The Way Work Should Work

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Today's guest is Stacy Brown-Philpot, who serves as the CEO of TaskRabbit, a marketplace that matches freelance labor with local demand, allowing consumers to find immediate help for everyday tasks. Stacy is also on the board of HP and Nordstrom, and most recently was announced as a founding member of SoftBank’s 100-million dollar growth opportunity, Growth Fund, dedicated to investing in black and minority-owned businesses. Prior to joining—prior to becoming CEO of TaskRabbit in 2013, Stacy spent 10 years at Google, and before that, she was at PwC and Goldman Sachs. Amazing track record of innovation and working across tech. So Adam, would love to hop into the next part.

Adam Jackson: Yeah, so we're especially excited to talk to Stacy today. She's one of the original pioneers of internet-enabled peer-to-peer marketplaces. Personally, as one of TaskRabbit’s first and most-active users, and still a pretty active one, I've always been really impressed by your vision around the future of work and how people are organized. In full disclosure, Stacy is also an investor in our project here called Braintrust. So Stacy, welcome to the show.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: One thing you probably didn't know, I think it was maybe a couple of years before your timing, when when Leah was getting it off the ground-up, was that in the early days of TaskRabbit, Leah actually knew me by name, because I was this super user in San Francisco. So apparently, I was top five in all of San Francisco.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: That’s awesome. 

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: And it's been a fantastic service for those of us that—I always refer to myself as productively lazy. So I can accomplish so many things, and one of the things I always use TaskRabbit for—my wife made fun of me about this in the very beginning—was to create forcing functions for myself. I'm actually perfectly capable of cleaning out my garage or organizing that closet that I've never organized. But if I hire somebody that comes to my house and actually helps me to do it, the chances of it getting done go through the roof. 

Stacy Brown-Philpot: There you go. 

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Adam and I have both been long term power users of TaskRabbit from the very early days, so it’s exciting to see how you guys have grown since then.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Well, thank you for being customers. We hope we've changed your life in some meaningful way through TaskRabbit.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Absolutely. And it probably kept a lot of marriages together as a result of not having to put together IKEA furniture.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Our mission is to make everyday life easier for everyday people, so we certainly made furniture assembly a whole lot easier for a lot of people.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: You've had a super interesting career, from management consulting, finance, and then into tech at Google. Talk a little bit about your path of becoming CEO of TaskRabbit, and what appealed to you to move from a place like Google into being CEO of a localized labor marketplace.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Yeah, I started my career in finance, so I was an accountant by training. I actually worked in public accounting, and then later in investment banking before Business School, and after Business School went to Google. I've always been interested in how numbers and Math, and how things work. I've also been interested in how businesses grow and scale. I was fortunate to join Google early on. They had then a thousand people, so wasn't super tiny, and it grew to 50,000 over the nine years that I was there. During that time, I started my career as a financial analyst and grew into more senior roles, moved into operations, and went to run our team in India, and across all of that built my leadership skills as someone who could manage, initially, 14 people, to over a thousand people. I fell in love with a lot of things. One is just growing and scaling teams, helping people develop and grow and become their best selves as individuals, and building global companies. I worked on the consumer side of Google for a lot of my career, which is all the products you know and love, like Chrome and Gmail and Maps, and all of those things. I just have this penchant for consumer-facing products and services. So a lot of my career was sort of building myself as a leader, falling in love with just consumer products and services, and doing it at a global level. It wasn't easy to leave Google. Google was an amazing experience with a powerful mission, but I fell in love with the mission of TaskRabbit, which is to make everyday life easier for everyday people, and that mission is what drew me to take this new company that's in a new space around the future of work, and grow it to a global scale.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Wow. Adam and I actually—we met over 10 years ago, as marketplace entrepreneurs, and we joked that we met while we would cry into our beers together about the challenges of essentially building two companies at once, and building a marketplace which serves both sides, and so, Adam and I have both been long term marketplace founders and then investors. One of the things I don't think a lot of people realize about a marketplace like TaskRabbit is actually the other dimensions that you have to a localized marketplace, so you have this dimension of geographic constraint, then you also have a dimension of category—meaning you're in 30 different categories, so you have to have a density of demand and supply across all of these different categories, and then you also have this other dimension of time. And so I'd love for you to kind of talk about those dimensions, and I think this is probably an area of your background in finance that really comes into play to build liquidity in a marketplace. So let's get your take on those challenges, and maybe how you've navigated them as CEO.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Yeah, that’s it. I love that framing of geography, category, and time; and what all of that does is, you end up—it forces you to build micro markets. Really small micro local markets and in the end, we look at the health of the market by zip code. We're literally down to the zip code of “Do we have enough taskers to provide these types of services in this zip code at this time for the customer?” But it wasn't easy to get to that place because geography means—we were operating in nine cities when I started, and Leah started the company in one city in Austin, right, and we had to make that market work before we could expand to new markets. And even expanding into new markets, there's a lot of similarities, at least in our marketplace that are, “Yes, this works in every market.” The quality of the taskers, for example. But there are some things that just don't work. A lot of people take public transportation to most tasks in New York. And so, a lot of tasks can't be done if someone has a car. In London, where we ultimately want, there's a tax to drive your car into the city in certain areas in London, and so people will hire taskers because they didn't want to have to drive their car. So there's all the nuances of a local market that have to be applied to adapt to a marketplace. So that's one thing that you can't just blanket the market with the same thing. Because nuances completely matter.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Huge, huge respect for what you do there—building a localized labor marketplace with all those different variables, and at Braintrust, we connect global enterprises with technical talent, so you have category, but geography really isn't an issue. And also, someone showing up at 6pm is not really an issue, so you have these other dimensions which make the business, both really valuable but also very challenging, so huge, huge respect for what you guys are doing to be able to scale that business.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Yeah, the category piece is interesting. we used to offer TaskRabbit to everybody for anything. And that was really hard because—

