I used the website to order a task ahead of time - delivering a burrito to my boyfriend on Valentine's Day! The coolest part was being able to watch the delivery happen in real-time on my iPhone (super cool).
It was an adjustment for me to think of an everyday task that I could outsource. In general, I think that if people can make the mental switch, Exec will be a game changer.
I have a lot of respect for Justin Kan, so this might come off a little weird, but: How the hell does he split his time between two time-intense companies and start a new startup at the same time? Am I missing something here?
Edit: three companies, but I guess he isn't in Socialcam's core team (or is he?)
Edit: Apparently, he just changed his role at Justin.TV to an advisor. So I think most of his time is spent on Exec, while on the side advising YC companies, Justin.TV/Twitch.TV, and Socialcam. But still definitely a lot for one person to manage.
I spent most of Monday at Justin.tv / TwitchTV. At TwitchTV I mostly work on strategy and management issues. My cofounder Emmett Shear runs the company as CEO along with a great management team including our COO Kevin Lin, who runs all the partnerships and operations, and CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint, who is the founder of IGN, and runs all biz dev. Operationally the team is excellent, the company is growing well (almost 60 people now between two offices) and my services aren't really required for operational issues. Monday night I work on Exec stuff as well.
Tuesday is YC day. Since we're going through YC for Exec, I'm down in Mountain View anyways. I hold office hours during the afternoon most weeks, and then attend the dinner with everyone else.
Wednesday -> Sunday I'm working on Exec full time, but occasionally do calls for JTV/TTV. I also stop by the JTV office a few times a week just to hang.
Socialcam is being run by our other cofounder on JTV, Michael Seibel, along with two engineers formerly from JTV. It is fully spun off as a corporate entity now. We still have a great relationship and they are part of the JTV family, but I don't have an active role. They are off to the races though and on the way to be extremely successful.
UPDATE:
Re-read this and it makes it sound like I work an insane amount. I don't want to make it seem like I'm Jack Dorsey-ing it. I take time on weekends and nights to relax and have a social life. I think working at a sustainable pace is important. Luckily (for me), I enjoy working at so many things because they give me a chance to exercise / learn different skills (strategy and growth at JTV, programming and pitching at Exec, talking about business ideas at YC).
The multitasking founder is an interesting emerging trend - Jack Dorsey being the most prominent example, and Steve Jobs before him. If an effective founder is the rarest commodity, and their role at mid-to-large startups can be reduced to its most essential elements, it makes a lot of economic sense.
It's probably an anti-pattern. The only great example, Steve Jobs, took the CEO title at Pixar but my sense is that he played more of a Chairman's role there, he only really did the full CEO thing at Apple.
Even Jobs had to neglect huge portions of Apple itself to focus on developing new products like the iPhone.
I can think of multiple counter-examples as well. People who are trying to run multiple organizations and doing rather poorly (as judged by results). I wouldn't want to single them out publicly though. Besides, it's rather difficult to judge the cause and effect for things like this.
I agree that it is hard to focus on multiple things. Certainly I am not "running" Justin.tv/TwitchTV by any means: my cofounder Emmett Shear is in every sense of it. I don't think I could have a day to day operational role at two companies. At JTV/TTV I focus on providing value by advising those people who are in operational roles.
Exec is awesome. We (ZeroCater) give all our employees Exec accounts and a weekly budget they can use to outsource random tasks outside of our core competencies.
That sounds very interesting. May I ask, how are your employees using this in practice? What kinds of tasks they are outsourcing, and how much is that weekly budget?
Just recently we had a big party [1]. We definitely outsourced a lot of the logistics and organization of that in various Exec tasks. More day-to-day, it's very random.
I think we give each ZeroCater employee something like 5 hours worth of Exec time per month. It's well worth it.
Strangely enough my biggest concern is how well this will scale.
EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm getting down boated. I'm pretty serious. I have no idea the average task duration but assume its an hour then every "exec" can only do about 7-8 a day (assume some non billable time). If they get 10,000 customers and say each need one task every 2 weeks. Thats 5000 tasks and would require a staff of 125 execs. With 125 execs now you need managers and quality control and customer support. I'm assume execs are only getting paid about $15 an hour. That means A. Quality of Execs would be an issue. B. You only have about $10 of every hour left towards margin. Margin in straight services is nasty and this one is thin and in this case unless you have an extremely efficient staff your margin tends to go down as you grow - not up.
This is the kind of thing which scales pretty well -- there are lots of unemployed/underemployed people in most markets.
I think the difference vs. taskrabbit is that it being realtime requires the task-runners/execs to be higher quality and more committed, so it might not work as well in a market with 0% unemployment where everyone has a 9-5 job. I don't think that's a major risk for the next decade or two.
They can obviously raise pricing. At some point, people will pay based on the money they save, and runners might get really efficient at certain kinds of missions. If, for instance, a common mission is "pick up my car from the bar the next morning", the requestor might think it is a 2 hour task (bus or taxi, ...); maybe a task-runner has an efficient solution involving a folding bicycle, or two people. Worth $100 to me, costs 30 minutes of someone else's time who is happy with $25/hr, win/win at $50.
