AMA: I’m Gavin, founder @ Thirdwork. I’ve worked at the White House and startups, ask me anything 🚀

@elena_alehno Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it! With the caveat that I'm certainly not an expert: I think with CBDC’s (Central Bank Digital Currencies) it’s less a question of whether it will happen, and more a question of where, when and how. Virtually all the major central banks, including the Federal Reserve, are exploring a CBDC. Nigeria has already launched one. So in my mind, the major question is whether the U.S. will launch one. The fact that there are real conversations happening at the Fed about a CBDC is remarkable in its own right. If adopted, it presents a pretty fundamental change to the structure of the financial system. The Federal Reserve doesn’t let individuals open accounts. I can’t just walk into the Fed and say “I want a checking account”! They provide accounts to commercial banks, who serve as intermediaries for the public. A CBDC would effectively cut out that intermediary, and the CBDC would be a liability of the Federal Reserve that would be available to the general public. That’s a fairly foundational change. As a result, it would be a huge undertaking. It would certainly require Congressional authorization, and would be hugely contentious. And while there are conversations about the benefits: faster and cheaper payments, financial inclusion, etc…it’s also unclear that you need a CBDC to do that. For example, India has created payments infra that banked a huge number of unbanked people, and it isn’t based on a digital currency. The dollar is still the world's reserve currency. Getting transformational legislation passed in the U.S. is always difficult. That’s why I’m skeptical it emerges in any major form over the next ~5 years, but who knows?!

@gavin_yerxa Thanks for sharing your thoughts on it!

@xinzhu_chen Hi Carly - I think broadly speaking when in a downturn, the startups that run lean and focus maniacally on finding product market fit are the ones with the highest chances of winning. For one thing, investors are being more cautious about deploying, and are looking for more capital-efficient companies. That has a trickle-down effect on the whole startup ecosystem; most startups are selling to other startups, so when the belt-tightening starts it can really cascade. I guess that's my second point; you need to be selling something people really want or need. If you're a B2B product and you're not an essential tool to someone at the company, you're at risk of getting cut from the budget. It's also important to keep in mind that plenty of incredible companies have been built during downturns (Uber, Square, Airbnb). But you need to prove real value (and do it efficiently) if you're going to convince customers to buy your product and investors to give you money!

@gavin_yerxa Many thanks, Gavin! That's really good sharing!

@reshma_james1 I'd say part of it was borne out of personal experience, which helps. I've hired many freelancers across engineering, design, marketing, and content/writing, and I’ve even spent time working as a freelancer writer. So I understood the pain points on both sides of the freelancer / client relationship. With Thirdwork, we were seeing that there was this huge boom in demand for freelance hiring in web3 startups. It was the fastest-growing job category on LinkedIn, and web3-related posts were growing at triple-digit rates monthly on Upwork. Nearly every job posting said somethign like "web3 experience preferred" or "defi native" or "has worked in crypto before". But there were also real trust and discovery problems. It’s a new and rapidly evolving ecosystem. There are bad actors on both the freelancer and the client side. (Everybody has a hiring horror story in web3). For the speed at which the space is moving, there was a matching problem, which we felt was a problem a marketplace was uniquely suited to solve. But that was just a hypothesis, so we went out and talked to people! We did a whole listening and learning tour before writing a line of code. I’ve talked to hundreds of founders building in web3 over the past few months, and it helped us better understand the problem space. And that led us to what we’re focused on today, which is helping match crypto startups with product, design and marketing talent. We’ve created a community of several hundred freelance builders, and we’ve been able to work with some incredible startups in the space like Rabbithole, Afterparty, Lighthouse to help them achieve their hiring and growth goals. We’re always listening, learning, and iterating. But broadly speaking, I’m excited to sit at the intersection of what I believe are two inevitable trends: fractional/freelance work and web3!

@gavin_yerxa Thank you Gavin for taking your time to respond! Loved reading through your experience!