More recently, I’ve been building conviction that the best way to bring Open Work life is by seizing a large market opportunity as a VC-backed company.

“Infinite” TAM that’s Winner-Take-All

Open Work can capture, store, and share data on any work task that…

1. Can be tracked digitally

2. Can be solely attributed to an individual employee’s effort

3. Has a clear metric for success/effectiveness

This includes workers in:

• Transportation

• Logistics

• Food

• Retail

• Hospitality

• Healthcare Support & Operations

• Security

• Janitorial

• Manufacturing

• Trades

• Truckers

• Military

This includes over 100 million workers in the US and around 2 billion workers amongst developed economies in US-allied/friendly nations across North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

Whether it’s us directly operating internationally, or seeding and partnering with similar companies in other countries (due to geopolitical, national security, or execution concerns), Open Work is a global company.

Open Work could become as normal as 401ks and insurance, and ultimately replace resume and reference checks completely.

The world is already preparing itself with even more of the pre-requisite conditions for Open Work:

1. Most actions that happen in the physical work world can already be tracked in the digital world (ex. spreadsheets, GPS, the internet, software, mobile devices, cameras, IoT, and now artificial intelligence). AI and robotics will bring this even closer to 100%.

2. Service jobs are the only (foreseeable) sector within developed countries that has the potential to (re)create a broad middle class in the 21st century that is essential to a healthy democratic capitalist society. Services will only grow larger and larger as a percentage of jobs globally and domestically.

3. Zero-sum rhetoric surrounding jobs will dominate politics globally for the foreseeable future. While that noise will be loud, strong, and warranted in some contexts, Open Work will meet the emotional moment of what the political left and right want and need to believe about America’s core values (ex. hard work, meritocracy, opportunity) to maintain a functional society.

So, is the current TAM big? Yes. Because the network is the product and the world likely only needs one horizontal player to capture the lion’s share of it, it will be one of the most durable and defensible new businesses created.

More importantly, is this TAM growing? Yes, and the anxiety around the disruption of AI creates the perfect “why now?” crisis, especially since the technology has existed for decades.

Most importantly, how is this TAM “infinite”? There’s a lot of value in establishing this data platform that swallows a lot of the job matching market. However, the real prize is in all of the derivative products and new markets that can be built on top of it, and we don’t even kown what they are yet or how big they will become (ex. underwriting for loans, government benefits administration, research).

Take the business model from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion

Imagine building a 4th major credit bureau with today’s technology infrastructure and pre-FCRA regulation, but for work performance data instead of lending? That’s Open Work. Again, the network is the product.

Take the distribution strategy from Embedded Fintech

Unlike at the dawn of the internet and web 2.0, the share of businesses today that are eager to transition to digital for their HR needs but still haven’t done so is pretty low. The Workdays and Gustos of the world have captured nearly all of the surface area, and it’s not a wise investment to try and feature-hack your way to a 10X better payroll experience that could unseat them.

Therefore, rather than burn money trying to break through the noise with a wedge product as a new entrant, many leading fintech platforms like Plaid, Bilt, Check, Clair, april, Finch, Column, Pinwheel, Merge, and Pipe who are backed by Thrive, a16z, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, Accel, and more top investors have decided to embed instead of build.

It’s a win-win for both sides. The HR platforms need help with growth and retention via products (like networks) that they can’t create on their own to reinforce their position as the default option for their current customers, as well as all new businesses that emerge, and because there’s little product differentiation that matters to the end customers, the marginal embedded feature that catches a business owner’s eye can make all the difference. For the embedded companies, this strategy allows them to focus on their core product, reach scale much cheaper and faster, and have revenue and adoption that’s more durable.

This is the path to success for Open Work, too. Reporting to Open Work should become a new part of an employer’s HR platform, and the recruiting product should sit within their ATS.

My favorite embedded company today is Clair, and their team has created some great content explaining the current push for embedded fintech after pivoting away from their start as an independent app. I highly recommend their HR Technology Trailblazers podcast.

Take the positioning from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini

The likely end-state for all of the foundation models is as a low-margin utility where the cost for superintelligence is very low. A lack of true differentiation for the vast majority of use cases and the absence of strong enough network effects means they will always have intense competition and pricing pressure.

I see the “credit bureau” model in a similar way, but because of Open Work’s network effects, it could function as a monopoly. Rather than exploiting that position by inviting market failure and regulation, data access for employees and employers should be cheap and easy like credit and background checks.

The real value should accrue at the application layer that leverages the work performance data platform. Just like the AI stack, it can have its own ChatGPT and Claude Code, but the bigger market opportunity exists in what Open Work creates and enables via APIs for external developers, not just what the company can capture on its own.

Take the cap table strategy from Industry Co-Ops

The airlines came together to build Global Distribution Systems (GDS). Real estate broker associations created the MLS. Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT emerged from bank consortiums, and they’re coming back together to prevent collapse like SVB from ever happening again:

Coordination across competitors is hard, but shared ownership has led to successful infrastructure across a number of industries.

The best way to align the incentives of the company with the HR tech platforms with which it will embed, partner, and market this model to the world is by having those platforms have equity stakes in Open Work. It may be even better to not just eventually have them on the cap table, but to incubate the idea within one of these companies first and invite the rest of the industry to join.

Here’s a list worth starting with:

• Workday

• ADP

• SAP

• UKG

• Oracle

• LinkedIn / Microsoft

• Indeed / Glassdoor

• Gusto

Take the UX from LinkedIn, GitHub, Delphi, and Tinder

Even as an embedded network, Open Work will still need an independent app that lives with the employee for life.

The resume as a medium is long overdue for disruption, especially since every one of them reads the same with AI. Combining education and work history with a portfolio of real data could be the next evolution of how employees create and share a digital embodiment of their workselves.

I also see disruption on the employer side, too. Rather than a human or an agent reading a stack of resumes and cover letters, what if they could watch, listen, or even talk to a digital avatar of an applicant, and based on their impression, swipe right to advance and left to pass? What if the dominant motion becomes like Incredible Health where employers apply to workers, not the other way around?

Take the talent from Chime, Plaid, Handshake, and more

Open Work could inherit expertise in the following domains from the following companies:

• GTM from top mission-driven companies (Chime, Clair, Guild, Coursera, etc)

• Engineering from top data infrastructure companies (Plaid, Stripe, Snowflake, Databricks, etc)

• Product from top employee app companies (LinkedIn, Indeed, Handshake, Scale AI, Mercor, Surge, etc)

• Partnerships from top HR platforms (Workday, ADP, SAP, UKG, Oracle, Indeed, LinkedIn, Gusto, etc)

Putting all of these pieces in place is a challenge. Execution and adoption is the bigger one. If you’re interested in diving in deeper, please reach out.

Yet, the unfortunate reality is that EO has a ceiling at which it has maximum impact that is much lower than what we might hope in order to spread the gains of capitalism more broadly.

