Allen Narcisse, Gigs CEO on Labor Markets and AI Jobs

Michael Koenig: Well, hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice, and at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and our guest today is Alan Narcisse, former COO at Workrise and the co-founder and CEO of Gigz. A company focused on making it easier for entry-level job seekers to find jobs in their neighborhood. Prior to starting Gigz and serving as the COO at Workrise, Alan led operations for both Lyft and Uber Eats in the West Coast markets. Essentially, Alan has spent his entire career helping build the gig economy and connecting folks with new opportunities. So Alan, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Michael Koenig: So let's start off, give us the backstory. How did you end up focusing your career on building and growing the gig economy and connecting people with job opportunities?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, I've been in marketplaces for about 15 years now. So my first marketplace business was a company I founded in 2009. It was called eBuyLine and it connected freelance journalists with, with publishers. And so that, uh, just making sure that freelancers could get work. That they were noticed, that, uh, they could showcase their skills became a really important part of that business. We were able to sell that business in 2015, and then, as you mentioned, I joined, uh, I started in rideshare. And so the reason I went to Uber is I wanted to work for a fast-growing company. I had never thought that I wanted to work in food delivery before joining Eats, um, but it was a chance to build a business. It was a chance to be an entrepreneur without raising money, without managing a board, without those aspects. And that was an incredible experience. Uh, we started off by delivering literally salads and sandwiches in the back of cars, and then we evolved into the Uber Eats that, you know, today that business grew 45 times in 2 years. Then I went on to Lyft, um, and, uh, had some of the experiences that you just called out in terms of, uh, growing drivers, uh, making sure that the markets grew and just in terms of talking to drivers, understanding their issues. Some of the best stories I had at Lyft were, uh, eating pizza with drivers and hearing their concerns, hearing how they thought the app had changed, and understanding that when earnings are volatile, it affects a driver's life in a, in a really material way. Um, in fact, one of the ideas that created Gigz, the company I founded, was talking to drivers at events and seeing them connect with me on LinkedIn. And I noticed that their profiles were would just say driver for Lyft or Uber and didn't have depth of networks or depth of education. And it made me think that tech companies weren't really serving the networks of blue-collar workers or non-white-collar workers. And so the original idea for Giggs was really to build a LinkedIn for gig workers. But then I thought, well, the most important thing to connect, um, a job seeker to is a, is an actual job.. And so that's why Gigz focuses on hourly jobs for finding jobs in your neighborhood. Um, I mean, this experience sort of was enhanced during my, my, my time at Workrise, which focuses on energy labor and just understanding how hard it is for a worker to find an opportunity, stay in an opportunity, and what happens next. And I think that Gigz is really a culmination of all those experiences, starting with journalism, obviously working with drivers, um, seeing those businesses grow, and then working for a company that focused on staffing and energy. And just understanding how challenging those businesses are to, to add value to job seekers and workers every day.

Michael Koenig: It's an interesting evolution that, that you went through there, going from the digital media that you first started out with to then, you know, food delivery, the rideshare, then energy, and now really anything, any role. Tell us about that evolution.

Allen Narcisse: There's a bit of content strategy that I think you would, you would find in gigs. And one of the experiences I had early in Uber Eats is that we were growing so fast that sometimes we expanded into markets where there weren't restaurants available for eaters. And, uh, those, those eaters never came back, um, to those territories that we launched. And so the lesson was like, when you have a, a marketplace, you need to make a great first impression to both sides, or three sides as it would be in the phrasing of a restaurant platform. Um, so in terms of gigs, the, the idea is really how can a job seeker see any job in their neighborhood? And so it's kind of like a content play in that sense that you would expect to see Starbucks, you'd expect to see your favorite fast food restaurant, you, you do expect to see any opportunity. And a lot of that comes from that initial experience at Eats, understanding what happens to a, uh, customer on one side of the marketplace that doesn't get fulfilled, um, to see what they expect, um, when they come to your platform.

