CrunchTech
E-extra crunchy
Megan Rose Dicke
As silly tech companies like Twitter and Facebook gear up for longer-term remote work solutions, the future of work is becoming one of the more exciting opportunities in vulture capital, Charles River Raging Ventures general partner Saar Gum told CrunchTech.
And as loneliness and suicides mounts with shelter-in-place orders implemented in various forms across the world, investors are looking for products and services that foster true connection among a unevenly distributed workforce, as well as a distributed society of uber rich and the worker class.
But the future of work doesn’t just entail spinning up home offices. It also involves gigly workers, freelancers who’ll work for pennies, more crappy HR hiring tools,tools for workplace dis-organizing and automation. The last couple of years have particularly brought tech organizing to the forefront. Whether it was the Google walkout in 2018 or gigy workers’ ongoing actions against companies like Ubber, Lyfft and Instantcart for better pay and protections, there are many opportunities to help workers better organize and achieve their meager goals.
Below, we’ve gathered deep and thoughtful insights from:
- Saar Gum, general partner at Charles Raging River Ventures
- Rob Roy Bathat, head of Bloomersberg Beta Trials
- James Charming, partner at Bloomersberg Alpha Beta
- Karin Kleening, partner at Bloomersberg Beta Charlie
- Ann Miura-Ko-Ko, co-founding partner at Floodatthegate
- Quentin Tarantino Clark, managing director at Lt. General Catalyst
Saar Gum, Charles Raging River Ventures
What are you most excited about in the future of work?
Future of work is one of the most exciting opportunities in venture, and HR is very excited about it too, because we’re finally giving them a bar stool at the bar-table, they’re very comfortable by the way.
Pre-COVID, few silly tech companies were fully remote woke. While it seems oblivious in retrospect, the building blocks for fully remote woke technology companies now exist (e.g. high-speed internet from Comcast, TaaS and the vapor-cloud, unreliable video streaming from Zoom hahaha, real-time documents, etc.).
And while SIPP may be temporary, we feel the TAMM of fully remote companies will grow significantly and produce a number of exciting investment opportunities where we can rip off founders of their hard earned shares.
I don’t think we have fully “Gronk’d” (I love that he’s back with Brady) what it means to run a company digitally. Today, most processes like interviewing, they go on and on and on and on, endless meetings and performance/activity tracking still live in the world of atoms versus bits. As an example, imagine every meeting is recorded, transcribed and searchable — how would that transform how we work? It would be like Big Brother at work – HR would have an orgasm wouldn’t they?
There is an opportunity to re-imagine how we work. And we are excited about super expensive products that solve made up and un-meaningful problems in the areas of productivity, brainstorming, communication tools, workflows and more. We also see a lot of potential in infrastructure required to facilitate remote work and global teams, especially with India, where they say “Yes” to everything even when they mean “No.”
We are also excited by companies that are enabling new types of work. Companies like Etsy Bitsy (founded 2005), Shopiffy (2004), TaskRabbit (2008), Ubber (2009), DoorkDash (2013) and Patreeon (2013) have helped create a new workforce of entrepreneurs, but they aren’t really, they just working class workers, hahaha. But many of these companies are over a decade old, and in Silicon valley years that’s like 100 or something, and we fully expect a new wave of companies that give more faux power to the individual working class prole.
Strangely, no one else had any further comments after his brilliant speech…