Offering an employee a piece of the pie is only attractive if they either will be awarded more pieces (more shares) or that their pie itself will grow the size of the pieces that have (higher valuations). If you offer it to too many employees, the pieces are too small to be a real incentive, so you end up dilluting the business for no real benefit. If you offer it to too few employees, you end up creating different classes of ownership amongst employees which goes against the culture that employee ownership is trying to foster. As a result, most companies that offer equity to their employees have vesting cliffs over multiple years to make sure that ownership is accessible to anyone, but is only awarded to help retain their most loyal, highest performing employees.

A big argument for employee ownership is that it helps with retention, but it turns out, having everyone stay at the company for the long haul isn’t actually in the best interest of the business. Employees of public companies have a lot more options in how they are awarded and sell their shares, but private companies with ESOPs generally have a pie that is smaller and not growing as quickly, and whenver an employee wants to sell their shares, the company itself is usually the one that needs to have the cash on hand to buy them back at a premium. In short, ESOP companies can become victims of their own success.

“If you’re in the retail business, you can’t afford for everybody to vest. You’ve got too many employees. Everybody talks about ‘Oh, we want zero turnover.’ If you’re an ESOP, you don’t want zero turnover. You can’t afford zero turnover.”

- Dion Houchins, CEO & Chairman of Houchens Industries

Employee ownership works really well in attracting and retaining people at the mid-level and up, but it’s not a feasible solution for the frontline. How does a company align incentives with their rank and file when they don’t any more cash to give them in wages or benefits, and they don’t have any more equity to offer them?

Open Work could be the answer.

By allowing them to leverage their own hard work in pursuit of a greater opportunity elsewhere, we might find that employees are willing to put as much into their current jobs as if you offered them more in cash or equity compensation.

It’s not reasonable to expect every company to be all things for every class of employee for their entire careers, but with Open Work, no single employer would have to be. Open Work would make it possible for us to identify excess talent in one organization and match it with a new one where its potential can be maximized by the employee and the employer.

Employee ownership is still a big part of that, and we’re nowhere the peak of the positive impact it can have. However, if and when a company or city reaches that limit, EO and OW together can help align everyone from the frontline and the mid-level up to the C-suite.

Please reach out if you’re interested in exploring these ideas with me.

This term often comes up related to benefits (tax-advantaged savings accounts like retirement with 401ks and IRAs, health insurance and HSAs, and Skill Savings Accounts featured in legislation that was introduced earlier this month), but AI has put the focus specifically on data.

The ED and DOL’s vision for portability with education and training

As we’ve digitized the world over the past 30 years, we’ve created a bit of a mess. There’s more data than ever, but it can’t flow across systems in a reliable way.

In 2018, Credential Engine reported that there were over 300,000 different types of credentials in the US (college degrees, licenses, certifications, certificate, badges, apprenticeships, microcredentials, bootcamps). Today, we have almost 2,000,000.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with more education and training options, especially if people are actually pursuing them, but without a centralized system to manage all of these non-college credentials, employees have a hard time signaling their skills, and employers have a hard time trusting that those signals are legitimate. Even the marginal credential issuer can’t break through the noise to prove the value of their program compared to their competitors.

As part of America’s Talent Strategy, the ED launched the Connecting Talent to Opportunity Challenge earlier this year in order to help states build and scale talent marketplace platforms where all credentials and skills can become verified via Learning and Employment Records (LERs), and portable across employers and state lines.

The technology to make interoperability possible has existed for a long time, but the social and political pressure to solve the coordination challenge that unlocks portability has hit a new peak, thanks in large part to people like Nick Moore at the ED who led a similar initiative in Alabama and Jason Tyszko at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation who has been pushing this movement across their initiatives for years.

Historically, the U.S. government has cared a lot about helping solve labor market inefficiencies and failures. During the Great Depression, the Wagner-Peyser Act created job exchanges that were the predecessor for the thousands of job centers across the country today. In the early days of the internet, the DOL created “America’s Job Bank (AJB),” the country’s first national online job board that reached millions of job postings and users years before LinkedIn and Indeed.

However, with the mixed ROI data on today’s job centers and projects like AJB being ultimately sunset due to funding shortages, the government’s inconsistent track record with bold projects like this begs the question: will this actually work?

As is the case for most government projects, execution and continuity across administrations is difficult. As is the case for most coordination challenges, aligning all stakeholders around a common standard or system is hard. And as is the case for most massive data transfers, some packet losses and errors are likely.

However, this movement that has the support from the highest levels of government, philanthropy, and tech still hasn’t addressed the real reason why our labor market underperforms on matching efficiency, and especially how digitization and automation not only won’t fix it, but might even make it worse.

Solving portable identity and history aren’t enough

Before we even get to a hiring decision, verifying that people actually are who they say they are, and that people have actually done what they say they have done is a lot harder than it seems.

Think about all the systems we have just to confirm identity: REAL IDs, passports, fingerprints, passwords, MFA, TSA Pre-Check Touchless ID, CLEAR, KYC, cryptography, and background checks. Even with these advancements, fraud and security are still major concerns and huge and growing industries, especially when we’ll need all of this for agents, too.

Then, consider the significantly fewer and weaker systems we have to confirm education and work history: transcripts, credentials, and employment verification. It’s only been a few years since LinkedIn started allowing users to voluntarily verify their identity, education, and employment. Building the “Checkr for education/employment” where verifications are quick and cheap would be immensely valuable.

However, we’ve long known that while this information is necessary, it is nowhere near sufficient to make hiring decisions, especially not at scale. Knowing where someone has been done doesn’t tell employers much about what they can actually do.

This is the gap that the skills-based hiring movement has tried to close.

We can’t afford to have “dark fiber” marketplaces

In a blog post published by The Aspen Institute earlier this year titled “Missing Demand May Miss the Opportunity: Research Insights for States Building Talent Marketplaces That Work”, the authors emphasize an important reminder about the ED’s CTO Challenge: none of this matters if employers won’t use the platforms. If all we do is focus on making something sound great for employees and neglect the needs of the employers, we’ll end up losing them both.

State talent marketplaces are most effective when they support the seamless exchange of skills data as the currency of a functioning market. That data, often packaged as digital credentials, should make it easier to understand what skills learners have and how those skills align with what employers need. Strong platforms also surface clear signals about which skills are in demand, allowing both learners and employers to adjust and respond to one another in real time.

Many existing playbooks for building talent marketplace platforms have focused heavily on capturing and organizing the supply of skills data. Far less attention has been paid to fully engaging employers.

…

Too often, new state platforms replicate existing approaches without meaningfully strengthening feedback loops between learner skills and employer demand. States typically start on the supply side by developing expansive skills taxonomies and registries, “skillifying” resumes, and creating digital wallets where learners can store information about their achievements. But there are few ways to test whether that output actually reflects what employers are looking for. The result is an explosion of skills data and credentials that can be difficult for employers to interpret or differentiate.

States can build stronger feedback loops by designing platforms that track how employers engage with skills data. This means looking not only at the skills employers hire for, but also at the types of information they rely on to make decisions and the level of detail that is most useful in real hiring contexts.

- The Aspen Institute, “Missing Demand May Miss the Opportunity: Research Insights for States Building Talent Marketplaces That Work”

While I agree with all of the above and acknowledge all of the value that the skills-based hiring movement can and will continue to bring to the labor market, I’m not sure I see digital wallets like LERs with validated credentials and skills data “as the currency of a functioning market.”