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: I remember that time.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Because, you know, with all of the demand, we just didn't have enough people. It was very hard to predict, and so we shifted the model in 2014 to limit the number of categories, and really focused on making sure we had high quality supply in those categories. Even still, it's not always clear what I can get done on TaskRabbit, but we know that now we provide services for people in and around the home, so you put your head around that and find something—find the Tasker who can help you.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: I remember when you guys did that. I remember that's actually when I first met you. It was actually when you were consolidating categories to build more liquidity and density in those categories. That seems like when the business started to really take off.  I remember that change, both as a user, and also that's the first time we met.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Very good.

Adam Jackson: It's actually a good segue. One of the things I've always been impressed by with TaskRabbit is—and it's quite an issue these days, maybe even more so now—is sort of this topic of ethics of marketplaces. You see other platforms like Uber and DoorDash which have been criticized probably fairly so for effectively squashing the minimum wage and removing some worker rights, and keeping tips, and crazy stuff like that. What's your view on responsibilities of marketplaces to their users?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I love the phrase ethics. TaskRabbit is a true two-sided marketplace, which means we really want to balance what our clients need and want to get done, and how they want to engage with the marketplace with what our Taskers need and want to get done in terms of how they find work on the platform. And our mission is to make everybody's everyday life easier, including our Taskers, and to make that happen, we've got to make sure they earn a meaningful income, that they have the resources that they need to be successful on the platform. So, even when COVID-19 hit, we provided PPE to taskers for free, at no cost, because we wanted them to be safe, if they were going to go out and Task. By doing that, we really put our taskers at the center of the story, and make sure that even as a client has an experience, experiences with TaskRabbit the platform but it's also with the Tasker who's showing up and providing that experience to you—it's a relationship. We're encouraging them to think about it that way. I think that that solves the question of ethics, like this is a People Power platform that's connecting individuals. When you—when we talk about it that way, there's a humanity that comes in and it forces us as a company to have the ethics, have the approach, have the processes, to make sure that everybody on the platform is treated fairly.

