What We Call the “Ownership Economy” with Braintrust CEO Adam Jackson

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’m co-founder and CEO of Braintrust, the first decentralized talent network. I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my adult life, and have founded a number of companies. Prior to Braintrust, I co-founded Doctor on Demand, the popular video telemedicine provider, with daytime talk show personality Dr. Phil.

In between, I’ve invested in 100+ of companies and decentralized projects, including Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), TrustToken, Binance, Terra Luna, Uniswap, Placer, Aktana, Bolt, BlockFi, Basis, Filecoin, Placer, Skale Labs, Protocol Labs, JCTurbo, Apero Health, Rapportive, MyTime, Automatic, Womply, Superhuman, and Zenefits.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Braintrust is the first user-owned talent network that connects skilled, vetted knowledge workers with the world’s most reputable brands like Nestle, Nike, and NASA.

The community that relies on Braintrust to find work are the same people who own and build it, ensuring the network always serves the needs of its users, instead of a centrally-controlled corporation. And because the community of knowledge workers and contributors earns ownership and control of Braintrust for its contributions to the network and its growth, new talent and jobs have been added at record speeds.

What is the origin story?

My co-founder Gabe and I have been building and investing in two-sided, web-enabled marketplaces our entire careers.

We love the business model: create a trusted place to transact, ensure quality and reputation, build liquidity on both sides so buyers and sellers can meet, discover price and transact. It’s a beautiful thing, but traditionally they’ve been very capital-intensive to start. The old playbook involves raising a ton of VC investment and using it to subsidize one or both sides of the marketplace to achieve that liquidity. The problem: those investors (deservedly) need a return.

Where does that return come from? Higher fees on the marketplace. Ever-increasing fees fuel a death spiral of misaligned incentives between the marketplace owner/operator and the users who make their living on the marketplace. Users start to disintermediate. Larger transactions are repelled, thus effectively capping growth as those hard-earned network effects erode. After building and investing in so many of these marketplaces, and then seeing the incentives diverge as they scale, we thought, “there must be a better way.”

That better way is what we call the “ownership economy.” It is a revolutionary form of network ownership powered by a new technology: blockchain tokens.

What makes user-owned networks different? No fees. If a network is owned by its users, why would they want to charge themselves high fees? By charging zero fees to the talent and nominal fees to clients, you keep incentives aligned, enabling a whole class of larger, ongoing transactions that make the network far more useful and valuable than a traditional high-fee marketplace.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We’re a young company with just over a year of building in public under our belts, but we’ve invested heavily in our people and our culture. Both my co-founder and I have built a lot of businesses, so we know how vital it is to establish strong values and to carry those through from the abstract to the very real-world.

We know how powerful ownership can be as a motivator and as a unifier. That’s why one of our values is “own it.” We want our community and our team to see themselves as the owners of the Braintrust network because they ARE the owners.

So we’re building a successful business and then turning it over to the community to self-govern. A centrally-owned company would never turn its own investment into a public good, and it would never really let anyone else “own it.” We’re instilling that value because we see it as the only way to build a truly scalable and successful talent network that doesn’t end up extracting value from the people it’s meant to serve.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

If I weren’t building Braintrust, which disintermediates expensive labor marketplaces and staffing firms by giving the value they extract back to the talent, I’d be building Braintrust for “last mile delivery”, which would dismantle the extractionary waste machines like Uber and Postmates.

These businesses do nothing but harm workers by pushing wages down and charge ludicrous fees which actually make their services MORE EXPENSIVE than the taxies/delivery people they displaced. It’s an economic disaster and they need to be replaced by user-owned networks.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

The whole point of Braintrust is to replace expensive middlemen who extract 30-80% of the value from the talent they connect to clients with a user owned marketplace that extracts nearly zero.

So, the more Gross Services Volume (GSV) we drive through Braintrust, the more value we’ve taken from the fat middleman and given back to our users!

Another key metric is referral rates. The more our community refers to the network, the more they are rewarded with BTRUST token, which is the sole instrument of control in our network.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The most exciting part is probably how quickly some of the world’s biggest brands have rapidly adopted Braintrust as their starting point for finding product, design, and technical talent. Nestle, Nike, athenahealth, Porsche, and TaskRabbit are all examples of big brands that have found success hiring on Braintrust.

Why is this? It’s because we’ve managed to attract the best talent globally. A lot of firms say that; why is it demonstrably true with Braintrust? Because, unlike all the other talent marketplaces and staffing firms out there, Braintrust takes ZERO FEES FROM THE TALENT.

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the best talent are attracted to the best terms (own your reputation, pay no fees). Those talent bring in more and bigger clients who do large, ongoing projects instead of small, one-off ones. Those client names and projects draw in even more talent since talent don’t want to have to keep pitching client after client. Instead, they want flexible, interesting and ongoing projects. The more projects talent complete, the more tokens they earn and thus the more control they have over the marketplace where they make their living. Flywheels are a beautiful thing!

The other metric that points directly to our vision of spreading economic opportunity more equitably around the world is the hourly rate growth of our freelance community. Since the beginning of the year, that rate has jumped a full 15% to just under $100 an hour now. For a global network, that’s really exciting. We’re creating potentially life-changing incomes for a lot of people.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Blockchain tokens are the most exciting technology of our time. Sounds crazy and buzz-wordy, right? It’s not. Tokens allow for a whole new value creation and distribution model that is more fair to workers (knowledge and blue collar alike) and, frankly, better for business. Software is famously eating the world … and blockchain is eating the middleman.

Blockchain tech enables User Owned Networks, and is rapidly proving that user owned networks grow faster and become more valuable to their users than investor owned networks.

I don’t worry about any technology in particular, just how some technologies are being used.

Saying “AI is bad” (as many do) is like saying hammers are bad. Sure, they can be used to harm, but also used to create. AI can be characterized this way as well: self-driving cars will help save lives, AI radiology can catch cancers that doctors miss, and so on. On the flip side, the AI that drives Facebook’s algorithm to serve disinformation about elections and vaccines is most certainly harming society. That’s not the technology's fault. It’s the people running it.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I think it’s clear from my answers above how community-centric I am, as well as how much I believe in the entrepreneurial process as a means of surfacing real innovation.

HackerNoon is effectively meeting right at the center of those two axes. It’s this place where anyone can come and learn without any sort of pretense or gatekeeping, while also maintaining an irreverent, let’s-not-take-this-whole-thing-too-seriously tone.

In terms of bringing along the next generation of builders and true owners of the ecosystem, it’s irreplaceable.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Anyone can learn anything. Knowledge is not a barrier to entry. Don’t understand something and are afraid you could never be an expert at it? Wrong. Anyone who wants to learn badly enough can very quickly become an expert on anything. I learned that in my 30s. Would’ve been better at 21. Also... buy Bitcoin.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

This year is a good example of it, but it comes up a decent amount in the technology space.

The secular trends that ultimately shape how we do things here on planet earth may be pushed forward or pulled back by external forces like say, a global pandemic, but the arc of technology will always bend towards those trends.

In the case of 2021, we’ve shifted a ton of attention to going back to the office, but the trend line has been moving towards decoupled, decentralized teams for some time now, and despite desires by some big companies like Apple, Google, or JPMorgan for a return to 2019, it’s simply not going to happen.

From the moment mobile and cloud computing became something enterprise IT teams were taking into account in their planning and purchasing, this inflection point was coming, and it’s not going to go away after COVID is a distant memory.

The tough part for all of us who don’t have a crystal ball is getting those big secular trends right. But having some conviction for those visionary bets will pay off: the ones you get right will change how people live their lives for a long, long time.

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