I have not blogged in a really long time mainly, because I became a little self conscious. I was doing some investing --angel or otherwise-- and I felt that I was being too public about it. So I pulled back.
I am going to fire up this blog (hopefully) and mainly discuss my views and the stuff I am working on.
I am really excited right now about my new company www.taskhero.com We are writing code as we speak. For those of you who know me----I did a company called workexchange in 1999. We competed with Elance at the time and unfortunately, we were all a bit early and being early is the same as being completely wrong--we shut down and so did everyone else in that space.
My new company TaskHero is a variation of what workexchange was doing. Instead of being a platform to outsource technology work ---TaskHero is a platform for people to outsource their daily tasks in a localized way.
Let me explain why I am doing this company. I often wonder what the world will look like in 2030. How will we live differently? How will we work differently? There is so much exciting change happening right now that the world in 2030 will look nothing like the world we know today. Drucker said it best.
Every few hundred years there occurs a sharp transformation. Society crosses a divide where withing a few short decades, society rearranges itself--its worldview, its values, its social and political structures. Fifty years later there is a new world and the people born into it cannot imagine the world in which their own parents were born. Sound familiar? Growing up we had 6 channels on the television and rotary dial phones that were tethered to the wall. I recently heard a funny story---a father and daughter spend a night at a hotel---the daughter wants to make a call and picks up the phone. The daughter picks up the receiver and hangs up --------she tells her father that the phone was broken. He asked why she thought that and she answered by telling him there was just a constant noise on the other end. What she was hearing was a dialtone---she had never heard a dialtone on a phone before!! How different our world is today.
Back to the discussion---these massive societal shifts have been happening since the 1500's. The first huge change came with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and Martin Luther's protestant reformation. As thought distribution became widespread there was a rediscovery period that changed the world.
The next transformation began in 1776 the year of the American Revolution and Adam Smith's Wealth of the nations---it was during this time that all is "ism's" emerged. Capitalism, Communism and the Industrial Revolution was born. It was during this time period that the Rothschilds of the world became more powerful and influential than Kings and Princes. Again--during the 1820's no one living at this time could imagine the world in which their grandparents had lived and their parents had been born.
Now Our period; two hundred years later is a period in which there has been massive transformation. After World War 2 ---America created the American G.I. Bill allowing every returning soldier money to attend a university----------this was the key factor in building our society into a knowledge society. This massive infusion of knowledge into our world has created the technology and specifically the internet that has changed the way we communicate, interact, and conduct commerce.
TaskHero is being built on the idea that the world is rapidly changes the way we work. In the future I see a world where everyone essentially works for themselves. In the future everyone will be the CEO of him/herself. Could we see a person IPO'ing themselves? Today--could Mark Zuckerberg sell shares of himself and his future creations? I guarantee you that Steve Jobs could have done it.
Well--that sort of thing is way off into the future but, for right now---TaskHero is the path in which I want to put people back to work. I want to inspire entrepreneurship---even if it begins with microentrepeneurship. I want to help people achieve their dreams!!
