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alexr_rwxWe're in Mountain View again! We're back at basically the same jobs as last time: Lindsey is working on Rust, Mozilla's new programming language, and I'm doing rad stuff on Google Translate.
We've been seeing Martin a fair bit (and Lauryn sometimes too, but not quite as often!), since he's got to come down to the South Bay for work here and again. We spent the morning and afternoon with them; Lauryn was involved with the SF Carnaval parade, so we went up to the Mission and watched the parade; it was pretty wild. Lots of people dancing and wearing crazy costumes and playing music and walking around on stilts. Then we had burritos and coffee and looked and books and hung out for a while! (hooray! :D )
Lindsey and I have been thinking about what we want to do when we're done with gradschool, which will be, y'know, sooner or later. We could try to get the full-time versions of our respective intern jobs; that would be a pretty good result. We could stay in academia and look for postdocs or possibly faculty jobs...
Or we could start a business. Let me lay this business plan on you: we outsource your business's management. You want to have a tech company or a widget manufacturing company or whatever. But you don't want to have management; it's too expensive and boring. This is where we come in. You contract with us, and we provide virtual managers for your company, as many as you need. They have plausible-sounding names. But underneath, your virtual corporate management is actually outsourced to very qualified people somewhere far away where labor costs are lower. And while we're presenting you the interface of a consistent set of virtual managers, the role of Alice (or Ashok, or Andy, whatever you want) is actually being played by some indeterminate number of hot-swappable qualified people, who may be switched out so that we can do better management load-balancing, to provide you better quality-of-service.
And then: we farm out the management decisions to Mechanical Turk, and get them for next to nothing (checking inter-rater reliability so that only sane-ish business decisions get presented to your business by your virtual managers), while still presenting you the same management interface.
Great business plan? Or greatest business plan... of all time?
We've been seeing Martin a fair bit (and Lauryn sometimes too, but not quite as often!), since he's got to come down to the South Bay for work here and again. We spent the morning and afternoon with them; Lauryn was involved with the SF Carnaval parade, so we went up to the Mission and watched the parade; it was pretty wild. Lots of people dancing and wearing crazy costumes and playing music and walking around on stilts. Then we had burritos and coffee and looked and books and hung out for a while! (hooray! :D )
Lindsey and I have been thinking about what we want to do when we're done with gradschool, which will be, y'know, sooner or later. We could try to get the full-time versions of our respective intern jobs; that would be a pretty good result. We could stay in academia and look for postdocs or possibly faculty jobs...
Or we could start a business. Let me lay this business plan on you: we outsource your business's management. You want to have a tech company or a widget manufacturing company or whatever. But you don't want to have management; it's too expensive and boring. This is where we come in. You contract with us, and we provide virtual managers for your company, as many as you need. They have plausible-sounding names. But underneath, your virtual corporate management is actually outsourced to very qualified people somewhere far away where labor costs are lower. And while we're presenting you the interface of a consistent set of virtual managers, the role of Alice (or Ashok, or Andy, whatever you want) is actually being played by some indeterminate number of hot-swappable qualified people, who may be switched out so that we can do better management load-balancing, to provide you better quality-of-service.
And then: we farm out the management decisions to Mechanical Turk, and get them for next to nothing (checking inter-rater reliability so that only sane-ish business decisions get presented to your business by your virtual managers), while still presenting you the same management interface.
Great business plan? Or greatest business plan... of all time?
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Date: 2012-05-28 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-28 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-28 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-28 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-28 05:25 am (UTC)Also we could have... futures... on management? I dunno how these things work really.
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Date: 2012-05-28 06:46 am (UTC)Picture it: people on MTurk being called upon to make decisions about how to, say, apportion tasks to people on MTurk.
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Date: 2012-05-28 07:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-28 10:36 pm (UTC)I think I've seen this theory in some of the more cognitively-motivated areas of AI.
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Date: 2012-05-28 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-28 08:26 pm (UTC)Yep -- that's why the consulting profession exists! Lots of businesses could stand to benefit from outside help with strategizing.
(I'm pretty sure Alex was joking, though...)