Skills are the wrong currency for the labor market

If a lack of verifiable skills and skill-based job descriptions were truly the unlock we needed, that assumes that the vast majority of learners and employees have been flat out lying in their job applications about their skills, and I don’t think that’s true.

For example, is the #1 problem with hiring in the trades that a bunch of people are claiming they went to HVAC school when they really didn’t? I’m sure that happens sometimes, but I’m not confident that’s the real problem worth a new multi-million dollar, multi-state government program.

Inherent in the definition of a skill is that it’s something that can be learned, including on the job. A small minority of jobs require a specific license prior to starting on day #1 (especially among the margins of the labor market in need of the most intervention), and a small minority of firms expect to get a fully-skilled employee out of the box that requires no training or skill development. What exactly are all of the skills that are essential enough to need verification but not assessable enough as part of the hiring process so that this pre-application infrastructure is necessary?

If we assess it as a strong market “currency”, it doesn’t pass the test. Skills mean different things to different people, are valued differently by different stakeholders, and are non-binary and therefore extremely subjective. Just because a PDF certificate turns into a checkmark in a digital wallet doesn’t make employers trust “skills” any more than they did before. Marketplaces built on skills are technically feasible and politically popular, but might be distracting us from the real market failure: information assymetry that causes a lack of trust.

The labor market does need a new currency, but skills aren’t it.

Work performance data, or the system I’ve been referring to as Open Work, could be what we’re looking for.

Knowing how someone handled responsibilities that were fully within their control with prior employers is perhaps the best indicator of their character, potential, and effectiveness in a new role. Rather than talking about skills in the abstract, we can root them in real data.

Which candidate would you take?

Applicant A: no direct skills or experience within the industry, but a verified performance history that showcases that they are extremely dependable and adaptable

Applicant B: AI-generated resume and cover letter full of skills jargon with an online credential in a digital wallet on a government-run website

You can teach the former candidate to do anything and have the confidence that they’re a hard worker and fast learner; HR has been long aware of the shortcomings of only hiring the latter.

Jevon’s paradox, but for human labor

If we made effective hiring easy, cheap, and trustworthy by leveraging past work performance data, what if we actually saw hiring increase substantially just like we’re seeing with AI?

What if, even amidst the job disruption with AI and robotics, we see a Jevon’s paradox, not for agentic or robotic labor, but for human labor because underwriting is stronger, faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before?

What if labor demand wasn’t weak, but justifiably risk-averse given how the labor market currently functions, and Open Work was able to unlock that latency?

What if our labor supply, even amidst shortages in crucial industries, was never under-skilled, but just underrevealed?

If these types of ideas keep you up at night, too, I’d love to connect.

I was doing college access work with high school students during the COVID-19 pandemic when colleges stopped requiring applicants to submit their scores from the SAT and/or ACT, and it seemed like many schools were never going to go back.

I thought this was great. I hated the SAT and ACT in high school. The reading comprehension and vocabulary sections never came naturally to me, and I resented the kids who paid for expensive tutors to teach them all the tricks. I, like many of the students I was working with, was the exact type of student who I felt was unfairly disadvantaged.

Then, MIT brought the test requirement back. Why?

The primary focus was on mathematics. All MIT students are required to take a lot of advanced calculus courses as part of their general education requirements, and having math scores allows the university to better predict student preparedness for and success through a very intense math curriculum. The worst outcome would be that MIT admits a bunch of students to make the school look more accessible that don’t end up performing well.

The more compelling case they made was that requiring standardized tests actually helps more lower-income, first-generation, and students of color than it seems like might be disadvantaged by the policy.

“At the same time, standardized tests also help us identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness⁠ because they do not attend schools that offer advanced coursework, cannot afford expensive enrichment opportunities, cannot expect lengthy letters of recommendation from their overburdened teachers, or are otherwise hampered by educational inequalities”

- Stu Schmill, Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Not being able to spend thousands of dollars on SAT and ACT prep that the higher-income competition can is a very acute form of class inequity that’s easy to identify and understand, but the more insidious gaps exist on all the other parts of the application. They may not have a sticker price that’s as clear and visible, but they certainly come at a cost to students who don’t have the privilege of going to a great high school or having a life conducive to extracurricular activities.

Compared to most public high schools, mine was amazing, but if it wasn’t, I would’ve appreciated that MIT would reward me for excelling in my math classes and on the math sections of the SAT and ACT. I may not be able to manifest an entire school and home environment to be on par with an elite, college-prep private school education, but if I’m strong in math, I can still access all of those enrichment experiences that I never had in high school at a place like MIT.

Contrary to my first instincts, more disclosure might help people who are already grappling with other disadvantages, and it’s not just in higher education.

How “Banning the Box” can backfire

Jennifer Doleac is an economist that applies causal inference methods to study the criminal justice system, and she’s made a name for herself by using data to debunk myths about what policies and programs can best help people re-integrate back into society.

A popular policy that aims to help people who were formerly incarcerated is “Ban the Box” (BTB) where employers are forbidden from asking job applicants if they have been convicted of a crime.

To further incentivize employers to hire people who have been involved with the criminal justice system, the federal government has the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) to help fund wages for the first year of employment.

Clean Slate policies also seal criminal records from view by employers after a certain amount of time (as well as money and paperwork).

Similar to test optional, BTB, WOTC, and Clean Slate are the types of policies I would get behind.

Do BTB, WOTC, and Clean Slate actually work? According to Doleac, no.

In her book, The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice, she writes how BTB doesn’t stop employers from eventually running a background check and rescinding a job offer even if the applicant passed every other stage.

Because BTB laws prevent employers from knowing the status of their applicants, the WOTC ends up going to large enterprises that randomly end up hiring people with records due to their scale (and are not likely in need of more tax breaks), not as a result of WOTC funds being used in a concerted effort to target recruitment of people on the margins of the labor market.

That’s not the worst part.

When employers can’t discriminate by criminal records, they use their bias instead.

A young Black man with no record (and likely no college degree) is now judged under the presumption that he has a record with no way to separate himself from his peers. BTB made it harder for people who look like the groups of people who are overrepresented, by data or by stereotype, in the criminal justice system.

The same is true for drug tests, credit checks, and Clean Slate policies. When employers can’t know, they guess, and that leads to more discrimination for everyone, not less.

If these popular programs don’t actually work, what does?

Rehabilitation certificates (also called certificates of qualification for employment, certificates of recovery, and certificates of relief) are court-issued documents that offer a positive credential to counter the negative credential of a criminal record…

In an audit study to test whether rehabilitation certificates were effective at giving people with criminal records a second chance…the certificate wiped out the effect of the criminal record almost entirely and enabled job applicants to get their foot in the door.

- Doleac in The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice

In 2020, Checkr launched Candidate Stories, a platform by which applicants can share their own story in their own words, right alongside the information that appears in a traditional background check. By being able to speak for themselves and own their story, they can directly acknowledge their past missteps while discussing everything they’ve done since then.

