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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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    The side hustle to my side hustle is helping make the social side of side hustles more fun. So many people seem to think the collective noun for free agents is “market” as in, Hobbesian gig market with race to the bottom pricing dynamics and ugly ratings manipulation games.

    12:23 PM - 4 Jul 2020
    • 4 Retweets
    • 51 Likes
    • Venk-E Eugene Marinelli Aneel ✊🏽 Matheus V ian m hines Shriphani Palakodety Tim Rooney "Fire Buddha" Rival Voices (76/284 olympic squats) Time for good trouble
    6 replies 4 retweets 51 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        Just because free agents don’t free associate through shared employment in paycheck corps doesn’t mean they are lone wolves who either stay out if each other’s way or compete 1:1 in Hobbesian ways. Economic sociability is not limited to markets and corporatized entities.

        1 reply 2 retweets 27 likes
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      3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        That said, infrastructure for doing anything other than engage in bidding wars on upwork is very limited. There’s no way to simply form a team to bid for an opportunity beyond trawling your general social network. There’s no way to talk about gigwork beyond vanilla social media.

        2 replies 0 retweets 21 likes
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      4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        The “enterprise” is a stack of complex software with way deeper collaboration/workflow capabilities than social media. Free agents cobble together ersatz imitations of this stack from underpowered free tools. We need a gigtech software distinct from both consumer and enterprise.

        2 replies 0 retweets 28 likes
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      5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        I wasn’t aware of these problems until recently because in 9 years as a free agent, I did *very* little collaborative work with other free agents. Just farmed out some subcontracts and used a few support people off and on. I used to rationalize this as “I just like working alone”

        1 reply 0 retweets 18 likes
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      6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        Now that I’m actually consciously trying, I think what actually held me back is sheer lack of even the most basic infrastructure. Even just a few months in, the @yak_collective experiment is revealing just how enormous the potential is if we can get the infrastructure right.

        1 reply 0 retweets 25 likes
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      7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        “The fortune in the combinatorial space of free agents” A group of n free agents has at least 2^n ways of creating value, not just n. And that’s an underestimate, since even the same team can collaborate in many different ways. Free agents radically unbundle the corporation.

        6 replies 9 retweets 31 likes
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      8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        While there are a million product ideas in this observation, that’s not where the action is, and I’m not particularly interested in imagining or building “SAP for free agents.” A startup corporation to build a product to unbundle the corporation would be kinda ironic.

        1 reply 0 retweets 14 likes
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      9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        The real action is in figuring out, and validating ways to work in the combinatorial space of free agents. Cobbled-together tools are fine for early experiments. The key is to focus on the content of gig work first, and tools to sustain it second.

        1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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      10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        If you start with the tools you’ll simply reinvent a commodity labor market like upwork, or rhapsodize about spherical blockchains in a vaccum we can’t actually use to work or collaborate. To actually unbundle the corporation with free agency you have to work in new patterns.

        3 replies 1 retweet 15 likes
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      11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        I’ve been writing thinking, and even building products for free agent work for over a decade. Even have a patent for multilevel recursive auction collaborative marketplaces, which my team actually built and deployed internally at Xerox 10 years ago 😎 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8086501?oq=marketplaces+venkatesh+rao …

        2 replies 0 retweets 11 likes
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      12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        But only now have both the technologies and the free-agent sector matured to the point where you can build out the infrastructure for real. Back then I think I was too early. It was pre-blockchain, pre- Stripe, pre-Freshbooks, pre most of the tools in the “passion economy” sector

        1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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      13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        The ideas back then were *really* primitive. Mturk seemed like the bleeding edge. Read books like Tom Malone’s Future of Work (inspiration for elance which eventually got absorbed into upwork) and Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation for a historical view. A lot has changed since 2010.

        1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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      14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        It’s time for a free-agency renaissance. The pioneer days are over. There’s no need to larp a dangerously and unnecessarily precarious cowboy economy. Time to do some settling and town planning.

        3 replies 1 retweet 14 likes
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      15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Cedric Charly

        No this is not Metcalfe’s law (network effect). That’s O(n^2). It’s not even Reed’s law (powerset effect), which is O(2^n). It is Reed’s law *as a lower bound* on possibilities https://twitter.com/cedricgc/status/1279511408317591552?s=21 …https://twitter.com/cedricgc/status/1279511408317591552 …

        Venkatesh Rao added,

        Cedric Charly @cedricgc
        Replying to @vgr
        Is this a restatement of Metcalfe's law or is there some substantial nuance to this specific application I am missing?
        3 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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      16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        I once actually tried to compute a formula for the size of this space in closed form and failed. If somebody wants, it is *at least* the set of all possible graphs, directed and undirected, defined on every component of every partition of every subset of the universal set.

        1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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      17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        Informally, it is the “number of ways n people can organize into teams” (with only full membership; fractional head counts make thid even bigger). The space of “organizations” is so huge and high dimensional, the part of it we occupy is barely a degenerate crumpled corner.

        1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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      18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
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        Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

        Note on navigating the space. You can't just enumerate and brute force search it for good configs, it is too big.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1279520092489781248 …

        Venkatesh Rao added,

        Venkatesh Rao @vgr
        Replying to @falseworkidol
        Yep, you need good ways to navigate it in emergent ways, but the path dependent degeneracy configurations we know are not necessarily the best ones for the present environment. In some work I did, I used reinforcement learning to identify good configs from work history.
        1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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      19. End of conversation

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