Digital Employment Cooperatives; THE Killer App - John Paller

all right next up by the way awesome spork uh if you ordered uh your swag early enough from the east denver store they sent you a spork in the mail has a little eth denver logo on it looking really nice uh looks like we have john pauler up next the one and only talking about digital employment cooperatives and the killer app the the killer app i'm really don't excited i don't know what the killer app is you're gonna have to tell me well i'll be happy to do that hudson and yeah at buffalcorn.com yeah i think we're out of sports though so like oh no limited edition there was 500 for the first 500 orders and i think they were like six 700 orders or something now that's amazing but yeah check out these shirts check out the rest of the swag unless they're sold out now but check out the swag it's good left so like yeah go check it out grab it because a lot of it's gonna be limited edition stuff um so yeah all right chat go wild for john take it away all right thanks so we're here talking about the ownership economy today this is the mini summit that we've got um to discuss sort of the future of ownership and sort of the migration away from third-party-owned systems whatever and you know the thing that's often not talked about um sort of talking about not necessarily having to do business things just because they're business things we haven't really talked much about the actual ownership of your employment so um this is a topic that's really near and dear to my heart i've spent 20 years in hr tech and employment systems and i've become a student of game design as it relates to employment so what i'm going to share with you is sort of a little deeper dive on sort of my perspective of things and really kind of getting down to like you know how important employment is for the adoption web 3 tac and ultimately in you know creating these impacts that we seek to to create through um all of these movements that we're building so the question is really about you know the next million users where is it going to come from i mean nfts are on fire right now in fact it's interesting because in 2019 um at each denver we had a big nft push and then it sort of quieted down last year and then it's back with a roar is it gonna come from there is it daos is it enterprise is it going to be government identity systems who knows right maybe we have a little bit different thesis at opolis so our work has led us to believe that the real magic comes when you can get people to use cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech and web3 primitives without them even really knowing they're doing it by giving them a chance to opt into it through other systems that they're used to already using and given that employment is the single common commercial thread for virtually everybody in the world who participates in the economy why not try to do it there so in other words why don't we create an on-ramp rails and a normalization professionalization rails for all of us that are already participating in the ecosystem and give us a bridge let's build a bridge between web 2 and web 3 and just let people come freely by choice so unpacking this concept a little bit about what it means to actually own your employment let's talk about what the current situation is of employment so you've got a highly paternalistic framework today so it's not uncommon that you hear about employment compliance or employment risk okay well regulatory requirements create risk and risk equals cost and if you watch your employers and what they do when they have all these additional costs coming out them in the form of alphabet soup legislation or whatever it is that means that controls come in and they start controlling time and structure and this this top down mechanism unfortunately the byproduct has created 70 percent of u.s workers just as one example all those i believe this is a global problem because most of the world uses the same corporate structure for housing of employment um [Music] people are disengaged and when you're disengaged at work i think we all know what that means is you're not productive and you're not being your best self you're not expressing your unique creativity in the way that i believe you were probably designed to do and although a meme and sort of a caricature of what employment's like i mean peter gibbons didn't exactly have this wrong i think a lot of people do that 15 minutes of work just enough not to get fired and again doing the business thing to do business thing wearing the ties and the going to the office and doing all these things i mean with the pandemic and and other extrinsic factors we're migrating away from this and this trend is very clear now these statistics were taken before covet hit okay now if i had an updated chart i would imagine this would be an accelerated view but essentially what it's pro what it's going to show here is that by 2028 this is just u.s statistics but again a global movement we're moving back to the independent worker we're moving back that direction why why are we doing that why is it that gen zeus are already working over 50 percent independent contractor they identify as non-w-2 employees they they don't want the jobs of our grandparents they don't want the world war ii and great depression era safety and security of the of what jobs used to represent so old school employment used to be just that like you went to work for a company my mother did it for 37 years one company she retired with a pension and she didn't happen to lose a retirement that was good but like if you look at the average work tenure now it's less than five years and more and more it's because the values have shifted but there's a huge trade-off in becoming independent in today's world huge you have to take on all of the responsibilities that would normally be done for you if you worked for somebody else so the real solution becomes when you're able to actually solve both it's the genius of the and not the tyranny of the or now to better understand this the employment frameworks that