Appendix A. Company Profiles
BlueCrew
Palo Alto, CA
Founded: 2015
Job discovery and scheduling
Tagline: Find work that fits you. Build a flexible career with BlueCrew.
Michele Casertano likes to use the phrase “staffing as a platform” to describe his company BlueCrew. The startup provides workers to companies on a temporary basis, similar to staffing agencies. But compared to traditional staffing agencies, BlueCrew uses a more data- and technology-driven approach. For example, every BlueCrew worker has an online profile, complete with job history, that employers can view. Workers are also dispatched to jobs automatically, based on BlueCrew’s proprietary algorithms. As Casertano, who cofounded BlueCrew and serves as its CEO, explains, “We’re a technology platform with a staffing marketplace.”
BlueCrew aims to reduce the inefficiencies of traditional staffing while increasing protections for independent workers by giving them workers’ compensation insurance and a pathway to health benefits. “Before BlueCrew, if you wanted to work, to temp and do purely on-demand work, you went to a staffing agency,” says Casertano. “And eventually they would call you on the phone if a job was there. But most of the time they disappear.” BlueCrew has expedited this process so that jobs can be filled in as little as one minute. When workers’ profiles match with available jobs, they receive alerts on their phones along with details about the assignment’s duration, location, and pay rate. If the job interests them, workers accept the assignment within the BlueCrew app by pressing a button.
Tasks range from warehouse tasks, such as packing boxes and driving forklifts to commercial moving, data entry, and customer support and are currently based in the Bay Area. Assignments can be as short as a few hours and as long as two months. Some companies also hire full-time workers through BlueCrew. Casertano says workers on the platform number in the “high hundreds.” His goal: to become “the leading [job discovery] platform for the temporary and flexible workforce, in general.”
Interestingly, BlueCrew’s model relies on hiring its workers as W2 employees. Casertano says he does this so he can cover his workers with workers’ compensation insurance. He also believes that his workers get a “better deal” by being W2 employees because BlueCrew handles their tax withholding, including the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) tax, which funds Social Security and Medicare. BlueCrew doesn’t give its workers health insurance automatically, but they can qualify for benefits after working more than 30 hours per week for 90 days.
Though Casertano admits that he sometimes worries about his employees’ “career growth,” he says it’s important to simply give people—particularly people who don’t have ready access to many jobs—an opportunity to work. “Some people decide this should be their main source of income,” he adds. “They refer to themselves as BlueCrew workers. They’ve created their own culture of why they’re temp workers.”
Breeze
San Francisco, CA
Founded: 2013
Facilities & Equipment, Job Discovery & Scheduling
Tagline: Get a car. And get paid.
Ride-sharing and delivery jobs are the most popular gig economy tasks, but are typically accessible only to drivers who have cars insured under their own names. As a result, people who struggle to finance cars may find themselves shut out of platforms such as Uber and Lyft. Breeze addresses this issue by leasing cars to independent workers. Members pay Breeze a one-time membership fee ($250) and a weekly leasing fee ($195). In return, members receive a Toyota Prius they can personally insure and use 24/7 for their gig economy work.
Breeze is much more than a car-leasing company. It also employs a “Member Success” team that counsels users in-person and over the phone about which gig economy jobs best fit their preferences, how many hours they should work a week at minimum, and how much they can expect to earn after expenses. Since 80% of Breeze’s new members are gig economy novices, the guidance prepares members for the realities of gig work and helps ensure they’ll be able to make their lease payments. As Breeze cofounder Jeffrey Pang explains, “A big part of our onboarding is checking all the boxes to make sure you qualify for these income streams. The last thing we want is for you to get a car and be like, ‘Wait, what do I do with this thing? I can’t make any money with it.’”
Breeze attracts two main types of users: people who have poor or no credit and people who don’t want to commit to a three-year lease or a five-year loan in order to get a vehicle to earn income. In keeping with the flexibility of gig economy work, Breeze lets users leave the program anytime, as long as they have completed at least one month of payments and give the company two weeks notice. Breeze leases are also geared toward lots of driving with an annual mileage cap of 30,000, which is two to three times more than what traditional car leases allow.
Breeze has no formal affiliation with any of the gig economy platforms. Its members hold an assortment of driving-centric jobs, from ride-sharing to grocery and meal delivery and home-cleaning services. Pang says Breeze’s “openness” and support for a range of jobs differentiates it from Uber’s leasing program, Uber Xchange.
