Kalido: The Vision (Part Two)

Ashvin Sologar
Jul 28, 2017 · 8 min read
An expanded vision, with a bigger sunrise and even more plants.

We covered how Kalido increases employment, facilitates meaningful connections, and builds stronger communities in Part One. Part Two covers how we want to encourage entrepreneurship; level the playing field; make the value of your network clear; and prepare for a post-work world.

Encourage entrepreneurship

Let’s help you get that rocket off the ground.

As a platform that helps entrepreneurs find clients, Kalido provides free exposure, which is a great start. And the way Kalido prioritises matches with shared contacts or networks makes it easy to leverage your existing connections to find great leads for future work. But above and beyond this, we believe Kalido creates opportunities for would-be entrepreneurs to meet the role models who will help them take their first steps to starting something, well before that first great client match.

Entrepreneurs all over the world usually share one common trait: an effective role model who made it clear that someone like them could be successful. Effective role models are usually people who started from roughly the same place you did; idolizing someone who started out with greater access to money, social connections, education, healthcare, transport, shelter, or basic safety often makes it too hard to internalize the idea that “I can do this too”. Most people have many such role models over time, making it less important how successful your first role model is, as long as they are further along your path than you are. What’s important is that understanding their journey allows you to create mental steps from where you are to where they are. And along the way, you’ll typically forge new connections and build credibility, putting you well on the way to finding your next role model.

Most online freelance platforms don’t help you find relatable, nearby role models. But because we are so passionate about supporting future entrepreneurs, Kalido will soon be introducing a Community feature, designed specifically to help address this issue. It will let you easily meet people in your community who can do things you never thought of doing, giving you an easy way to reach out to them, and helping you take the first step on your own journey to success. And as you move forward, we hope you’ll be part of someone else’s first step as well.

Level the work playing field

Flat is good.

Starting your own business can be expensive. Everything from phones to offices to accountants adds up. Kalido is a talent matching platform, and so we care about how much matching (or leads, in the parallel world of advertising) costs you. Most talent matching platforms operate on a percentage based ‘commission’ model, where freelancers and sharing economy participants pay 10–25% of their pre-tax revenues for ‘service fees’. That means that for the exact same service, a service provider might pay the platform anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. And until Kalido, with its free matches and connections, there have been no truly great global alternatives, making service providers effectively hostages to these platforms. We aim to level the playing field.

The majority of these platforms have chosen to either take a cut of service provider’s revenue, or to charge for leads. Both models have serious failures.

Let’s start with taking a cut of revenue: In most businesses, suppliers do not charge you more just because you’re more successful. Charging different customers different prices for different services is not unreasonable. But when a company puts the same effort in for every customer, a flat fee or a usage-based fee, like a utility, makes much more sense. And talent matching platforms are utilities: they provide the same basic service to everyone, connecting employers with skilled individuals. But unlike utilities, the gig economy as a whole has run ahead of regulation, leaving freelancers at the mercy of exploitative pricing models. And since freelancers are on the rise, the number of users on these platforms has only grown, so the owners of these platforms have no incentive to examine their pricing.

The business of charging for leads is not much better: Today, advertising companies and employment sites charge you for the right to bid on a piece of work, or for every person they direct to you. You pay for what you get, which sounds reasonable. But if you’re a plumber, your keyword budget means you’re competing blindly with every other plumber in the region. The ad company’s incentive is to either charge as many plumbers as possible for a bid, or to make the one lead it gives out as expensive as possible. The result: lots of money for ad companies, but more random (and often unhelpful) choices for everyone else, and almost always less revenue or profit for suppliers. But what if the plumber had an edge? What if he could be ranked higher if the person looking knew one of his other clients, or went to the same school, or was just a little closer geographically? What if, instead of spending valuable time and money for clients he was unlikely to win anyway, the plumber could use that edge to spend less, because his first matches were more likely to become clients. This would let every kind of supplier focus on addressing smaller, but higher quality groups of leads, while simultaneously improving the quality of results for customers as well. Then suppliers could spend less on advertising, charge less overhead to their clients, and build more business based on quality and reputation. That’s the world we are trying to build with Kalido.

Kalido shatters expectations by offering a better solution, a better pricing model, and a better outcome for both service providers and clients. We believe any fees for users who find great business through Kalido should be related to the service we provide to them (matching), not the service they provide to others (accounting, carpentry, dog-walking, etc.). And those amounts should not cripple anyone’s ability to earn a living. We also believe the basic right to participate should be free, to encourage entrepreneurs everywhere. Our vision is a profitable employment platform that people are happy to pay for without needing to charge the equivalent of many countries’ income tax rates as a service fee. Eventually, we’ll add premium services and other revenue streams, but they won’t come at the expense of your privacy, or your ability to find those critical first clients. With your help, we’ll change an entire industry along the way.

Make the value of your network clear

Kalido helps you see the value in your own web of connections.

Your phone book is a vastly underappreciated opportunity engine. Every day, people find talented people through the people they already knew. But understanding what all of your friends do in a professional sense is hard. And understanding what all of your friends’ friends do — without a tool like Kalido — is pretty much impossible.

Social networks let you see what your friends’ friends ate for lunch, and traditional professional networking platforms let you peruse people’s CVs, but are not really a useful or pleasant way of understanding the skills people can and want to provide to others.

Instead of CVs, imagine a world where you could easily browse through available and needed skills in your community, across your school’s alumni, amongst your colleagues at a new company, or of course, from your friends’ friends. It’s a first step to finding that first client, role model or business partner. That’s how Kalido makes the value of your personal network clear, and we hope the results will surprise you. Even if you don’t think you have a powerful network, there is a chance that someone you know knows someone in an industry you’re excited about, or has a connection that you never thought to ask about. Kalido makes all of this transparent, fostering conversations that might never otherwise happen. We can help you make new connections, make the most of the connections you have, and find new opportunities to get you on your way.

Prepare for a post-work world

The future is scary. Kalido is here to help.

Automation is coming for you. And you. And you. And everyone else you know. Some consultants estimate that 40% of jobs are automatable. Others estimate that for 60% of all jobs, at least a third of the required work is automatable. There’s also a more optimistic view that relies on some of the same data here. Bottom line: There are many disagreements about how fast automation is coming, and for whom it will come next, but automation is a real threat to employment.

For the next 5, 10, or maybe 20 years, whatever you do might be perfectly safe. Which is great. But eventually, there’s a good chance that software, robots, or some combination of the two, will replace a large portion of what you do today. So what happens after that?

The author, Daniel Pink, argues based on a review of nearly 50 years worth of behavioural psychology research, that three things are at the root of human drive: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Put differently, we want to have the freedom to do things we are good at, and can become better at, in a meaningful context. But when traditional jobs disappear without a replacement that drives people to interact with each other for purpose, what happens after that may well be increased rates of severe depression, substance abuse, and suicide.

Kalido can’t solve the problem of finding meaning for everyone, nor can we be sure what people will do once traditional work is no longer an option, but we do hope we can help people to find ways to meaningfully interact, even in a post-work society, and we think it is critical to start planning for this future now, as a matter of public health. Saving the world seems like a cliché for a startup, but we want to do our part anyway.

We know that was a long read, but we hope it helped explain why we are so excited to build Kalido, and provides a peek at where we’re going next. And as always, if you have any suggestions or questions, we’d love to hear them!

Ashvin Sologar

Written by

Co-founder, Kalido (www.kalido.me)

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