The gig economy broke work.

Alex and Bradford here, the founders of Village.

Over the last ten years, platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and Airbnb came to dominate how we get around, eat, and sleep. They also radically shifted the nature of work. Buoyed by the pandemic, as many as 50 million (or one third America’s labor force) have now made money from freelance and gig-work; up to 20 million on a full-time basis.

But while consumers love the convenience and instant gratification of the gig economy, it’s come to be characterized by low and unstable earnings and a lack of basic benefits for workers. There’s also uncertainty that many of the products and companies themselves will survive now that billions in investor subsidies have come to an end. 

The path from Uber.

The failings of the gig economy stem from the fact that the way work is compensated needs to catch up to this new style of work. We spent a combined ten years at Uber when the platform's growth was exploding, and in that time developed a deep understanding of the dynamics of these platforms.

Today, the world sees work as black and white. You’re either hitched to the employment wagon with a salary, health insurance, and maybe even company stock, or you go it alone and get paid gig-to-gig. That hasn’t changed much in 200 years.

The problem is that we only have a few ways — cash, salaries, employee equity — to compensate work. That’s dumb. It forces companies to make a choice between paying contractors without benefits, or hiring employees.

This is as much a technological problem as a social or regulatory one, and Village is solving it.

Village is truly groundbreaking tech.

Village’s tech means you can program any type of value —  a dollar, a stock unit, a benefit — and automatically distribute it according to the value of work done. Using this tech, marketplace platforms could even pay fractional health benefits to gig workers proportional to time they spent on each platform, or implement equity-style revenue share.

To make this possible, we leverage both traditional banking rails, in addition to advanced ledgers, digital wallets, and permissioned blockchain technology. There's no other solution available that allows platforms to directly distribute value in such a nuanced way to a vast network of individuals, whether that's cash, or a wide array of non-monetary rewards, like loyalty points, revenue share units, or digital assets. Village brings all these systems together so you can create a comprehensive, flexible, and powerful solution for your business.

We’ve combined the best of both traditional fintech, marketplace, as well as some more emerging blockchain technologies. We’re breaking some basic notions about work and pay in order to unlock the next stage of global development.

We're putting our tech to good use.

In the immediate term, Village is deploying our products to help platform businesses create stronger platform-worker relationships, and helping align the interest of management and shareholders with workers and merchants. 

But the next ten years and beyond is going to see an even greater blurring between traditional employment and independent work. Village is the technology the world needs to ensure that this transition is equitable and a net positive for society.