Since Breeze makes it possible for more people to take up gig work, Pang sees the company as an enabler for the broader gig economy. “We are the financial backbone for a growing percentage of the gig economy,” he posits. “We’re accelerating and enabling access for our members who would otherwise lack the ability to get car ownership or for whom committing to a term loan didn’t make sense.”
Breeze is currently available in six U.S. cities (Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.) and will open soon in San Diego.
Coworker.org
Washington, D.C.
Founded: 2013
Community & Organizing
Tagline: A digital platform for worker voice.
Gig workers typically lack access to people in positions of power who can help them improve their work environment. Instead, independent workers seeking to change something in their workplaces frequently turn to social media to air their grievances and rally support.
Michelle Miller, a former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) employee, cofounded the nonprofit Coworker.org to help workers organize in a more effective way. The organization is currently focused on providing “digital infrastructure” to people so they can advocate for themselves at work. These tools, most of which are located on the Coworker.org site, allow workers to create online petitions, collect signatures and comments, and circulate their campaigns via social media.
A Starbucks barista recently used the platform to overturn the coffee chain’s ban on visible tattoos. A Publix Super Markets worker is currently trying to do the same for beards. The California App-Based Drivers Association started a Coworker.org petition to ask Uber to let consumers add tips to their fares. And a Postmates courier used Coworker.org to request a way to notify merchants that couriers who were on their last delivery run couldn’t accept any more jobs that day.
Since petition signers can contact a campaign’s creator through email and vice versa, the networks that form around Coworker.org campaigns can be sustained and leveraged for other campaigns. About 25,000 Starbucks baristas have subscribed to updates from the Coworker.org platform, as have 8,000 Publix employees and 2,000 Uber drivers. Overall, Coworker.org has attracted 250,000 subscribers, 90,000 of whom have participated in a campaign in their workplace.
Coworker.org wants to foster these worker communities so they coalesce into “future forms of worker power,” says Miller. “We’ve been experimenting with ways in which we can start to have these networks become visible to one another and see themselves as a powerful community,” she explains. To strengthen ties between baristas, Coworker.org has started sending curated social content emails (emails that feature social media content, such as tweets, aggregated from Starbucks workers) and working conditions surveys within its Starbucks network.
Coworker.org welcomes all types of workers, but Miller says the organization has “particular reach” among “disaggregated” freelancers and independent workers who use the platform to connect with likeminded people. Gig workers often fear that if they complain about workplace issues they will be removed from their work platform without notice or a means of defending themselves, according to Miller. “The feeling that you’re managed by an invisible algorithm or a platform makes it really frustrating and risky to even be able to bring up a benign complaint about anything,” she adds. Banding together as a group through services such as Coworker.org helps reduce this risk while amplifying independent workers’ voices.
Dispatcher
Palo Alto, CA
Founded: 2015
Job discovery and scheduling
Tagline: Empowering the On-Demand Workforce. Discover the best on-demand jobs.
Dispatcher is a new app that matches gig workers with jobs. Its cofounders plan to build it into a real-time labor exchange for the gig economy, similar to an ad exchange. As Dispatcher CEO Teck Chia explains, the online ads ecosystem contains ad exchanges, demand-side platforms, and supply-side platforms. The exchanges sit in the middle while the demand and supply-side platforms optimize yields for the buyers and sellers of ads, respectively. Dispatcher thinks the labor market will evolve the same way. “On the supply side, we enable workers to participate in multiple [gig economy] networks,” says Chia. “And on the demand side, we enable platforms to scale their networks in step with customer demand with no over-hiring or under-hiring.”
Dispatcher is focusing its efforts on the supply or workers side of the gig economy labor exchange. It launched its app in September 2015 with an emphasis on job discovery. Users can fill out a single job application within the app and quickly apply to dozens of gig economy platforms.
The setup is based on Dispatcher research, which found that a number of gig workers were active only on one gig economy platform—either because they weren’t aware of the range of potential employers or because applying to multiple platforms was tedious or both. Typically, these people find gig work on sites such as Craigslist where big companies like Uber and Lyft dominate the job ads.