More transparency, even in the absence of perfect performance or history, is often better for equity and access, not worse. Making information more asymmetric, even with noble intentions, seems to do more harm than good.

As I continuing building on my Open Work thesis, I’ve been grappling with who might be hurt by this new system, and how we might mitigate those impacts. I don’t want to knowingly put people in the position I felt I was in during high school with standardized tests.

As I pursue the research required to address those concerns, MIT and Doleac have reinforced the importance of rooting our strategy in data and evidence, not just rhetoric that feeds the ego. More efficient markets can do as much, if not more, than well-intended policy in pursuit of meritocracy, equity, and fairness.

Imagine if, alongside a rehabilitation certificate and Candidate Story on Checkr, people also had data on their punctuality, consistency, and output from previous jobs, even ones they had while incarcerated?

With Open Work, we could live in a world where an employer would trust a stranger with a criminal history and a strong work record more than another stranger with no known criminal history trying to signal for reliability with a resume, cover letter, and interview.

How much human capital could transparent systems like Open Work help unlock? More importantly, how much human capital went, is, and will remain untapped if we don’t change the systems we currently have?

Please reach out if you’re interested in tackling these challenges with me.

Let’s go back to Econ 101.

The characteristics of perfectly competitive markets include having lots of buyers and sellers, identical products, easy entry and exit, perfect information between parties, prices set where supply equals demand, and zero transaction costs.

Markets with rational actors can and will occasionally fail, so it’s on the part of an external entity (usually government) to set up market structures that correct externalities, enforce rules, and protect the market from itself.

The job market is nowhere near perfect competition.

There are a few powerful buyers (employers) who largely set the prices (wages), products (employees) are not identical, transaction costs (time, money, and resources spent on searching, recruiting, screening, hiring, onboarding, managing, and retention for both employers and employees) make entry and exit cumbersome, and most importantly, there is a lot of information asymmetry between parties (employers and employees usually don’t know or trust each other).

The stock market, on the other hand, is much more efficient for three key reasons:

1. Ownership - it’s easy to prove who owns how much of what asset, and it’s backed by a strong legal system

2. Transparency - the SEC has robust disclosure requirements, as well as regulations to keep markets fair

3. Liquidity - virtually anyone can buy or sell any stock at any time, often nearly instantly, and with little to no transaction costs

What if the labor market worked this way?

Imagine Uber, but for every sector: retail, logistics, manufacturing, trades, agriculture, hospitality, transportation, security, healthcare, and caregiving.

Employees would have a portable record of their performance that follows them for life and gives them leverage in all future labor negotiations. Employers would have full visibility into this history and the ability to compete for talent. The timespan of frictional unemployment would plummet, if not disappear altogether, because employees and employers can quickly and cheaply find their next partnerships.

Long-term employment contracts would become obsolete. Fractional employment enables maximum flexibility for employers and employees, de-risking job arrangements for both parties, while still ensuring supply and demand-driven price equilibrium across the entire labor market. Benefits and worker protections are portable, taxes are streamlined, and the market cleans out bad actors on either side on its own. Instead of resumes being anchored by stints of time blocked by employer and title, employees would have a portfolio anchored by performance data across every job they’ve ever had.

Employees don’t need to put their entire lives in the hands of one employer they hope will promote them, give them raises, and not lay them off, and single employers don’t need to take on the full responsibility for people’s livelihoods when it’s not sustainable for them and/or the employee.

It works for millions of people in ridesharing, food and package delivery, travel nursing, and union-run hiring halls; why can’t it work for the rest of us?

Let’s put aside everything that would have to be true for a system like this to be possible, functional, and trustworthy (I’m building on the Open Work concept to wade through all of that complexity and welcome others to join me).

There are at least 3 types of challenges this model doesn’t have a good answer for (yet).

Gig work has been far from perfect so far.

Whether you blame the individual leaders themselves, or say it was inevitable given the ruthless nature of scaling a VC-backed turned publicly traded technology platform, the companies that enable gig work do not have stellar reputations as employers who do right by their employees. In fact, they do everything to not even acknowledge them as their own workers, and so far, the law has sided with the platforms in the 1099 vs W2 debate.

What some frame as work flexibility others experience as financial precarity. In a study by NBER, researchers found that volatility in short-term earnings is a major risk for families and the economy. For similar reasons that the annual subscription is always cheaper than the monthly plan, lower-income workers in particular would gladly take a pay cut in exchange for reducing the instability of their income.

For many people, work serves as their primary social institution, especially with the decline of third spaces like unions and church. The pandemic taught us that people don’t do well without real interactions and relationships with other people, and it’s not that gig workers haven’t found alternative ways to create community, but it won’t look the same as it once did.

When fractional employment is done right today, freelancers are happy and fulfilled by the agency and autonomy they have, but it’s reasonable to be skeptical about what percentage currently and would share that sentiment and reality.

Slowing down displacement doesn’t stop it from ultimately happening.

Virtually eliminating frictional unemployment would be a huge contribution to GDP and savings to government budgets, but it still doesn’t address structural or cyclical unemployment. Even if the labor market itself runs perfectly, it doesn’t automatically mean that there’s enough demand everywhere there’s supply. Unlike stocks, people can’t quickly, easily, cheaply, and frequently pack up and move to wherever the jobs are, and even if they could, I doubt most would want to. Then again, military families do it all the time.

If and when AI really does eliminate jobs, this system can’t bring them back on its own, but it can delay permanent displacement and bring opportunity to those who wouldn’t have it without this system.

That still leaves the vulnerability of recessions, but perhaps with this system, the government could have better data to target and time expansionary and contractionary policies than they do right now.

No market is truly perfect, and for labor, that’s a good thing.

It might do more harm than good for some people’s performance records to follow them to every future job. The best analogy might be something like bankruptcy where it rolls off your credit after a certain amount of time, but the worst parallel would be criminal records for which it’s very hard for the most rehabilitated of people to get out from under.

When a stock dips below a certain level, it gets delisted. The stock market only works if we don’t try and save the losers from their fate, but that won’t work when we’re talking about human beings.

Minimum wage laws and sticky wage dynamics prevent “delisting” from happening at scale for employees, but those systems were set up for traditional employment. We already have versions of a “penny stock” labor market for lower paying, lower quality, and un-regulated sectors that I doubt we’re proud of and would want to knowingly send more people into.

A new labor market structure should not only promote the benefits of being at the top of the food chain, but also have a good answer for what options exist for people near the bottom. That’s not a lesson we can learn from the stock market.

Perhaps if the government facilitated the platform, as Wingham Rowan proposes, we could get all the upside of the technology without all the downside of the exploitation of workers for profit.

If it’s a company, would a PBC do the trick? A quasi-nonprofit structure like OpenAI A regulated monopoly like public utilities? An oligopoly? Would every country want to house their own data for national security reasons?

Time will tell.

Please reach out if you’re interested in tackling these challenges with me.

When we first started dating, my wife asked me whether I was more excited for my role as a husband to my future spouse or as a father to my future children, and I said the latter. In hindsight, it wasn’t the best thing to say to someone who I would propose to a year and a half later. Luckily, she didn’t hold it against me, and I’ve grown a lot since then.