People relate this to TaskRabbit and I believe that's wrong.
But not for the reason you might be thinking.
So why is it wrong to relate this to TaskRabbit? Because TaskRabbit isn't competitive, yet. They're about the auction format not the on-demand format. Apples and oranges. That's fine, but take stock in their assets: national brand recognition, solid network effects, a built out rep system, resources. It is only a matter of time on _if_ they want to compete.
If I were a TaskRabbit decision maker I would start a skunkworks team to clone, but not launch. Not until Exec does all the work of validating.
So really Exec is more relatable to Cherry.com, an on-demand mobile car washing service started by three valley insiders. I sign up, pay $30, go shopping, and get texted when my car is done being detailed. It's amazing.
And after talking to Cherry's contractors, there's also an amazing feedback system built up to ensure quality. But Cherry is just one vertical so it lacks scale.
That's where Exec could shine, by being the consigliere some of us need to get through modern life. Or while in a bind on the way to Burning Man.
On-demand dial-up services are the future. If you use Grindr, you know what I'm talking about.
Your onboarding costs you $20 for each Exec you sign up - in this economy, your acquisition cost for them is likely near zero because WOM and free PR will give you more opportunities than you can handle.
You bootstrap CS with either the founders or one of your close friends, building systems to support the common cases (e.g. "Exec flaked on me") and using T1 support as a system-level T2. Your margins are asymptotically the same as selling iPhone apps at $15 each ($10 minus pocket change either way), but you'll have many customer LTVs in the hundreds. Eventually, you'll have a proper CS team in place like e.g. Airbnb and the'll involve themselves in < 5% of orders at a fully-loaded cost of $12 per incident.
We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work. The major gamble is that there exists sufficient market demand among the upper middle class for semi-interchangeable gophers. It doesn't strike me as obviously a billion dollar business but then again I thought "Young ladies will happily pay money to stay the night at private residences" sounded categorically insane the first time I heard it and we already know how that story turns out.
P.S. Numbers here come from "Big dumb megacorp with a traditional CS department assumes an American FTE talking on he phone costs $12." There's all sort of ways you can cheat that assumption, beginning with not being a big dumb megacorp.
Your managers are algorithms. - We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work
I'm sorry I don't buy this, I may be misreading how Exec works but it looks like Exec's are employees - not freelancers. I don't know how this would work any other way you couldn't guarantee staffing levels and "real time service" for your customers if they were independents like Task Rabbit. Not to mention Rentacoder, Odesk and 99designs all usually have some aspect of geographic arbitrage which brings down their prices. The major difference in this model is that Exec becomes entirely responsible for QC - unlike each of the other's you mention where if a person (or place) is crap that "vendor" gets downvoted out of the game. Here the only people who lose karma is Exec itself.
This brings a whole world of pain and management which none of the crowdsourced models address - payroll taxes, labor codes HR - scheduling. You're definitely not managing with algorithms. I have a good friend who runs a Doggy Day Care in SF who hires a lot of folks in this price range. He has a hard time getting 15 people who can walk dogs with a decent level of service.
You guarantee request quality of service, not staffing levels, by using a per-request queue. Beginning with the person most likely to say yes desirably, send out SMSes saying "Exec! New job for you. If you want details reply in next 2 minutes.". If they reply, opportunistically lock job for 5 min while they read. If not, move onto next potential exec. Tune parameters as required until 90% of customers get called within 10 minutes.
I totally get that your friend deals with the problems of flakey and unreliable people who are habitually not up to the task of working... but she doesn't deal with them like they were IP packets, does she? If she did, she wouldn't really be in the dog walking business anymore, but she'd also have potentially quite good reliability systemwide based on a network of high-failure components.
There seems to be a disconnect on the points we're arguing here. Task scheduling and routing is (almost) the easy part or at least a pretty solvable equation - there's a whole range of operations and queue theory texts that can make a quick go of managing that.
I'm more concerned with the human element. HR overhead, people making sure tasks are getting done well and in a timely manner. "but she doesn't deal with them like they were IP packets, does she?" - No she (he actually ;-) can't they're people.
"I'm more concerned with the human element. HR overhead, people making sure tasks are getting done well and in a timely manner. "but she doesn't deal with them like they were IP packets, does she?" - No she (he actually ;-) can't they're people."
That's the point of Exec and of every we-can-disintermediate-this-or-make-it-massively-easier-by-using-IT-and-CS startup. They can treat people like IP packets. At some stage they'll have practically open hiring and most people will wash out fairly quickly but the ones who either excel or consistently fail to fuck up will just keep on getting tasks from Exec, the others won't.
Think he's talking about the employee/customer relation and its logistics. Those sites mentioned are mere platforms or markets, it's up the both parties to find each other – they just make it easier by being the middelmen.
