Freelance Forward 2020: The U.S. Independent Workforce Report
COVID-19 pandemic drives influx of young, highly-skilled, first-time freelancers seeking alternate career opportunities
- Freelancers are increasingly high-skilled: 50% of freelancers provide skilled services such as computer programming, marketing, IT, and business consulting, up from 45% in 2019.
- More professionals are freelancing full-time: The share of independent professionals who earn a living freelancing full time has increased 8 percentage points to 36% since 2019.
- Amid a global recession, the freelance workforce remains an essential pillar of the U.S. economy: Freelancers contributed $1.2 trillion dollars to the U.S. economy in annual earnings – a 22% increase since 2019.
- For those age 55+, freelancing helps to address financial needs as they grow older. 65% of Boomers who freelance say that independent work is a good way to transition into retirement.
- The composition of the freelance workforce is getting younger: 50% of Gen Z workers (age 18-22), 44% of Millennials (age 23-38), 30% of Gen X (age 39-54), and 26% of Boomers (age 55+) freelanced.
- Conversely, 12% of the US workforce began freelancing during the pandemic for the first time. Of those that started:
- 48% already see it as both a full time and long-term career opportunity
- Although 81% of freelancers say their college education is useful to the work they do now, of those with a 4-year college education, 65% wish they had instead obtained a 2-year degree and supplemented their education with online training.
- 54% of freelancers say soft skills like communication and people skills are very important to their work.
- 86% of freelancers say that the best days are ahead for freelancing.
The man behind Latin America’s “anti-bank”
Key Insights:
- With a valuation of $10 billion and more than 26 million users spread across Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, the Brazilian startup is the largest digital bank in the world.
- Its operating costs are less than those of Brazil’s oligarchic big five banks: Itaú, Santander, Bradesco, Banco do Brasil, and Caixa Econômica Federal.
- Nubank’s software development is done in-house.
- Users can open accounts, get credit lines, and pay bills on their smartphones, without setting foot in a bank branch or signing physical paperwork.
- Vélez started Nubank in 2013.
- Nubank raised $820 million across seven funding rounds
- The company collects a massive amount of information on its customers: 10,000 data points on each person.
- Vélez financed part of his undergraduate tuition at Stanford with a cow he bought at age 12 with money he saved from birthdays and summer jobs.
- Fundamentally, the path for Nubank was, Let’s do something that actually makes sense for Latin America. Let’s tackle a real problem.
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Financial services are complex because the banks want to keep it that way. That means powerful and profitable banks on one end and unempowered consumers on the other. Our core purpose is to break complexity and empower people.
How Roku Built Itself Into a Major Gatekeeper in Premium Streaming
Key Insights:
- So how did Roku, with a market cap of around $18 billion, get the same bargaining leverage as Amazon — a colossus worth more than $1.6 trillion?
- Of Roku’s 43 million total active accounts at the end of the second quarter of 2020, about 95% are in the United States..
- Today, Roku has more than twice the number of Comcast’s residential TV subscribers, which stood at 19.5 million as of the end of June 2020.
- “What you’re seeing Roku become is more than just an aggregation platform. They look closer to a gatekeeper, like cable TV companies used to be.”
- This year’s COVID stay-at-home orders have only accelerated the migration of consumer viewing from traditional TV to streaming.
- “Roku did something you almost never see in tech: They executed a pivot from being a hardware company to a services business,”
- “It’s incredibly hard to do. Even Apple’s struggling with it.”
- Amazon’s Fire TV and Google’s Android TV outpace Roku outside the U.S.
How Covid-19 is impacting the flow of people, information, goods, and money
Key Insights:
- The US is going from asking “what is Covid-19?” to asking “what happens after Covid-19?”.
- Covid-19 has disrupted something at the very core of our economy, our communities, our very society: flow.
- There is a concept called circular flow used to model how goods and services move between different agents (or decision makers) in a closed system.
- Without movement, the agents can’t interact with one another.
- Without flow, the system or economy stagnates and breaks down.
- And that’s exactly what Covid-19 is doing to our communities, our economy, and our society. It’s disrupting flow.
- The circular flow of four large categories: people, goods, information, and money.
- The new technique he developed and showed how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
- Malik developed a method to study paleoclimate time series, sets of data that tell us about past climates using indirect observations.
- By measuring the presence of a particular isotope in stalagmites from a cave in South Asia, scientists were able to develop a record of monsoon rainfall in the region for the past 5,700 years.
- There are several theories about why the Indus Valley Civilization declined — including invasion by nomadic Indo-Aryans and earthquakes — but climate change appears to be the most likely scenario.
- His analysis showed there was a major shift in monsoon patterns just before the dawn of this civilization and that the pattern reversed course right before it declined, indicating it was in fact climate change that caused the fall.
- The full text of the study is published in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science.