EP009 - How web3 and DAOs transform the future of work with Cory Hymel of Gigster
About the episode
This episode focuses on a booming innovation, web3. With the introduction of blockchain technologies, DAOs emerged. The way they work and organize incentivized value generation already started to influence how we work together. I invited Cory Hymel, VP of product at Gigster to discuss the topic.
About the guest
Cory Hymel serves as the Vice President of Product at Gigster, a company democratizing access to great software development. With over 600 engineers, Gigster helps startups to Fortune 500 companies unleash human cloud-driven innovation at a global scale. Follow him on YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn and read his blog at https://gigster.com/blog.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
The future of work is gonna be much, much more fluid. The idea of working for a company for the next 40 years is completely dead. We're at that stage where fractionally working for Uber than Lyft, and then DoorDash is totally cool. Fluid employment will be a norm in the future.
The biggest pitfall many leaders make, especially when looking at the innovation side, is that they're trying to adapt the past to the present. They're looking backward. In reality, you should be turning forward and saying, what can I build that's new? And what can I build that’s innovative?
The future workforce will get really bored, really quickly. So you have two options, right? Either one, you try really hard to retain them in some way. Or, two, you overhaul your business model to adapt and build processes around high churn levels. How do you capture work? How do you capture knowledge transfer?
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Welcome everyone, yet another day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today's topic is a bit closer to my chest than usual, as I am or was also active in the same industry. We will talk about how blockchain impacts the future of work, why DAOs can important, can be important, and how distributed companies work. To discuss, I have Cory Hymel from Gigster. Hey Cory, it's lovely to have you here.
Hey, thanks for having me man. Good to, good to chat.
Pleasure. So can you tell a little bit more about Gigster and what are you doing there?
Yeah, of course. So, you know, Gigster herself has been around for about 10 years. And we were founded on the idea that the future is remote and it is distributed. So, I don't know where our founders got some crystal ball to see where we would be today in a post covid society. But the whole kind of concept was around, you know, the future of work is distributed, is remote. So how do we invest kind of ahead of that evidence and build tooling and process and platforms and enable you to run teams at scale. And then we'll do kind of like custom software dev for it. So a lot of our focus is around the research side. How do, how do like distributed workers think? Like how do they act? What motivates them? What are drivers behind them? How do they work in the context of teams? And then what are, you know, either, you know AI tooling or models or processes that you can put in place to help make them more effective and set them up for success? So we've been doing that for about 10 years now. It's really cool. We do a lot of work with like Stanford and Berkeley and their behavioral science units, their computer science departments to run kind of experiments and tests to see how can we make working remote more effective. So it's a good time. And within that my whole reason for being is so I I recently moved into, the role of VP of product, but before that I was director of blockchain as well as the head of academic partnerships and kind of our r and d qua. It wasn't technically r and d, but like, it was kind of, it was basically r and d, but the research side of the house. And so spent a number of years doing that and now kind of oversee the larger portfolio. But the whole topic that you have brought up around web3 and the impact to the future of work, I think is a really fascinating fascinating concept. And it's almost like these new mechanics that were given to us in order to make the future of work and distributed work much more effectively. And it really kind of turned on its head the notion of what a company is. I think a notion of what a company is in the context of like, globally organized individuals working toward a common theme and that we've found super interesting. So I'm excited for our chat today.
This all sounds super, super, serious man and and we know each other from the past. Just to let you let the audience know. And still I didn't know that Gigster was founded 10 years ago. So like I'm personally, I'm working remotely since eight years now, no, nine, so, yeah. Wow. But at that time, that was like super new. So I mean, it was the time when digital nomads as a term just like mm-hmm. , like, kind of like coined up people moved to Chiang Mai and stuff like that. You know, everyone knows the stories. But the distributed workforce like the remote work itself wasn't even a term at that time. And I'm like stunned now that gigster founded 10 years ago with the idea of distributed work. So how, I mean, can you tell me a little bit more about that? That's like super interesting.
Yeah, it was it's funny you mentioned Chiang Mai. So I was actually in Chiang Mai as one of those additional nomads I left. And when it all like maybe 2015 or so, like...