Adam Jackson: Stacy, I guess I've never heard you quoted, saying, “When this business will really take off is when we can replace the Taskers with robots.” To famously quote, someone else in the [inaudible].

Stacy Brown-Philpot: There are just some things the robots can't do. Not yet, but maybe.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: They don't have these for IKEA furniture right, twisting the little keys, yeah.

Adam Jackson: This is one of those categories right. This is like people helping people, and I just don't see that changing. Keeping it along this thread, what responsibility do you think marketplaces have in promoting diversity? What are some concrete things that other marketplaces can do on this diversity and inclusion effort?

Did we lose you, Stacy?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: We froze there for a second.

Adam Jackson: Yeah, yeah. Am I frozen?

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Yeah.

Adam Jackson: Or she just hates that—my question.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: What a perfect question to freeze on.

Sometimes you can freeze in questions but this is like, that’s so funny.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Sorry. Got disconnected. I don’t know what happened.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: We're just joking. We're like, what a perfect question to freeze on.

Adam Jackson: Did you—did you hear my question?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I heard the question. I was already talking and in a second, like—

Adam Jackson: [inaudible]

Stacy Brown-Philpot: You asked a question about diversity, and let me answer that. I was going to—started by saying, diversity is paramount now, especially now, more than ever, and we've always thought about that and how we built the TaskRabbit marketplace. We've always wanted it to reflect the population in which we operate. It really should. And we wanted to make sure that underserved populations have opportunities to Task on TaskRabbit, that might not have otherwise had them. One of the benefits of being a marketplace is that people can see your ratings and your reviews, and they can select a Tasker based on the quality of the work that they've done, and that provides a lot of equality in ways that other employment opportunities might not. We started—go ahead.

Adam Jackson: Sorry, sorry, you go. 

Stacy Brown-Philpot: We started TaskRabbit for good a few years ago, and one of our projects has actually been working with workforce development agencies to identify populations of people that might not consider TaskRabbit as a way to return to work if you're homeless or as a way to start in your career if you need a new start. And so, we've extended the work that we're doing to try to increase the number of Taskers from those populations as well, and that's another element of diversity that often gets overlooked, but is also extremely important to building economic equity in our country in our world.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Some of these other marketplaces—I know that Airbnb looked at this, which was the idea of blinding matches. So like not showing profile photos, not showing names. Have you guys looked into that at all or do you have any thoughts and perspective about how marketplaces can make matches but not provide or remove potential bias in the match.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: We are constantly looking at ways to address bias on our platform, and I'm aware of the things that Airbnb has done. Some of the things that we've looked at, and we're reiterating, we're constantly testing and iterating our blind matches, and a lot of times when you get an IKEA furniture assembly, you don't know who the Tasker is, that's gonna show up. But you just know they are an expert on the things that you bought, but when you actually look at what you buy, what's in your cart, we decide who the Tasker is going to be who’s going to show up at that time. Most customers, they just want the job done. and they trusted our platform, they trusted TaskRabbit

—really tackle in a significant way, fortunately.

