side hustle

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Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, buy low sell high, content marketing, inventory management, Lyft, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, subscription business, TaskRabbit, the scientific method, Uber for X, uber lyft

FORECAST YOUR PROFIT ON THE BACK OF A NAPKIN To estimate the profit of your side hustle, you don’t need a finance degree or a scientific calculator. You just need a napkin, a pen, and the power of observation. WEEK 2: SELECT YOUR BEST IDEA Once you have multiple ideas, you need to be able to identify the best ones. Learn how to instantly rank and compare ideas so that you’ll have confidence to proceed with the highest possible odds of success. DAY 6. USE THE SIDE HUSTLE SELECTOR TO COMPARE IDEAS Once you start thinking about side hustles, the ideas don’t stop. This tool will show you how to apply “Tinder for Hustling” logic to pick the best one at any given time.

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And since you’re the one making the decisions, it can also be fun—only unlike other things you do for fun, this form of entertainment actually brings you more money every month. Remember, a side hustle is the new job security. There’s no downside, and the possibilities are unlimited. Now let’s turn this idea into your reality. WEEK 1 BUILD AN ARSENAL OF IDEAS A side hustle has many benefits, but it all starts with an idea. This first week of hustling will teach you how to generate business ideas that actually work. DAY 1 Predict the Future A side hustle has many benefits and no downside. It all starts with your answer to an important question: Twenty-seven days from now, what will be different about your life?

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It all starts with your answer to an important question: Twenty-seven days from now, what will be different about your life? Before we get to work, let’s get one thing straight. A side hustle isn’t just about money in the bank, as helpful as that can be. A side hustle really can change your life. When you build something for yourself, even as you continue to work your day job, you become empowered. You gain confidence. You create security, both in the form of that extra cash and also in the fact that you’re opening up future opportunities for yourself. So right from the beginning of this journey, start thinking about your future. Assume that this side hustle thing will work out. What would that mean for you? What will be different about your life?

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need by Grant Sabatier

8-hour work day, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, bitcoin, buy and hold, cryptocurrency, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, drop ship, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, lifestyle creep, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, passive income, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, Skype, solopreneur, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, TaskRabbit, the rule of 72, time value of money, uber lyft, Vanguard fund

At least 40 percent of my own net worth has come from investing the money I made side hustling. In fact, it would have taken me at least twice as long to reach financial independence without side hustling. While we will dive deep into side hustling later in the book, to find a great profitable side hustle, make a list of all the skills you have or things you are good at and a list of the things you love to do. Which ones overlap? Evaluate those opportunities first. If you like your side hustles, you will be more likely to stick with them and perhaps even grow them so they become more lucrative. Your side hustle can literally be anything, as long as you make money doing it, and once again thanks to the internet, there are more ways to make money than ever before.

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I’ll also show you how to maximize your benefits, including the best remote-work options possible; increase your skills; find a higher-paying job; and maximize the opportunities to use your nine-to-five to reach financial freedom as quickly as possible. Step 6: Start a profitable side hustle and diversify your income streams. It’s never been easier to start a profitable side hustle and make extra money, but the problem is, most people don’t do it right. They spend their time side hustling for someone else instead of for themselves, which means they aren’t earning as much money as possible. Or they spend their time trying to grow a side hustle that was doomed from the beginning. I’ll show you how to pick, launch, and grow a profitable side hustle so you can make more money in less time and create the moneymaker’s holy grail—passive income streams that make enough money to cover your living expenses and then some!

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Perhaps these gigs aren’t dream jobs and maybe they don’t have much growth potential, but money is money, right? It’s crazy to me how many people stop side hustling in this way once they get a full-time job. Side hustling—what I define as any way you make money outside of your full-time job—is a relatively simple way to become an entrepreneur and diversify your income streams without taking the risk of leaving your full-time job. You can also start a side hustle with very little time and money, so the learning opportunities are high, but the financial risk is low. If one of your side hustles doesn’t work out, you can try another. The more side hustles you have, the more money you can make, and if you’re already earning a full salary from your main job, you can invest 100 percent of your side income, which will automatically increase your savings rate.

