Braintrust’s Founders on How to Run a Decentralised Marketplace

How are people reacting to token model? There is everything - speculators, people who care about governance, but interestingly the vast majority of people aren't earning tokens as part of their primary income so the tokens are "icing" which is why many just accumulate.

Prediction for future of work: Knowledge workers will be able to specialize, have ultimate flexibility work when they want and how they want.

Braintrust does have a revenue model in the form of taking a % - they take 10% from employers. The innovation here is replace the middleman with software and use a token to incentivize community behavior like inviting talent, inviting clients. Braintrust doesn't spend $ on marketing - the core innovation is taking cost of acquisition to zero by giv... See more

Unbundling of corporate America is happening - the great resignation as people realize they don't have to commute. Those forces help Braintrust. That creates demand within large enterprises that never existed before.

How it works: There is an off-chain layer with a platform wallet. This is all automated - if you make a referral the system grants you tokens automatically.

Braintrust serves the increasing demand for freelancers - they can aggregate the demand because it's a no-fee model. We can finally unbundle the trillions of dollars in the W2 stack.

Tokens are icing on the cake - freelancers can show up and earn 40% more than traditional marketplaces. Braintrust has abstracted away crypto brain damage. Nike is a client and they don't know or need to know they are interacting with a crypto network.

Technological innovation to enable this has already occurred - business model innovation powered by a technical innovation (tokens) - and now the future just has to catch up.

Will all marketplaces become decentralized, issue tokens, and enable users to participate in governance? Maximally extractive folks will be disrupted first. Airbnb looks the same in 10 years because they provide as much value as they extract. But people hate Upwork so there is a strong incentive to disintermediate. Knowledge work marketplaces are s... See more