📥 Your Weekly Career Digest #6

🔥 Hot Future of Work Startups

A recent article by Crunchbase has highlighted the startups that have gotten most growth/funding in the last year. Whilst most don’t target employees (B2B has a much higher appeal, easier go-to-market play and unit economics) I still think it’s interesting to have a peek, to understand what’s bubbling and what companies are embracing to keep up with changes in the ecosystem.

Talent - Multiverse provides apprenticeship jobs in technology to those without college degrees. I think it’s a fantastic idea, filling the gap that the Bootcamp business model has and improving the old ‘apprenticeship’ model that is usually very unstructured. They just landed 220M$ at 1.7$bn valuation.

Compensation - As we discussed in a recent edition (Find salary data and negotiate your next job offer), this has changed dramatically and will become through the years a much more complex issue for both employees and employers. To make sense of this and manage it all in one place, Pave has thought to centralize the different types of comp (equity, variable, benefits, etc) but also provide benchmarks for career levels and roles. This is fantastic - but raises again the question; why isn’t there something employees can access too? It’s unthinkable that this information (historically unavailable) will now be for hiring managers only.

Learning - Always a hot topic, but some new types of services have sprung up that aggregate third party learning resources instead of building their own, and tailor them in specific programs for company employees. One that has just got 100$ million, valued at 2$bn is Go1.

🔐 Building your web3 ‘on-chain’ Reputation

One of the things that excites me most about blockchain, is how it can solve reputation and credentialing issues that are close to the education and job markets.

Today, DAOs like Rabbithole and 101 are building their own versions of web3 ‘universities’ through a ‘learn-to-earn’ proof of learning model, where you complete courses to learn about a topic/skill, and are awarded certifications on the blockchain, that can also enable you to earn ownership in networks.

A new concept that is still in its infancy, is the one of Soulbound Tokens:

Removing (or reducing) speculation from the equation is what is going to bring massive adoption of web3, and the ability of such an instrument to solve as the main vehicle for proof of attendance or proof of learning and experience at universities and companies, could well revolutionize the current status quo and centralization of institutions like universities or web2 social networks (like Linkedin).

Currently, the only live Soulbound Token project is at Binance, whilst Ethereum’s founder, Vitalik Buterin is also planning to launch one soon.

Does Hybrid Work Actually Work? Insights from 30,000 Emails

A new study claims to have the first causal evidence on hybrid work being the best solution vs full-time office and remote alternatives.

The study analyzed 30,000 emails and saw that hybrid work resulted in 0.8 more emails sent per day, and office work led to a 0.5 increase, compared to the group that mostly worked at home. Also, hybrid work is associated with a 58 percent increase in the number of unique email recipients compared to those mostly working from home, a metric that indicates that workers in the hybrid category had broader intra-organizational email networks.

The work didn’t suffer from flexible schedules; in fact, just the opposite. The results showed that hybrid workers produced more novel work than the other two groups, with managers subjectively rating their work as higher quality than the others.

💸 Decentralized Compensation

Ever thought about the time when you didn’t think your boss made a fair decision on your raise?

Coordinape (currently used by roughly 300 DAOs including Bankless, PoolTogether and DAOhaus) built the Gift Circle, a way to decentralize compensation decisions where contributors decide how many ‘GIVE’ tokens to gift to their teammates, which will then become a part of the total budget allocated to a certain project.

After contributors have sent GIVE to their peers, an interactive map is generated that shows all interactions between members.

Each line in the circle map represents an interaction of GIVE between two contributors. Any member of a circle can see how a given teammate allocated their GIVE to others and see how many GIVE tokens another contributor received, providing a visual representation of how compensation is distributed.

Ultimately, the circle map promotes transparency insofar as it shows how members of a circle perceive where value is created for the community and for each other.

As a result, it becomes easier for contributing workers to understand when their work is going in a direction that’s extremely exciting for their colleagues and when it’s not.