By showing users the breadth of gig employers and making it fast and easy for them to get on board multiple platforms, Dispatcher aims to help them earn as much money as possible. On-demand work usually has downtime, and toggling between platforms can fill the gaps. “An Uber driver might spend anywhere from 15 minutes to hours between requests,” says Chia. “Meanwhile, other platforms might have jobs that the same Uber driver could fulfill during that idle time. We want users to maximize their earnings by increasing the utilization of their time and resources, such as their car.” (Most of Dispatcher’s current users are drivers for ride-sharing and delivery platforms, but the company is open to serving all types of gig workers.)
In the future, Dispatcher’s app will aggregate data that lets users select assignments that match their preferences while optimizing their earnings. (SherpaShare, on page 46, has a similar idea.) “Let’s say I’m a driver,” says Chia. “I may not want to drive more than 10 miles out of my way. I may want a certain base pay or only want to do certain jobs like pick up food versus pick up passengers. I can emphasize those criteria and when I get jobs, I can pick the ones I feel are the best for me.”
Another way to view Dispatcher is as a super-smart dispatch channel—one that gives workers a lot of agency and aims to show them the best times to work and the best jobs to take.
Even
Oakland, CA
Founded: 2014
Finance & Admin, Education & Training
Tagline: The financial stability app.
Independent workers have unique financial concerns, chief among them irregular paychecks. Even is a startup that manages workers’ money so they can have steady salaries. As Even cofounder Quinten Farmer explains, “You can think of Even as stepping in in those moments when you don’t get enough hours of work or you’re less busy than you were planning on—and providing additional funds to tide you over until that time when you get more hours or you are busier than you expected and you make more than your average pay.”
Here’s how Even works: Users give the company access to their bank accounts. After analyzing users’ previous six months of income data, Even’s mobile app calculates their average paychecks and delivers that amount to them each payday. If a user earns more money than usual on a payday, Even saves the surplus in a savings account at one of its partner banks. When money is tight, Even draws on those savings to give the user the same salary as usual. (Even calls this feature a paycheck “boost.”)
If a user has no savings or insufficient savings, Even makes up the difference via interest-free advances and reimburses itself the next time the user has a larger-than-average paycheck. Even also recalculates users’ average pay once a month to catch any dramatic swings in income. Users pay a flat fee of $3 a week for the service.
The startup says it eliminates the stress surrounding “unexpectedly low” pay that afflicts many independent contractors. It’s also trying to provide an alternative to risky and expensive forms of short-term credit, such as payday loans and bank account overdrafts.
The service, which is still in closed beta, isn’t available to all gig workers. People who get paid via direct deposit on a regular schedule, such as Uber drivers, are potential candidates. However, people with less predictable pay, such as freelance graphic designers, can’t use the app, at least not yet. Most of Even’s users work in the service industry, at retailers and in restaurants. Even is talking to employers in those sectors to see whether they would be willing to offer Even to their employees as a benefit.
Though Even is primarily a financial service, it also engages in user education and training. Each Even user is assigned an advisor called an Evener, who answers questions about the app as well as more general money queries. Users can chat with their Eveners inside the app in real-time.
Eveners don’t provide financial advice unrelated to Even, but will help users calibrate their Even payments to meet goals, such as paying off credit card debt or student loans within a set amount of time. Farmer says the Eveners play a crucial role in increasing customer satisfaction as well as his company’s sustainability. “If you’re making positive financial decisions, that means you’re safer for us to serve,” he notes. “It’s a way to make our customers healthier over the long-term.”
Freelancers Union
https://www.freelancersunion.org
Brooklyn, NY
Founded: 1995
Cross Function (Benefits, Healthcare & Insurance/Community & Organizing/Education & Training)
Tagline: A Federation of the Unaffiliated.
Compared to the other companies and organizations in this report, Freelancers Union offers a wider array of services for independent workers: everything from community and organizing resources to healthcare and insurance products and education and training content.
Sara Horowitz, the Union’s Founder and Executive Director, says the nonprofit has a duty to serve workers in many ways. “We’re not going to pick a vertical and be amazing only in that vertical,” she says. “We have a social sector responsibility to be wider than that.”
The Union is not a traditional labor union, as its members do not pay dues and it does not negotiate with their employers about working conditions. However, the group does organize its members to protect and promote their common interests, like a conventional union would. The Union says its more than 275,000 members include “freelancers, consultants, independent contractors, temps, part-timers, contingent employees, and the self-employed.”
