Sondre Rasch, founder of Konsus

Thank you. So this was my first job. Well, not that I say this is actually a stock photo, but before her designer looked at it, this was a picture of my first job. I was 18 years old and I worked as a janitor at the Directorate of Fisheries. I had everything you could wish for in a job. I had the two-hour commute to get to work at 7am. I spent six hours every day watching an animation of our ventilation system, and my boss possibly had Tourette's. I realised after that summer that there was no need for me to rush into adulthood, and as it happens, this was not my first meeting with work and working. At the time, I had spent four years already working on the internet, running a web hosting company. And on the internet, of course, nobody knows you're a dog, but it's also true that anyone can work from anywhere. There are no mandatory office hours, no commute, and far fewer middle managers, thankfully. So back then, working on the internet was for nerds and hackers, but this is no longer true. The future of work is underway, and that's what I'm going to tell you about today. The company I am co-founder of is Consus.com. My name is Sandra, by the way. It's a platform for highly skilled freelance workers. So that means that we provide on-demand freelancers, companies send us tasks like design, writing, and data, and we instantly assign them to freelancers, top talent freelancers all over the world based on skill and availability. As was said in the introduction, we were part of the Y Combinator batch winter 16, and now I'm going to tell the story of why I think work is changing, and also the four ideas that we are building our company on. Idea number one is that work is changing. What this graph shows, which is based on really good data by counting up bank accounts, by the way, is that in the last three years, the amount of people in the U.S. who participated in the freelancer economy has gone from a little over 0% to almost 5%. So that's a 47-fold increase in participants over the last three years. So why do people go from having normal jobs to working as freelancers, as this trend clearly shows? We ask them, and the top three answers are, number one is freedom and flexibility to set your own hours. The second is the ability to pursue your passion. And the third is to work from wherever you want and being your own boss. A last idea that sort of touches on this is that today too many people are restricted access for free movement, reducing the productivity of billions of people because they're in a country or a life situation that does not give them a lot of economic opportunity. This is also related to this. The second idea is the power of on demand. So Spotify, Uber, Airbnb have sort of shown us that instant universal access can be as better, at least as good as or even better than owning. And for a company, this means that instant universal access to talent can maybe be in some cases as good as or better than hiring. The smartphone revolution that has happened in the last years has made it very easy to connect people. And this is also true in the labor market. So for example, in concerts, somebody is always awake to answer your questions because they have their smartphone where we send out notifications. And our freelancers can join the projects that they like with a simple click in the work feed. So when this works perfectly, it almost feels like magic for the user because you simply go to the chat and you say what you want and then the next morning it appears. The third idea, conversational UI. We're very early in this, but talking like a human is the concept. Some think the future will be very weird and different. What we're trying to do is basically to make it more human, to go back to human nature, so to speak. And we do that through the oldest technology that we have, of course language. There is no user interface to understand. You just say what you want. And for concerts, this is the method that we have both externally to our customers, but also our freelancers. All the communication is directly with a human or a bot in a chat. And as was mentioned in the presentation earlier today, we're also then gathering a lot of data in all those conversations with also learning data from feedback forms, which as we're now getting a larger mass of this, we're seeing that we can very quickly make very interesting observations on customer service, even with the little skill that we have. So instead of fighting human nature, I think we should embrace it. The fourth idea is this kind of software as a service or even company as a service. When we started concerts, we could bootstrap that into existence because we were building on platforms like Slack. We were using services like Intercom and Dropbox that reduces the cost that we needed to launch to almost zero. Now we want to be that same thing for other companies by basically allowing a company, when they start and they don't have the designer and they don't have the writer, to plug, implement concerts and then focus their attention on what they're best at. A Harvard Business Review study showed that even in bigger companies, 40% of your time is spent on non-core tasks. And by implementing a system like concerts, the point is then to increase the productivity of the company and the speed of the operations by focusing your attention on what you're best at. So is this true, these four ideas? Is it true that that is how it's going to be? Well, one case in point is of course us, our company. We are built on these ideas and we launched in, me and my co-founder Frederick launched in Oslo in late August. Since we launched, we've been growing 10% weekly for over 30 weeks straight now, accelerated somewhat when we joined Y Combinator in January to 13% weekly. And of course the next, you can also see proof of this, that this is happening, but just like looking out the window. And here in Malmö, there are dozens now of co-working spaces that have opened. The freelancer economy is clearly blossoming here. Perhaps you've seen in your Facebook feed, like the most dedicated people start quitting their jobs, becoming this kind of digital nob- that's an extreme case. But there is clearly something that is happening. It's a big change and we're in the middle of it right now. I kind of think that the step one of the internet was internet as a nervous system. Everybody knows what's going on somewhere else. And step two of any such emergent, I don't want to say hive mind, but these functions where you use that nervous system to do something that's useful, and in this case, working together. So in summary, I think, and I'm pretty confident that work is changing and that this trend is going to continue. Both in society and unless we mess it up, also in consensus. So the next step for us as a company is, as I guess most of the other companies here, is scaling. We have made something that people want and now we want to scale that to 10x or 100x. If we succeed, I see the future of work as being able to work from wherever you want, when you want, on what you're master and are interested in with security. And for companies, the vision is to have basically the full potential of humanity at your fingertips. So there's still a long way to go to that, but to finish up, I think in 10 years, working jobs will surely look very different than they do today. And in a good way, in a more equitable, free and efficient way. So if you believe that, then I hope you'll join us in making that come about. Thank you.