Unbundling Work from Employment

The notion of the “organization man”—a term popularized by William H. Whyte’s seminal 1956 book that describes the subsuming of individual agency in service of a large corporation—is giving way to the rise of “micro-entrepreneurs,” or free agents, creators, freelancers, and independent workers who utilize digital platforms to make a living by lever... See more

4. Learning, upskilling, and development

With increasing verticalization by content type, a single login/authorization system can help superfans pay for a single subscription and access all of a creator’s content. For instance, paying for a creator on Patreon could grant access to their private Substack group, private Zoom events, paid podcast, etc.

. Prior to Cameo being founded in 2017, it would have been strange for celebrities to charge fans for personalized shout-out videos, but Cameo normalized this type of paid interaction—and anticipates $100M in bookings this year.

There’s a massive opportunity for digital platforms that lower the barriers to micro-entrepreneurship to support the growth of these workers, in whichever directions they seek.

2. Connections between different apps & automation of experiences

Employment at a company is itself a bundle of various services and infrastructure, and there’s an opportunity for platforms to replace what workers lose when they leave traditional employment arrangements. For micro-entrepreneurs, the tradeoff of independence is a de-risked company environment for learning, pivoting, and risk-taking—and there’s an ... See more

While the unbundling of Craigslist created billions of dollars of value, it pales in comparison to the unbundling we’re currently living through. Outside of commerce, unbundling is now affecting a much broader domain of everyone’s lives: work is being unbundled from traditional employment.

Freshbooks’ 2019 study on self-employment found that the primary motivations for those pursuing self-employment were non-financial: most individuals seek a combination of freedom, fulfillment, and career control.