Comment by odysseas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by odysseas | Hacker News Reader

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:-) I would love to be on a debate meeting-room to argue with you on this for hours :-)

I was attracted to it because skilled manual labor was practically abandoned by techies. 15 years after I started oDesk there are plenty of startups that are tackling the problem of building global/remote teams around engineers. Nobody is helping the crew that comes to my home to fix my fence or driveway or floor.

I saw a space that is as big as 10% of the workforce of most countries, the skilled, often licensed technicians that work in the home improvement, construction industry - that huge slice of the workforce still remaining abandoned by the techies - by the disruptors. By people that tout wanting to "shape the future of humanity".

You may find it surprising that the answer here is both around remote work and pretty advanced technology that enables a remote architect/civil engineer/drafter to draft/design/spec and a "local" customer to visualize the end result ahead of time and a local crew to follow the instructions/spec and build.

Please don't spend hours arguing with people that don't get it haha. Home improvement has been such a pain in the butt for me and I just can't see it not being a problem for millions of people. Best of luck!

Thank you.

But to tell you the truth when I told to the Upwork team in my farewell get together what I was intending to do (I described it "home services" then ) I saw lots of raised eyebrows.

Even more when I went back home to my family in Greece, and had to explain how "building fences" for people is my best idea for how to change the world... they just thought I was making a joke :-)

So I understand completely @treelovinhippie's reaction.

I understand broke founders who go after the boring startup projects with the goal to just make money. But once you have money behind you that's your rare opportunity to tackle the profound projects that capitalism doesn't really give a shit about.

eg tackle poverty, hunger, homelessness, climate change, freeing everyone from 9-5 jobs to pursue their own passions, reducing living costs to give everyone more free time to pursue their passions, creating new models for collective governance, helping communities to bootstrap collective intelligence, distributing the web and institutions, building models for open P2P accounting and supply chains, brain computer interfaces etc etc etc etc etc.

Attempting to monopolize the home improvement industry by becoming a middleman that routes tasks and takes a cut, with the goal of selling the company off is truly lacking imagination.

At the very least you could build Ergeon as a distributed and open network co-operative. Cap your team to a max of 20 people, pay everyone including yourself the same salary, either distribute zero shares to anyone (inc founders or investors) or equal non-transferable shares to all contractors + team (with dividend payouts), setup the company such that it can never be sold (whatever legal setup makes sense), have public transparent financials, charge a 1% transaction fee but cap your annual budget and pay back any excess to the network of contractors. That would be profound.

> At the very least you could build Ergeon as a distributed and open network co-operative.

:-) I now get the hippie substring of your username .

Well it's either that or build middleman platforms like Upwork that force workers into bidding wars and fight over scraps to survive. You can either make the world a better place for many, or just enrich yourself.

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