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

The honey hole is the secret spot he can return to that is likely to yield a great catch. The best side hustles are your equivalent of a honey hole: you enjoy them, you are excited to return, you have discovered something unique to you, and they provide value in return. There are four criteria to developing a strong side hustle: 1. Cash (flow) cow: If it does not create income, either now or in the future, your beloved side hustle is a hobby. The best side hustles will demonstrate a monetary return on your investment, if not now, then at some point in the not-too-distant future. How long are you willing to wait? I suggest experimenting with a side hustle that allows you to test revenue generation fairly quickly.

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If you love teaching underwater basket weaving, but there is no one interested in learning it, you will be quickly catapulted back into unprofitable hobby territory. Look for side hustles with a sizable market to serve, yet not so broad or undifferentiated that you have difficulty resonating with ideal clients. 3. Enjoyment: A side hustle doing grunt work is valuable if it helps you pay the bills or save up for the next big trip you want to take. But a side hustle with even better potential is one that emphasizes your strengths and makes you excited to work on it, whether you have fifteen minutes to spend that day or five hours. 4. Skill building: Ideally, your side hustle will also help you learn or improve skills that may be needed in your field in the coming years.

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“So you can breathe” income: hourly wage, possibly projects below your skill level Mid-level: monthly retainer, steady cash flow, part-time work Big bets: high income potential; big contracts, clients, or job offers; income sources with longer lead times but greater reward Side hustle: This term refers to modern-day moonlighting, earning income on the side while maintaining a full-time job. This is often not sustainable indefinitely, though some people will be perfectly happy with a light side hustle, like making and selling jewelry or doing freelance design work for friends, that brings them joy without having to quit their job. Even entrepreneurs can have side hustles, or creative sandboxes to play in outside of their main revenue-generating activities. My mom’s advice for me growing up was, “You should always know how to support yourself.”

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The urban legends of side hustling at its worst included one Lyft driver who continued to pick up riders after she went into labor, then Lyft-ed herself to the hospital to give birth, and T-shirts with the slogan “9 TO 5 IS FOR THE WEAK.” It was in a set of risible “hustle culture” memes extolling the “grindset.” One maxim: “You can’t make excuses and money. Which is it going to be?” Commercial websites like Side Hustle Nation also were part of it: as Nick Loper, the site’s chief side hustler, exhorted, “My escape route was a side hustle business I built in my spare time—and you can do it too.” The site Medium had a whole Side Hustle Club, with the motto “Where the outcome is income.” This “grind” vocabulary for work can even be heard in a new rendition of that famous song by working-class patron saint Dolly Parton, where she twanged in praise of working on the side and in the off hours: “Workin’ five to nine . . . a whole new way to make a livin’ / Gonna change your life,” all in the service of an ad for Squarespace, a Web-hosting platform, “Be your own boss and climb your own ladder.”

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Once called drably “another job,” these more chic words gave instability—that fewer than half of American adults, just 47 percent, say that they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted in 2020 by the Pew Research Center—a shiny gloss. The con of the side hustle happened when an NFL coach admiringly remarked that doing your job right means waking up at 3 a.m. with “a knot in your stomach, a rash on your skin, are losing sleep, and losing touch with your wife and kids.” It was in the exhortations of former SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan, who pushed “hustle culture” to one and all. “Hustle opens the doors of opportunity,” Whelan once said, encouraging her followers to work long days with the exhortation to “rise and grind.” The urban legends of side hustling at its worst included one Lyft driver who continued to pick up riders after she went into labor, then Lyft-ed herself to the hospital to give birth, and T-shirts with the slogan “9 TO 5 IS FOR THE WEAK.”

