100 Million Gig Workers Later

Originally published on January 25, 2021

Note to Reader

Success in a startup is a moving target. At Moves, we’re trying to achieve something great, and we’ve decided to do that in the open. What we’ve put on paper today may not be true tomorrow. Our goal is to publish this document as a declaration of what we believe at this moment in time. It will change, because we will learn and improve.

This is our Declaration for Independent Workers.

The Gig Economy Needs Moves

Today’s gig economy is the result of a series of exciting innovations and breakthroughs that have unlocked immeasurable consumer value and created entirely new markets. There is a lot to celebrate when looking back at the past decade in which this economy was created.

Companies like Uber and TaskRabbit have not only created new markets, they’ve introduced a new paradigm to the world: The so-called “on-demand” economy, through which we can efficiently drive value to consumers in ways that were previously impractical.

Understandably, the driver of this success has been an explosion of consumer demand for new products and services now made possible.

As a result, the consumer has been front and center in the growth of these companies.

And this trend needs to continue. There are more innovative products and services yet to be unlocked in the gig economy that will continue to fundamentally improve consumers’ lives. We celebrate that continued innovation.

BUT, this rise in demand can only continue if the supply is sustainably growing. This is an issue that has, until recently, not been the subject of enough discussion and innovation.

In the gig economy, when we talk of demand, we mean the consumer. When we talk of supply, we mean the worker.

It’s time for the worker to become the beneficiary of innovation and newly created value. Without this balance, the gig economy will grow into an unsustainable lopsided market, doomed to fail.

What Does the Future Hold?

I find it helpful to imagine the world 10 years in the future, without constraining those ideas to the realities of today. 10 years ago, Tobe Lütke might have described a future where a small merchant could compete directly with Amazon. Brian Chesky might have imagined a future where we’d comfortably stay in the homes of strangers when traveling.

Breakthrough builders are visitors from the future, telling us what’s coming.

- Mike Maples Jr.

So what does our future look like? What behaviors and outcomes will we create that seem far-fetched today, but will be a normal part of day-to-day life in 10 years?

In thinking about the future, I take inspiration from the past. Initially, there are three primary outcomes I believe we’re pursuing, two of which have historical relevance that we can look to for inspiration:

Outcome #1: Creating a social community that instills a sense of belonging and enables members to improve their financial health together.

Outcome #2: Providing financial tools that address the characteristics and needs of our aligned member base.
Historical equivalent: Credit Unions used to define their requirements for membership as “people who shared a common bond.”

Outcome #3: Creating better collective outcomes for workers in the gig economy.
Historical equivalent: 50 or 100 years ago, you might find a similar mission in a Labor Union.

#2 and #3 are imperfect analogies at best, but I find them helpful to begin understanding the outcomes we’re pursuing, without being constrained by them, meanwhile working to unlock #1.

Starting from first principles, I want us to build a product that reflects Community, Economic Alignment, and Shared Purpose.

The Historical Constraints and the Breakthroughs

Credit Unions and Labor Unions are both imperfect analogies of the future we’re creating because they are both zero-sum games and rely on imperfect mechanisms to represent their members’ interests. They also don’t characterize the positive sense of community that we envision for our members.

Credit Unions return their margins back to members through reduced fees and dividends, usually sacrificing their ability to reinvest in innovation and long-term product value. Other than their collective pricing, members have no real connection between them. Historically, there has been minimal long-term upside to being a member-owner of a Credit Union. It’s also historically made it very difficult for these types of businesses to be capitalized with investor dollars for purposes of growth.

Labor Unions use hostile tactics to advocate for higher pay for employed workers, usually leading to increased prices for consumers or decreased profit margins for employers. On top of this, Labor Unions rely on traditional definitions of employment to be able to achieve collective bargaining, which implies reduced flexibility to the worker who has to accept whatever working conditions others have decided for them.

So, although the principles of both of these are interesting, they lead to stagnant outcomes that discourage economic value creation and real community. That’s the opportunity for Moves.

There are two breakthroughs and an emerging trend that are allowing us to invent an entirely new approach to serving the workers of the gig economy while also creating a valuable new market:

1. Breakthrough: The gig economy has effectively created a new classification of workers (now partially supported by new regulations) that emphasizes flexibility and dynamism in workers’ career choices. These workers are digitally native and uniquely share empathy for each other’s challenges.

2. Breakthrough: The crypto “experiment” has highlighted a new way of creating and distributing value that is not nearly as constrained and two-dimensional as stocks or member units. The maturity and acceptance of this technology are nearing mainstream usability. Applying blockchain principles within our product strategy will provide us a dynamic mechanism to create shared economic alignment between us and our members.

