(2012-03-07) Wilson Usv Work Market

Fred Wilson and USV are now very interested in flexible Work Market-s (Labor Market, Network Economy). Our firm is seeing these work markets sprout up all around us and if there is a single investment theme that is dominating our deal flow right now, this would be it. Christina touched on this in her recent blog post on the USV blog (the section she titled "work is shifting to a peer to peer model").

• See previous 2011-11-03-[[Work Market]]
• Christina Cacioppo's post notes: These Free Agent-s, disaggregated and newly empowered, can promote and sustain themselves with new tools: Op Ez caters to service professionals, like bartenders and hairdressers, and allows them to build followings independent of their employers, while Vay Able and Side Tour provide marketing and transaction-processing for neighborhood tour guides. Hip Tic helps graphic designers promote their work, while Zerp Ly helps creative professionals do the same, and Interview Street lets programmers show off their skills. As technology creates new free agents, it's also changing the notion of "work" to be less time- and location-specific. This is especially true of work that can be done easily at a distance. Workers who can't differentiate themselves using their reputation will be commoditized. This summer, web services were launched that allow you to order up a proofreader (Kib In), blogger (Content Ly), tutor (Learn Bop), language partner (Verbl Ing), car ride (Ridejoy), science researcher (Science Exchange), cooking instructor (Culture Kitchen), mystery shopper (Spot Check), or transcriptionist (MobileWorks) from your browser. The Mechanical Turk-ification of work has begun.