Philip Rosedale - Founder of Coffee and Power
About this video
Philip Rosedale introduces Coffee & Power, a company using technology to change how people work together: more mobile work, contracts instead of salaries, and ad hoc digital teamwork. He imagines an app showing where people with different skills work in a city. He tells young people that 'boring' subjects like philosophy, psychology, architecture and history matter more than ever, because technology keeps opening up new ideas.
You'll be able to
- describe the changes in work that Coffee & Power was built for.
- explain why Rosedale thinks varied subjects matter more as technology changes the world.
- explain why Rosedale says the space of new ideas is growing, not shrinking.
Key words
- salary
- A fixed regular payment for working for one employer.
- contract (work)
- An agreement to do a particular job or project, often for a set fee and time.
- mobile work
- Working from different places, like cafés or coworking spaces, rather than one office.
- ad hoc
- Arranged when needed for a particular purpose, rather than planned long in advance.
- antiquated
- Old-fashioned and no longer suitable.
Transcript
- I'm Philip Rosedale and my new company is called Coffee & Power. So Coffee & Power is an attempt to use technology in the area of work to enable people to work together in new ways. I became convinced that there were going to be enormous changes coming in the way we work together.
And that the idea of assigning a bunch of people who work for you salaries and telling them to go off and build a new software project was becoming increasingly antiquated. And so what we're trying to do with Coffee & Power is change the way work, works. We're trying to create a network and a tool set for mobile work.
We believe that increasingly people are gonna work away from offices. They're gonna work on contracts instead of on salaries. They're gonna work with each other in a much more ad hoc digital way than the did before and we're trying to build a website, and iPhone, and Android apps that enable people to do that effectively.
So imagine an app that was just for work that would let you look at a city and see where people with different skills worked. So say you're an entrepreneur and you need a web designer, imagine being able to look at a map of a city and literally see that in this coffee shop in this coworking space are the following five or 10 people.
They were there yesterday and so they'll probably be here today. My message to kids today would be to realize that many of those subjects that you learned growing up or that you've just learned in college that you think of as kind of boring and they don't matter very much, they matter a lot now.
Because as we increasingly have the ability to change all of the world around us all of these disparate subjects philosophy, psychology, architecture those subjects are gonna matter more and more in a world that we now have the power to change so much. For example, looking back on history and seeing where the mistakes were made.
It is a human tendency to believe that it's all been done, and it hasn't. In fact we're in a period now where the rate at which technology is changing the world around us is accelerating. And so the possible space of new ideas is growing not shrinking. We as human beings are falling behind in the race with technology to exploit new possibilities.
You know I think as technology gets more and more human as the internet and computing affects our lives in more and more mainstream ways it creates an opportunity for kids, for students to turn almost any rich, interesting, education path into some impact on products in the rest of the world.
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