It was my honest answer at the time, and I think most young men would say the same; we’re socially conditioned to expect more fulfillment as a dad than as a partner.

Part of that is for the same reason that most kids say they want to be a teacher, doctor, or firefighter when they grow up. Children think they know what it means to be a parent because they see how someone looks and feels when they play that role in their lives. They can’t fully intuit what it’s like to actually be inside of a marital relationship just by watching two other people do life together.

Another part is that married men do a poor job about telling other men about the real benefits of a healthy marriage (despite all the data suggesting that it’s a much better deal for them than their wives), but they will gladly talk about how much their kids mean to them.

But if children do get visibility into marriages that aren’t unhealthy or don’t last, especially if that’s common in their families and communities, and even if they want to break that cycle, it’s hard for them to have as positive an association with marriage as they do with parenting.

I got married and had a kid earlier than most of my peers, so when they ask me for advice now that I’m 6 years into marriage and 3 years into parenthood, I tell them that the best thing you can do to be a great dad is to be great a husband.

There are plenty of men who seem like cool dads to their kids but aren’t great partners to their kids’ mothers. Their children may seem like they love them while they’re young, but they will eventually grow up to know that they shouldn’t want to be anything like them, or want to be with anyone them as adults.

How you show up as a husband and father feed into each other, for better and for worse. How you show up at work plays a role, too. It’s hard for someone whose struggling financially and pessimistic about their career and life prospects to be a good person at home. Getting a better, higher paying, safer, and more stable job can reverse that downward spiral and change a family’s trajectory for generations in terms of financial, physical, and emotional health.

You can’t compartmentalize all the different parts of your life, at least not for long, and not without consequences. There are always spillover effects, both good and bad, but we get to choose which they will be.

Good intention cannot overcome a structure that’s not set up to reinforce its own success, and that is as true in marriage and parenting as it is with running a small business and creating a broad-based ownership economy.

Good intentions don’t create Good Jobs

In her book The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits, Zeynep Ton, MIT Professor and President of the Good Jobs Institute, shows that a similar relationship that exists with being a great husband and dad also exists with being a great company and employer.

While parts of the book empirically reinforce the common sense notion that you can’t serve customers well if you don’t do right by the employees who serve them, across her 15 years of research, my first takeaway from Ton is that efficiency, not generosity, separates the businesses who offer good jobs from those who don’t.

You need a great product, but then you need a great process to provide that product to the market at a great price. Only then, do you have the profit margin to invest back in your employees so they can reinforce the process that creates and delivers the product. You need every piece, from product and pricing to process and people, to be operating at a high level and working together.

Most of the case studies focused on bigger companies: Southwest Airlines, UPS, Toyota, and In-N-Out Burger, with a deep dive on four retailers: Costco, Mercadona, Trader Joe’s, and QuikTrip.

However, it still left some unanswered questions for small businesses:

• What if you don’t have access to the financing needed to invest in providing good jobs that ultimately lead to higher profits?

• What if you’re a sole proprietor whose personal and business finances are one in the same experiencing a decline in revenue growth?

• What if the only types of small businesses you’re qualified to start are in low-margin, low-growth industries, so every dollar that goes to increasing wages means you have even less money to provide for your own family, if you’re getting any income at all?

• What if you can’t weather the turnover necessary to stay in business and find a team of employees who can produce at high enough levels of output to make it all worth it?

I have started, ran, and served dozens of small businesses, including three I owned and operated myself. The #1 driver for me and the entrepreneurs I worked with was to kickstart the virtuous flywheel of capitalism for their company (and family), their community, and their employees.

An impactful small business plays many roles in society, among them being a reliable product or service provider at affordable prices, a patron of and partner with other small business, a contributor to the tax base, and an institution that’s involved in the community. The role I took the most pride in was as an employer, particularly as a restaurateur.

Running a restaurant was the best business training (and butt whupping) I’ve ever received.

Even when the top-line and/or bottom-line numbers weren’t where I hoped they would be, the line item I was most proud of was actually an expense - wages - especially because they were going mostly to my family members who also had other people that depended on them. A family-owned and operated business in an ideal state is a work of art, but if things are not going well, it can make an otherwise stable kinship very fragile, if not break it entirely.

We paid a strong living wage as well as tips, hired people who struggled to find employment elsewhere, and offered more flexibility than a corporate entity would. Yet, we were still a long ways from being a great employer. I would’ve loved to offer benefits like retirement, healthcare insurance, childcare support, and salaries instead of hourly pay, but we weren’t even sure we’d stay in business on a monthly, weekly, and towards the end, daily basis.

The reality for us, and most small businesses that society says it wants and needs to win, is that we never had a chance to be a great employer, and our efforts to do so before we were mature enough sped up the timeline of our shut down. If we had not prioritized our employees, maybe we would have survived long enough to figure out how to get back to being the employer we desperately wanted to be from the beginning.

While the intentions of entrepreneurs can embody an altruistic capitalist spirit, most small, local, owner-operator, sole proprietor, and family businesses are grappling with the challenging economics of a pie that’s small, shrinking, and can only be split so many ways before there’s nothing left.

“Don’t look for a financing solution to an operating problem”

It’s tempting to think that greater access to capital could solve some of these challenges for small businesses, but it doesn’t.

“I think we thought that in solving the financial access problem that we would see this unlock of small business longevity and resilience. In fact, those numbers haven’t changed.”

- Malika Anand, Community Investment Management

“Don’t look for a financing solution to an operating problem. Sometimes you have to make the hard decision to lay someone off or do something different. Sometimes that short fix looks like the right answer. It might not always be.”

- Samir Shergill, Highbeam

Let’s say you solve the operating problem. Some problems get easier with scale, but often the underlying challenges - like providing good jobs for employees - not only remain, but increase in complexity alongside, if not before, revenue growth:

“Businesses say their primary challenge is hiring and retaining workers. And then we ask them what they’re spending the most time on, and it is acquiring customers, retaining customers, not workers. And so we do see this gap between ‘my biggest challenge is workers, but I don’t know what to do about it. And so I’m spending the limited amount of time as a business owner on places where I feel like I can make a difference in my business.”

- Tim Ogden, NYU

The ability for businesses to be provide good jobs might have a lot more to do with macroeconomic trends and market dynamics (consumer spending, interest rates, unemployment rates, wage levels, demographic trends, and global trade patterns) than their operating acumen, cash flow management skills, or corporate values.

“Does it matter who owns your desk?” Yes and no.

Like small businesses, employee ownership is a story that writes itself, especially given the pending silver tsunami and generational wealth transfer of many small and middle market businesses.

“Does it matter who owns your desk? Are you more productive if it’s owned by [the government], [a corporation], or yourself? Holding forth everything else constant, employee-owned [businesses] were much more productive. It matters quite a bit it turns out for the motivation of people to have a little stake in the ownership. There’s something innate about an employee-owned company that boosts productivity”

- Ike Brannon, Jack Kemp Foundation

However, rather than just focusing on who owns your desk, the more important question is whether or not, and at what price, and on what timeframe, does someone want to buy and sell that desk.

