This sounds pretty damn cool. It's like a more humane, more generous implementation of the vision of Mechanical Turk. When is it coming to London? I'll sign up.
Soon I hope. London is on the short list of places to expand to!
Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
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Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#32Exec is awesome. We (ZeroCater) give all our employees Exec accounts and a weekly budget they can use to outsource random tasks outside of our core competencies. Congrats Justin and Co!
This is a great idea. Certainly your employees cost more than $25/hr.
We definitely think this is a great use case. Any companies in the SF area who want to try it out should hit me up at justin@iamexec.com.
Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#33I would love to have an Exec for tasks inside my company. The money would be drawn from a company´s bank account. Sort of like internal bounties perhaps. Maybe even complementing salaries, I don´t know. Thoughts?
Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#34I have a lot of respect for Justin Kan, so this might come off a little weird, but: How the hell does he split his time between two time-intense companies and start a new startup at the same time? Am I missing something here? Edit: three companies, but I guess he isn't in Socialcam's core team (or is he?)
So, here's the skinny:
I spent most of Monday at Justin.tv / TwitchTV. At TwitchTV I mostly work on strategy and management issues. My cofounder Emmett Shear runs the company as CEO along with a great management team including our COO Kevin Lin, who runs all the partnerships and operations, and CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint, who is the founder of IGN, and runs all biz dev. Operationally the team is excellent, the company is growing well (almost 60 people now between two offices) and my services aren't really required for operational issues. Monday night I work on Exec stuff as well.
Tuesday is YC day. Since we're going through YC for Exec, I'm down in Mountain View anyways. I hold office hours during the afternoon most weeks, and then attend the dinner with everyone else.
Wednesday -> Sunday I'm working on Exec full time, but occasionally do calls for JTV/TTV. I also stop by the JTV office a few times a week just to hang.
Socialcam is being run by our other cofounder on JTV, Michael Seibel, along with two engineers formerly from JTV. It is fully spun off as a corporate entity now. We still have a great relationship and they are part of the JTV family, but I don't have an active role. They are off to the races though and on the way to be extremely successful.
UPDATE:
Re-read this and it makes it sound like I work an insane amount. I don't want to make it seem like I'm Jack Dorsey-ing it. I take time on weekends and nights to relax and have a social life. I think working at a sustainable pace is important. Luckily (for me), I enjoy working at so many things because they give me a chance to exercise / learn different skills (strategy and growth at JTV, programming and pitching at Exec, talking about business ideas at YC).
Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your managers are algorithms. - We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work I'm sorry I don't buy this, I may be misreading how Exec works but it looks like Exec's are employees - not freelancers . I don't know how this would work any other way you couldn't guarantee staffing levels and "real time service" for your customers if they were independents l…
You guarantee request quality of service, not staffing levels, by using a per-request queue. Beginning with the person most likely to say yes desirably, send out SMSes saying "Exec! New job for you. If you want details reply in next 2 minutes.". If they reply, opportunistically lock job for 5 min while they read. If not, move onto next potential exec. Tune parameters as required until 90% of customers get called with…
Think he's talking about the employee/customer relation and its logistics. Those sites mentioned are mere platforms or markets, it's up the both parties to find each other – they just make it easier by being the middelmen.
Exec is actually representing the seller side, the service provider. Execs don't match sellers and buyers, they match buyers with Exec employees which, already mentioned, can open a new set of challenges than sites like Airbnb and 99designs.
You definitely get more quality dealing with Exec's handpicked employees, but from what I see, there's alot of managing effort required from Exec unless they can (or have already) come up a way to answer it via algorithms.
Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#36This sounds pretty damn cool. It's like a more humane, more generous implementation of the vision of Mechanical Turk. When is it coming to London? I'll sign up.
It's not real-time but you might be interested in okhired.com - my (London based) startup. Would love some feedback if you have a minute.
Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#37I have a lot of respect for Justin Kan, so this might come off a little weird, but: How the hell does he split his time between two time-intense companies and start a new startup at the same time? Am I missing something here? Edit: three companies, but I guess he isn't in Socialcam's core team (or is he?)
So, here's the skinny: I spent most of Monday at Justin.tv / TwitchTV. At TwitchTV I mostly work on strategy and management issues. My cofounder Emmett Shear runs the company as CEO along with a great management team including our COO Kevin Lin, who runs all the partnerships and operations, and CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint, who is the founder of IGN, and runs all biz dev. Operationally the team is excellent, the company…
Wow, really impressive! Thanks for clarifying.
Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#38I have a lot of respect for Justin Kan, so this might come off a little weird, but: How the hell does he split his time between two time-intense companies and start a new startup at the same time? Am I missing something here? Edit: three companies, but I guess he isn't in Socialcam's core team (or is he?)
So, here's the skinny: I spent most of Monday at Justin.tv / TwitchTV. At TwitchTV I mostly work on strategy and management issues. My cofounder Emmett Shear runs the company as CEO along with a great management team including our COO Kevin Lin, who runs all the partnerships and operations, and CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint, who is the founder of IGN, and runs all biz dev. Operationally the team is excellent, the company…
The multitasking founder is an interesting emerging trend - Jack Dorsey being the most prominent example, and Steve Jobs before him. If an effective founder is the rarest commodity, and their role at mid-to-large startups can be reduced to its most essential elements, it makes a lot of economic sense.
Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#39Strangely enough my biggest concern is how well this will scale. EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm getting down boated. I'm pretty serious. I have no idea the average task duration but assume its an hour then every "exec" can only do about 7-8 a day (assume some non billable time). If they get 10,000 customers and say each need one task every 2 weeks. Thats 5000 tasks and would require a staff of 125 execs. With 125 execs n…
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Re: Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, here's the skinny: I spent most of Monday at Justin.tv / TwitchTV. At TwitchTV I mostly work on strategy and management issues. My cofounder Emmett Shear runs the company as CEO along with a great management team including our COO Kevin Lin, who runs all the partnerships and operations, and CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint, who is the founder of IGN, and runs all biz dev. Operationally the team is excellent, the company…
The multitasking founder is an interesting emerging trend - Jack Dorsey being the most prominent example, and Steve Jobs before him. If an effective founder is the rarest commodity, and their role at mid-to-large startups can be reduced to its most essential elements, it makes a lot of economic sense.
It's probably an anti-pattern. The only great example, Steve Jobs, took the CEO title at Pixar but my sense is that he played more of a Chairman's role there, he only really did the full CEO thing at Apple.
Even Jobs had to neglect huge portions of Apple itself to focus on developing new products like the iPhone.
One reason it probably can't really work very well: http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html