Braintrust
Written BY Kelly Costello / PHOTOGRAPHY Provided BY BrainTrust
Welcome back to another SHACK15 Startup Spotlight, where we highlight the exciting work being done by our resident startups and members of our community.
Braintrust is the first user-controlled talent network that connects organizations with highly skilled tech talent, serving dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Founded by SHACK15 members Adam Jackson and Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski, Braintrust’s innovative business model helps organizations to find vetted teams to tackle their most complex projects, while empowering talent with a user-controlled, fee-free platform enabled by a blockchain token.
They recently released a research paper on “The Talent-Led Revolution” where they explore the changing dynamics of the modern workforce, how technology is transforming relationships between freelancers and organizations, and how this will impact the future of work. In interviewing leaders and freelancers from Deloitte, Facebook, IDEO, Silicon Foundry and more, they uncovered evidence of a Talent-Led Revolution, in which elite tech talent with highly sought-after skills are positioned to build careers as freelancers, and reshape the relationship between employer and employee. They believe it will result in a paradigm shift toward a new economy, in which value will be redistributed back to freelancers and organizations.
Enjoy an excerpt from the paper, and check out the full text if you’re interested in learning more. They also have an upcoming webinar, which will be deep dive into their research and the trends impacting the future of work, and you can sign up here.
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The Talent-Led Revolution - A shift towards the user economy
“We are in the midst of a paradigm shift. Technology has transformed how we work, how fast we work, what we produce, and the skills needed to succeed. When planning for the future, companies are seeking the most desirable technical skills—software development, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and are looking outside of their existing full-time workforce to find them. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, one-half to two-thirds of organizations are likely to turn to external contractors to address these skills gaps.
At the same time, roughly 42 million Americans will opt into the freelance workforce in 2020. As part of this, the Gig Economy introduced tech-enabled platforms, or marketplaces, that created opportunities for talent to work as either full-time or part-time freelancers. This change has redefined the employer/employee
relationship. It is now evolving into a freelancer/ organization partnership, in which project-based work can be completed by a distributed team.
And while these trends were already apparent heading into 2020, they have been dramatically magnified—and accelerated—by the COVID-19 pandemic. Enterprises have been forced to work remotely, virtualize teams that have spent their entire careers in offices, and uncover new ways of driving innovation. Businesses are beginning to see remote work not as a risk, but as an opportunity.
“The COVID-19 experience will [...] build our courage to adopt new patterns to fix antiquated processes“, said Eva Chen, CEO at Trend Micro. “As a result, organizations will ditch the notion of having a big office and revert back to a small-town model of working in cluster offices with more remote work.”
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The Talent-Led Revolution
While the Gig Economy provided opportunities for individual talent to gain additional income, it heavily favored the organizations behind the platform, versus the individual. “Gig platforms like Uber and Lyft, for example, have business models that classify their workers as contractors not employees,” said Michael Safran, Innovation Strategist for WellB at Blue Cross & Blue Shield. “It’s great in the sense that you can pick up work very quickly compared to a more traditional job, but not great in the sense that all talent get from that work is a paycheck.”
However, the Gig Economy has led the way for a new economy in which both organizations—as well as distributed freelancers—stand to benefit.
As automation takes over the low-value, redundant work that is not as fulfilling for people, new, exciting opportunities for freelancers arise. “Automation has made the bar of what you can do with a distributed workforce higher. The work that can get done is more complicated and gets into more creative spaces,” explained James Everingham, Head of Engineering for Facebook’s Calibra project.
It’s something that Susan O’Malley, Senior Director of IDEO CoLab, has experienced first-hand in her career. Her first job at Google
focused on reviewing copy for Google Adwords to ensure that it was error-free and acceptable for all viewing audiences. During her time in this role, however, Google found a way to automate this responsibility, freeing her up to take on work that drove increasing value for the Adwords product.
“Over time, my job became more complicated. Google actually wanted me to have a relationship with the customers and do work that really improved their lives and their businesses,” shared O’Malley, “they needed me to focus on complex problems.”
Her work in nurturing client relationships later led to her promotion to team lead. Now at IDEO, O’Malley consistently sees these transitions occurring within organizations her team works with every day.
Following the Google model, widespread adoption of automation will enable organizations to refocus their workforces and bring next-generation products to market. It will enable organizations to build products that will require skills humans excel at to produce — creativity, empathy, and human-centered design thinking. And these are exactly the types of projects that highly-skilled freelancers are excited about, and the type of work that will drive value for organizations in the next economy. (Keep reading this chapter in the full research paper, here.)
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Introducing the User-Owned Economy
At Braintrust, we envision the rise of the User-Owned Economy, in which talent are positioned to make career decisions based upon lifestyle preferences. Organizations, as a result, are redesigning employment to make way for distributed work and freelance talent.
For companies and freelancers to succeed in the future, they’ll need access to the right technology, which is key to building partnerships within the talent network. Users of these networks—technical freelancers and organizations—will connect and collaborate using decentralized technology, such as blockchain, to form the User-Owned Economy.
Unlike previous recruitment and employment trends, the shift is being pulled by the talent, instead of pushed by the corporation. For this reason, we are calling it a Talent-Led Revolution.
“As leaders, we know that we can’t always attract top talent as full-time employees — particularly in the Bay Area — when competing with companies like Microsoft and Amazon,” shared Kukic of Nestlé. He also pointed out that hiring distributed freelancers opens up new opportunities to partner with workers that wouldn’t otherwise agree to full-time employment.
Distributed work also forces employers to focus almost exclusively on skills fit, which helps remove bias and eliminate barriers that exclude people of color and under-represented populations from traditional workforces.
But how will this economy function? Distributed teams will need to trust the companies they partner with, and vice versa, Since organizations no longer bear the responsibility of hiring talent as full-time employees, freelancers are inherently taking on risks for long-term reward.
For successful freelancer/organization partnerships, organizations are challenged to develop project-based workflows that freelancers can complete within specific time frames, and at fair market rates. Organizations can strategically redesign internal systems, introducing collaboration tools into their tech stacks that support a distributed freelance workforce. Leaders can redesign their product development processes, and adjust their organizational planning to ensure that full-time employees are empowered to collaborate directly with freelancers. Leaders should think in agile sprints, rather than quarters or years.
Kerry Brown, Vice President of Workforce Adoption at SAP, speaks to the rapid nature of work as a result of the Digital Age. “The cost of doing business is very different,” she said. “The pace at which each corporation must rethink, reinvent, readjust, and reinvest—in almost everything they do—is constant.”
And these dynamics continue to evolve in response to COVID-19, as organizations reimagine their workspaces to enable longer-term (or even permanent) support for remote team members….”
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To read the full research paper and learn more about Braintrust, visit their website!
If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, be sure to register for their upcoming webinar on “The Talent-Led Revolution” on Thursday, July 16.