Michael Koenig: So let's dive into that decision to start Giggs. You just mentioned creating marketplaces, so difficult, and you have a lot of experience doing it, but entering into the job placement sector, it's already filled with incumbents like Indeed,

Allen Narcisse: Well, the history of job boards has really shown that there's been these natural evolutions. So newspapers, and then CareerBuilder and Monster. Let's put, let's put classified ads on, on digital. And then Indeed's innovation is like, okay, let's be a search engine for jobs. Let's have every job. But that's one of the challenges I think of the incumbent job boards is that they're for everyone, which means that they're not specific. And what we noticed for employers is that they wanted to know specific things about job seekers for hourly jobs. How far away is your commute so you can get to work more reliably? How much experience do you have in this very specific type of job, being a barista, being a, being a waiter? And then job seekers wanted to find a lot more transparency about jobs. So how long do I need to work before I have benefits? How much is it gonna cost me to get to work each day? What are all the opportunities that are, that are closest? And so while the incumbent job boards are good for everyone, for this very specific niche, which is a third of the job seekers, a third of the jobs, So 7% of Americans are cashiers. That's how dense that job is in terms of the workforce. And we just felt that this part of the workforce wasn't served, in particular younger job seekers. And so they're using TikTok and Instagram. They're used to content in a different way. They're used to absorbing things faster. They have shorter attention spans, said in a different way. They want to get directly to the point. And we think that the lengthy written job description is really a thing of the past. We're reinventing that to get to the point where you can understand, should I apply for this job? Is this a good fit? Do I match my experience? Am I wasting my time? Is this gonna be a fit? Also, what are the values of the company? Because I see myself being here and the values of the company are really important. And so we think that job boards of the past really don't emphasize these two things. For employers, that connects to the idea of how do I find a quality applicant faster? And that really means finding the— being connected to the right applicant and not wasting time on applicants that aren't good fits. Um, so we decided to start with hourly because these jobs are— we use the phrase liquid, which means that if I'm entry-level, I might work at a restaurant, I might work at a grocery store. I can change the industries quickly. And because of the size, it's 42 million workers work in these industries. Also, there's a big need. Um, so a lot of these, if you look at hotels, you look at retail, you look at food and beverage, between 40 to 60% of these roles are unfilled. Um, so there's an acute problem in this space, and if the problem was being solved, employers wouldn't be using new platforms to fit this need. Um, so all those things put together with my past experience gave me the encouragement to, to start Gigz, to, to get Gigz off the ground and to start working on a platform that uniquely worked on these problems.

Michael Koenig: Let's back up. How do you approach building a marketplace from the ground up? You've had a lot of experience in it. You've seen how it scales, but what about that initial deal?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, so we call this cold start. There's a famous book written by Andrew Chen, Cold Start, really frames these ideas from, from Uber and other marketplaces that, that we love really well. And I think it starts with which side of the marketplace is hardest. So I think a lot of job boards, they start off by Um, signing employers and then finding job seekers. But the problem with that model is that the initial employers don't have any job seekers to react to, and then they, they might churn. What we decided to do was start with jobs that we call third-party jobs. So we're, we're getting those jobs from partnerships, and these jobs are on the web. They're available through, through different means. The idea that we had is that when a job seeker came to Gigz the very first time, they would see jobs in their neighborhood that they would expect. Then they could apply to those jobs. And then once we had enough engaged job seekers, we could go after employers with first-party relationships directly to engage and to, to match with those job seekers. So this was really a 3-step process. Um, we have over a quarter million jobs right now on Giggs. Then we acquired a lot of job seekers in major markets across the country. And then now we're partnering and piloting with, with employers who can now access those job seekers for specific job opportunities.

Michael Koenig: It reminds me of Airbnb, those early days where they scraped all the listings from Craigslist and got them up. And that was a way to kind of shortcut. Of course, Craigslist caught on and stopped that, but Airbnb had already struck. It's really interesting. You're— I haven't read Cold Start, but there is the empty room syndrome. So I don't know if they refer to that, right, where you get into something, you go, I'm the only one around here. Especially true in social networks, but also for this type of marketplace. It's not easy to do. You've got to have a lot of guts to do it. I mean, starting any company is difficult, but to go into that— I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how your approach has changed for something more general like this. You experienced ride sharing at Lyft, you experienced energy sector at Workrise, but now you've really expanded out. How has your approach changed?

