is otherwise in thousands of cities among eight countries and the sole furniture assembly provider at IKEA.
“Sioux Falls is one of the fastest-growing metros in the Northern Plains,” Smith says. “It makes perfect sense for us.”
For taskers, they have the autonomy to work however much they want, on whatever skillset they want and get to keep all their hourly earnings. There are more than 200,000 independent workers today.
“Looking back at my childhood, there weren’t businesses like Taskrabbit providing an opportunity for people like my parents to earn an income with that flexibility,” Smith says. “I’m very excited to provide that opportunity now for people in Sioux Falls.”