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“There is a part of me that still feels I did something wrong.” In addition to side hustling’s secret and melancholic instability, scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom observes, hustling can serve as a “kind of racial theater.” American culture “applauds the hustler” for “striking out on her own,” even though she may be doing so because she is excluded from traditional and secure employment due to bias. Digital platforms and companies “celebrate grit and urge us to ‘respect the hustle,’” she writes, but this glorification covered over the fact that it’s usually the already privileged whose side hustles add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

For example, if you’ve always dreamed of becoming a writer but couldn’t support yourself on a writer’s salary (which is pretty common), by making $20,000 per year as a freelance writer, you’ve reduced your required portfolio size by $20,000 × 25 = $500,000. This is what we like to call SideFIRE. By having a side hustle in “retirement,” you don’t have to become fully FI before reaping most of the benefits. You can build the life of your dreams using the power of a side hustle and have your portfolio supplement your living expenses. In the example I just gave, your portfolio would cover half of your $40,000-per-year expenses and your side-hustle income would cover the other half. By developing a side hustle while you’re working, you essentially kill three birds with one stone: you increase your savings rate by making more money, develop a new skill, and reduce the size of the portfolio needed to escape your nine-to-five.

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You don’t have kids! We’ll cover the topic of retiring early with kids in chapter 19.) Backup Plan #4: The Side Hustle Cost cutting and geographic arbitrage are great tools, but if you want to stay where you are without changing your lifestyle, you have another option: a side hustle! I know, I know; another finance book advising you to “start a business!” as if it’s just that easy. I tried it myself, and I failed—multiple times! The big difference with starting a side hustle after you’ve retired is that your bar for success is much lower. If you quit your job to crochet hoodies for cats and only make $5,000 in a year, you’d consider that an abject failure.

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According to the 4 Percent Rule, that means you can decrease the portfolio you need to escape from your job by a whopping $125,000. Think about how much time it would take for you to save that much money. This is why side hustles, by themselves, are not super useful for your financial freedom, but coupled with a portfolio spinning off passive income, they can make all the difference in the world. And if your side hustle has to do with your passion, it’s a triple win, because it decreases the size of the portfolio you need, lets you follow that passion, and generates additional income. You don’t need a million to break free.

Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

We have a sort of paradox of choice – the ability to monetise each and every hobby we might employ, and yet the insistence that if we aren’t earning stripes, we’re cutting corners. In his 2019 article,8 ‘The Toxic Fantasy of the Side Hustle’, Alex Collinson asks when we started saying ‘side-hustle’, rather than just ‘second job’. The article was part of a slew of online examinations following Henley Business School’s 2018 study on the side-hustle economy, and I think that the notion of it being a ‘toxic fantasy’ is pretty bang on. It’s not that the impression of having a side-hustle is necessarily misleading, and it’s certainly not wrong by any means, but the fantasy of it is misplaced. The side-hustle feeds off the idea that we all have an unlimited potential for earning money, restricted only by our time and what we choose to do with it.

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Could be getting paid for it. Donating clothes to charity? Should’ve flogged them on eBay. On your phone? You could be making thousands in stocks and shares as a #forex #trader. I’ll be the first to put my hand up and say that I have started my career through side-hustles, and they’ve brought me great rewards. There’s nothing wrong with having a side-hustle – it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise – but there are significant questions to be asked about the impact of it as a culture. It’s become an illustrious dream that turns any second you’re not earning money into an anxiety, and the mental effects of that are draining.

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Generally, we no longer think it’s necessary to sit through fifteen years of corporate work in order to know the field and move up the rankings, paying respect to the culture in return for a pension we’re not even guaranteed to receive. We’d rather better our chances by trying our own luck, spurred on by side-hustle culture. We refuse to be put in a box, but suffer from the lack of boundaries that comes from moving beyond those walls of traditional benchmarks. As a generation, we’ve grown up without definitive borders between work and ‘not-work’. Technology allows us constant access to our working lives, which has slowly but surely developed into an anxiety that not working anywhere and everywhere is the equivalent of being in the office and having a nap.