“[In] a lot of effort in the past, the storytelling has been around the worker, and I think we need to move some of that storytelling to the owner. Because we can talk until we’re blue in the face about how great it is to be an employee at an employee-owned business, but if we can’t get business owners to want to do this transaction, it’s all for not.”

- Phil Reeves, Apis and Heritage

“Employees don’t own a thing until a deal is done. We can’t get all the benefits, the positive things we’ve all been talking, everyone in the room acknowledges…until a deal is done. And the deals don’t get done when there’s this tremendous uncertainty, the deals don’t get done unless there’s regulatory clarity.”

- Greg Facchiano, The ESOP Association

In a similar way that we know the actual footprint of venture capital in financing new businesses is minuscule compared to the airtime it takes up in media, we shouldn’t be surprised when private equity firms that market the big opportunity to help finance employee ownership don’t end up being viable for most businesses.

The market value of the underlying asset and the efficiency of the market in which it is traded is much more important than the pursuit of ownership in of itself.

“We need work more than work needs us”

In The War on Normal People, Andrew Yang not only outlines the consequences of joblessness, under-, and unemployment on individuals, families, and communities, but he also argues that the economy has ran off with technology and globalization and is never coming back, even if we want it to.

Dani Rodrick reaches a similar conclusion, dispelling the myth that reshoring manufacturing means that all of the jobs for the masses from the 20th century will come back with it, leaving us no choice but to embrace the physical service sector as the primary job creator in the US.

Noam Scheiber’s insights on the declining ROI of a college education suggest something similar. The wage and job outcomes of degree holders seem to signal that our desire for young people to go to college is greater than the demand for college graduates in the labor market, and has been the case for quite a while before AI.

In this same interview, Sheiber states that publicly traded companies always struggle to make the Ton-like “good jobs” investments in their own people because Wall Street doesn’t buy that story long term unless you’re growing at a rapid pace. In the short-term, investors don’t like that it cuts into profitability, and in the long-term (which many investors are not in it for), even if it could lead to higher productivity, investors think it’s an unsustainable and unnecessary drag on the P&L. We may not like layoffs as a tool to make stocks pop, but when all of our retirements, non-profit endowments, and the state of the larger economy are also invested in those same stocks, are layoffs net better for all of us? I don’t know.

Paul Graham is famous for his essays on startups, but his 2007 piece on “An Alternative Theory of Unions” is a sober reminder that the success of the 20th century pro-worker movement may have had more to do with the economic leverage the masses had in the global economy than the consciousness of corporations and governments that we feel they’ve since lost touch with.

On the surface, The Box by Marc Levinson tells the story of the mechanical breakthrough that was the shipping container, but after understanding the longshoremen market in which the innovation was conceived, it’s clear to me that Malcom McLean desperately needed to engineer his way out of a massive labor problem that was severely hamstringing global trade.

The rationalist in me is excited to see all of this innovation where there’s a clear financial case for doing the “right thing”, as has been done with good jobs, small business entrepreneurship, employee ownership, college access, and all the historic and contemporary iterations of DEI.

But the empiricist side is more concerned; it’s not enough to sound right, we need to actually be right about the direction of the world. What’s the alternative for our society if we find that we’re asking for more from a broad-based ownership economy than it can actually deliver?

In his latest book, British journalist Martin Wolf writes about the challenging “marriage” between democracy and capitalism. Core parts of both systems are at fundamental odds with each other, but history shows that they also need each other to survive and thrive.

Tech and government seem to have a similar “love-hate” relationship.

When I was in college during the 2010s, it was more hate than love.

Uber and AirBnB faced regulatory opposition in nearly every city, Mark Zuckerberg had to testify before Congress about Facebook’s data protections and impact on the 2016 election, and Google’s shutting down of Project Maven was the precursor for the current tensions between Anthropic, OpenAI, and the Department of War.

Yet, today feels different.

Patriotism is at the center of not just AI, robotics, and space, but also public safety, drones, manufacturing, supply chain, energy, and infrastructure. a16z is one of the leading investors, champions, and coiners of this “American Dynamism” movement where they hope to bring more harmony between Silicon Valley, DC, and the Heartland.

What’s really driving the return of “Atoms”

Base Power’s viral ad from last fall captures this budding spirit:

Enterprise AI may be having its greenfield moment now, but it’ll switch to brownfield sooner rather than later (if it hasn’t already).

It’s not just about “atoms” vs. “bits” or the cache of “hard” and “frontier” tech.

Being “mission-driven” as a company has become table stakes largely because having purpose and meaning from work feels more and more essential for every subsequent generation of top tech talent.

Founders Fund urges Silicon Valley’s best and brightest to “choose good quests” where the path to ROI at the start is long, hard, and fuzzy (if not completely invisible), but the impact of success is so great that doing anything else would feel like a waste.

This moral failure extends beyond the call for more breakthroughs in science and industry.

We need American Dynamism for the American Dream.

250 years ago, to be a great American founder meant that one’s life work was as a groundbreaking political and social scientist, not (just) as a natural and computer scientist. They were engineers of their own vision for human civilization, not (just) machines and code.

In the 18th, 19th, and 20th century, policy was how our leaders moved the country closer to living up to our noble ideals.

In the 21st century, technology is already starting to match and compete with policy as the best platform to create our desired (and undesired) social outcomes at scale.

• We don’t look to just the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for insights on the job market; we also look to LinkedIn and Indeed.

• We don’t look to just the Small Business Administration (SBA) to fund “Main Street” businesses; we also look to Stripe, Square, Shopify, PayPal, Squire, and Toast.

• We don’t look to just unemployment insurance programs to help people weather job transitions; we also look to gig platforms like DoorDash, Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, Instacart, Amazon Flex, and Shipt.

• We don’t look to just public K-12 and higher education to teach nontraditional learners; we also look to Khan Academy, Coursera, Duolingo, and Oboe.

• We don’t look to just nonprofit credit unions to democratize access to financial services; we also look to Robinhood and Chime.

• We don’t look to just the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to improve the housing and real estate market; we also look to Zillow, Redfin, AirBnB, Flow, and Opendoor.

The passion driving many tech leaders is a deep, profound loyalty to seeing American ideals of freedom and opportunity prevail in the world. They should have more to offer than an endorsement in favor of or against UBI.

As tech rewrites the laws of physics (both figuratively and in some cases literally) with new technologies across every frontier and turns what used to be considered science fiction into just science, it can’t be that they think politics is too complex or controversial.

We needed calls from top founders and VCs to give more technologists permission to do more with their skills than B2B SaaS and Enterprise AI, so perhaps tech doesn’t feel like it’s place to contribute.

If that is the case, on behalf of everyone in government, nonprofits, academia, and philanthropy who are committed to reviving the American Dream, consider this permission granted for tech to not just join the conversation, but lead from the front.

The future Jeffersons, Lincolns, and Kings won’t just use laws and words to make America more just and fair. They’ll use code and capital.

In 1984, U.S. Congressman Stewart McKinney said that the banks are “too big to fail.” Today, the tech platforms are too big to not be deeply involved (or culpable) in the health (or lack thereof) of democratic capitalism.