Episodic income is one issue of concern for this group as is the need for cost-effective benefits. The Union says 77% of freelancers wrestle with nonpayment (clients failing to pay them) at some point in their careers. The organization recently launched an advocacy campaign dubbed “Freelance isn’t free” to draw attention to the problem and effect solutions.
For years, the Union was best known for providing benefits to freelancers. From 2009 to 2014, the Union sold health plans to New York freelancers through its own insurance company. Following implementation of the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA), the organization shuttered that company and now offers members Empire BlueCross BlueShield medical plans. Freelancers Union says partnering with Empire was the best way for it to offer affordable, comprehensive insurance plans that meet the ACA’s requirements.
Of the 10 available plans, 4 include free, unlimited visits to Freelancers Medical, a no co-pay primary care practice that the Union runs in Brooklyn and Manhattan and plans to expand nationwide. The Union also sells dental coverage, retirement plans and disability, liability, and term life insurance through partners.
Increasing networking opportunities through monthly in-person events and online forums is another Union initiative. The group’s Spark program, which brings freelancers face-to-face to discuss common concerns, is active in 18 cities across the country. Online, the Union hosts “Hives Groups” forums where freelancers can post jobs, ask questions, and trade tips. The Union also publishes educational resources on its site, including guides to filing taxes and creating freelance work contracts.
Ultimately, Horowitz wants the group to become cohesive and active enough that it influences elected officials and has an impact on policy. “Our job is to really help to bring gig workers together to articulate how the economy needs to be transformed for the good of us all,” she says.
Hurdlr
Washington, D.C.
Founded: 2012
Finance & Admin, Education & Training
Tagline: Simple financials for gig workers, rideshare drivers, couriers, and Airbnb hosts.
“Most people hate accounting,” notes Hurdlr CEO and cofounder, Raj Bhaskar. “I believe accounting is a major hurdle for most people and I’m passionate about wanting to make it painless for gig workers.”
Hurdlr is a finance-tracking app for independent workers that reduces the “pain” of accounting in several ways. The app’s marquee feature is an “income tax estimation engine” that incorporates tax deduction rules and rates to automatically calculate how much tax users owe. Deductions are based on several factors, including users’ driving mileage, which the app tracks through their smartphones’ GPS, and relevant expenses, such as tolls, which the app securely accesses from users’ credit card and bank accounts (with permission).
These tax estimates are updated in real-time inside Hurdlr’s app and computed on both the state and federal level. (Hurdlr customizes the calculations for all 50 states and Washington, D.C.) The idea is to show users their net income, after expenses and taxes. Hurdlr calls this figure users’ “Take Home Pay.” “Your Take Home Pay is arguably more important than your earnings because that’s what you get to keep after taxes,” says Bhaskar. “So, we show that number front and center.”
Hurdlr addresses more types of workers than other gig economy administrative apps do. The most common jobs among Hurdlr users are driving (for a variety of platforms) and hosting (for services such as Airbnb), but couriers, cleaners, and other gig workers can also use the app.
Bhaskar says all of these workers want similar features in a finance-tracking app: something that is designed “mobile-first,” multipurpose, and largely automated. “Most of these folks are on the go, trying to make a good living,” he explains. “They need something smart that doesn’t really require manual data entry, that connects all the dots versus using five separate apps.”
Bhaskar also thinks independent workers need better resources to learn about finances and taxes. “The majority of Uber drivers didn’t know they had tax obligations until they received a 1099 from Uber,” he says. Hurdlr has posted several tax guides for Airbnb hosts and Uber and other ride-share drivers on its website. “Even if you have a tax filer, they’ll make you sign papers that say you’re still responsible for all this stuff,” he points out. “So there’s quite a bit that you need to know.” (Hurdlr doesn’t actually file people’s taxes for them, but does format its data so users can export reports to aid with tax filing, either for themselves or for their accountants.)
Says Bhaskar, “We see ourselves as basically taking care of your finances until tax time, year-round.”
Karma
Los Angeles, CA
Founded: 2013
Identity & Reputation
Tagline: Your reputation anywhere.