Did you do the Bali trip as well?
So I did a year in a van traveling the US, Mexico, and Canada, and then sold the van and then went to Thailand. And okay.
So you did the Van Life, and you did you do the the Bali Life?
I did not do the Bali Life. But I did like the Lao, Cambodia, Thailand, all through there.
Fair enough.
And then was working remote the whole time, which is really cool. But I think I hit that. It was like the early adopter wave of the whole digital nomad go living.
Yeah. It was super new there. Yeah.
Yeah. And it was really cool. But like, so from the Gigster side what the initial thesis was that we wanted to build like emerging tech. Like we wanted to build the coolest projects around like projects where you needed people that were not readily available to do. And this is, you know, this is back 2013, 2014 you know, if it was then and you were wanting to, to do some, you know, really compelling or really kind of push the envelope style ai, you know, computer vision type project it was really difficult to hire or find people that could do that right? Because this was at the time when, you know when, like Google and Apple, you know, and all of them were literally hiring engineers just so their competitors wouldn't get them. They would hire them for like, they'd be like, we don't need you to do anything. We'll give you $250,000 a year just please don't go work for, you know, the competitor, which is and, and we'll pay your cell phone bill and we'll give you a wellness program and we'll give you a free car and we'll like give you a free, you know, we got massages on staff and asai bowls and you know, all of this stuff like it was wild in the valley then. But still, like there was still a huge need for those skill sets for companies to try to innovate and be competitive, whether they're SMBs mid-market, you know, or even big enterprises like in the manufacturing or other, I would call it like, you know, less tech sectors. And so what Gigster did was like, hey, in order to build these like what if we created a platform and a process that allowed these, you know, these knowledge workers, these and we'll continue to use like AI as a case study, but can be blockchain, it could be all these other ones, right? Like we can let these AI engineers like fractionally provide their time. Two projects almost kind of like moonlighting, right? But they'll all be remote, they'll all be distributed. Like we won't really have a headquarters that they have to report to, to walk into. Gigster itself will manage the whole process because the other flip side of it was that if you are an engineer You don't really want to have to mess with like invoicing or finding clients or like signing MSAs or, you know, writing user stories. So Gigster was like, we will set up this really conducive environment. Ecosystem. Ecosystem, yeah. Environment that attracts these people to come in and be like, oh, great. Like I wanna work on that. All of the extra noise has been handled. And I can provide like, Strongest amount of value, which again, case study here would be model development, right? Or writing the algorithm to the ML algorithm for some project. And then I can get out, right? Like it might only take me three or four weeks and I don't wanna be locked in for the next year and a half. I wanna fractionally provide my expertise in time. To a project and then move somewhere else. And so that's what we did. We built the ecosystem, we built the platform, the process to manage all of that, which was you know, consists of a lot of different things. But think even conceptually, if you think about it, like within a project, the historic way businesses would like allocate resources to mm-hmm. work on a project would. We need resource A, B, C, D, and E. Whether that's a project manager, a designer, front engineer, you know, whatever the roles are. The easiest way to do it we need them for basically full-time for the next six months. Right? All of them. And if you look at how much they're actually contributing, you know, it's not a linear, it's not a straight line of like maximum output, right? It's some phases someone's doing this more, some phases someone else is doing a lot more. But the old work model that the world operated on was like, we'll, just that's fine. We'll just give everyone full-time. It's easy for us to do the math. But what we were thinking is that, well, if that's the case, like why don't you elastically pull people in and out of these teams where they are providing the most value and then pull 'em off when they're not. Because again, top engineers will get like, Super bored really quick and like when really smart people get bored, they will either leave, nothing will happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or nothing will happen. Or they'll start doing their own thing, right? Like they're not gonna idly just sit and collect a paycheck. They will find something to do. And that was the general kind of, Thought, I think that was the nucleus. You know, again, I wasn't the founder of Gigster, like full disclosure, but I've been with the company I think arguably, like, I think maybe the longest of anyone still left. Mm-hmm. . So I was there when the founders were still founder-CEO led. So did get to kind of hear the vision and pitch a lot from them from the early days. And then, yeah, since then we've grown and, you know, the world's a different place now.