Tech should certainly re-build, strengthen, and protect America’s “hardware” (our people, property, and core systems), but we also need them to help re-program our country’s “software” (how our institutions make the American Dream a reality).

It’s time for American Dynamism for the American Dream to have its greenfield moment, and Open Work aims to be one of those platforms.

If you’d like to join a group of economists, engineers, executives, and elected officials exploring what Open Work could mean for economic opportunity in the U.S. and abroad, send me a note on LinkedIn and I’ll invite you to our group.

For most of human history, economic, political, and social power were tied. If you didn’t own property, you didn’t vote, nor were you entitled to any rights, respect, or courtesy in your everyday affairs.

The U.S. was founded on a radical, unproven thesis that despite the economic inequality that many argue is inherent, natural, and healthy in a democratic capitalist society, economic power could and should be detached from political and social power. Just because we have inequality on an economic basis does not mean we need to have or should accept inequality on a political or social basis.

What economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians have debated is that while the three pillars can be separated on paper, if and when does the gap in one area - usually income and wealth - get too large that it stretches the others beyond their limits and jeopardize the entire system?

Recently, liberals and conservatives alike have been sounding the alarm that the social contract is being broken, and economic, political, and social power are re-linking together.

In 2010, my former economics professor, Dr. William “Sandy” Darity whose renowned work can be categorized today as being in and around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), proposed a national program called “baby bonds” where every American would receive a publicly-funded trust fund to help close the wealth gap.

Fast forward to 2025, President Trump and many business leaders, many of whom critics of DEI initiatives, created “Trump Accounts” that, at a high level, rhyme with Dr. Darity’s “baby bonds”.

In November 2024, the country re-elects Donald Trump. 12 months later, the city of New York elects Zohran Mamdani.

Regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, the masses seem to agree that the brokenness of the system, as it relates to economic opportunity, is to the detriment of all of us.

Dr. Raj Chetty, the foremost expert on economic mobility in the U.S., has published numerous research findings showing that the “American Dream” has been slipping away for quite some time now, at least since the dawn of the 21st century.

Pete Stavros, Partner & Co-Head of Global Private Equity at KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, has pioneered an employee ownership movement so that frontline workers of portfolio companies share in the upside of successful investments, and it is becoming standard practice across the entire industry that is infamous for layoffs.

Aaron Shapiro, Founder & CEO at Carver Edison, is pursuing a similar goal with public companies by leveraging Cashless Participation® so rank and file employees can purchase company stock through ESPPs without cutting into their take home pay.

Vlad Tenev, Co-Founder & CEO of Robinhood, believes retail and non-accredited investors deserve exposure to the best private companies, including the more recent ones leading in AI, so the gains don’t only accrue to wealthy and well connected individuals and institutions.

Even with these insights and efforts, the truth that is hard to accept is that we can’t promise economic mobility to every hardworking person in this country. Multiple generations of working class Americans have known that this core tenet of the American Dream is just that: a dream.

If we can’t promise economic mobility, this essay proposes a system by which we can offer something else that matters just as much, if not more: economic dignity.

It is possible for the sweat equity someone puts in at work to be converted into an asset owned and leveraged by workers for their own benefit, not just exploited by their employers. It is possible for someone’s hard work to be seen, acknowledged, and most importantly, owned by them for their own advancement.

In the spirit of open source, open science, and open banking/finance, today, I’m calling this new system Open Work.

Open Work Defined

Imagine if one of the banks with which you have a loan refused to report your payments to an external credit bureau to help you boost your credit score. Instead, they kept that data to itself so other banks couldn’t have insight into your history to offer you any competing products.

Imagine if another one of the banks that holds the primary account you use for day-to-day expenses prevented you from sharing your transaction history with a fintech platform that helps with budgeting, saving, and investing for the future.

Imagine if a sports team never allowed the players on their team to know or access their own individual performance stats out of fear that they would use those stats to get recruited by another team, or worse, leverage those stats into a better offer from their current team.

All three of these scenarios were once the status quo, but today, they are obviously unfair, and borderline, if not outright, illegal. And most importantly, it is just bad business practice.

Yet, the majority of people in America (and the world) who work in the physical labor economy, are forced to make a living in a system just like this where they don’t know or have access to data on their work performance at their current job, let alone being able to leverage it in pursuit of their next job.

What if someone who works in the physical labor economy could use their performance data to vouch for their work ethic, dependability, and consistency to get another job in the physical labor economy, potentially advancing their career?

What if in the same way every purchase and payment flows to a credit score that the individual owns and is free to use and share however, whenever, wherever, and with whomever they want, every shift clocked and task completed at work could help them build another type of “credit” that helps them earn more income and work their way into the middle class?

What could that do for economic opportunity, mobility, and the “American Dream”? What could that do for employee engagement, output, profitability, and competitiveness of American companies? What impact could that have on our democracy and politics?

I am proposing the creation of a new type of technology company that builds data platforms by which workers can turn their hard work into an asset they can leverage for future work opportunities.

Open Work combines the concepts of…

• “reporting” from platforms like Transunion, The Work Number, and Checkr/Truework

• “open data” from a platform like Plaid, and

• “worker fairness” from platforms like Ownership Workers, Carver Edison, and EarnIn

Here’s how it works:

1. Employers “report” work performance data for their employees to Open Work databanks, similar to how lenders report to credit bureaus

2. The databanks receive, store, and present this data for and on behalf of employees

3. With the consent of employees, just like credit or background checks, future employers can “pull” or “run” their history from databanks as part of their hiring process

Open Work has tenets that are similar to other core systems in our economy like credit scores, employment verification, background checks, and even GPAs and standardized test scores for students and professional license holders in the knowledge economy. It also takes inspiration from more innovative open data models that benefit both companies and their customers and employees, including the following:

• Duolingo users have a fluency score in the app, which directly aligns with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), as well as the Duolingo English Test (DET) that serve as an alternative to the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFLS), the exam people use to go to school and get jobs at English speaking institutions. This allows people to use the same score produced while enjoying a free, gamified learning app to access life-changing professional opportunities.

• Gig platforms like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, GrubHub, and Instacart not only track performance data that informs their algorithm, but they also give 24/7 live access to that data to their workers directly in the app, and it feeds into their rewards/incentives system so they know where they stand and how to boost their standing

• Car insurance companies already use driving records to inform premiums, but the more innovative among them also leverage live driving data that tracks metrics like phone usage and harsh braking to offer discounts to safer drivers who demonstrate they deserve it

The possibilities of what can be built on top of this data infrastructure is vast. Base use cases would allow employers to identify, recruit, hire, manage, promote, and retain employees, lenders and landlords to improve their underwriting and application processes while also making them accessible to more people, and research institutions to study labor markets and economic trends.

Here are three more case studies of what Open Work could look like in action:

Open Work in Prisons

Of all the domains where this model for economic opportunity can move the needle for working class Americans, our criminal justice system is the one where it’s needed the most.

Along with pursuing an education and focusing on their physical, mental, and spiritual health, work is often a fundamental part of the prison, parole, and probation experience.

