Change the Game for Frontline Employees

The majority of human societies are transactional, meaning access to generally agreed upon human rights like sustenance, shelter, safety, community, education, healthcare, and self-governance depends upon one's ability to generate economic value and purchase access to those things. Depending on your point of view, this may be a triumph or a tragedy, but we can all agree that more human rights for more humans is a good thing. Thus, we're working to get previously disempowered people more access to economic power.

Irrespective of your overarching economic or political philosophy, it's undeniable that markets are one of the most durable and impactful technologies in human history. They are not, however, infallible. Like any technology, markets are often under-regulated, mismanaged, or just plain broken. History would indicate that the best way (excluding government intervention) to fix those breakages is to change markets from within with profit-generating, self-sustaining businesses. Thus, we're restructuring markets with a for-profit company.

Human behavior and economic markets are driven, in the most fundamental terms, by the pursuit of incentives. To fight economic disempowerment, though, we need the players who DO have economic power (typically the owners of businesses) to share it with those who don't (typically workers). Generosity doesn't scale -- at a population level, humans and businesses can't be relied on to consistently practice individual values like fairness, instead they follow their incentives. Thus, we're achieving impact at scale by aligning incentives in the market with the outcomes we want.

This industry offers an unparalleled opportunity to generate incremental value: 80+% of global commerce still happens in physical, brick-and-mortar environments. It offers an incomparable volume of workers to economically empower: retail, restaurant, and hospitality jobs comprise more than a 3rd of the US workforce, with a shocking percentage living below the poverty line. And it is currently experiencing a once-in-a-generation period of flux: in the wake of the COVID pandemic, severe labor shortages, supply chain collapse, and the continued encroachment of e-commerce, the entire industry is forced to rethink how it does business. Thus, we're targeting brick-and-mortar retail, restaurants, and hospitality as the best bang-for-buck industry to accomplish our goals.

Perhaps this goes without saying in 2022, but by far the most scalable and cost-effective way to accomplish behavior change across populations is with technology. Thus, we're building technology products to accomplish our goals with flexibility and at scale.