That's a really great story and funny to mention that like emerging technologies, how they are super valuable for engineers and how they're super valuable for clients and how we can connect the two in together. And one of these emerging techs are, you know, blockchain. Mm-hmm. . And I think how blockchain profoundly impacts, like the way we work, which is, by the way, not everyone generally think about it when, when they talk about blockchain. So they usually think about, you know, the crypto, the exchanges stuff like that. But mm-hmm, when you think about it, it's in the name, it's distributed and, and the workforce is distributed too. And to get the ball rolling. I've read the white paper from Colony and it was insane how they describe how they work together with their people and and their community together. Mm-hmm. So it was really interesting. So there are some couple of principles That we should share I think to start with to discuss. One thing is that they don't have silos within the company they have domains. Mm. And between the domain expertise, the people who work for colony they provide value and they are compensated based on the value that they create. Seems fair enough for like normal companies as well. Right? But the caveat here is that the more value they generate, For the company first of all, by the way, just side note, it's value. It's not task list. So they're not mm-hmm. . It's not about how much tasks they produce to the company. It's about how much value they generate for the company. That's like right already mindset change for most leaders, I guess. But the second one, and that when they generate value, they get a reputation, like a score. Mm-hmm. . And that reputation decay over time. So it doesn't really, it doesn't matter how much value do you provided in 10 years ago. If you hadn't added anything since then because your compensation will be based on the reputation at the end. Not just the value that they gen that you generate. So it's really interesting how, it's really interesting how they kinda like approach the whole compensation work and of course, on top of everything, their workforce is super remote and support distributed, not just in a sense of like, they live anywhere they want mm-hmm. , but through like contracting, shall we say, like legal perspective. They're also super distributed as well, and like super flexible, right? Super interesting how blockchain forms this whole future work principles as well.
Mm-hmm. So that, that reputation thing, I think is a fascinating concept. Mm-hmm. Like that is mm-hmm really, really cool. So we, like, early on we had this system called Karma, which was basically like mm-hmm if you did a project and you delivered well, you got some karma points, and then we had leaderboards. Then based on your Karma score, you placed in different areas. What we didn't do was the decaying thing, which is really, really interesting. And what we also ended up kind of like sunset it. Like we didn't really, I think, respect it for the complexity that it really was, and it led to like hyperinflation and next thing you knew, like people had just absurd karma scores that were no longer like, accurate. But what we saw, and I haven't read the colony thing, but like what I. What I think is really fascinating about reputation scores, especially in the context of distributed work and distributed teams, is that in a physical environment, it's almost like human nature, you know, part of the lizard brain to understand where you stand within the social context of your surroundings, right? Like you can look like if you are in a room with a group of people, you can visually sign, you know, kind of like size people up and kind of understand where you might be within, I don't wanna say the food chain, but within the social dynamic of this body of people. And when you go remote and distributed you like, no longer have that. And in the context of work or even within the context of just a distributed network of people that are trying to work towards a similar goal. Mm-hmm. Not being able to place yourself within the social context and know where you stand is a really, really like bad mental state to be in, right? To not know where you belong or where you fit in relation to others. Yes. And that reputation thing that colony did sounds extremely fascinating to look at.
Oh, and by the way, it's transparent, so if you joined a company, you can see the others reputation. Oh, and one more thing, which is super interesting, of course. The higher the reputation you have I'm not exactly sure how they work this out, by the way, I'm just guessing from here, the higher the reputation you have, the more likely you can get involved in the decision making as well. Right, so, so it means that the more value you generate, the more reputation you will have. You need to constantly generate value to not decay your reputation, and by the higher your reputation have, the more likely you make decisions. Right. Where to go with the whole process that you do.