we have today are all designed for corporations as the customer so not dissimilar from social media or many many other free products out there employment is designed with the corporation as the consumer hr tech systems point solutions erp systems data management systems job boards even linkedin it's all designed with you as the product so our belief is that we've got to move past this so my personal belief is that we need better systems we need a new game we need a new we need a new game design and there aren't motivations there aren't incentives there aren't appropriate incentives for incumbents to actually do anything about this so we've decided to do something different so just like the web 3 internet we need employment frameworks that are centered on the individual and we need to be able to arbitrage costs together in a collective form and giving choice and optionality to people to have their employment on demand when from where with whom and how much they choose so this satisfies both as we talked about earlier the safety and security components because it essentially replicates the experience of employment but hands the keys to the individual now other components that are really important to this we've seen in other platform economy you know examples where at scale the incentives of the legal entity will diverge from the actual users or stakeholders in the community but we also need a benevolent legal framework we need something that actually sustains the interests of the stakeholders meeting the employees specifically at scale and then we need technology that allows individuals to signal or you know cast their their their opinions about certain topics or proposals and stakeholders are aligned in a value creation metric so in terms of employment it would be seemingly um logical to think that scaling value would happen through scaling total payroll volume so the higher the amount of transactional volume just like an exchange measures its volume and trades a unemployment ecosystem would measure its volume as value in terms of total payroll processing and when you do this you're actually creating a positive sum gain so instead of the zero-sum games or the extraction-based games or the misalignment games that exist with you know typical employment corporate-based systems we actually create a symmetry of scalability and infinite value creation so this is where i transitioned to a little bit of my my light shill on opolis and you know i i i haven't done this a lot over the first three installments of of denver because specifically i'm here for the community and we do it specifically to give a big tent of blank canvas to people to express their creativity but it opolis has matured now to a place where it's really important that people understand how critical this component is to the future of the ecosystem so what obelisk is is a digital employment cooperative where independent contractors can have all of the accoutrements of typical employment and the portability the opt-in the choice of being independent while maintaining 100 compliance think about it like self-sovereign employment so the thing that you'll notice though that's really um back to the original how do we get the next million users is you know when we talked about positioning the brand marketing and just how do we actually speak to our audience we didn't actually think that it was a good idea to have a lot of crypto speak or a lot of blockchaining speak or web three speak or primitive speak or defy speak in our marketing in our webpage if you go to opelus.com you'll notice it's right down the fairway and talking to regular people to your next-door neighbor that maybe wants to be independent but maybe doesn't have the vehicle or maybe they are independent and they're paying you know three times the amount that they would normally pay for healthcare insurance and things like that so we're targeted directly and squarely at just regular people because our belief is that in five years once the standards are set most of this is just going to be like people are going to use it because it works better they're not that's what we need to get to they're not going to be wooed by our ability to explain consensus mechanisms or private key management or any of that we need to really get to a place where ux and ui attract people and the overall experience attracts people and that's where we are so to use a quick example and to illustrate how this works and what it is here's my friend emily she's an independent contractor she has been doing software development for six years on her own and she absolutely loves it but the state exchange is charging her 4 000 a year more than she would normally pay working for another company and she spends thousands of dollars a year managing her business not to mention the 20 revenue streams that she's trying to juggle at one time in fact she's got half of those are doubts that she's earning income from so managing this is a big headache it's a lot of stress in her small family with her two kids and her husband who don't really participate in this world so fighting opolis allowed her to integrate all of these things into one thing she owns her decisions around healthcare and her business she can vertically integrate all the different components plus maintain compliance so the taos no longer have to figure out how to build these rails for her there she's actually providing it for herself her benefits mirror that of exactly what she was used to experiencing at his w-2 so now she's providing the safety and security for her family whereas typically being independent would not be able to do that and compliance and regulatory stuff is set it and forget it she can choose she does choose to be paid in cryptocurrencies in part based on standards that are set forth by the by the cooperative and she's able to actually have all this stuff done under the hood by by the employment commons itself without her having to worry about it and the best part is she's sharing in the value creation of her own consumption the work token launching after eat denver actually is