Ten Great Highlights from Work Awesome @awehq

Luke Winston, Head of Customer Development & Services, Formlabs

“Unique will actually be common, and it’s going to be expected—because it’s going to be available. Companies use digital scanning technologies to scan your ear, and make headphones that fit your ear perfectly. It’s just the start of what’s actually happening.”

Albert Wenger, partner, Union Square Ventures

“At the moment, you have a lot of people who are in various precarious positions and they are participants in the labor market without choice. And so they can’t walk away from a bad job or a bad city. Basic income solves those problems much more eloquently than a minimum wage. People are exploited because they don’t have a walkaway option.”

John Vars, CPO, Taskrabbit

“When we think about the future of work and the gig economy, we find … many of our taskers are looking for flexibility, they’re looking for independence, they’re looking to set their own schedules.”

Jeff Wald, co-founder, Work Market

“We think about the ability for a corporation to engage on-demand labor at scale, efficiently, and we think about the ability to mitigate the risk associated with on-demand labor.”

Steven Hill – author of “Raw Deal: How the Uber Economy

“This technology makes it so easy to hire and fire workers. They want a labor force they can turn on and off like a garden hose. For workers, it is increasingly a raw deal.”

Fred Stutzman, CEO of Freedom

“When you start to detach … you realize the world doesn’t end when you step away from Facebook, Instragram, or Slack… we’ve been conditioned to keep going back.”

Nina Temple, Global Staffing Lead, Google

Don’t “cold call” people. Build relationships and nurture them over time.

“By now we have a huge database of people who have either applied to Google or interviewed with Google – we’re regularly looking through all those people.”

Marlon Litz-Rosenzweig, cofounder Talerio/Mylittlejob

“Many companies don’t feel ready to engage with freelancers. We’re trying to create a marketplace and have an infrastructure that makes it easy to engage with the right freelancer.”

Michael Solomon, cofounder 10x management

“We need to stop thinking about the workforce, workers, contractors—whatever they are—as commodities.”

“You don’t manage everyone the same way.”

Alex Chung, CEO of Giphy

“We commit a year. If you come into work, we put your salary away into a bank account for one year. If you commit not to quit for a year. At the end of the year, do you want to commit for another year? People know they’re not going to be fired and if they do, they get a year severance.”

[make work fun]

“We have a bartender every Friday that makes drinks. Someone picks a bar and we run a tab all night.”

David Mandell, CEO PivotDesk

“People are starting to realize that there’s actually a lot of benefit to sharing a culture, sharing an experience, sharing people. We’ve seen companies get funded because they’re sharing space with the right person. We’ve seen companies spin off.”

The full video archive here