Really quickly, we're going to talk
about the Gig Economy,
talk about an example in the technology space.
And then, we'll bring it home and we'll give
a couple of different examples.
To start, I'll give you
a little bit background of the company that
I'm a part of, Topcoder.
And a lot of people refer to us Topcoder as
a crowd sourcing company or as
a virtual work company or as a talent marketplace.
And I actually don't think any of
those terms really fit what we do.
When we started the company,
we were, really simple,
we're a bunch of engineers
and we just thought really idealistically
about wouldn't it be awesome if we could just
get the right person whenever we need them?
On demand, the right technologists,
the right data scientist, the right designer.
And that was the concept that we had
from the very beginning of Topcoder.
We ended up trying to build it and we said,
let's build a network let's build a community is what
we call ourselves of like-minded individuals.
We span those three disciplines.
Data science, like developing algorithms.
Application development and creative design,
as it relates to application development.
And as we build the model,
the underpinning of it was,
well, how do we attract these people?
They said, well, it has to be monetized, right?
There needs to be payment. There needs to be retribution.
That's one piece of it.
But the big thing is that we wanted it to be fun.
Because a lot of people talked about today, passion.
Passion is more powerful than anything else
that I've seen in Topcoder.
If you're passionate about what you want to do,
then that really can
drive behavior than more than money can,
more than the desire to learn.
And that's what one of the learnings along the way,
kind of fast forward to where we are today.
And Topcoder is a global network,
global community of software developers,
1.2 million people.
We run competitions.
That's like our main thing. People know us.
If we want to go create an app or build
an algorithm or solve a design problem,
we make it a fun competition.
We allow people to come in
and compete against each other,
and trash talk and win money and learn stuff.
That's kind of what our model is.
We do that over 10,000 times every year.
And it's all to build digital assets for our customers.
We've paid out over a 100 million dollars of prize money.
Again, like the prize money does make the world go round
but it's the passion in the fact that
people see themselves on a leader board.
And they can see that, hey,
I am number 115 out of
10,000 data scientists that competed in the last year.
It's huge. It's a huge motivational factor.
I just want to give you a little bit of background on
Topcoder and actually the middle number here,
the 96%, that was this thing that kind of floored us.
It's like 96% fulfillment.
I couldn't get that out of my own team to save my life in
my entire history of a product
manager or project manager or
technology architect, not even close.
That was kind of the most surprising thing is like
what competition actually does to
people and how they perform.
A little bit about some of the myths of these models,
like crowd sourcing models.
One is that really can't be
used for hugely complex tasks.
This is an example of something that we're
running right now. It's for IARPA.
It's IARPA's research arm of the intelligence agency.
And it's to build a functional map of the world.
It's a computer vision problem.
It's a fairly standard computer science problem
but ridiculously complex.
How do you take a known data set of, okay,
this is a building and this is used for
this and this is a playground and this is
an industrial center and this is industrial gas and
all these things that you want to be able to identify.
And we can do that in the United States,
in specific cities really intricately.
But can we take that and
create an algorithm that learns from
that data and then can apply it to the rest of the world?
That's what this problem is.
We're on our second leg of it.
Results are phenomenal.
But this is a really complex problem.
A hundred thousand dollars of prize money.
It could be zero dollars
of prize money, we would never do that.
But people would still compete
because it's such an awesome problem.
It's such a neat, fun, cool problem.
And obviously, what we can do with it is important.
Another myth is on the quality side of it,
that you sacrifice quality when you go to unknown people,
as what a lot of people will say,
it's a crowd, it's unknown.
Again, I go back and I say it's a community, right?
There's a lot of unknown entities out there.
This is something that we built for Razorfish.
And it's a design project.
And Razorfish has amazing designs.
And they can certainly do this.
But what they couldn't do is the way that we did it.
We ran this project and we ran it over seven days.
We had 77 people register for it, interest.
We got 17 countries to
participate and submit 27 different submissions.
