Labor Clouds and Being Your Own Enterprise

My friend John Battelle published an interview with our portfolio company Work Market‘s CEO Stephen DeWitt yesterday.

There are a couple interesting ideas that are explained in that interview:

• Labor clouds. It turns out that John’s new company NewCo is using Work Market to create and manage a labor cloud of writers and editors to create a new publication. Some of these writers and editors are full time employees, some are contractors, some are true freelancers. In the “labor cloud” model, you manage all of the labor you need to get something done in a single platform instead of three (or four, or five, or six).
• My favorite line from the piece, and the one I tweeted out, is this “”By 2040, I’m pretty confident that every skilled worker will have their own signpost. You will be your own enterprise” I like the idea that people are going to have more agency over their work life, their careers, and the way they want to work. I think that leads us to a better place, for both employers and employees.

This vision for the enterprise is more than the “uberization of work” although many people will simply see it as that. It is a recognition that enterprises should not manage workers in silos based on how they pay them but instead they should manage their workers in a cloud which allows everyone to be paid and managed the way they want. That’s a transformative vision for the future of work.