Exec is actually representing the seller side, the service provider. Execs don't match sellers and buyers, they match buyers with Exec employees which, already mentioned, can open a new set of challenges than sites like Airbnb and 99designs.
You definitely get more quality dealing with Exec's handpicked employees, but from what I see, there's alot of managing effort required from Exec unless they can (or have already) come up a way to answer it via algorithms.
I'm blown by how basic the site looks right now. This attitude of launching something which probably doesn't even do much yet is really hard for me to digest. Also, Justin's comment on keeping features to a minimum is interesting. Everyone always talks about it, but few manage to pull it off because you need the right features.
Justin, can you comment on how you chose your feature set?
One of my biggest problems using marketplaces is the cognitive overhead of figuring out the often complex process how I'm supposed to use the site.
With Exec, I wanted to make something that was super simple and just works. Most of our challenge is actually figuring out how to inform users of what they can get done, because for most people outsourcing their errands is a new behavior to learn.
We haven't created any features that weren't based on iterating to solve a real user problem that was being experienced during our trial. Our minimum viable product really was "minimum" -- everything including the the map / location tracking, iphone app for the Execs, etc came out of that process. The first version of Exec was literally single text area.
We have done a ton of work on the backend to make sure that Execs pick up and do your jobs excellently -- a lot of that is transparent to the user. Lots of thought has gone into making that work well.
If by "basic" you meant the site's design, then I fully admit that. We used Twitter Bootstrap, which is awesome. I'm not a great designer, but hopefully we can bring someone on soon that is excellent :) (Shameless plug, Exec is hiring a designer and senior engineer for our core team. Come help us build the future of work: https://iamexec.com/hiring)
Thanks Justin. You're probably already tired with comparisons to Zaarly and Taskrabbit, but it looks to me like you are focusing on building a really high quality version of the same idea. Talk about focus!
Don't confuse "simple" with "doesn't do much yet."
Exec does plenty. It planned an awesome weekend biking trip for my girlfriend and I, found me a great-sounding (and surprisingly affordable) stereo amp for my bedroom sound system, got me a new iphone (after minimaxing all of the plan options based on my historical usage and international travel plans), researched all of my options for cloud photo storage and got me set up, found me the most styling archival-quality inventor's notebook ever, helped me box up stuff and move it to storage, stocked our office with drinks.. gosh, probably some other things I'm forgetting. All in about a week and and a half. It rocks.
This was enough for Justin to sell me on offering a $100/month Exec credit to all of our employees (who am I kidding, I sold myself without any work whatsoever on their part.) So that quota-based, employer-pays billing system was the other thing they prioritized.
Like Uber, the genius of Exec is precisely that it is one text box and one button. More stuff on the webpage would probably make it worse.
Kan mentions that Exec is real-time compared to other existing services, such as TaskRabbit. I've used TaskRabbit several times and found TaskRabbit to be plenty fast enough, probably similar to the real-time described in the article.
I think there is a market for quick programming tasks. A small very welldefined task like putting up a jqueryUI stylesheet according to some specification,would fall into such a category.Of course,the problem with programming is the iteration required.
I'm talking about quick jobs. Can you hire someone to help you with some Clojure or Ruby code just for an hour? It looks like it takes an hour just to post a job on elance.
same here, that's why I recommended those sites.. I'm not sure who could reasonably expect a programming task to be done in 1 hour... for those so-called "emergencies" or critical tasks, you can't hire someone who has NO idea what the project entails, you need an expert who has worked on it before.
I've often wished for a similar marketplace, but more for consulting, than actual programming. When starting out with a new language or new technology (particularly unpopular ones, that don't have good online resources) it would be worth paying an "expert" for an hour or two of their time to ask questions.
I was excited to try this out and was very impressed with the quality and speed of the service.
Back when I was working at Big Co Inc., the shared admin assistants were an incredibly valuable resource to leverage your time. Unfortunately, it's not a feasible option to hire one at a startup. Exec changes that.
It's a great option for times when you need something NOW but can't or don't want to stop what you are otherwise doing. Examples: taking a mac to the genius bar, getting printer ink, getting batteries.
Also relevant is this cdixon blog post about how the internet is changing what a "job" is. [1]
The fact that they interview the workers is a big plus from my point of view. From your "About us" page:
> Anyone can join the site but we are currently only focusing on the London and the surrounding area so this is probably where most of the jobs will be. However, you're welcome to sign up and create an alert to notify you when jobs become available near you.
That doesn't sound like there's much vetting. A service like this lives or dies on being able to convince the buyer that there won't be any trouble that ends up costing even more time and money.
I would love to have an Exec for tasks inside my company. The money would be drawn from a company´s bank account. Sort of like internal bounties perhaps. Maybe even complementing salaries, I don´t know. Thoughts?
I would like to know how they determined the price point. IMO, with such a name, they should be targeting higher end customers. People willing to shell out $50+ or $100+ for a specific task..... Or $15000 a la Transporteur
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