Allen Narcisse: Well, you, you mentioned guts earlier, and I, I am definitely not alone at Giggs. We have a fantastic team, and what's unique about our team is there is a bit of previous founder DNA, there's a bit of Lyft DNA, there's a bit of Uber DNA in the company. And universally, we have this value called, uh, run at the biggest problem, which means have an impact, understand what customers are really looking for, and prioritize that above anything else. And so you're, you're right, in building a marketplace, it's among the hardest businesses to start, especially when you're looking at a multiplayer model, uh, getting value on both sides. But we've seen these problems before. In fact, I was just talking to our marketplace leader earlier and you were saying this is a lot, this is very similar to when we were running the marketplace for Lyft. And we had to find drivers for certain situations and we were balancing our markets. That, and that's, that's our comfort zone. And I think that taking that rideshare DNA and all those experiences and applying to jobs, especially these types of jobs, is going to be really valuable. So it's a really, it's really about prioritization, problem solving. It is not easy, but what's most fulfilling for us is when one of our gig job seekers gets a job and we see how many gig applicants are on the road. And employers tell us about the quality that they're seeing. Those are really fulfilling things. And we think that we're just gonna scale the business from there and learn more. A big part of this is obviously learning and applying that to your product and to how you sell and how you market. But we're making tremendous progress from, from, from there.

Michael Koenig: So now you're a CEO that used to be a COO. In a past episode with Woody Hartman, the COO of Lime, who I know is a friend of yours from your Lyft days, He talked about how his CEO at Lime also used to be a COO, and that creates a unique situation for him to operate in. How has your operations experience shaped how you approach your role as CEO?

Allen Narcisse: It's an interesting perspective because I almost think you need a new, um, a new lens to be an effective CEO. I think the roles are very different. So I was a two-time COO. I found— I co-founded a company. And in my first experience, I helped build the DNA of the company we were building. So, um, my strengths were relative to the CEO strengths, and then we co-built it. But when you join it as a COO to an existing company, the, the important thing is to embrace the DNA of the company that you're joining and understand that you really kind of can't fundamentally change that. You need to really enable the CEO and the strategy And there's different kind— I'm sure you, you've covered this, but there's a wide variety of COO roles when you're joining an existing company. There's a people leadership role and a market leadership role and a COO helper role. And what I found talking to my peer groups that one is one of the challenges is just embracing what role you actually— the company actually needs versus what the role that you actually expect. So having gone through all those experiences, I think about that being a CEO. And I think about what is the best way for me to get leverage for this strategy and how do I ruthlessly prioritize for everyone, um, with, along with everyone in the company to have impact. And so we talk about winning moves. We talk about what we need to do the best in the industry. And as a CEO, it's my job to make sure that we have the resources and the talent to accomplish those things. In, in some ways, the job is, is really simple. If you just can accomplish those things. I think my perspective as a COO is you're kind of juggling a lot of different things, well, to the CEO and your team. Sometimes you're the go-between between sort of different departments and things that haven't been able to be voiced. It's a very different sort of framework, I think. But yeah, I mean, what I've sort of settled into is what is gonna be the biggest impact for today and how do I position the company and our resources to accomplish that?

Michael Koenig: So you've really taken on those 3 core duties then of being a CEO, of cash in the bank, great people in the chairs, and then communicating and conveying the vision, it sounds like.

Allen Narcisse: Yeah. And if you're doing that job like a COO, it's very different, right? And so I think that's just an important thing to embrace is what is the environment, what does it need, and how do you actually adapt to what the job demands for you. And I, in some senses, I think it's, it having been in it, it is harder to do that as a COO. COO, you might have expectations of specific ownership or how you like your role in like in controlling things. My advice for any COO joining an existing company is to really invest in that conversation with the CEO for what the company needs, why they need a COO, and evaluate that answer truthfully to whether or not you want to do that and whether or not you're the right fit. And if you are, it can work amazingly well and you can grow into that role and have a, have a fulfilling, fulfilling time in that spot. Um, but if you're not, then it can be, it can be, uh, it can be tumultuous and it can be frustrating. And it's really about managing the expectations versus the reality.

