I had the great privilege of interviewing Harvard Business School professor Christopher Stanton recently for my client Braintrust.
Braintrust is a new way of imagining hiring and recruiting and … maybe even how you build a company. Stanton has been researching hiring and corporations since he saw oDesk (now Upwork) over a decade ago in grad school. But while the on-demand model took off for food and transport and even vacations, nothing really disrupted the core pattern of hiring for critical functionality.
“There has been far too little experimentation among many of the incumbent [staffing] platforms.”
Christopher Stanton, Professor, Harvard Business School
Until now.
Braintrust is a new model with a open-source community vibe and a token, BTrust, that you accrue as you do things that benefit the community: work, suggest other talented people, refer jobs, vet new community members, and more. Of course, you get paid in USD or local currency, but you accrue BTtrust as well.
Stanton wrote a paper on Braintrust with some HBS colleagues, and studied it with one of his B-school classes. He has high praise:
“My view is that Braintrust is really a player that is going to be a more efficient staffing solution that provides transparency to both sides of the market,” Stanton told me.
I interviewed him about the future of work, what Covid did to employment, and how the corporation will evolve over the next few years. Braintrust used it as the basis of a LinkedIn Event, which you can view right here …