No that's cool. Right. And it comes back to the concept of like leaderboards. Mm-hmm. So there's a book called, and this is kind of how I run my management style called the four Disciplines of Execution. Mm-hmm. And one of the main four disciplines is around the idea of having leader boards, right? So when you break down people's works, so it kind of follows this concept of setting like the important goals, and then breaking them down in the lag metrics, and then the net next one is being able to visibly see accomplishments that the team makes and not just you from a leadership perspective, but it's important for your team to see the accomplishments that they're making through leaderboards and like reputation is a great kind of embodiment of being able again to see your contribution gain in tangible, you know, whether that's digital or you can view it and you can almost see it in tactile, understand growth within within the context of others is super important. And so the book was written even before you know, distributed like before Covid. And so they're arguing that leaderboards in that concept was important when we were in person and now mm-hmm. I think it's even 10 times more important to know because you know, you sitting in your office by yourself communicating people with through Slack, like you are just floating out there in the ether, right? And a lot of companies that moved from on-prem to distributed and didn't adopt any of these like social context placing principles or even address them probably because they didn't realize it was there, which is a very common mistake. We see a lot you know, it can lead to silent quitting, right? It can lead to the churn, it can lead to employee unhappiness. It can lead to lack of productivity, or it can lead to, you know misaligned you know, goals and expectations. So it has a really detrimental effect across the board and can happen quickly too. And now that, now that we're, what, two years? Two years into Covid, three years into Covid? Don't even know anymore. Yeah. It's like a lot of companies are starting know to really feel the effects and I think it's gonna continue to ripple more and more as time goes on.
And it's easy to be as you said in the office environment, it's easy to orientate yourself when you enter right. First time, for example, when you onboard it on the first weeks of whatever, but in a remote setup or in a distributed setup you cannot skip transparency. Mm-hmm. Because it helps you to understand what the heck is going on here. Because all you see screen and that's. I mean, let's be honest, it's only the project management, the team chat and the zoom that you mm-hmm usually see and associate with your workplace right now. So it's super easy to get lost and don't know what to do, who to engage with, who to ask help for or support or whatever. So transparency is super important. I, I think web3 helped companies to be a little bit more transparent because it teaches transparency in itself.
Yeah. So when I look at web3 one of the major disruptions, right, that it's gonna cause is that I find DAOs one of the most fascinating concepts to come around in a long time, and I think that what we saw at a high level, it's a way to organize people around a common goal or idea very, very fastly. And if you're able to do that, that's how you know a DAO is working. How you know if a DAO is successful, however is that if you're able to incentivize people to actually do work towards that common direction. Right? It's one thing to get everyone one in the room and be like, do you agree that, that this is important? And everyone say yes, but it's another thing to actually say, okay, well if you agree this is good, I need you to do why most people won't do it. Yes. And so that ability to build incentive structures to organically kind of bring people together and then incentivize them to perform tasks towards that goal, I think that web3 contribution to the future, and especially its impact that it's gonna have on, you know, I'm sure there's gonna be like hundreds of books that come out on like how to adapt DAO principles to your organization to drive incentives from your remote workers. Someone put quotes around that. That will be a title. Market. Market here. Market here. I'm telling you, that is, that is gold. That will be a book one day. I think that that, that one is there and it does come back to a lot we were talking about around like transparency, being able to place yourself in social context, being able to You know, our big belief is that the future of work is gonna be much, much more fluid meaning that people will, you know, the idea is long dead of like going to work for a company for the next 40 years. And like you will work and die here. You'll get a pension, you know, in maybe, you know, a nice windbreaker jacket at your 40th year kind of thing. Like it's gone, completely gone. You know, it broke down from then like where it became socially acceptable to kind of move and bounce around in between companies. And now, you know, we're at that like micro transaction state where fractionally working for Uber part of the time, and then Lyft and then DoorDash, and then you know, X, Y, and Z is totally cool. Like people make full livings off of that. So when we say the fluidity of the workforce, it's going to be more conducive to people moving in and out. Right? And we saw that in DAOs where like, you can come into a Dao, you can provide value, you can get compensation for your time and your value, and then you can move out and go do something else when you find it interesting. And that I think is also from the web3 side, gonna be super, super compelling and a great contribution to the future of the world. Maybe to work future of work.