A lot of gig economy work depends on trust, identity, and reputation. Whether you want to attract travelers to your Airbnb listing, take care of someone’s dog on DogVacay, or get paid for your tour guide services on Vayable, customers need to trust that you are who you say you are and will do what you’ve said you’ll do.
Amassing trust on a new platform takes time and can impact gig workers’ earnings. Karma gives independent workers a way to accelerate the process. The startup’s software begins by pulling data from social media profiles and peer-to-peer website reviews. Karma also looks at something called vouching, which is its homegrown recommendations system. (Karma members can write vouches for up to six other members. Vouches appear on recipients’ Karma profiles.) After analyzing a person’s social media, reviews, and vouch data, Karma calculates a numerical online reputation score and makes the score available across supported sites through a browser extension. “Instead of taking several months to build out my profile strong enough so people can begin to trust me, I can instantaneously build out my profile from all of my online interactions,” says Zach Schiff-Abrams, Karma’s CEO and cofounder.
Karma scores are meant to serve the needs of the gig economy in ways that Klout scores and LinkedIn skill endorsements don’t. As Schiff-Abrams points out, Klout is more of a social influence score than a reputation score and LinkedIn endorsements are specific to LinkedIn. In contrast, Karma scores are designed to function as reputation ratings across the gig economy.
Karma’s utility hinges on many people having Karma scores, so they can be compared. Since opening its beta in May, 6,000 people have registered for the system. Schiff-Abrams expects more people to sign on when Karma begins working directly with gig economy platforms. (Right now, the startup uses other sites’ APIs to access their review data.) Karma has teamed up with Rentable and is interested in collaborating with other platforms. Potential partners have discussed using Karma to quickly populate and augment data in their users’ profiles.
Other gig economy startups are also targeting this space, but either focus on identity verification or steer away from computing reputation as a single score. Karma doesn’t do actual identity verification. Instead, it uses social network profiles to validate a user’s identity. Identity verification is also just one portion of the Karma score. The startup’s algorithms weigh other factors, such as online reviews, more heavily than identity in its calculations.
The idea of measuring reputation as a score is something Karma plans to keep for now though the company may eventually switch to using traffic light color codes (red, yellow, green) to indicate a person’s general reputation rating.
“When you’re thinking about renting a power drill or an air mattress from somebody, you want to know whether that person is reputable or not,” says Schiff-Abrams. “Our members see this as a massive, massive opportunity for their own potential business.”
Peers
San Francisco, CA
Founded: 2013
Benefits, Healthcare & Insurance
Tagline: Making the sharing economy work for the people that power it.
Though Peers is only two years old, it has already pivoted in terms of mission and management. It launched in 2013 as an advocacy group that was closely aligned with sharing economy companies such as Airbnb. For about a year, Peers used member petitions, rallies, and op-eds to actively participate in legal and regulatory campaigns relevant to those companies.
At the time, Peers was a nonprofit organization that owned a benefit corporation. In 2014, after realizing the principal disputes about the sharing economy’s legality were being resolved, Peers shifted gears. The startup hired a new executive director (Shelby Clark), revised its mission to support independent workers’ needs more directly, and separated into two entities (a nonprofit foundation and a for-profit company) to achieve that mission. (Clark is in charge of the company; the foundation still exists, but is not currently active.)
Clark says the new Peers wants to “recreate the safety net” formerly administered through employers, but in a way that suits today’s independent workers. It’s a mission that overlaps with that of the Freelancers Union (see page 40), but Peers is targeting workers in the on-demand economy while the Union engages with a broader range of freelancers. Peers members work for a variety of gig economy platforms, the two most common of which are Airbnb and Uber.
Going forward, Peers plans to focus more specifically on providing these independent workers with benefits and insurance. Clark says benefits are where he sees the greatest need among the startup’s members. Peers already sells a homesharing liability insurance product through an insurance broker. To broaden its offerings, Peers is exploring launching a “portable benefits” platform in late 2015. The idea is to supply people with health, disability, and retirement coverage that isn’t tied to their jobs. In an attempt to “fairly distribute” costs, Peers will allow contributions from multiple payers—both workers and their employers.
Like it did with its homesharing liability insurance, Peers is partnering with carriers to provide these upcoming products and ensure they are suited for independent workers. For example, Peers plans to offer short-term disability insurance as an alternative to workers’ compensation. Clark says Peers may eventually become an insurance carrier if it is able to source insurance products at reasonable prices from traditional carriers.
