Skip to content
By using Twitter’s services you agree to our Cookies Use. We and our partners operate globally and use cookies, including for analytics, personalisation, and ads.
  • Home Home Home, current page.
  • About

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Language: English
    • Bahasa Indonesia
    • Bahasa Melayu
    • Català
    • Čeština
    • Dansk
    • Deutsch
    • English UK
    • Español
    • Filipino
    • Français
    • Hrvatski
    • Italiano
    • Magyar
    • Nederlands
    • Norsk
    • Polski
    • Português
    • Română
    • Slovenčina
    • Suomi
    • Svenska
    • Tiếng Việt
    • Türkçe
    • Ελληνικά
    • Български език
    • Русский
    • Српски
    • Українська мова
    • עִבְרִית
    • العربية
    • فارسی
    • मराठी
    • हिन्दी
    • বাংলা
    • ગુજરાતી
    • தமிழ்
    • ಕನ್ನಡ
    • ภาษาไทย
    • 한국어
    • 日本語
    • 简体中文
    • 繁體中文
  • Have an account? Log in
    Have an account?
    · Forgot password?

    New to Twitter?
    Sign up
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

Tweets

  • © 2020 Twitter
  • About
  • Help Center
  • Terms
  • Privacy policy
  • Imprint
  • Cookies
  • Ads info
Dismiss
Previous
Next

Go to a person's profile

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @

Promote this Tweet

Block

  • Tweet with a location

    You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

    Your lists

    Create a new list


    Under 100 characters, optional

    Privacy

    Copy link to Tweet

    Embed this Tweet

    Embed this Video

    Add this Tweet to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Add this video to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Hmm, there was a problem reaching the server.

    By embedding Twitter content in your website or app, you are agreeing to the Twitter Developer Agreement and Developer Policy.

    Preview

    Why you're seeing this ad

    Log in to Twitter

    · Forgot password?
    Don't have an account? Sign up »

    Sign up for Twitter

    Not on Twitter? Sign up, tune into the things you care about, and get updates as they happen.

    Sign up
    Have an account? Log in »

    Two-way (sending and receiving) short codes:

    Country Code For customers of
    United States 40404 (any)
    Canada 21212 (any)
    United Kingdom 86444 Vodafone, Orange, 3, O2
    Brazil 40404 Nextel, TIM
    Haiti 40404 Digicel, Voila
    Ireland 51210 Vodafone, O2
    India 53000 Bharti Airtel, Videocon, Reliance
    Indonesia 89887 AXIS, 3, Telkomsel, Indosat, XL Axiata
    Italy 4880804 Wind
    3424486444 Vodafone
    » See SMS short codes for other countries

    Confirmation

     

    Welcome home!

    This timeline is where you’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you.

    Tweets not working for you?

    Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account.

    Say a lot with a little

    When you see a Tweet you love, tap the heart — it lets the person who wrote it know you shared the love.

    Spread the word

    The fastest way to share someone else’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Tap the icon to send it instantly.

    Join the conversation

    Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Find a topic you’re passionate about, and jump right in.

    Learn the latest

    Get instant insight into what people are talking about now.

    Get more of what you love

    Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about.

    Find what's happening

    See the latest conversations about any topic instantly.

    Never miss a Moment

    Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      “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
      Show this thread
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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
      Show this thread
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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.

      1:06 PM - 4 Jul 2020
      • 9 Likes
      • Jenna Dixon Brad Neuberg James Death will not release you James Cham ✍🏻 ivashko Kerry 0.005 Seconds To Freedom ʈ ʈ ʈ l l l ɽ ɽ ɽ
      1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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
          Show this thread
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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
          Show this thread
        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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
          Show this thread
        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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
          Show this thread
        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 4
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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
          Show this thread
        7. End of conversation

      Loading seems to be taking a while.

      Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

        Promoted Tweet

        false

        • © 2020 Twitter
        • About
        • Help Center
        • Terms
        • Privacy policy
        • Imprint
        • Cookies
        • Ads info