Prison labor at scale has been an essential part of the U.S. economy for a long time. I spent my summers in college in the Deep South where I studied the history and modern day impacts of mass incarceration. In 2017, I contributed to a policy analysis for Louisiana in which the ripple effects of the carceral system were at the center of the state’s economy, politics, and culture.

Fast forward to today, 80 million people live with a record in the U.S. 1 in 3 adults has an arrest record and face unemployment rates up to 10x higher than the national average.

While some of them regain the right to vote, virtually none of them ever regain the right to apply for a job without their criminal background being the only testament to their character that’s publicly available, concrete in specificity, and omnipresent everywhere they go.

What if another part of their history followed them in the same way, but rather than hurting their chances of getting a job, it helped them?

By allowing people serving time to have their job and behavioral performance tracked and shared with future employers, Open Work lets their data, not just their record, speak for their character, something that is more accurately captured over an extended, more recent period of time rather than being labeled indefinitely and exclusively by one mistake in one moment in their more distant past.

Employment is a primary driver of recidivism, and Open Work is one of the lowest hanging fruit solutions to keeping people out of prison and out of poverty.

Open Work in Schools

My first job out of college was teaching 6th grade math at a Title I school. Among the many uphill battles I faced to ensure my students received an excellent education, the first and most important hurdle to overcome was attendance.

Attendance not only correlates with everything we want every student to have and experience in the classroom and beyond, but it’s also the key metric by which schools and districts receive their funding on a per pupil basis. Especially at the high school level, getting students to come to and stay in school is all some administrators focus on.

What if a strong attendance record (ex. the percentage of days and class periods without unexcused tardies or absences) could help graduates (particularly those who can’t rely on college-ready GPAs, ACT scores, or letters of recommendation) secure a steady source of income?

Financial stability can be the true difference in whether those same students eventually get to pursue and excel in college, and with Open Work, every day of high school lets them show their consistency and dependability, essential characteristics that every employer wishes they could better screen for and have more of from their young workers.

Healthy incentives where all students get something concrete out of coming to school would have positive ripple effects on students, schools, employers, and the entire city.

Open Work in Robotics

In the 20th century, deindustrialization left unemployment, poverty, and desertedness in its wake, especially in the Heartland. In the 21st century, physical AI is expected to further destabilize work and life for people in the physical labor economy.

The widespread adoption of ships, trains, cars, trucks, and planes transformed the global economy, but because they can also do tremendous physical and financial harm in the wrong hands, we require a license to control them, keep records on those license holders, and determine eligibility and assess risk (ex. insurance premiums) based on their performance history.

While many robots will be nearly or fully autonomous, still creating jobs for those who build and service them, others will still need to be remotely “driven” by a human who can live and work anywhere in the world. Rather than doing the back-breaking and injury-prone work in factories, work for humans will look more like a video game where they can see and control the actions of a robot that does the actual work on-site.

If, like their machine-driven predecessors, every robotics company were to embrace Open Work, we could track and share data on human pilots of robots, focusing on how well they optimize for minimal crashes and collisions and maximum uptime and output.

Even with a driver’s license, a car insurance underwriter needs to know your driving history before they can offer you a quote. Why wouldn’t we want the same history available for the people controlling the most powerful machines in history?

Cracking the Collective Action Problem

There are some challenges to overcome and risks to manage in order for Open Work to become standard business practice.

Some of them are technical and product challenges that require enterprise-grade infrastructure, security, and design to make sure data is both secure and open, and that its processes capture both accountability and fairness for employees and employers of all types and sizes.

Some of them are more complex, like the alignment of political interests across several stakeholders that would need to take place for implementation in environments like prisons and schools.

One of the biggest challenges is the collective action problem that economists, policymakers, executives, and union leaders would need to tackle together. Despite knowing that more openness leads to stronger, healthier, more competitive markets, employers might resist adopting Open Work if they are concerned about turnover once their work performance data is made accessible to their competitors by way of their employees’ data.

Prior to 1970, the same was true in the credit markets. There were several credit bureaus that operated locally and independently, and their systems were intentionally incompatible with each other and rife with inconsistencies and bias. Because the consequences of inefficiency were too grave as the national and global credit markets grew, Congress passed the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) that requires lenders to report to credit bureaus, while also requiring credit bureaus to make those reports accessible to credit holders, leading to the consolidation of the industry down to the “Big 3” of TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian, and the standardization of credit scoring like FICO.

Open Work may need its own FCRA to see widespread adoption, but before that, its advocates would need to have evidence-based responses to legitimate concerns that this would cause more harm than good to employers and employees, especially with the uncertainty of the impact of AI and robotics on labor markets.

As of today, my belief is that Open Work over the long term would lead to more opportunity for employees, less turnover for employers, and less unemployment for cities, and that those benefits are worth having the smartest minds come together to tackle the challenges mentioned above.

Data and Signal

When pursuing an opportunity in the knowledge economy, we use data (a quantitative measure) like grades, exams, and credentials so someone who doesn’t know us can have a sense of our past performance as a qualifier and an indicator of potential future performance.

When that data isn’t available or fully comprehensive, we signal (a qualitative measure) through things like where we went to school, where we’ve worked, what titles we’ve had, who we know, how we communicate, how we dress, and what our online presence is like.

People who work in the physical labor economy don’t have access to these types of data or signals.

Because of society’s inelastic demand for essential labor, opportunity is driven more by bias than meritocracy, and we all pay the price for it.

Knowledge workers already have justifiable anxiety about AI impacting their professional opportunities moving forward. What if, on top of that, they had to find a way to make a living and build a career without relying on GPAs, SAT scores, advanced degrees, cover letters, or LinkedIn?

Open Work is a powerful way to give employees access to an asset they’ve already earned, and workers in the physical labor economy need it now more than ever.

Work is Everything

The nature of work, how reliable it is, how safe it is, how healthy it is, how much it pays, and the way it pays are the most important factors for quality of life. It influences if and how people show up at home for their spouses, kids, relatives, and friends. It determines where and how they live, how they take care of their health, and how much their kids are able to focus in school.

It’s the elephant in every room for everything we care about the most.

When people talk about economic growth and competitiveness, they’re talking about work. When people talk about unaffordability and inequity in housing, education, and healthcare, they’re talking about work.

The most important company in someone’s life will never be the one who creates a product they buy, regardless of how cheap or magical the experience is. It will always be the employer who makes it possible for them to survive, and hopefully, thrive.

What is a more worthy cause for a country where this is a consensual concern about the standing of everyday people than to innovate on the nature of work in 2025 and beyond?

Open Work is about more than the creation of a new type of technology company.

It is both philosophical and moral. It is very political yet extremely bipartisan. It has global and local implications. At its core, it is deeply American.

I believe that --- independent of what you do for work, how much you get paid to do that work, whether you have a path over time to doing better or more fulfilling work, whether you can one day make significantly more money from that work, or even whether you can trust that the nature of that work will always exist amidst globalization and technology --- a frontline worker can and should have the same level of dignity as a C-suite executive.

If you’d like to join a group of economists, engineers, executives, and elected officials exploring what Open Work could mean for economic opportunity in the U.S. and abroad, send me a note on LinkedIn and I’ll invite you to our group.