“We have this great economic opportunity of people being able to earn money on their own terms, but this is all happening outside of traditional safety nets,” Clark points out. “We’re aiming to provide workers with a basic level of protection and support—if they’re sick, they’re injured, when they want to retire—so they don’t have to choose between flexibility and stability.”
SherpaShare
Mountain View, CA
Founded: 2014
Finance & Admin, Community and Organizing
Tagline: Collaborate on and manage your on-demand work.
How do you get tens of thousands of gig economy drivers to use your software regularly? For SherpaShare, the answer is to package an assortment of useful and unique tools into a single dashboard. SherpaShare, which is available in both web and app form, offers users earnings, expense, and mileage trackers as well as in-app chat messaging and city “heatmaps” that show where drivers are working. (The company’s web and mobile app offerings include most of the same tools except that the chat and heatmap features are specific to the app.) Cofounders Jianming Zhou and Ryder Pearce say they are giving gig workers the data they need to make better decisions and earn more money.
Since launching in 2014, SherpaShare has attracted 30,000 users, mostly in the U.S., but also in Australia, Canada, and Mexico. SherpaShare estimates that 10% of ride-share and delivery drivers in the U.S. use its dashboard.
Each feature in the SherpaShare dashboard addresses a problem common to gig economy drivers. (The software, which can be used by anyone who drives to make money, is particularly popular among Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and Sidecar workers.)
SherpaShare’s expense and mileage trackers are designed to help users understand their true earnings and maximize their tax write-offs, similar to Hurdlr (see page 42). People who work for Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Sidecar, or DoorDash can automatically export their trip-level earnings data to the SherpaShare dashboard for greater insights, such as how much they made per hour of driving during a particular month.
The app’s chat feature provides drivers, who typically work alone, with a sense of community. SherpaShare says it’s the only real-time chat app that caters to gig economy drivers. Drivers use the communications channel to solicit advice, trade entertaining stories about passengers, and debate proposed industry rules.
The city heatmaps show drivers where other drivers are working and the geographic areas in which they might be able to make more money. Zhou says this feature is important because gig economy platforms typically don’t share this type of real-time operational information. That leaves drivers dependent on alternative data sources, such as SherpaShare.
Zhou and Pearce plan to continue augmenting the SherpaShare dashboard and to eventually expand beyond drivers and couriers to serve other gig workers. The startup is developing ways to give users more explicit advice on how to earn more money. That information could concern which platforms to work for, what types of assignments to take and the best areas to drive. “Right now, we give drivers general real-time information via the heatmap and chat, but as we grow we want drivers to be able to more directly make decisions based on the information they see,” says Pearce.
The idea sounds similar to what Dispatcher is building—page 37. Like Dispatcher, SherpaShare views itself as a middleman that links gig workers with companies. Says Pearce, “We have the supply of workers; they are starting to come to us first. And then from there we can more efficiently connect them to the companies.”
Shift Messenger
San Francisco, CA
Founded: 2014
Job Discovery & Scheduling
Tagline: Messaging app for hourly workers.
When hourly workers, such as Starbucks baristas or Home Depot store associates, can’t work their scheduled shifts, they usually have to frantically text and call their colleagues looking for a substitute. Shift Messenger gives these workers a tool purpose-built for swapping shifts.
Workers can use the messaging app to “post” shifts that they need covered to their colleagues. Recipients get push notifications on their phones and can see details about the shift, such as its time and location, who posted it, and attached comments. If a recipient wants to take on the posted shift, he or she simply presses a button in the app that says, “Cover.”
The streamlined process is designed to reduce the inconvenience of swapping shifts and the time associated with the task. Austin Vedder, Shift Messenger’s cofounder and CEO, says users can post a shift within 30 seconds and that most shifts get covered within 30 minutes.
Users can cut this response time even further if they “broadcast” their shifts to large groups. The feature, which is geared toward people who work at chains with multiple locations, publicizes available shifts to chain employees located within 25 miles. (To give users control over their broadcasts, the app shows a list of eligible stores and lets users select which stores to target.) Vedder says the broadcasting feature is useful to companies that are phasing out controversial practices such as “on-call” scheduling, which forces employees to be available to work on specific days without actually guaranteeing them work on those days. “Our approach is more volunteer-driven,” he says.
