Greetings from Hong Kong! It’s fun to live in the future for a week 😃 For a quick list of inspiring recent content, jump to below my signature for resources from this post.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the future of work at Sama and LXMI. My teams built these companies based on three major trends shaping the global economy (and thus, our collective human fate):
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AI and automation of routine tasks across industries [Samasource’s latest platform release allows machine learning teams to capture the fourth dimension in creating training data from video content…read more here.]
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The rise of the freelance economy and local service jobs vs. traditional 9-5 employment [Samaschool, which just won a $1M grant from Google.org and was awarded the 2017 Workforce Innovation Award from NYC as “the first collaboration in the country to focus on independent work as a workforce development strategy and tool,” is releasing three white papers in the coming month on this topic. Stay tuned here.]
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Sustainability in the supply chain [LXMI is based on rare, organic and fair-trade ingredients that #givework in poor regions. Why does this matter? Watch the just-released interview on Marie Forleo here.]
If you’re worried about the prospects for our advanced breed of monkeys orbiting an average star (RIP, beloved Stephen Hawking), the best thing you can do is to invest in, buy from, or create a social enterprise tackling one of these issues.
I had the chance to judge the Berkeley Haas Global Social Venture Competition on Friday and meet startups battling everything from nasty commercial fertilizers to waste fish and came away UTTERLY INSPIRED.
If you’re going to pour your life and soul (and I really mean soul….entrepreneurship can suck the life out of you as I’ve written in prior posts) into building a company, make it something truly worthwhile for people and planet. Social venture competitions are the best place to see the next crop of truly world-changing ideas; beyond GSVC, check out the Amsterdam-based Green Challenge and Chivas The Venture. There’s even a social enterprise competition in Hong Kong!
On the personal front, my health recovery is finally going well and I’m back to full-throttle (thank you SO much for asking, sending well wishes, and a few beautiful books that arrived in SF when I was there last week). I’m hoping to catch some R&R this weekend with a flight at Dragon’s Back — I dragged my wing all the way here for a weekend respite from a pretty insane few weeks. (Want to learn more about paragliding? Watch my first solo mountain flight here or check out the USPHA’s website. Definitely one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life).