One also interesting incentive is that you can be part of multiple DAOs. Mm-hmm that's also important to note, I think. And when we are talking about like, not web3, but like work work, I rarely do predictions, but if I have to I think more and more people will follow companies. And when I say follow, it means that they're not working full-time there but contributing to the company's mission in some way and get incentivized to do so and compensated in order to do, you know, anything X, y, z for that company. So, compensation connection to your company you are provided value will be much more transparent. And what I'm also talking about here is companies need to open up to the public as well. So I'm sure that the product roadmap that you're building is super unique and whatever but most of the time that product roadmap or at least the milestones that you achieve, should be open to the public. So it should be other people who are part of dAO or whatever can join and follow you because you unlocked X, Y, Z as a company. Mm-hmm. So everything can be a little bit more transparent, more fluid, more fractional a little bit. Yeah. But because of that, companies will also be incentivized to actually, you know, be able to work in the future of work.
Yeah. I feel like interesting concept to think about is that idea of competitive advantage. And how do you reconcile that with openness? Right. You know, it's, mm-hmm. it's human nature to want to have the leg up on anyone else, right? And that means that if someone is being open and you find what they have as a way that you can leverage that to get ahead. I mean, that's just, I mean, that's instinctual that people will do that unless everyone is, you know, once we make it to our altruistic society where there is no difference and there is no crime and there is no nothing and everything is fine and open, like until we get there a billion years in the future until then, like it's, it becomes hard of like saying like, how do you keep things open while maintaining competitive, but I think if you look at some of the successes that like open source projects have had in being able to create massive amounts of value in really, really compelling outputs all while being like, look, here's what's going on. Like the reason that we are able to do this stuff is because our culture of being, you know, inclusive and open and transparent attracts a lot of really, really smart people that want to fractionally provide their expertise to help us get to this goal. Now as a, you know, a company that, a traditional company or a traditional leader, you might look at that and be like, ah, well it only works in some cases, and like, that might be true. Or that'll never work for my business. So this is, this is the one gripe, or the one thing that I hear everyone take in the wrong direction consistently is either one, or all the times I've talked about DAOs. Like, that would never work for my company. One two, or, you know, when we talk like doing, like, for instance, like digital assets for companies, like, that'll never work. You know, I, I can never turn these into that and that's where, where I see the biggest pitfall of a lot of leaders make, especially when looking at web3 from a adoption side or mm-hmm. or innovation side, is that they're trying to adapt the past to the present. They're looking backwards. They're saying, you gave me this new tool. Let me turn around and see how I can use this. When in reality, you should be turning forward and saying, what can I build that's new, right? And what can I build that's, that's innovative? You know, that's the biggest thing that people fail to grasp and realize out of all of this really, really interesting pushing the envelope style outputs that have come out over the past three, four years from web3. Is that like, don't go take DAOs and be like, we can't do DAOs. There's nothing there. It's like, look at there, there, I mean, there's nuggets a lot of really, really good learnings that you can take and apply that to either your remote workforce, right? How you plan to build skunk work teams, how you plan to attract or retain talent. Like there's great incentive mechanisms in there that help you keep workers around beyond and that is the one, like when I talk to people, it's like you're turning. Stay looking forward. Stop. Don't back, don't try to like, make it backward compatible. It's, yeah. It's forward compatible.
Sure, sure, sure, sure. But it is also important to little bit, I'm kind of like in the middle by the way. Mm-hmm. In this argument. It's also important to look a little bit back, just becau, but wait, just because wait, wait for you. Just because to see did we solve this shit before? And if yes, how? Or anything similar to that. So one example is the transparency. So why sort of, sometimes I speak with others and I share that, okay, so your company, which is like a, I don't know, a hundred people or less should share the performance metrics of revenue and everything else at least transparently with the internal staff. Mm-hmm. now I'm a big advocate of open startups as well. So like, sharing everything with everyone because it attracts people. If you are doing really great with your company the talent will come to work for you. And usually the answers that I have is that, oh, come on. We cannot share that information. I mean, it's like, and just please look back a little bit. Mm-hmm. And just understand that we did this before. It's called Stock Market and Public Companies. They also share almost every key metric that they have because they are mandated to share so, Why not do the same? I'm not, I'm not talking about sharing the, I dunno compensation packages for everyone publicly, but that could be a great idea too. But like, just the key milestones, the key metrics, the key performance indicators. That should be transparent as well. So sometimes it's worth to look a little bit back and see if we solve this problem before somewhere else or somewhat differently. What can, what did we learn from that and how can we apply to the future situation, right, that we have.