And the end result was a combination of
a bunch of different submissions.
Everybody that submits in
anybody's IP that gets used gets compensated for it.
It's never about paying a low amount of money.
We want to pay as much as we can for the job.
That's always our motto.
And reward people that do really well.
But take a look at those countries like Zambia,
Spain, Poland, Guatemala, United States.
When have you ever been able to create a project team of
people from these countries
in a seven day period of time and create something?
Like exactly never. That's something
that's just a different approach
to how you can solve problems.
And the final myth is that,
well, can it be used at scale?
Is it really applicable to me as a big company?
Can be used in my project? It sounds great.
I love to build a T-shirt with it.
But can I use it at scale?
And this is our most successful commercial client,
has a phenomenal visionary, CTO recently left.
But he was there and he
established Topcoder as the way to get things done.
Now, we've run in eight years 152 projects with Comcast.
2,600 engineers have worked on
their products and just over
14,000 or just under 14,0000 units of work.
These are products that are in your hands as consumers,
that were built through
competitions and access to these resources.
It can be done at scale.
Those are kind of some of the myths I just
wanted to throw out there immediately.
How does it work?
The way that it's designed is we atomize down
problems in a way that
allows us to let people specialize.
Like when we started this model,
I guess at the beginning, it was all
about can we find really smart people?
And wouldn't that be cool?
It's like wouldn't be great if I
could just have pizza right now.
And it was like that simple of a concept and then we
realized it's so much greater than that.
Like we're actually democratizing
opportunity to people that would never
have the chance to work on
an IARPA project or a Comcast project.
And they could be in the US.
It doesn't matter where they are.
It's just that they earn the right to do that work,
they earn the right to be part of that solution.
And that's what was so much bigger than
Topcoder or than any idea that we ever had.
But the secret behind it is this idea of atomizing things
down and then allowing people to
self-select into what they're interested in.
What are they passionate about?
And again, back to our simple idea,
we always thought that there's a best person to do
something because they're the
smartest or they've been trained the most
or they've gone to the best schools
or they've done it before.
And in fact, it's like, well,
who's wakes up that morning is
most passionate about solving that problem.
And that's probably going to be the best person.
And that's a we kind of figured out as we went.
And you can be passionate about one thing on
Monday and another thing about Friday.
From our workforce perspective,
it's a really cool way to
decide what you're going to work on,
when you're going to work on things.
And then, at the end of
it it's all about creating a digital asset.
It has to be something that's finished and measurable.
A lot of the talks today that I've learned from,
there's a lot of things that are not
in a spreadsheet or in a statistic or measured.
And we tend to always try to put something in that light.
That's some of the learnings I'm going to take from
this is like what other network effects can we do
that are softer or that are more around passion
and and people feeling
good about what they're doing about.
I mean, I learned a ton from today's talks.
And let's see.
Okay, so just a couple of
core tenants of how Topcoder works.
And one, just to start with,
it's this whole idea of atomization again.
That was the most important thing that we did.
You can't just throw something out
there and expect somebody to be an expert at everything.
It's not fair to the people.
You can do it, but you'll sacrifice.
If you can break it down
and allow people to say, "You know what?
I want to be the best designer
of Apple Watch applications in the world," right?
That's something they can be passionate about.
I want to be the best computer vision programmer
in the world.
And then finally, that allows them to specialize.
The competition aspect of it,
a lot of people will say, "Well,
that's really cutthroat," right?
What about the people that don't whim?
They're self-selecting in,
they know what they're getting into,
and it's not about not paying a lot.
I would prefer to pay two,
three times what it's worth.
I think the quality is that much better.
But the competition gets people energized.
It gets that 96 percent fulfillment rate.
It gets them excited when they see
their profile has another badge on it, right?
And they have another statistic on
their leader board that shows they've done something.
So it really does drive
a lot of the behavior of the community.
And then finally, transparency. Everything we do.
Like, how many, how much, and how
somebody is going to get graded.
