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.
Conversation
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
1
28
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
17
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 experiment is revealing just how enormous the potential is if we can get the infrastructure right.
1
24
“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.
5
9
29
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
14
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
1
10
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
1
15
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 😎
patents.google.com/patent/US80865
2
12
Replying to
This is super cool. Do you know anyone else doing similar work? I actually read a piece yesterday on the decentralized but coherent "microenterprise" approach that Haier uses, seems promising.
Quote Tweet
A fascinating article on how Haier created an open, decentralized, coherent enterprise architecture to eliminate internal bureaucracy and accelerate productivity. twitter.com/StephenPiment/…
Show this thread
1
1
Replying to
There’s a ton of people/work on this stuff. The field of free agent studies so to speak is 25 years old

