Lessons on the future of work from the last six years
Work makes many people suffer.
Many suffer from lack of work, while others suffer from work — its inability to provide, its effect on their personal lives, their health. We can do something about it!
This is what we’ve learned in six years at Bloomberg Beta:
From our first day, we’ve focused on the future of work— investing in founders who use technology to make work more humane and more productive.
If we learn from communities outside the technology industry, we might not have to choose.
Before investing in startups, I spent time in many a place… as an exec at a big corporation, a founder, university faculty, a government staffer, head of a non-profit. Every experience gave me a lens, and I now need them all… because so much of what we believed was wrong.
Let’s start with what’s clear:
Technology has reinvented our life (shopping, family, friendships) so much less than it’s changed our daily work — the thing we do with more of our waking hours than anything.
Yet most ways technology has changed work — automating the rote, offering work on demand, opening communication channels — have failed to make work pay for the vast majority of people. (Though they have made things cheaper to buy…)
Technology is a force of nature — we can shape it, we can harness it (and should!), but we can’t roll it back.
Our fund was blind, six years ago, to the technology trend that would most change work: machine intelligence.
A year later we were (over my foolish objection) the first venture capital fund to declare a focus on “AI.” (Save, thanks to @shivon!)
We’ve done our homework about work. We read the books and articles by journalists, economists, technologists, and thinkers deep too many to count… and we’ve tried to study the future of work for everyone, not just people sitting at keyboards in San Francisco or New York.
(Though we do see much of that keyboard-work as a harbinger.)
Stellar tutors taught us much. That the future is already here, and that working people want, above all else, stability and dignity.
A commission of American leaders (facilitated by @NewAmerica and co-chaired by @slaughterAM) showed us how technology might affect work over the next decades. Turns out the “will the robots take the jobs” tug of war might matter less than we think.
The University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, founded by @professor_ajay, co-hosted an annual summit with us to bring together businesspeople and machine intelligence experts, as we think about how to lead companies through the coming transition.
Working people already dealing with automation — from accountants automating audits to Walmart managers dealing with the cash recycler to truck drivers watching early self-driving semis roll — showed us, again, the so-called “future” is now.
Working people caring for an elderly family member — who, themselves, sometimes are also working, as older Americans will — showed us the most important demographic to understand about the future of work isn’t millennials. It’s older people.
The government and people of Stockton helped us anticipate the experiment to raise the floor by giving people cash grants, thanks to @MichaelDTubbs and the Economic Security Project. (Turns out, stability is freeing!)
Working people consistently explained they want two things from work (and “meaning” isn’t one of them, unless they make more than $150,000 per year). More on what they want, (1) stability and (2) dignity.
We delved into studying the line of work we know most intimately: starting companies.
Incarcerated people showed us that natural entrepreneurship lives in the hardest soil. Thanks to @AshleyCVCF, we visited the country’s first vocational high school for entrepreneurship… in Fresno! (Turns out, founders are in all the places.)
Members of Congress, led by @TimRyan, took us on tours of cities around the U.S. (Columbus, Flint, Detroit, Youngstown, South Bend @PeteButtigieg, Atlanta, et. al.) to get technology companies to thrive in and relocate to those places. All happening!
Data tutored us, too: it allowed us to identify the specific people most likely to start companies in the future — “Future Founders.” Turns out, it’s a more diverse group than current founders — which shocked absolutely nobody.
Now that we know the issues better, how do we address them? I’m a technology investor, so I put that lens on first. (And we’re getting to the punchline here…)
The technology industry is getting tomatoes thrown at it daily — for reasons that are, in the main, fair. Many want to slow technology, even stop it. That would be foolish — though we can direct the way it unfolds. The time to do that is now.
This exact moment, when people and governments grow afraid of the power of technology companies, also happens to be when we need technology the most. Our elemental challenges, like climate change, and universal human thriving, demand every ounce of our invention.
We in technology need to take our power, and our responsibility for it, more seriously if we want to keep delivering on a better future.
Leaders at all levels of the technology industry should be trading talent, ideas, and understandings with our peers in government, culture, the academy, and the communities we claim to serve — instead of just trading barbs.
As clueless as people in government are about technology, people in technology are clueless about government. We can do something about that!
(Of course, Sara Fenske Bahat noticed I missed a belt loop!)
We try to do our part @BloombergBeta by giving founders the opportunity to cultivate relationships with leaders outside of technology: government officials, experts writing books, cultural leaders.
We’re learning to offer a dialogue that puts anyone technology startup in the bigger conversation about our society and economy. (By the time startups get IPO-powerful, it’s usually too late… so we need much more of this, faster.)
If we can connect the technology community more deeply to ideas, leaders, and communities that we profoundly affect with our work, then maybe we can realize the benefits of technology for the next hundred years, in a way that benefits all of us.
That better future, where we harness the gale force of technology, is at risk.
I believe that in connecting technology with leaders and communities in other walks of life, we, in the technology industry, should take responsibility for boring our end of the Chunnel. Others will meet us before we get to the other side.
P.S. I’ll add that the answers, insofar as I feel we have them, are few and far between. I feel I now get the issues much better, but not yet the solutions. One thing we need: much more data. Probably 10,000x less data relevant to the future of work than, say, climate change.
Originally shared on Twitter.
