The New World of Reinvent on Medium
How our new publication is currently helping drive more innovation about the future of work and the sharing economy.
I love my job. As founder and CEO of the startup company Reinvent, I get to engage with some of the most innovative minds of the San Francisco Bay Area on a daily basis and talk to them about how to bring about fundamental system change, or reinvention. To my mind, there is no more important conversation to hold in America, or the world, right now.
Reinvent is a five-year-old media company based in the Mission District in San Francisco that specializes in connecting up diverse networks of innovators from many different fields and catalyzing in-depth conversations on how we drive more fundamental innovation throughout our economy and society. We capture those conversations in physical gatherings, online video roundtables, and one-on-one interviews and then make them available to everyone. We believe that there’s no reason to keep those kinds of important discussions behind closed doors. We want everyone to use the ideas that emerge in their own creative ways.
Reinvent also takes those in-depth conversations and looks for the highlights, the best ideas and insights. Our team then creates shorter pieces that can be more easily digested and shared. One of the main places we will now do that is through our new publication in Medium, at medium.reinvent.net.
The work we focus on is done through what we call series, which are underwritten by organizations that are aligned with us in wanting to see more innovative thinking or new ideas in a certain area. Our partners share our long-term goals, but don’t have editorial control over who we engage or how we shape the conversation. In our Medium environment currently we are focused on two series that are trying to better understand the profound economic changes around us and how we might devise new ways forward that would better serve everyone. This changing economic terrain is absolutely critical to understanding so much of what’s happening in our world today — including much of what’s surfacing in our unprecedented politics.
The global economy is going through a phase shift as increasingly powerful digital technologies are changing how the economy functions, who benefits, who is in control, and even the nature of work. The rise of tech platforms in just the last decade is an extraordinary phenomenon that not many people fully appreciate. The following two graphics help drive home how quickly the commanding heights of the global economy have been transformed.
The first graphic shows the top five publicly traded companies in the world according to market capitalization in 2001. They are a good reflection of the what most people understood as the 20th century economy: a manufacturing giant, an oil company, a financial services corporation, one dominant retailer, and one tech company, Microsoft.
Just 15 years later, all five dominant players in the global economy are tech companies, with three based in the San Francisco Bay Area, home of Silicon Valley, and all five of them based on the west coast of the United States. And all of them are ascendant, with much more growth into global markets to come.
If you are interested in this phase shift and where it might be going, then follow Reinvent stories on Medium, which are distilled versions of what can also be viewed or listened to in more depth on our website. Our Future of Work series focuses on one of the biggest developments of this evolving new economy — the explosion of independent workers, from high-end contract workers, to gig workers, to temps getting 1099s. Our Future of Work series, done in partnership with Intuit, is specifically trying to answer the focal question: What can be done now to ensure that all independent workers thrive in the years ahead?
We also have a series that focuses on the Future of the Sharing Economy, which can be seen as a subset of the larger world of the Future of Work. We use the common definition of the sharing economy as the burgeoning part of the economy that is focused on sharing underutilized assets, from cars to homes to bikes and even underutilized skills. Our Future of Sharing series, done in partnership with Airbnb, tries to answer the simple focal question: How can we make the sharing economy work for everyone?
To get started on these two topics in our publication in Medium, here are some suggestions of a variety of stories:
For those who want a deeper dive into the nuances of the more complex full conversations, here’s some places to start on our Reinvent website:
- UC Berkeley Distinguished Chair of Engineering Ken Goldberg delivered a fascinating presentation that effectively dispelled automation anxiety at What’s Now: San Francisco.
- City Lab Co-Founder and leading urbanist Richard Florida joined us virtually to discuss his vision of a more inclusive prosperity through cities.
- Our Future of Work series kickoff event featured eight thought leaders posing questions and sharing their insights during a highly interactive and informative evening.
- Soil and Shadow CEO and Founder Nikki Silvestri shared her thoughts on building a more diverse and sustainable sharing economy.
- We convened two virtual roundtables on the future of work — one to discuss using cities to pilot new initiatives for independent workers, and another to discuss shifting our corporations to meet the needs of independent workers.
There will be many more pieces to come in Medium and the Reinvent website through the rest of the year. To stay abreast of all of this, the simplest and easiest way is follow our publication on Medium. There is plenty more learning and innovation to come in the months ahead. Join us on this journey.