Yeah, I think that's the one where that idea of being fully, I mean, there's degrees to transparency, right? Yeah. You know, my opinion is that like, again, being able to share out a roadmap, right or let people know if you're hitting your top level objectives. Mm-hmm. I do think is important, right? I think that if we did, like, if companies did do that, then The sales cycle would be way easier because you can, you just know like, is this kind, like, are they really f you know, lack of a term? Like are they full of shit or not? You can look and see where they're hitting their metrics or no. And then I think that there's varying degrees all the way up to kind of publicly traded companies where you can have the public be at financial risk or stake based on and therefore you should be fully transparent because people are giving you money to participate in your upside or potentially downside. Of course. Yeah, and that's a really strong concept and like if you look at it again, that idea of it, it almost, I think in some worlds makes it easier if you are transparent, because it's not like you're trying to live a lie anymore to like, maybe attract talent or sell product or attract customers. It's like, look here it is. You know we're trying for better or for worse. But I could see people arguing that well, as people will always do, people will argue with the wall, but that's fine. Always be put in front of Yeah. Which is fine. But, but fine. Yeah. Again, but I think from a. Thought experiment side, it is really, really interesting to think through. It'd be like, what if this, yes. Right. And what could this drive? And, you know, maybe some companies will start to experiment with it. Right. Which would be really cool. And I guess they kind of already have in the sense, right like DAOs, again from an example standpoint, like they're fully transparent. You can see how much money they have in their treasury. You can see where their spending goes. You can, you know, as a participant you can vote on where it goes. You can see who's getting paid. You can see if they're hitting milestones if they get funding, you can see all of that stuff. And that's cool. And again, it like, to your point, it has attracted people to go work there because of transparency. And I think that future generations, you know, like me and you are, are relatively old thinking that people are entering the workforce at 18. You know or even before that, like, I mean you can start programming within a DAO when you're whatever age you want to be, right? So there's people contributing there at 14, 15, you know, entering the workforce at 18. And they're gonna have massively different expectations of transparency from companies, from openness from companies, from fluidity and contribution models from companies. And I think that web3 will play a huge role in enabling a lot of those different expectations from future markets.
I was at ETH Amsterdam last time, and just reflect back to the current generation and I have no idea what people think, but you will never be able to attract these people for a full-time job ever at all. At least their top talents ever. Like I'm not even able to imagine them working in an office or any kind of fixed setup. Mm-hmm. But again, these were the most talented, highly talented, it was a web3 space, so obviously everyone was super, super smart. But still, I mean, we are talking about top talent, right? So and unique people. So it's really, companies need to figure out how the future, not just the work, but the future of employment. Mm-hmm. If there's any kind of employment in general at all. And as someone who's running stuff at Gigster , how do you see the future of employment? Yeah. Will there be any kind of employment in a general?
Yeah. I mean that's huge. I mean that's a fantastic question. Right. And like, so we saw this similar behavior when we first started in that a lot of the leading AI researchers, and again, I'll use AI as a case right, because that's kind of like quasi to what blockchain, you know, develops.
Yeah. Usually people who are active there are super smart and usually on the top of their talents.