Shift Messenger’s app also allows one-to-one messaging between managers and employees and photo-sharing, which managers often use to distribute pictures of work schedules to employees. Like shift postings, these features aim to facilitate communication in workplaces where people don’t have their own desks, offices, or company email addresses. “It’s a messaging app that’s designed to solve the types of problems an hourly worker faces,” says Vedder. “In a lot of ways, we see ourselves as like Slack or Hipchat, but designed for an hourly work environment.”
Retail and restaurant employees comprise the bulk of Shift Messenger users, but the app is suited to any group that works shifts at the same physical location (or in the same general vicinity), such as nurses and police officers. Thousands of workplace groups are active on Shift Messenger, primarily in the U.S., but also in Canada.
Vedder says his overall goal is to help hourly workers manage their work lives by connecting them to their workplace communities. He wants to forge these ties while shielding workers’ privacy. Some hourly workplaces use Facebook groups to trade shifts, but doing so requires workers to share their Facebook contact information with a number of people they don’t know well. In contrast, Shift Messenger is organized around private workplace groups that are vetted by a group administrator, who is typically the manager of a particular workplace location. The group members can see each other’s names but not phone numbers or any other sensitive information.
Stride Health
San Francisco, CA
Founded: 2013
Benefits, Healthcare & Insurance
Tagline: Benefits built for independents. Simple tools to help you save money and manage your healthcare.
Stride Health initially attracted attention for its health coverage recommendation engine, which matches independent workers with insurance plans, sort of like a Kayak.com for health, but with more intelligence and greater guidance for users.
The engine was designed to help consumers in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, which opened up government healthcare subsidies to independent workers (based on income) and made it compulsory to sign up for insurance (or be fined). The law prodded gig workers to get insurance—or change their insurance—but many people found the selection and enrollment process frustrating. “[If you’re a gig worker] it’s very hard to understand what insurance you actually need, to pair with this independent lifestyle,” says Stride Health CEO and cofounder Noah Lang. “You have to know, what do you need for your health status and what do you need for your income and risk profile?”
Stride Health’s solution was to create a Health Insurance Recommendation Algorithm that delivers personalized suggestions based on a customer’s medical conditions, prescription drugs, financial standing, and favorite doctors, among other factors. Instead of spending hours wading through healthcare.gov, people can go to Stride Health’s mobile web app, punch in a few details about their medical histories, needs, and income, and receive a single recommended plan within minutes.
If customers don’t like Stride Health’s initial proposal, they can opt to view all of the company’s applicable plans. The startup earns commissions on purchases, but it makes suggestions without regard to compensation and will enroll people in whatever plans are the best fit.
To help people compare plans, Stride Health also shows estimated annual costs (including out-of-pocket fees and applicable government subsidies), the number of nearby doctors who accept the plan and the maximum amount a person will have to pay for care in a year, given a worst-case scenario. After a person enrolls in a plan via Stride Health, the startup’s “Member Experience” team acts as an on-call coverage advisor and will help users find care, price their options for care, and resolve disputes with their insurance companies.
Lang likens the level of personalization to the user experience that consumers enjoy when they book trips online or select movies to stream from Netflix. The startup has 230 carrier partners in its marketplace and separately partners with all the state exchanges and healthcare.gov. Coverage is currently available in 39 states and will expand to all 50 states by November 1, 2015.
Lang views any person who generates independent income as a potential customer. That includes everyone from freelance “creatives” to small business owners, but Lang says gig workers represent a “large portion” of Stride Health’s user-base. The startup has partnerships with Uber, Postmates, and TaskRabbit that give it preferential access to their workers. (Uber has embedded access to Stride Health within its drivers’ app, TaskRabbit includes it in its “Tasker Perks” program and Postmates promotes it to its couriers via emails.)
Stride Health’s next phase will protect independent workers’ income streams as well as their health. Bolstered by $13 million in Series A funding, the startup is expanding to cover a broader suite of benefits. In August 2015, it introduced a prescription discount plan and a doctor search tool, and in September 2015, it launched a “care-planning” product that pairs members with in-network primary care practitioners to reduce their out-of-pocket health costs. Several “income-protection” products are in the works, as well. Says Lang, “We’re the HR team for people who don’t have one.”