3. Emerging Trend: The greatest consumer products are becoming social, in that they create a sense of community and peer-to-peer interaction within an otherwise normal “single-player” product. When this concept is combined with the right customer segment, the results can lead to 1 + 1 = 10. The gig economy already has many of the social characteristics that make independent workers a prime target for this type of innovative product.

I consider these breakthroughs because they provide us a new set of tools and design considerations with which we can build something previously impossible. Breakthroughs are often a combination of technological change, regulatory change, and consumer behavioral change that allow for something new to be introduced to the world.

Take for example the modern car industry. Without the invention of the combustion engine, followed by Henry Ford’s assembly line, followed by government acceptance and regulation, we would not have the automotive industry we take for granted today. Taking that analogy one step further, without a significant change in consumer behavior, we wouldn’t see the changes brought on by Uber and Lyft.

The Future of the Gig Economy and Moves

It’s 2030. Gig workers make up the majority of the North American workforce. Every year, more people opt into a life of flexibility and autonomy. Since the early 20s, governments have passed new laws to reflect this new labor dynamic, ensuring that labor market providers (like Uber) support and contribute to individual workers’ financial standing through arm’s length products like Moves.

Moves has become the most important product relationship for workers in the gig economy. At its core, Moves enables its members to achieve financial health and peace of mind, via tools to help manage their income sources, benefits, investments, ownership holdings, savings, and credit, all while participating in a social community of their peers pursuing the same outcomes.

While the gig platforms continue to innovate on consumer value, Moves has become the primary driver of worker value. Workers care more about their relationship with Moves than with any of the underlying gig platforms that might generate consumer demand.

Moves is a social finance tool. It enables its members to improve their financial standing by connecting them to their peers to collectively tackle challenges, while also competing with each other. Every day, Moves members are prompted with challenges — some collective, some competitive — that all help improve their financial health. These challenges lead to outcomes like more savings, better credit access, better earnings, more ownership, etc.

Today, every gig worker’s career starts the day they join Moves. Uniquely, Moves is a digital union or “collective,” which means members belong to a community of their peers, pursue common objectives, and share in the value of Moves, as well as earning proportionate ownership in the gig platforms that they work on (e.g., Uber and TaskRabbit).

Through Moves, depending on their interests and skills, workers end up joining both the Moves Collective and the relevant “sub collectives” (SCs) that represent large groups of gig workers within different subsets of the gig economy (e.g., the California Food Delivery SC holds all food couriers in California across all gig platforms).

Since launching 10 years ago, Moves has become a much-needed balance in the gig economy in favor of the worker. Moves members today not only share in the economic upside of Moves, but they’ve earned a material collective ownership in the major gig platforms too. As such, gig workers have enthusiastically adopted Moves to near 100% market penetration across gigs and geographies that we support.

Moves members are now effectively represented through the collective value that Moves is able to provide to them, but also directly represented through formal governance roles within companies like Uber and its peers.

Moves is not built like a traditional company. Although many have followed their model in recent years, we were the first to pioneer a business that profited by giving a sense of ownership back to their customers. Moves has created a unique economic system that perfectly aligns its interests with those of its members.

Once earned, ownership in the Moves Collective belongs indefinitely to the worker should they choose to hold onto it. This means that they can continue earning economic distribution as a Moves member long after retirement or a career change.

All these mechanisms are intended to reflect the new realities of a changed labor market — one that demands adaptability but provides flexibility.

Moves will be the product that empowers the workers of this new market.

The Way Forward

As much as designing the future is exciting and inspiring, we need to translate these insights into tangible strategies today. We need to build a team that is uniquely capable of turning these insights into reality. And most of all, we need to be ambitious enough to pursue a vision that is intentionally non-consensus.

We’ll do this by prioritizing five things:

1. Becoming fanatical advocates of the future we’re creating.

2. Approaching every problem from first principles and ignoring (where possible) the constraints that limit our creativity.

3. Informing our product choices with a deep understanding of our members’ needs — while not limiting ourselves to their ideas — and ultimately showing them our vision in practice.

4. Challenging each other to push boundaries and increase velocity. We’ll do this by creating a culture of empowerment.

5. Being aware of our competitors (or tangential products) without being distracted by their approach — In all likelihood, our competitors don’t see the world the way we do, so they’re building to a different north star…. and they’re probably wrong.

In a company of our stage, these responsibilities belong to every one of us. Every one of us needs to feel directly accountable to the pursuit of our mission and needs to get comfortable being trailblazers and becoming market leaders. This is no small task, but I know we’re up for it.

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

- Steve Jobs