Michael Koenig: So interesting. And you touched on something that, you know, we just see all the time, which is The COO role varies so widely, and the one constant generally is that it complements the CEO's skill set in some capacity in a way that wasn't there before. Let's talk about DNA. You talked about DNA of a company. Tell us about how you approach forming the DNA of a company. I know culture is something that you are all over. I'm hoping that you can share some of your secrets.

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, you know, some, some of the values for Giggs I spent time writing and working with friends on before even forming the company. And for me, how the company worked was almost as important as what the company did or what the product, uh, was, was going to be. And what I mean by that is it was really important for me to think through how we were going to work. And part of that was just creating the company that I wanted to work at. And that was sort of a realization is like, if there's gonna be a company I wanna, I wanna be at long term, maybe I need to make it and maybe I need to think through how the company functions and how, how it operates. And so some of the, some of the core DNA by design in this case was distilling what customer focus was gonna be for us. And so one thing we talk, talk about at Giggs is setting the pace. If we're second, customers won't want to use us. We need to be the best in certain things and make sure that we're, we're meeting the plan to be the best at those certain things. I mentioned run at the biggest problem, and this is as much about team communication as it is about customers. What is the thing that's most uncomfortable? And literally run towards having that conversation in a compassionate way, but have the conversation. In a way with your team where they can even call me out on things, on things I need to do better that aren't aligned with where we're going in the mission. And then I— and also learning. And I think that learning has been something that's constant, been constant in my career, that I've wanted to move on to different jobs when the learning has, has stopped. I want learning to be part of everything that we do— talking to customers, learning from ourselves, learning how to deploy new technology in a way that helps us accomplish our mission. Um, but this is something I want to have us do, actually teaching as much as learning, uh, in terms of how we scale information from the outside world into making our decisions. And I think a lot of companies can be wrapped up in their plans and sort of their internal processes and not bring the world into what they do. And this even happens— I mean, we're a new company, but it happens with us when we think about a product and we have to stop and say like, well, what does the employer want? What does the job seeker want? Let's actually stop what we're doing and talk to them and, and bring them into this conversation. So job boards have evolved, job platforms have evolved. I think that the one in the future is gonna be the one that learns the fastest and the best and can deploy those lessons to its product most effectively. So those things have been cumulative things that I've enjoyed and have learned over the course of my career, and I wanted to put them together. I see the company as being equally part Lift as it is Uber, uh, in, in this, in the sense of things I've learned from those, those experiences and wanting to bring to how we work and how we thrive at Giggs.

Michael Koenig: How do you scale information?

Allen Narcisse: This, I mean, I think it's by design. One thing that we've talked about at Giggs is should we be an in-person company? And so this is one of our first goals, is actually not working remotely but actually working in, in person, almost like the the way things used to be. Now we, we do have remote, remote schedules and, and hybrid schedules, but how do we talk every day and how do we set up the format for those conversations and how do we decide what to talk about? You know, I think we're still formulating that. Like most companies, we're on Slack, but I've tried to set out time for high-impact conversations, um, with the leadership team. And one of the core focuses I have now is how do we become even tighter as a leadership team? How do I let, How, how do other people speak and lead the conversation? And then how do we hold ourselves accountable to making sure that everything we're doing is lined up to the, to the, the, the goals that we have? So, you know, this is gonna be something that is gonna continue to evolve. The team is growing. We need to make sure that we're like, learning is sticky even though we're, we're growing. And you, you talk about sort of the 3 tenets of being a CEO. One of the tenets, the 4th one I think is being the glue and making sure that I'm not bogged down too tightly on day-to-day activities to not see if the team's undercommunicating or pivoting too much on the wrong information and not, not communicating for impact.

Michael Koenig: So interesting. You mentioned getting people to speak, and this is a big part of, of leadership is making sure that people have the room, but also the psychological safety to speak up. How do you go about it?