rewarding her for her consumption and bringing her friends so again aligning incentives for one single metric with which is growth of payroll in the ecosystem through a process called payroll mining she's receiving these blocks as the community grows and she's actually increasing her ownership and value stake in the organization now under the hood today behind all the marketing that looks really normy friendly and maybe really boring to some people we have a legal cooperative that's an lca to create sustainability on behalf of the organization we use a progressive decentralization approach and we have web 3 authentication so everybody who signs up actually gets an ethereum address and doesn't even know it and people can opt in to be paid a remit in payroll or in cryptocurrencies we use snapshots for voting signaling and superfluid to stream tokens to folks as far as the drop goes and we're working on automating crypto invoicing and looking at define integration inside the dashboard so that you can elect um any token you want in your paycheck so what does opolis become tomorrow so if it's good today for compliance and paper pushing and just making sure that people are legitimized as we bridge web 2 and web 3 what does it become and what it becomes is it becomes a public utility infrastructure for global employment fluid permissionless borderless work it gives them the controls of from where with whom and how much they'd like to work they can actually spend more time working on what's important to them now we talk a lot about d5 legos we talk money legos and i'm introducing a comment a concept to you today called employment legos if this is really a major point of onboarding which i believe that it is because we can create a system that is better faster and cheaper and more benevolent to the user themselves more user-centric then we got to think about what are the possibilities we can lend against invoices in defy we can offer people their own data their own employee files on a portable basis we can actually use a lot of the primitives that we that a lot of our other presenters have put out here today crypto payroll is an obvious one smart legal contracts services agreements and then flash organizations at scale think about the power of having a million people in a digital employment cooperative what have we also created a market a market that service consumers can come to find talent literally on demand create an organization on the fly and execute work in real time and these things are just not possible in today's hr tech landscape and i can tell you because i've built a few of these startups that just will never be able to provide this because of the organizational framework that's in the way which is corporate based employment now the most important thing for me why i do this is because i i honestly think that the biggest travesty is when you think about the 70 of people who are actively disengaged in their work to me i can't imagine how much how little joy they're experiencing and the thing that they do most of their waking hours the means to an end culture for paychecks the paycheck culture for employment needs to evolve and we need to provide better systems that allow people to unlock their own creativity and align their days and their work with something that actually is meaningful to them so having an opt-in employment system that's permissionless and borderless and but also compliant and making sure that we're we're scratching both sides you know scratching both backs i guess you could say making sure everybody's happy is a really really powerful thing because to me if a person is is living who they really were created to be that's the joy factor that's the thing that actually creates the the pinnacle of human experience and work is a component of that i don't think it needs to be something that we just do begrudgingly i love what i do i've loved what i've done for a long time i've been an entrepreneur for almost 20 years so i haven't really worked for anybody in a very long time and i'd love to be able to share that feeling and those experiences with anybody who chooses it so how can i get involved well you can get involved by joining the coalition to support the future of sovereign workers if you go to opolis.

com denver i'll show you the email address in just a second as an individual foreign or domestic to the us or as an organization foreign or domestic to the u.s you can join the coalition to support the coalition of the self-sovereign worker now there's two kinds of members official members the lca cooperative one is an employee member which is a consuming sort of actual employee of co-employed person of the cooperative and the second is a coalition member who participates in the referral mechanism now coalition members also earn work tokens for referring members this is the value contribution activity that we see as most valuable to the ecosystem and our call to you today is to activate the network effect we don't believe that a traditional sales structure is going to be something that we even want to do it's going to be in natural emerging order through the community on behalf of the individuals who make up our community that make this a success so thank you for your time and opportunity to present to you today i mean thank you for watching we were looking at viewership statistics and in all the different channels and after hours things we're going to be well over 20 000 unique viewers this week so it's been an amazing uh week so far and i can't wait to see what the projects bring tomorrow and um i see that that hudson's joining me back on the stage here so thank you hudson for being our all-powerful mc this morning it gave me a break to actually prepare for my talk for a little bit well thank you so much for all this john uh where everyone's enjoying eat denver and thank you to you and everyone else who's putting it on it's it's our pleasure to do it so we'll see you all in the ether space feel free to come join us at the coalition um also hudson if you'd like and uh we'll uh see you all in etherspace take care