Adam Jackson:You took my next question out of my mouth. I was wondering about which systems you were using to make sure that works. That's brilliant. And so, sort of wrapping up on the marketplace topic, let's talk about the future of marketplaces, You've been scaling TaskRabbit here for a number of years through the IKEA acquisition. How's that going? I know they've kind of let you keep the reins and run with it. Well, what does the future look like for TaskRabbit?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: We have really been thrilled with having IKEA as a partner to us. We launched a partnership with them in one store in London, and December of 2016, a year after we met the team, and that was successful, and it led to the acquisition, and now we operate TaskRabbit in 6 countries. What's really worked is that both companies have very powerful missions. Our mission is to make everyday life easier for everyday people, theirs is to create a better everyday life for the many people. They wrote theirs over 75 years ago, ours over 10 years ago, but the alignment there is so powerful. We also have shared values of caring about the community in which we operate. It makes it easy for us to truly operate as a two-sided marketplace, even though we're this sort of independent entity within IKEA. That gave us a nice grounding for how we really accelerate what we do. They didn't buy our company just to let us sort of continue to do what we're doing, they really wanted to accelerate the opportunity for IKEA customers to have a better experience, and also attract more IKEA customers to IKEA who might not otherwise come, or might not otherwise add something to their cart because they don't want to have to put it together. We've seen our business go from less than 2% IKEA furniture assembly to over 20% IKEA furniture assembly, even as the business is—our business has grown by more than 50% every year, which is amazing. We're very proud of the new customers who are trying TaskRabbit for the first time through IKEA, and we're very proud to be in a position where we are creating a more convenient and high quality experience for IKEA customers.

Adam Jackson: It really strikes me as—so many acquisitions, as, if you've been in the valley long enough, they just don't make sense or even if they sound like they make sense, they don't work out. I've been on both sides of those. This is one we were really truly—wow, that made a lot of sense and actually worked out, so congrats on that.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Thank you. Thank you.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: So Stacy, can we transition a little bit more on to the investing side, and maybe the future of marketplaces there. A couple of weeks ago, SoftBank announced that they will create this 100-million dollar opportunity Growth Fund focused on investing in companies led by people of color, and with less than 1% of venture capital going to African American founders, clearly this is an important mission and one really the need in serious funding to start to balance.

What are the areas that you're excited about, kind of helping—you’re on the board of that as one of two people helping to shepherd that organization. Can you talk a little bit about areas that you think are maybe underappreciated or undercovered marketplace opportunities, potentially in groups of, in ethnic minorities or groups of color that are building businesses and categories that maybe, don't seem obvious to the classic Silicon Valley venture community.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: So we're still in the very early stages of building out the fund, and it came together because of the moment that we're in, the time that we're in, and the need to take action. Our focus is on Black, LatinX, and Native American founders and entrepreneurs who are building tech and tech-enabled services of which marketplaces will fit. A lot of what we're trying to do is look across the country, in the US, to identify those founders who might not, otherwise, have an opportunity or have access to Silicon Valley. And while I don't have a lot of the details, I can tell you that, that's what the priority is. I do believe that marketplaces and other tech-enabled services are the future for our economy, when you look at the number of jobs that have been lost, a lot of them are service-oriented jobs, and then an economy is suffering because of it. We deeply understand the importance of those services. We also deeply understand the importance of marketplaces like ours that are giving people the opportunity to become independent contractors who can now have a flexible way of working. So there's meaningful work on TaskRabbit. The average hourly rate is $35 in the US. It's flexible and the importance of flexibility is only going to change, even as we navigate our life post-COVID-19, so, if you think about essential services, the platforms and marketplaces that are enabled using tech-enabled services will be essential services.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Yep. Yep, absolutely. Stacy, you invested in Braintrust early on, when Adam and I were just kind of coming up with this idea of deciding to dedicate—to put everything else aside and to dedicate all of our time and energy to build this. What caught your attention? Why did you get involved?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: As someone who knows marketplaces deeply, it was clear that this was a piece of the market that was ripe for the opportunity to really disaggregate how things are done to provide companies with a way to access talent and to do it in a way that gives people the opportunity they wouldn't otherwise get. That's a marketplace and that's what you do. So now, that opportunity was there, but it was also the two of you—the team. And in the very beginning, that's what it comes down to—it is how passionate is the team about what you're doing, how committed are you, and how much grit do you have around taking those steps that no one else wants to take.