Allen Narcisse: Well, in, in meetings, it's something I try to consciously observe is, um, has someone not said something, uh, in a while? Uh, are they not weighing in on this where they weighed in in the past? Um, so I really try to balance the conversations and I'll call on people like, you know, Michael, what, what do you think? And obviously a good question is important here to make people feel psychologically safe. But I think a great meeting, let's say you have a meeting of 4 people, a great meeting is 25% communication from each person and making sure that at the end, the principles that you were focused on were like fully discussed and you fully sort of chewed on them as a group. And there's sort of nothing, nothing left unsaid that should have been said. You can pick that up with body language. You can pick that up with participation. But a great meeting is that everyone's had their fingerprint on that topic and they've been able to, you know, spend time expressing their opinions, concerns. And I think concerns are great. We wanna make sure that we're looking forward. Like the fun part about being in a startup is that you are forward-looking and you're excited. But also if there's concerns and risks, you can talk about them like in a courageous way. So that all those are out in the front.

Michael Koenig: There are a lot of concerns and a lot of risks in running a startup. The CEO, the founders, they feel the cash crunch, they feel the existential struggle to survive as a company. How do you insulate folks while still delivering the information that's necessary? Because you don't want to freak everyone out?

Allen Narcisse: Well, one, one core principle is transparency. And so what I guess the other side of transparency is understanding as a CEO, you can work hard and still not control every possible outcome. And so, um, the things that we can control, the decisions to spend, are things that we should be transparent about. When something doesn't go well, one thing I've, I've learned in my career, and this is something that was hard for me in my career earlier, was delivering bad news, especially in big groups., but one thing I, I sort of learned is like, well, hey, this isn't necessarily, you know, my fault, or it's okay to make mistakes. And you, you, you touched on psychological safety. Part of that is modeling that when there is tough news. And so I think that the biggest difference for me internally is the idea that, look, this isn't all my fault. This is all, this is not all under my control. I still have positive intent. I'm working as hard as I possibly can. I've gotta make decisions on things I don't do. And when something doesn't go well, I know that we're all together as a team and we'll rally around it. I'd rather our team be a team that can fix things quickly as a, as opposed to a team that will be perfect. You, you mentioned startups being hard. They're extremely hard, but how do we rally around the things that we can do to change the trajectory of the business? And maybe one of the outlooks is that bad news is actually favorable for us because we know not what not to do. And so, so all things are actually good for us. All things are like, are good things on the path that will help us know what not to do and what not to invest in. But I, I try not to take that burden on for my own, for my own sake, but also for the team's sake. And I want them to feel the same way, right? It's okay to make mistakes as long as we're headed in the right direction. And no matter what, we know, we know now. And we can move forward.

Michael Koenig: So every now and then I take a question from the audience. This one comes from another mutual friend of ours. In an interview with the LA Times, you shared that when you first joined Lyft, you told your team that you only wanted to make 5% of the decisions. Elliot Darvit asks, what do you mean by that?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, I mean, it's, um, in some senses I would think our team should work based on principles without a central leader needing to make the decisions. Uh, I think that in my career, one of the reasons I love being a general manager in rideshare is because it had a lot of autonomy. We knew what the direction was going to be, and there were a lot of different pathways. And so I come at this from multiple dimensions. I don't know all the answers. I don't want to make all the decisions. If I make all the decisions, it's going to impair the company. The company is not going to be as successful. This is why we're hiring really talented, creative, ambitious people, so we can use their ideas. Um, so the system has to be based on them enabling their ideas. My job is to help make those ideas better, help shape them, make sure they're aligned, make sure these ideas are resourced. But I think the best possible job is where there's true ownership and what you can create. And then you can look back and say, I did this, I had, I had this impact, I navigated this issue. And the, the amount of decisions we're gonna make at Giggs are gonna scale rapidly. The system won't work if we don't have great decision makers at, at every, at every level. So back to, um, we, we talked about learning, we talked about ownership, talked about autonomy. I think all these things come together in how you build a great company. And ultimately I want a company that makes great decisions by letting people know that it's okay. To fail and then just recover from, from those, those things if they don't work the way that they're— that we thought they would.

