most people seemed to have picked up on this, but we aren't looking for a company that wants to have one million _employees_.
i can envision a future where a million people drive for uber, or where someone creates a healthcare platform that lets individuals find people who need care, or an education platform that matches up people who want to learn with people who want to each, or...
Temp agencies employ 2.6 million people a year in the US. It's fragmented and inefficient in a way that is mildly predatory to workers. My guess is that software could replace the temp agency middleman and help "employ" 1 million+ folks.
A website for US-based temps, "physical delivery" of employees, is interesting. I'm not aware of any service that does this. Like Uber for people!
If physical presence isn't required, Elance, Odesk and even Amazon Mechanical Turk exist. Drives cost of labor down to the $1/hour range (globally competitive) - probably not what Sam is getting at here.
It's also really interesting to see this idea. My initial read is that this sounds like a response to the common criticism that Silicon Valley destroys jobs in aggregate ("software eats the world.") Will be fascinating to see if something emerges here.
You are definitely onto something huge here [1]: you could be improving the livelihood of millions with an app to allow people to fill in on temp jobs at competitive wages with the click of a button. Talk of a massive impact...
The road ahead is steep, though. At first I thought Leah's TaskRabbit would eventually head that way, but to me it strikes me as if she's still massively underestimating the potential of her platform. Justin Kan's Exec and its postmortem doesn't bode too well, either (but it's still an insightful read) [2]. I'm pretty sure though you and AB have what it takes to figure it all out.
The propublica article opened my eyes to many things. It's a 134 billion dollar a year market that's highly fragmented - top 4 largest only account for 11% of the market. Sounds like a problem for software.
Taskrabbit is for tasks, which are great, but not in as much demand as weekly, monthly, or even daily stints. Think the local starbucks, a small business around the holiday hours, or even accounting (Robert Half is big on this).
Overall, it has the potential for a very large impact and massive business. Look at the jobs report today. If you could more efficiently help employ 1 million people the economy is improved. You're also looking at one of the largest workforces and businesses in the country.
btw, sounds like you know Andres and I. Can't tell who this is by your username. Feel free to drop me a line - j@jasonlbaptiste.com
Or "a million entrepreneurs who are responsible and fully in control of their own healthcare and retirement benefits". If you're self-employed, you can choose the precise healthcare and retirement package that makes sense for you.
Or "50k new firms each with 20 employees". When I first read the OP I thought about some new "Green Power" innovation where you need installers, servicers, etc. Possibly-crazy example would be PV that's 100x cheaper / more efficient than today, leading to an explosion in the demand for rooftop installations -- to the level of nearly every household, strip mall, big box, etc in the developed world. Prior example might be the auto industry 100 years ago, which created a need for parts mfg firms, dealers, mechanics, etc.
Or an entirely new and previously unheard of industry. Definitely-crazy example would be making Mars colonization possible, where you'd need thousands of employees for production, thousands more colonists, specialists like pilots, entire sub-industries, etc. The canonical prior example would be the explosive growth of the internet over the past 30 years; SEO as a job title (to pick one) didn't exist in 1990.
Prior example might be the auto industry 100 years ago, which created a need for parts mfg firms, dealers, mechanics, etc. (...) Or an entirely new and previously unheard of industry.
Pneumatic transit comes to mind. Demonstrating the viability of Hyperloop as the first new mode of transportation since the jet would spurn a whole new global industry practically overnight!
That doesn't sound like indenture. If you aren't contributing to society, you do not deserve anything. This is precisely what corporations do today and it works.
No, it actually doesn't work. While it does sound like a good idea in theory (tit-for-tat), in practice greedy corporations (I mean that neutrally, in the capitalist sense where corporations have a duty to extract maximum profits) have powerful incentives to shaft employees over these benefits in order to maximise shareholder value.
In an ideal scenario, companies would compete for employees, and would provide good benefits to out-offer other companies. In practice, a large part of the workforce is groveling for jobs and will accept any raw deal for some kind of income.
How about a company that figures out how to provide _very_ affordable high-quality health care to large numbers of people, so they aren't dependent on an employer for their healthcare? That would allow many more people to become free-lancers, or to work for companies too small to get good health insurance prices. Such affordable healthcare might make it possible for a million more people to work for startups.
Such a company might not be feasible in the current regulatory climate, but some people say the same about Uber.
I read it more like a machine in everyone's basement, next to the water heater. It would diagnose illnesses, set broken bones, stitch up wounds, and inject you with all the drugs you need.
This is one of the most cynical threads I've seen on HN. I hope you're undeterred by the reactions here. If HN starts funding hardware startups - especially ones that that manufacture locally - the multiplier effect [1] can be significant.
There's no empirical data, at least not in the fortune 500, that show a company with more than maybe ~500K employees. So the headline point is easily rejected at that level.
If the concept is to "create an ecosystem" that has 1x10^6 employees, than this seems almost trivial. In that case its just a series of logical optics on starting new industries. But again, what is the empirical data show?
Would facebook meet this test? Did they invent social media? Probably not, so they are a "failure". Are there any companies in the fortune 500 that would? Maybe RCA and the TV industry? or the early Hollywood Studios? Silicon Valley itself seems have created more than "a million jobs" if you abstract it out to "the computer" industry, or "the software" industry but its largest companies don't get that big and its ecosystems are simply abstractions both in their point of origin and their ultimate threshold/boundary definitions.
Having a company that employes people for "freelance work" is simply just an outsourcing shell company and nothing to be proud of. It also doesn't seem overly original, in the more dramatic way the the headline would suggest.
I too want to have a million people doing my bidding for me, cheaply. (BTW, The fastest way to get this dynamic is probably to make the poor poorer, and the rich richer).
I can also envision a future where no one drives because all cars are driverless. I'm not sure why you'd want the future where we still have humans doing the driving or the cooking or the teaching or anything else for that matter when we can just let the people lounge around or create art and poetry.
Would it be fair to say a marketplace for services which software is poor (relative to humans) at providing? I can't see how else to create 1M jobs while still having the jobs, individually, produce value.
Shameless plugin > "education platform that matches up people who want to learn with people who want to teach" - kind of what we are trying to do at FillSkills
i can envision a future where a million people drive for uber, or where someone creates a healthcare platform that lets individuals find people who need care, or an education platform that matches up people who want to learn with people who want to each, or...