There are two reasons why I made Pika. The first is simple and not very interesting, and I'll get to it in a minute.

The second is weird. Although "a company that helps people find jobs" is in no way an odd type of business, it's definitely not what I would have imagined for myself 5 or 10 years ago.

In fact, it was around 10 years ago that a few friends and I toyed around with the idea of a consultancy for crowdfunding campaigns. With that same enthusiasm for not-job jobs, I joined the Awesome Foundation as a founding trustee, had a Kickstarter campaign to walk across the country, and a while later, started working at Indiegogo as an engineer.

After seeing how crowdfunding actually works (spoiler, it's very hard without an established brand, extremely rare viral luck, or only expecting friends of friends to give you a few thousand tops) I became pretty disillusioned with the space. And this isn't unique to crowdfunding. It's better documented elsewhere, but the "crowdfunding", as well as the "gig economy" (a thing I was extremely excited about at one point), are really just rebranding of workforce casualisation.

It is convenient that we can hang our rags-to-riches narratives (that damn near always have footnotes on a large gift or loan from a relative) on different models, and weirdly enough, even paying off college debt gets a write-up for this kind of thing. Rags-to-zero net worth still requires hustle, luck, and probably a lot of money or at least living with relatives without paying rent.

So these funding models give a new way to tell those stories, and just like social media celebrities, even if you only have a handful of success stories getting lucky, that's enough to fill your front page and confuse new registrants with anecdotes that at first glance, look like data.

I still think that separating "funding" from "work" is an incredibly important exercise. Your time and labor are worth what people will pay, and the context matters a lot. "Hard work" and "loyalty" are obviously desirable traits in employees, but ascribing too much importance to them gives employers enormous leverage. If we accept our morality to be dictated by the most advantaged, we're stuck competing in a race to the bottom where wealth flows to the top.

And

There is no single answer. The bootstraps myth is unkind. Lean-in is unkind. Gurus like Suze Orman would tell you to work harder. Tim Ferriss would tell you to work smarter. Nearly all of these type of people will tell you about their amazing system. Plenty of people will tell you that the "systems" are bullshit. Others will tell you the system is to sell a system to others.

So the next rung in the scam ladder is born: the entrepreneurship myth. People who understand that systems (or platforms) really benefit the aggregators more than the aggregate, and that's the same thing. There's just more money at stake. I've helped build systems that crash and burn because the model focuses on a free, consumer web audience.

Why doesn't this work? The price for ads is very high. When companies operate at a loss (intentionally), their ROI can be negative for buying ads. If the ads cost the same for venture backed companies as they do for bootstrapped ones, the bootstrapped ones will get outspent. (BTW, it's worth noting here that advertising/internet companies make money on all sides here, through directly selling the ads, by creating the markets that efficiently raise the prices, and by investing in/acquiring companies that have spent enough to get big).

There are other channels for growth, but that one is really important. Ads in some form are how people hear about something they wouldn't have otherwise. Whether they need to hear about it or not is another matter.

All this is to say, bootstrapping has its place, and jobs have theirs.

And And

One other thing that is important is that we have to remember to say "and." Yes, there are probably ways that you can "MAXIMIZE YOUR EARNING POTENTIAL," but the AND here is crucial: "AND we need a society that incentivizes inherent individual and shared goods."

There's obviously a war raging about the soul of democracy. And there's a war for the soul of tech industry as well: should every action and scrap of identity be commoditfied? Maybe we answer "no", but we work in jobs that answer "YES" to this anyways.

Not everyone has the option to refuse jobs that are bad for the world. Maybe it's only the lucky who get that choice.

I'd suggest that we have systemic problems "and" people can do things to improve systems "and" people can do things to help themselves (or families) that don't interrogate the system at all. Someone who only identifies with the third brand a lot of people who see any type of cultural or economic critique as whiners who only identify problems. I know exactly zero people who don't try to make things better for themselves or think about how they might do so. Lazy hippie whiners are rare, if they exist at all.

The subtler war that I've seen a lot of is between the "liberals" and the "left". It seems to break down along Clinton vs. Sanders camps pretty evenly. The liberals see the left as unrealistic and as playing "spoiler" in elections where a candidate that isn't "pure" enough won't get enough votes. The left see liberals as losers who can't win, even with compromised candidates.

The liberals have support of the democratic party, and moderate civil rights groups. And the liberals have support of marginalized people for whom the system does not work, but would be harmed by radical changes. Words like "revolution" don't sit well with people who can be harmed by reform. If politics is always going to be bad news for you, you'd at least want to make it small bad news, right?

The left is a collection of groups. Some of them are frustrated by the decline of unions, the stagnation of wages, and the profits (and we've had plenty) going to the 1%. Some would actually rather spoil an election, even a national one, in order to vote their true candidate (or not at all). Some might not even see this as spoiling the election because they feel that the oppressive systems that they (or people broadly) are being harmed by are supported by both parties.

Pika

So back to Pika. I built a thing to help people find jobs. I'm incredibly cynical about the tech industry and employment in general. And I still think that people who want jobs should have an easier go of it. And I think that people who feel stuck with terrible and exploitative employers should be empowered to leave easily.

And the whole reason I can build Pika is because I've had well paying jobs. And I might be able to help someone else feel comfortable going off on their own once they feel established. And yes, the boring other reason for making it is for my own personal success.

And I can't see what's going on in tech without being incredibly worried about the systems involved, and I can't personally admit a critique of labor that doesn't acknowledge that individual opportunity is important.

Threats

Pika will work if it helps people find jobs. I believe it does this, and it's better than an ad-hoc system of emails, resume versions, and spreadsheets that most people cobble together over a few unfortunate weeks or months that they're job hunting.

It would not work if a totalizing competitor built a service that was better. LinkedIn, and others like it, would have to stop treating people as inventory. The frustrating and exploitative parts of that site (and others like it) are endemic to the industry. In short, I'm not worried.

Recruiters could build a platform like this, but they won't, because they're in the relationships business. This could be a complement to their services, but as soon as someone discovered a job that they really wanted (but wasn't in the recruiter's network), they really couldn't justify their commission. Not worried here either.

VC-backed, disruptive companies could probably wreck me, but they wouldn't even try to do this. They'd set their sights on LinkedIn from the get-go. What I'm attempting isn't a big enough target and seeks no monopoly in the marketplace.

More broadly, one threat would be that jobs could stop being a thing that people get or want. That would either mean something very very bad had happened. Or (less likely) something very very good had happened.

Anways, if you need a job, Pika might save you some time finding a good one.