If they're competing for their paycheck,
you've got to be specific.
So there's a lot of aspects of it that have
to be very transparent.
This is one of the people.
This's one of the many, right?
So Albert Wang is out of China.
He's incredibly productive.
He's made well over a million dollars. I don't know.
Could be probably nearing two miillion dollars.
He just loves what he does.
And when he started in 2004,
he only did it part time because his family shunned it.
They're like, "It wasn't the thing to do.
You're supposed to get a job.
This is the way it works."
I think he's PhD.
"You weren't supposed to do this."
And then eventually, he just went more and more.
Now, he does it full time and he's phenomenal.
I mean, he's lucky to get them on your project.
And he also does this role of
a co-pilot for us which is a person that
helps manage these different atomized pieces of work.
So, that's a career path that we've
created for people like this.
So Topcoder's an example,
but there are other companies.
These are companies that do similar things.
So Local Motors builds cars, right?
It's competition.
They bring people together.
They work together.
Tongal is another one.
They build video clips.
They build commercials. They're out of Santa Monica, L.A.
Awesome company, college friends of mine.
MESH01 is another crowdsourcing company.
They build things like
the next running shoe for Adidas, right?
They'll design it, do
the CAD diagrams all through competition.
And XPRIZE, everybody knows XPRIZE.
They're a little bit different.
But the coolest thing about
this slide is that we all work together.
And that's what's called a network effect, right?
So, Airbus comes to us and says, "Hey,
I want to build a drone air traffic control system with
Topcoder and a drone through Local Motors,
and it's got to work together."
And the coolest thing to me is
starting to see that happen is really neat.
So, to wrap this up,
I want to tell a little bit about
what do I see coming next.
So this is my own vantage point of
our model and those other companies.
And it's all about these network effects.
So I kind of look at at things like,
can you make same side network effects that make
your communities stronger and smarter and healthier?
And you do cross-site network effects that
grow the amount of opportunity
the community can work on from the customer base.
So one thing that we're all
doing is trying to make it easier.
So I want to be able to use
my mobile phone and pull up
an application to build the next mobile app for Topcoder.
I want to do it right to my files.
I want to be able to click
a few buttons and build the next version of it,
see a bunch of awesome designs,
get somebody to code it up,
run a competition to fix,
to find the bugs, fix the bugs.
So we're building a product called
Connect. It's been up for a year and a half.
It's still going through a lot of iterations,
but Connect is all about building an app like that.
But it's geared towards not the large enterprises.
It's geared towards small to medium sized businesses.
It's geared towards somebody that has a credit card,
wants to be able to build a mobile application,
running a restaurant, and
can't get access to the best developers in the world.
That's where I think the future is going to be
because I love the large enterprises.
They pay the bills and they're great.
But large enterprises are starting to
look more like a ton of startups.
So that's why I think
a lot of this model will be able to adapt to
that better than a
300,000 person consulting organization.
So I think that's one area that
that will do cross-site network effect.
And then the second one is really neat.
It's called hybrid crowd.
So it's the ability to not just run work on a public.
Maybe you can bring your own crowd into it, right?
Maybe you could take this entire community right
here and do an ideation contest,
and then have the public crowd design it,
and then have Microsoft engineers build it, right?
Wouldn't that be cool? But all
use these crowdsourcing techniques.
Use the ability to run a competition
with your internal people.
So that's one of the things we're
working on and the thing that we'l launch,
that I'm really passionate about,
in November is one for the Veterans Administration.
So we'll have a community of
vets and partnership with NASA.
They've got a whole set of projects that they want to
give special access to just veterans.
You guys be the community that does this,
all our prize money is going to go
towards the veterans community.
But think about that.
If you're on, hey,
maybe you want to take a coding competition or
a QA competition and just run it
on vets because you're passionate about that.
So that's where I see some of this going.
And it's allowing it to create
those network effects and grow the model.
So with that, I think I am out of time.