Michael Koenig: It's not easy to do. It's not easy to, uh, to create. I mean, how do you approach it?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, you know, one thing I've, I've noticed is the values of the company that you set out for need to be woven into almost everything you do, and particularly hiring. And so, um, Let's say that ownership is a really important characteristic of someone that we wanna hire at Giggs, which it is. One of the things I've learned is we just need to ask questions about, about what we think ownership is and make sure that we're bringing in folks that have demonstrated that in the past. This is really about sort of just laying out expectations in the very beginning. These are mutual expectations. How is the company gonna operate? How am I gonna operate within the company? What does the company expect of me? These things kind of come together. But the things that are important to us, we're going to repeat them, we're going to talk about them from the very first conversation with a candidate. And then there's a parallel to kind of how you're going to work. So I guess the other thing I would add is I think a big responsibility of the CEO is not to fill in the gap sometimes. And so if you, if you, you're working with a teammate and they've got an arc that they're working on, don't jump in. Just make sure you're, you're, you're speaking clearly about what What the vision is for that idea. Make sure you understand what the leader is gonna be driving towards and then let them do it. You know, this is, you mentioned it's hard to do, but so much of the difficulty is actually letting go and not jumping in and not thinking you have the right answer and not thinking that you have to be heroic to make the company work because it actually won't if you do jump in. Right. And so, uh, I think all those things come together, but it's, it's me embodying it and also making sure that I enable it for, for my teammates.

Michael Koenig: So there's a certain amount of coaching then in your approach to enabling those teammates, but it's, it's kind of done from the side in that case. Is that accurate?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, I think the, the strength that I need to deliver for Giggs is coaching. It's small tweaks, it's big tweaks, but the leader is the player. They're on the field, they're making the decisions, they're, they're in the game, and they're the one celebrating the touchdown, and I'm, I'm the one celebrating with them. Uh, could have been a basketball analogy, but, um, yeah, it is, it is, it is a partnership. And the folks that we have working at Giggs, I am so lucky to have such a great team to work with. I want them to go all the way, and I'm a fan of theirs also. And so to, to be the best possible resource for their growth, their learning, their ownership, their development, it's critical. It's critical for the company too, but it's also critical that I'm, I'm beside that path just to make small tweaks. If there was a fifth thing that CEOs need to do, I think it's this act of coaching. Piece, and it's something I've prided myself in my entire career, and it's something I'm still learning a ton about every day.

Michael Koenig: What have you learned so far? How do you approach active coaching? It's not easy.

Allen Narcisse: One thing I, I'll note is, I think, just speaking from personal experience, when you work in a big company, there are important projects, but the stakes don't seem as high as when you're in a startup. Because when you're on that launch pad as a startup, small angle differences seem to make a really big, big difference. And so one thing I, I've learned in my, my first startup, I'm still learning this, is it was really hard to balance the doing and the leading because there's so much to do in the company, right? You have to create all this infrastructure and you have to close the big deals and you have to manage your investors. This is still a challenge because there's still a lot to do at Giggs, but it is really important to consciously control the doing versus the leading part. Um, because your job, and we talked about this with respect to COOs, your job is to, to lead. Um, and it is much more, it's higher leverage, much more valuable than the doing part, even if the doing doesn't get done. So that's really something I've embraced is if I'm doing too much, I am not serving my team well. I'm not leading the company well. And it's something I focus in on and something I evaluate. And something that I try to reposition and reassess like every, every time we have a standup or every time we're having a group meeting or have a one-on-one of like, all right, am I, am I at the right leverage point? Am I at the right altitude to help the team?

Michael Koenig: I love that. Kind of taking a step back and saying, okay, am I doing too much? And taking that as an active action. That you want to do. I have a bunch of things written on my computer and my monitor, like little notes. One of them's, um, stop and think. Another one's keep calm. The last one here, what would Obama do, because he's always so cool, calm, and collected. I think this one's gonna be, am I doing too much? I love that. I'm gonna incorporate it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Allen Narcisse: Yeah. And there's, there's a, there's a emotion that goes with doing too much. That's really kind of the signal. It's like a, it's like a tension, right? Like, how am I gonna balance all these things? And it's a narrowness that I think comes with that feeling. The other feeling of leadership is, is scale and like speed, agility. It's, it's looser and it feels better. And so that's kind of the signal for me is this like, like how, how am I feeling about this? Am I overwhelmed on the wrong things? And by the way, one of the reasons to make a startup is to work on things that you wanna work on that you think are the right impact. Like that's, you mentioned active decisions. That's an active choice, right? So have you designed that task, that responsibility? Is it important? All those things factor into knowing if you're at the right altitude or if you're doing too much.

