Meet The Team: KJ Erickson, Co-Founder & CEO of Public Market
Background
Entrepreneur and Economist.
Stanford University, Oxford MBA.
Y Combinator, Medium “Top Writer in Technology.”
A graduate of Stanford University and Oxford Business School, KJ is trained in economics and game theory and is passionate about building consumer-facing web products and marketplaces backed by alternative currencies. KJ has 14 years experience as an entrepreneur, having been backed by top VCs including Greylock, Foundation Capital, Norwest, Maveron. Her Y Combinator-backed company Abundance Labs created Simbi, the world’s largest services marketplace run on a digital currency. KJ has received numerous awards including Rolling Stone’s “People Shaping the Future”, The New Leaders Council’s “Top 40 Leaders Under 40” and CNN’s “People You Should Know.” KJ is also a Skoll Scholar and a Clinton Foundation Honoree who spent her early professional life in refugee camps and post-conflict zones in Africa, partnering with UNHCR to bring innovative development services to victims of war. KJ’s work has been featured in numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, INC. Glamour, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fast Company, Rolling Stone, and Entrepreneur.
5 QUESTIONS FOR KJ
What’s your crypto origin story?
My whole career has been devoted to economic justice. I see my personal journey as a case study in learning how to employ smarter means to achieve those ends. I started out focusing on doing ‘good’ in the most direct way — living in refugee camps, building an organization that helped 70,000 of the worst off people on the planet to get jobs, education and healthcare. That work was personally fulfilling, but not scalable and did not do enough to address the systemic issues that cause conflict and poverty. So my next venture was to build an alternative economic system, via Simbi, helping those who struggle in the dollar-based economy to turn their excess capacity into real economic value. That work was super important, but ultimately a band-aid that was necessary because of the incredible economic disempowerment we are seeing in our country. So how do we get to the root cause of disenfranchisement? That is where the new business models enabled by blockchain come in. If we can rebuild our economic infrastructure in a way that is fair, non-extractive and price-optimized, there is a fighting chance we can reverse the horrific advancements of wealth inequality and plutocracy that we are currently witnessing worldwide.
Why Public Market?
Public Market makes commerce radically more efficient, saving money for consumers and freeing independent sellers to get out from under the weight of monopolistic marketplaces. Our mission is to restore the commercial commons, by enabling an economy where goods can be freely and fairly traded for everyone’s benefit — without a middleman sitting by the digital register.
What’s one powerful or exciting new idea you’ve come across recently?
I’m super passionate about networks that are built by the participants, for the participants. I think this has all kinds of exciting implications that we are just beginning to explore: implications for leadership models, for governance, for product development processes and dev ops, for financing, and for the distribution of returns. As an entrepreneur, what I like thinking about is which of these unknowns are problems or questions for today, and which are ones that can be addressed tomorrow when we have more data, use cases, and tools.
Which entrepreneur on earth do you want to sit down and share a coffee with?
Richard Branson! I want to sit down with him and help him understand not just the big picture implications of what Public Market is building, but also the pragmatism of the strategy we are employing to get there. His bold nature, his passion for disruption, his belief in blockchain technology and his penchant for consumer branding and marketing would make him the ultimate ally. Plus, I know the meeting would be a ton of fun.
What’s one book that too few people have read?
Long Walk to Freedom — Nelson Mandela’s autobiograpy — probably influenced my life more than any other book. His commitment to justice, his attitude in the face of the challenges along the way, his personal integrity, and the compassion he demonstrated to even his persecutors have all deeply inspired me since I read the book for the first time at age 18.
We have tons of copies of Long Walk to Freedom available to purchase (and receive rewards for!) on Public Market — I recommend signing up for the waitlist as soon as possible.
