“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air” J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
Julie had worked at a company for 3 years, there she was a great team member and an awesome back-end developer. She worked from home 2-3 days each week like everyone else in the team. One day her partner was accepted to school one thousand miles away and she asked if she could continue to work remotely. “Of course”, her manager said yes. After 18 months, she wanted to reduce her commitment to half time so that she could study an online masters in machine learning and data science. Her manager agreed and later on when she was done studying, she got an intro to another company that was looking for her new skills. That company couldn’t afford her full time, so they agreed that she would work half time for her original employer and half time at her new data science role. Fast forward another couple of years when Julie realizes that the cost of living where she is based has skyrocketed and decides to move to a beach in Central America, where she has a good internet connection, amazing weather, surf in the morning and organic food at a price she can afford. She is fulfilled with her life and her work, mostly because she is autonomous and able to work on interesting projects in her own terms from anywhere in the world.
This is just a story, but it’s also the world that we live in. You might have heard the phrase “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” As much as Julie is a fictional character, she’s actually very much a picture of someone from the future living among us.
There is a massive shift underway in the make up of society. Gen-Y or millennials are growing up to become the largest percentage of the world’s workforce and Gen-Z is following right behind. This is the generation that grew surrounded by technology. They were the first to carry laptops, tablets and smartphones to school and grew up with ubiquitous Internet access and touchscreens around them. They have seen world change at a macro scale and at an unprecedented pace. They are often blamed for seeking instant satisfaction, when in reality they feel mostly dissatisfied with the status quo and the world they inherited.
These new generations are the flexible-work natives, the ones who are questioning the very foundation of what work means. While many of us grew up watching our parents go to the office early in the morning and return home late at night. They don’t see that in their future. They don’t imagine themselves working at company for many years to earn the corner office. In fact, they might not want an office with their names on it in the first place.
As a species, we’ve been worried about “the future of work” for quite some time. Since the 1700’s and 1800’s with the Industrial Revolution and the advent of machines, engines and assembly lines, to today with computers and machine learning. MIT has even dedicated a Taskforce to research the Future of Work.
“Emerging technologies and policies can be leveraged toward a shared prosperity”
MIT Work of the Future Report
We live in a world where automation and AI are obviously advancing at a fast pace and we’re seeing that computers are better at many tasks than humans. This means that the jobs we do and the way we work will change. I have been thinking about this a lot lately.
Naval Ravikant was interviewed by Joe Rogan for his podcast and he was discussing his view of the future. He was talking about how humans are unique in their ability to do creative work and in his view of the future, tasks that can be automated will be automated but humans will self-organize and work on discrete creative missions. This inspired me and I went on to obsess over the idea that some people were already doing that, enabled by the internet and their own drive. The question that I couldn’t get out of my head was, why couldn’t some of this happen at scale today?
Here is a short blurb from the podcast, but please go and listen to the whole thing.
”… I think the smart people have already started figuring out that the internet enables this. And they’re starting to work more and more remotely on their own schedule, on their own time, on their own place, with their own friends, in their own way. And that’s actually how we are the most productive … we’re gonna go back to being small groups of creative bands of individuals, setting out to do missions. And when those missions are done, we collect our money, we get rated, and then we rest and reassess until we’re ready for the next sprint.”
Naval Ravikant, https://youtu.be/3qHkcs3kG44
As I thought more about these smart people and how they find these flexible remote jobs, it became clear that a lot of it hinged on reputation and trust. Julie’s example above demonstrates this. The job itself could be easily scoped and done remotely but some things needed to happen for her to negotiate that way of working.
Those things have become my obsession. How can you reduce friction for remote workers to effectively work with established companies? How can you build the right protocols to spin up a team of creative workers and compensate them fairly based on the value they have created? All of these are the core problems we’ve decided to tackle at Telescoped. I am lucky to have two amazing co-founders who are every bit as passionate as I am about our mission and a supportive group of angel investors who want to help us change the world.
“The pursuit of autonomy, opportunities and purpose to the talented people of the world”
Telescoped mission statement
Together we’re going to bring the future closer. We’re building a company for the long haul, focused on lasting value and in positively impacting people’s lives.