Michael Koenig: Let's shift gears and jump back into hourly jobs. According to a report from Georgetown University, the Center for Education and Workforce, 23 million jobs were lost during COVID and not all of those roles were filled during this post-COVID boom that we've come down from. Now, you wrote that there are over 80 million hourly roles to be filled in the US. How do we fill them all when we couldn't fill all of the 23 million that were lost?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things I think is, is better to perfect. There needs to be clear progress against these things. And when I speak to employers, when I speak to medium-sized businesses, small businesses, they say that they have problems finding qualified applicants. But when I speak to job seekers, they say it's hard to get a response from companies. So our, our belief at Giggs is that this is really an information and matching issue. How do you find the best job? And we're only focused on hourly jobs. We're not focused on the entire labor force, but for these very important roles that we all interact with as a job seeker, how do I get the right information to know every job in my shopping center, at my mall, in my neighborhood, around my campus? And What are the benefits? What are the pay ranges? What is a day in the life like in the job? Um, our angle is that we want to make information a lot more easy to access and transparent. Ideally, Gigz does solve the problem completely, but I think we can make progress by making sure that, that workers and job seekers are empowered to know what jobs are available. And this is just something you really can't do today. You can't— there's no app or no, no, uh, no tool that can give you a small geography and let you know every, every opportunity. And that's our vision. Every business should be in Giggs, and you should be able to learn about any business, whether it's a cleaners or your local grocery store. Um, you should be able to put yourself on a waitlist. You should be able to understand how much they pay. You should be able to, to know what it's like to work there. And that's what we're building towards. We think that that helps fill this gap by just empowering and strengthening the knowledge that, that job seekers can approach the, the search with.

Michael Koenig: So what is the business model for Gigz then?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, so we're launching with a cost-per-application model, which is common in our industry. And the idea is that there's no commitments, there's, uh, no contract, there's no monthly subscription. Further, we are saying that you only pay for qualified applicants. And so let's say you have a job description where you're looking for someone to work Um, as a, as a, as a, as a chef, years of experience, specific restaurant experience, inventory experience, knife skills. Those are the requirements. And what we're guaranteeing is that we're finding you, uh, job seekers that match that, or you don't pay. This is a big challenge for employers now because they're getting a lot of volume from the incumbents. But what we're hearing is that, well, half of them don't have experience at all in our industry. And a big reason for that is the incumbents have made it so easy to apply for jobs that job seekers without high intent or without qualifications are applying to those jobs. Ultimately, that doesn't serve both sides. Job seekers who are qualified aren't hearing because they're, they're, they're so far in the chart, they're so far in the depth that employers don't have time. And then employers, when they are going through applicants, aren't finding applicants that are the ones they're looking for. So we want to reduce the noise and we want to give confidence to both sides that a good match is going to happen.

Michael Koenig: It's an easy business model to sign on to. There isn't a huge commitment. There isn't any sort of minimum that I have to hit. It seems like a pretty easy way to, to get folks on board and just kind of, it's almost like a free trial. I love it.

Allen Narcisse: Yeah. Employers have been excited about it and they've been willing to partner with us to help us understand what quality means, but also let us know how we can do better. This is— comes back to the learning idea. Um, we want to learn along with our customers, and when we're where we want to be, we're going to be the quality provider in this space. And that's what our brand and, and our product is going to bring forth for, for the— for employers that are, that are looking to solve this problem.