I often tell people early on in TaskRabbit’s time when there was just Leah, there was like this desert that she was in and nobody else was there and she was walking and nobody knew where she was going but she knew, and then when I joined, I kind of saw where we were going, but it was unclear, and it wasn't clear there was an oasis with some water in that direction, but we were still gonna go there because we believe that the Oasis was there with the water, and we got to it and then we got to the next one and the next one and we made it, and that's the, that's sort of grit that an early stage founder has to have—it is the belief that the Oasis is there, and that they'll get there.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: I mean, listen. Thank you so much. You know, Adam and I, we joke about this often, which is that like both of us started a few companies, invested probably 70 companies together, both had our own venture funds, and when we came with the idea to start Braintrust and the idea was basically to create the first user-owned, user-controlled marketplace. We were laughed at at Sand Hill. We did split out 80-100 meetings, and literally people said, if you want to do anything else, we'll fund it. Just don't do this. And this is also like in the height of blockchain winter, where basically not a single person wanting to invest in anything that even smelled the blockchain. And so it's just always interesting to see the people that are there with you early on and believe in your vision, even when it sounds crazy, and when when other people are laughing outside of their offices, you backed us and I think, I think we're going to make you look even smarter than you already look.

Adam Jackson: Maybe switching gears a little bit. Stacy, you just started touching on this in your previous comment. I wanted to drill a little further. So you've got this extremely unique viewpoint, especially, we have right now we're going through this pandemic in this economic distress, you've got this viewpoint of running one of the largest labor marketplaces, and sitting on the board of Nordstrom, one of the country's largest retailers. Two sectors. Absolutely disproportionately affected by the pandemic. What has that been like, first of all?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: It's been interesting because even HP is disproportionately affected, too, so I can give you kind of the arc of the story across all three. Because they do a lot of manufacturing—HP does a lot of manufacturing in China. They were disproportionately affected, even when we in the US thought this was just a China thing. We thought this was just a thing that's not going to hit us, because it impacts their supply chain. And while obviously they had inventory, there was a need as a board to think about the forecast and can we meet customer sales, even if this pandemic never comes, or spreads anywhere else, we got a supply chain challenge. And so the global nature of how we operate businesses, and the dependencies that we have—or the interdependencies that we have across the globe. If a pandemic hits one country, it affects everybody, almost immediately. And since then, HP—we've worked out the supply chain, there’s still some challenges but we've worked it out—are facing a surge in laptop sales, because everybody is working from home and more importantly, kids are at home, and they all need computers to get onto their Zoom and whatever school systems that they were on. That was a huge piece of their business that, historically, people kind of mostly focused on their printing business, but they saw and said, wait a minute PCs are big now because everybody's at home. He needs to sell all the devices, and now we need to buy a printer to go with it, and in fact, no, wait, we need a home system. We just never thought we needed that before. So  what's really changed.  the dynamic of how they think about their business, and then they've gone into 3d printing face shields and equipment for the face shields around all the millions of people who need them. And so it created a new business opportunity. So I think that's the story for a lot of businesses out there, which is like, there's something that hurt us, there's something that we're just reacting to, and then there's new opportunities that are out there. Nordstrom, similarly, has really been hurt by going to zero, meaning all the stores are closed, but they have a significant business online already through their app, and so they obviously saw a surge of customers shift to shopping online and shopping on the app, which means they had to kind of refactor their supply chain to get goods from another—you might have gone to the store but now we're going to ship this to another state.

Adam Jackson: Well, I’m a big trunk club guy and I know I'm using that much more.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Yes, you are. So there you go. This is the exciting part of it, and it's devastating to see the looting and rioting that’s happened in a lot of their stores and we're as a board, we're all very hurt by that, and obviously empathized with the people who are truly trying to peacefully protest and help the company kind of navigate through it, but there's a lot of new opportunities that are coming through them because of the change in the way that customers are shopping, the types of things that we wear when we work from home that we don't wear when we go to work. There's a lot of opportunities coming from that. I'll finish with the TaskRabbit arc, which was once we found out that we were going to shelter-in-place, obviously our business is going to be impacted because people go inside your home to provide the tasks. We had to figure out how to adapt and what to do. Our first priority was the protection and the safety of the community. We gave our Taskers the information that they needed, and some of them still wanted to Task, but we encouraged them to do contact list tasks. We obviously saw pickup in those types of tasks, especially deliveries, around groceries, errands, picking up prescriptions and things like that from pharmacies, and as things started to open up, more and more people started to stay home longer than they thought, barbeque grills, trampolines, exercise equipment, things that needs to be assembled, outside home office equipment. So, we've seen a new surge of business coming into those categories that otherwise wouldn't have seen that kind of volume, and I think that creates a huge opportunity for us. I think all of us have an arc somewhere, and every company is, I don't know where they are on that arc. They may be still at the hard part which is like, “Well, our business has been decimated in this way and hopefully we all emerge on the arc,” and what we found is new opportunity because of where we are, and this is what we're going to do next.