Yeah. Like the leading people in the space, they would because they had the ability to move between companies easily cuz they were so sought after, they would, they'd say somewhere and as soon as it got bored or it got lame, they would move almost like a herd to the next company. So we had One of our head of ais for a while she was the whistleblower from the Facebook thing that had come out against Mark and all them, but again, incredibly, incredibly smart. Like she was phenomenal, like incredibly, it was phenomenal to work with her. But she was part of like that top 0.001% where, you know, I'd asked her one day, I was like, you know what? I think she was working at Twitter before that. And I was like, well, you know, like, what was ai like Twitter anymore? She's like, it's not cool anymore. Like everyone went to Meta or went to Facebook, or they had gone somewhere else. Like the way that she casually said like, oh, it's not cool to do AI there anymore. They all went to Uber. Right? Or they all went to here. They all onto to their okay, great. That, yeah. Right. Like that's it's like, how do you get a, like, how do you, like, what do you have to do to bring that to them? Besides like, and what's crazy is like, they're not super driven by money, right? Like they are no more compelled about these hard problems. And I think that as we look at future of employment, that is gonna become more pervasive. And this is obviously speaking or it can come off as like some level of like entitlement, right? Assuming that like everyone has pay and like everyone can put a roof over their heads. But like there will be like future generations will have this idea that the technology should, like computers and tech the whole idea is that it should make life easier because it should democratize opportunity. It should like, Automate out a lot of like low level jobs, so it should open up stuff for passion positions where people can kind of work. Like you don't have to like be obsessed with what you do, but like it should be a level of, I'm mildly interested in this, so I should wanna do this. Which if you look at history, being mildly interested in what you do would put you in the top 1% of like the rest of the world, like 99% of people have zero interest there to put a check on the table, right? Yes. And in the future, like future of employment, we're hoping, or like, it's very hopeful to think if I can go to 1% to like 5%, that that would be a huge win. Like if five per percent of people, and like these are by no means, like I have no research to back up these percentage numbers, but just as like a theory or a thought. If, if we can enable that, that would be huge. And I think the other big side of it too is that if you look at the internet, and especially like social media has done to attention span expectations, is that they are radically lower. I mean, I think that on TikTok, like there's, or whatever it is now, like it's gotta be like three to five seconds and if you're not hooked, then like you are out of there. Right. That cognitive response to stimulation is pervasive. Like it doesn't just stop there. It means that future workforce will get really bored, really quick. So you have two options, right? Either one, you try really, really hard and put a lot of time and effort into retaining them in some way. Or two you kind of overhaul your business model to adapt and say, okay, well if that's the case, and like I, I can actually build a business around and expecting high levels of churn, what does that look like from an organizational or process standpoint? Right? Like, how do I capture work? How do I capture knowledge transfer? How do I structure work? How do I structure, you know, objectives and data and all of this to make basically to be conducive to the churn. Yes. Then that's a really fascinating concept to think about. And again, to tie it back, I think that web3 and a lot of the projects that are out there did decent jobs of harnessing the churn and building successful. You know, outputs from that. So when you think about the future of employment, I think those are kind of two big areas to watch out for.
Sure. Before we close, because mm-hmm. mean, we can talk for hours. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanted to say a little bit about that as a reflection because it's so interesting. So I talk about that as well a lot and I'm not sure it's a solution, but what I usually recommend is that the leaders who are in the organization should be full-time ish, like what people usually consider full-time because they are the most passionate about the stuff. But the rest of the team you should embrace the churn. So you should design your operations everything that you do in order to get shit done. With constantly changing people because you cannot expect that people will be at your company just for paycheck for more than half or more than a year. Mm-hmm. People will leave constantly changing, constantly. So you need to build out processes and the operations that embraces that change. But still, you have a little team internally that stays on board because they're running the operations, not the people, but the operations. Anyway. Agree. Agree. Okay, so this is great, man. That was great. Let's wrap up with how people can find you.
Yeah, so the best place is probably on LinkedIn. It's just my first name and my last name. I do have a Twitter, but I'm not very active. I'm actually really bad at posting on social media stuff but I do post a lot a around like, kind of again, these like abstract thought experiment stuff that randomly will run through my brain. But like to put 'em out there to see what other people think. Cause I think it's really interesting to talk to people like yourself and others that hear about the space, but that's probably the best. But thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed this conversation.
It was a pleasure. I really enjoyed it too. Thank you.
