APIs and the Future of Work
Part I: Connecting Products Together

APIs, otherwise known as Application Programming Interfaces, are arguably the mostimportant tools for enabling automation.
WHY USE APIs?
Developers typically use APIs to enable inter-application communication without needing to remake the underlying technology:
- Marketplace companies can integrate Stripe’s Payments API and rely on Stripe’s security and infrastructure.
- Instead of remembering different passwords, users can rely on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin APIs to authenticate the user.
- Airbnb doesn’t need to build its own map system and can use Google Maps APIs to reliably locate where users are.
APIs make developers’ lives easier and provide generics for programmers to use repeatedly. You can make sense of the syntax by reading the developer’s documentation provided by each supporting company.
AUTOMATION
Technology is quickly trending towards automation. Intuitively, it’s coming soon but in practice, it’s a little more complicated. Why should humans do something they don’t like doing? Why not let robots perform tasks cheaply and reliably?
You can go ahead and build powerful machines that exist purely in its own environment. My bet is that the vision of a robotic future can only come to fruition if products are cohesively integrated.
Take Momentum Machines (backed $18m+ by GV, Khosla and Lemnos Labs) for instance.
Or, look at Chowbotics (backed $6m+ by Galvanize, Techstars and Foundry).
You have these machines being built and it’s obvious to imagine that we’re going to be in a post-restaurant-worker world soon. With over 46% of restauranteurs stating that their #1 challenge is hiring, retaining and training workers, a cost-effective solution could be gradual workforce automation.
McDonald’s makes salads and burgers. They would optimally require a solution that integrates a french fryer, burger maker, smoothie grinder, salad maker and POS system. Then, all these robots need to have is regularly loaded fresh ingredients. Enter the API-zation of Everything.
WHAT THIS MEANS
Running a restaurant with robotics means a sudden alignment of several different stakeholder groups.
- Customers can get cheaper, faster and fresher food while creatively ordering more customizations than ever.
- Chef and worker lives are simplified because the harder, unappealing work can be automated by a robot.
- Restaurant management gets to cut costs and increase revenue because robots work faster and more efficiently than people. (Each restaurant worker brings around ~$56k worth of revenue as opposed grocery industry’s $226k)
- Robots (at scale) are cheaper than today’s workers and don’t suffer from the threat of a minimum wage hike (Also see: taxing robots).
To sum that up, this intermingling of technologies ultimately furthers automation and makes life easier for workers, food cheaper for customers and management easier for companies.

WHITE COLLAR
I started thinking about what these technologies could be applied to. In most cases, I believe white collar labor will be automated before blue collar labor does. Here are some reasons why:
- Employers have greater financial incentive to automate white collar labor. Paying doctors and lawyers cost a ton of money. Legal services market is estimated to be roughly $437b annually. Primary care doctors contribute to $267b in annual revenue. Automating these professions could mean significant cost savings.
- Robots do many things better than humans. One of the reasons why US healthcare is so outrageously expensive is because of the insurances doctors need to purchase (eg. malpractice). If robots were created to programmatically perform surgery, incisions could be more precise and scissors won’t be left in patients.
- There’s a ton of bureaucracy. If you’ve ever worked in a large company, you’d know the sheer amount of hoops you need jump through before finally getting approval for even the simplest of tasks. (It’s one of the reasons why I think working for a startup is a good career move!)
- It’s easier to automate white collar labor. There are simply more moving pieces in blue collar labor, for the most part. For example, construction is difficult and requires movement of heavy machinery. Accountants, however, track financial statements, ensure everything is aligned properly and ensure statements are in accordance to firm and regulatory policy. Effective bank statement and invoice management can eliminate the bulk of the labor accountants and tax professionals do.
WATCH HERE
The technology for an all-out robotic revolution isn’t available yet. Some trailblazing companies that have started this revolution include Stripe (API for payments), Sendgrid (API for emails) and Twilio (API for phones). Here are some of the newer companies I’ve been watching:
- Scale API: Humans on demand. Today, they focus on human microtasks (think: programmable Amazon M-Turk). In the future, they could theoretically have a marketplace where construction workers are programmatically scheduled to perform certain tasks when building a structure. (Construction labor is a >$1 trillion industry)
- Rapid API: Marketplace for standardized API access. They essentially create software to discover and connect APIs to each other. As a result, developers can build complex applications quickly and efficiently. I’m imagining this to be the app store for API companies.
- Lob: API for physical mail. Yes, I believe physical mail is going to disappear in the long term. That’s not to say a huge company can’t be built in this industry today (World letter mail market is $320b in 2015). As long as the IRS forces you to mail in documents, you’re going to have physical mail and Lob’s going to be a lucrative business.
- Algolia: APIs for search. Most people, when they use Spotify, don’t think about how Search works. Likewise for Google. If I searched “trending,” we could match this to every single document that says “trending.” Or, we can intelligently look at context clues and what I searched before. That’s what I envision Algolia to be. I don’t want every single site where “trending” appears on the web to display, I want today’s Twitter results.
QUELL YOUR FEARS
So what happens when most labor disappears eventually? We would perhaps read in history books about the astronomical healthcare prices and be completely awestruck with how backwards we were in 2017.

The major downfall for this mass integration and advent of better robotics technology is, unfortunately, the loss of jobs. However, I think there’s less need for concern. When the industrial revolution first began, outcry for the loss of traditional jobs skyrocketed. The result a hundred years later? We’ve completely rebounded and became wealthier than ever.
Work in the future is going to look significantly different from what it does now. Manna, the dystopian short novel by Marshall Brain, does a good job of describing the potential outcomes. You can have a future where everything is free because productivity is self-sustainable (Australia). Or, you can have a desolate and hyper-capitalistic future where people only live in subsidized housing (America) and thrive off of something similar to Universal Basic Income. Though, I don’t think we’d get to that point.
Rather, our society is going to evolve and create different kinds of jobs. People could settle onto new planets or become astronauts and explore discovered ones. People could become artists and create new kinds of sensory stimulation experiences. Computers are good at extrapolating and quantifying definite conclusions but fall short in creating new interpretations.
Additionally, some jobs are simply difficult to be automated. Restauranteurs and chefs curate new kinds of cuisines. It’s what these people love doing and why they become chefs or restauranteurs in the first place. When the background production of meals is automated, you’d still have chefs determining what kind of food should be served. It’s hard for even the best Artificial Intelligence to come up with new, delicious cuisines.
Ultimately, I don’t know the answer to the future of work and I’m not sure I’m completely right here. But, automation is coming and we need to begin thinking about the future of work now and investing in the companies that are building a better future.
This post is part of a series of trends I’m interested in working with, investing in or learning about.