Adam Jackson: Such an incredible viewpoint, you've got there. Thank you for sharing that. That's fascinating.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Adam I talked about this a lot, which is that some of these trends were already underway. The trend towards remote work, the trend towards distributed teams, the trend towards offline to online—trends were already in play, it just got accelerated by a decade in three months. Yes. In February, we go and talk to a big enterprise and they say we need everyone co-located. Now, no one could say that. And that's just one simple example on how they access talent, but we've seen it kind of across the board with companies shifting more of their business to e-commerce from traditional retail. So, I think, exactly, exactly what you're saying.

I want to shift into a fun little lightning round, where we do just one-sentence, quick answers, the  first things that come to your head. First is, what have you learned about yourself during shelter-in-place?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I miss being around people a whole lot.

Adam Jackson: Amen. People other than our families.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I noticed when I describe myself as an introvert often, and I am an introvert, but there's something about going into a room with other humans and we’re breathing the same air that I just—in working together—that I just miss.

Adam Jackson: Yeah. Um, so the old way—what's an old way of working, pre-COVID component of working, that you hope never comes back?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Traveling for two-day conferences.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Amen.

Adam Jackson: Hard to argue with that.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: All right, so, Silicon Valley has always been this incredibly dense concentration of talent and capital and innovation, and so much of it is working in offices in this tiny kind of little 30 to 40 mile circumference. Post-COVID, Silicon Valley on the way up or on the way down?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: On the way up.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: Why?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: This is still a place where innovation happens. And I sit on the governor's task force to reopen the state, and as a lot of people across the private sector, public sector, have discussions to really support the conversation for how we make these decisions, and it is amazing to me that the people in the private sector, who represented from Silicon Valley tech—the ideas that we have are forward-thinking. We may not physically be here in Silicon Valley, but the mentality of moving forward, and being forward-thinking is something that is in us as people, and what drew us to these types of work environments, and I don't think we'll lose that.

Adam Jackson: That's—it's almost a contrarian viewpoint right now. I mean, people are so down in the Bay Area right now.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Well, it’s expensive. People will move, and I'm sure a lot of your employees are, right. We want to live somewhere else that's cheaper. And so that's a reason to be disheartened about the future of Silicon Valley, but if we think about the essence of what this place is really about. When I grew up in Detroit, I had heard about California, and Stanford, and Silicon Valley, and it was this place where all these ideas came from. And I want nothing more than for Silicon Valley to be back to continue to be that place where ideas can come from. Now, ideas will come from everywhere else, all over the country, but I don't think we'll lose that part. People will move, though. Definitely.

Adam Jackson: I tend to agree. I mean, there's got to be a place for the Larian Circus and the Elon's of the world to land, and that's been Stanford, right, and the country in our society is better for it. I think that they came here and as opposed to somewhere else.

Not next, Stacy, if you could fast forward any specific business, not necessarily by name, just the function of the business by five years, what would it be and why.?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I would say, elderly care. If you think about what's happening right now, care for—and as we grow up as a generation for elderly, and our children, we become sandwiched. We just haven't really figured out how to do that well. And so I would accelerate how we think about air, how we think about care for elderly, how we think about care for our children, so that those of us who are now building companies, running companies, doing things, can really truly manage that. And I'm sitting in the center of it. I'm watching it and there just aren't really many good solutions.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: 

Feels like an amazing marketplace opportunity, still like hasn't even really scratched the surface there. Both of those have to be, like, two of the single largest labor markets in the world. And they’ve really haven't been solved yet so [inaudible].

