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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 likesShow this thread -
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
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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 @vgrReplying to @falseworkidolYep, 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 likesShow this thread
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