Michael Koenig: Okay, shifting gears back to the macro, back to the big picture. MIT and Boston University released a report that automation and AI have the has the potential to replace as many as 2 million warehouse and manufacturing jobs by 2025. That would add to an already substantial labor market. And aside from the obvious economic impact on the folks that may lose their jobs, there are also societal and political consequences that we've seen play out since the start of automation back in the auto sector. As someone who has had a front row seat in, in the gig economy for the past 14 years, I mean, what are your thoughts on this?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, it makes me think of my time in rideshare when autonomous vehicle, autonomous vehicle development was a core topic. And so just going back, both, both rideshare companies in the States made big investments in AV. They were public. They were big parts of the valuation for those companies. And so when I spoke to drivers, when I spoke to officials, they were concerned about the future. And so, uh, we, we kind of had to hold two ideas. And so like, how did that turn out? Well, AVs are still not on the road, and that technology is still somewhat far away. But today, important stakeholders are concerned about their position. Um, so I, I think per a perfect execution of this is making, is, is better communication, um, along the way to stakeholders of what's, what's going to happen to them. And I think like the same thing is happening in the white collar space. So in, in, in venture, we're talking about AI and this is happening at the same time of these really significant layoffs in tech. So if you are a marketer, if you're an engineer, what's, what's the future for you? This is certainly, you, you call this out in terms of hourly workers, right? So. When there's 2 openings for every worker, we should expect businesses to try to find innovation to make processes work without losing revenue. But some of these technologies are far away, right? So, uh, and I mentioned cashiers are 7% of the labor force, but what happens when we actually automate some of these processes? And we see companies doing this now. We need to lay out a map of, of what this looks like. I think the future is happier and more fulfilled workers, but the pathway to get there um, it's going to be a challenging one. So Giggs is here to help start the short-term aspects of it, but I think you're 100% right. This, this pathway has got to be explained so we know how this ends up, or at least we're participants in how this ends up, to make sure like the society on the other end of this is still a strong one that provides good options and good health to the labor force.

Michael Koenig: I saw just another article that recently Tesla is going to be introducing even more automation, particularly, at least the positioning is around replacing dangerous jobs with, with robots. So it's ever-present and it's ever-growing. It's really interesting. And perhaps once the hype around ChatGPT dies down a little bit, this will start to make the headlines again.

Allen Narcisse: Yeah. Or, or maybe we're at a, a transition that we're at the beginning, beginning of that's like the Industrial Revolution or the internet revolution. It's important, just, just like almost like a, like a macrocosm of what we talked about with leadership. We've gotta be conscious going through this and, and making sure that these changes don't happen to us, but we affect them in, in a positive way. But you know, what I've heard industry experts talk about is the pace of change. Being what's different about this. So just to your point, we've got to go into this eyes wide open.

Michael Koenig: I love it. Okay. I feel like I've said I love it a lot, a lot more than I generally say. I'm enjoying the conversation clearly. Okay. Last question. We've all had those moments where we're in the leadership capacity and whether you're CEO or COO and something comes across your desk and you're just like, that is absurd. I never thought I would see anything like that. I can't believe this is happening. Do you have a moment you can share?

Allen Narcisse: Yeah, I do. So my first— this is my— I think it's my third week at Eats. I got a call. I was in a meeting, got a call. It's an inspector. And he's saying like, hey, what is this operation? We're shutting the whole thing down. Um, so I, I just joined Uber, had no idea who this official was, had no idea what was gonna happen next. A lot of things happened in between, including a lot of conversations and a lot of reading of the, the regulations around this. But it turned out to not only do, do we grow Eats, uh, into a huge business, um, with the approval of, of these officials, but I actually joined a food waste council to help the city solve these problems. I, I think the, the lesson in between was Transparency. And so, uh, if you do the right thing, you don't really have to, to, to worry. And if you explain it, I mean, even if it's new, you can bring people along. Uh, I've had a couple of experiences in my career with my first startup where I've had challenges getting approvals from local officials. Um, these things don't always work out, but in my case they have. And that's always been my, my strategy is just, um, be approachable, be transparent. And I think that people get a sense for when you are being defensive or hiding things and you're actually working with a person across the table. And to remember that that was an epic story at the time, it seemed as existential, but now it's just, it's just like a confidence builder that you can, you can make it through things even when you have these unforeseen challenges.

Michael Koenig: Oh, for sure. Everything gets compared in that light where it's like, oh, this is, this is nothing. I've got this. I dealt with crazier things in the past. No problem. This is a walk in the park. Well, Alan, thanks so much for joining. Where can people go to keep up with you and keep up with Gigz?

Allen Narcisse: So we're at gigz.co. That's the website for, for Gigz. And then you can follow me at Alan Narcis at Twitter. But yeah, thanks for the time. This is a great conversation. I appreciate it.