Stacy Brown-Philpot: There’s so much equity between how much the care providers make with the value that they provide to the people receiving the service.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: The perfect opportunity for disintermediating all of that margin that's sitting between there, and actually provide a better quality of service for a fraction of the cost, which is like, I think that’s part of what Silicon Valley is all about, it’s building technology to do those things that typically hierarchies have done, and done in really poor fashion. [inaudible] also said that the old model of elderly care moves from a hierarchy to a network, where everyone gets more value.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Yes.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: All right, what's the company that you wish you invested in the future of work besides Zoom and Braintrust.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I was an early adopter of Amazon mom. And that doesn't even exist anymore, and I wish I had bought the stock when it was with Amazon mom, which became Amazon Prime. Wasn't that—nobody even knows what Amazon mom is—but I remember being—this girl, they're like, “Do you want us to give you a discount and free delivery if you sign up?” And I was like, “Sure, I'm a new mom!” and I didn't [inaudible].

Adam Jackson: That's a good one. A final one, here, Stacy. This one's from one of my favorite people, Peter Teal. What's something you believe strongly to be true that's a very unpopular viewpoint today?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I would—I think what's becoming popular now, and is—the topic of racism. And as a black woman, I have experienced racism my whole life. And while I've never had anybody put their knee on my neck, physically, it's happened in other ways. And so, the acknowledgement that racism against black people is a thing, it is present. It is present among us. It is systemic, it is very real to me, it has been real to me my whole life, and it's not popular to feel it, and especially if you're not black. Definitely not popular to acknowledge it and to feel it. But in order for us to heal and move forward, we have to feel it. We have to grieve it, and then we have to find a way to heal and move forward. So, I'm encouraged that what's happening with the protests and the actions that are happening as a result of them are going to result in some real meaningful change. And I hope that it really does.

Adam Jackson: I mean, that kid—the murder of Mr Floyd. It feels different this time, it feels more historic from my standpoint, which doesn't mean anything, but does it feel different from your standpoint?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: It doesn't feel different for me. Um, it is—it's happened to so many people like him, it just was never televised that way. What feels different is the number of people, and the diversity of people around the world who are standing up and saying that this is wrong. And that feels different to my mother. I can't say me because I was a little kid back in the ‘60s, but when I talk to her. She's like, she’s like no, that part—that part is different. We were alone in the ‘60s, and now, everybody is standing up, and that's what's different. And that's good.

Adam Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. This is my last one, I'm just going to slip in here. When can we see you run for governor of California?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I am like a baby, because in our task force, I'm still learning vocabulary. I would say like businesses and our company, and they're, okay, so the private sector. Oh, okay. Got it. Let me learn my ABCs, first, okay. [inaudible] something else.

Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski: You got two votes here, two votes. [inaudible] right now.

Adam Jackson: I imagine there's millions more where that came from. It's nothing against Newsome, I guess, but, boy, you'd be a hell of a leader. Just putting it out there. Anyway, thank you, Stacy, so much, for being here. This was such a treat to have you on the show and hear your amazing experience in this incredible perch you sit from and seeing how things are working right now.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Thank you so much.

Adam Jackson: Where can people reach you and find out more about you?

Stacy Brown-Philpot: Ah, LinkedIn. I'm faster on LinkedIn.

Adam Jackson: Yes, we're big LinkedIn fans.That's a post-COVID thing too, right. LinkedIn [inaudible] thing now, right.

Stacy Brown-Philpot: I more on LinkedIn more now, than ever!

Adam Jackson: Us too.

All right. Okay, awesome. Okay, we’ll clip the show right there.