Cashing Out: Win the Wealth Game by Walking Away by Julien Saunders, Kiersten Saunders

barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, digital divide, diversification, do what you love, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, index fund, job automation, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lifestyle creep, Lyft, microaggression, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, passive income, passive investing, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, side hustle, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, work culture , young professional

It wasn’t a life-changing amount of money, but it was a welcome trickle of cash flow in addition to the income from her new job. Over the years, Jannese would continue to learn about affiliate marketing and apply the lessons to her blog and other side hustles. In 2020, she launched the Yo Quiero Dinero podcast, offered financial coaching and side-hustle coaching, launched an online course, and was a freelance writer, all in addition to her day job. And the results were nothing short of impressive. On top of the salary from her primary job, she earned an additional $100,000, which she used to pay off her student loans, crush her credit card debt, and boost her saving rate.

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[apparently] she got it from me.” She certainly had gotten it from her: unknowingly, her mother’s advice had been the very thing that sparked her desire for financial independence! Purple is the purest example of cashing out we’ve ever heard. While she didn’t take the entrepreneurial, real estate, or side-hustle route, she doubled down on her relentless discipline. Instead of finding or developing the next big idea, she simply poured all of her extra time into minimizing her spending. She was also willing to break social norms and common career advice by routinely job-hopping and effectively used that tactic to grow her income significantly over a focused period of time.

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But considering she had $39,000 of student loan debt, $10,000 of credit card debt, and a $439,000 mortgage hanging over her head, she sucked it up—until she was suddenly laid off. Though the initial news came as a shock, she rebounded, choosing to see her predicament as an opportunity and not a death sentence. Having been inspired by FIRE podcasts and blogs, she’d already begun to explore the world of side hustling online and saw this as an opportunity to turn up the heat. Jannese is passionate about cooking and noticed there was a gap in blogs that featured Puerto Rican and Latin cuisine. So after taking a food-blogging course, devouring YouTube videos, and learning about search engine optimization, she launched her first blog, Delish D’Lites.

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way by Tanja Hester

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy and hold, crowdsourcing, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, full employment, General Magic , gig economy, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, independent contractor, index fund, labor-force participation, lifestyle creep, longitudinal study, low interest rates, medical bankruptcy, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, multilevel marketing, obamacare, passive income, post-work, remote working, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, stocks for the long run, tech worker, Vanguard fund, work culture

As we saw in chapter 7, earning more and banking your increased earnings in your investments is the absolute best way to increase how much you can invest year over year. There are several big ways you can increase your income: by starting a lucrative side hustle, by retraining for a higher-paying career, by increasing your focus in your current career, by negotiating for more money, or by going to work for yourself. Work a Side Hustle Side hustles have grown more common in recent years as younger people especially find them necessary to make ends meet with their student loan debt burdens and high rents in big cities. But side hustles can work for anyone who wants to earn more, assuming you choose one that’s truly lucrative. Quite a few multilevel marketing schemes out there prey on folks who are eager to make a little extra on the side, and they often result in those people losing money.

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For 10 years, I taught yoga and spin classes as my side hustle. The startup costs were minimal—a few hundred dollars for my basic certification—and there were almost no ongoing costs. Though I didn’t always love having to get up at five a.m. to teach classes, the pay rate was good, and the bonus was that I got paid to work out. Teaching yoga at studios is not always profitable, as there are high costs associated with traditional teacher training, and studios don’t all pay fairly, but teaching regular fitness classes at the gym can be a great side hustle. In general, part-time jobs on top of your full-time job start providing income the fastest, though the income itself may not be huge.

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I’d often be rushing to get off a late call and then sprinting to class. It didn’t feel good to bluster into class like that, and I knew it wasn’t sustainable anymore. So as hard as it was to close that chapter, I realized that giving up my side hustle would allow me to increase my focus and effort at work, which set me up for a promotion, higher pay, and increased opportunities. Around the same time, Mark decided to increase his focus at work, too. Though he never had a side hustle and had always produced high-quality work that made him beloved by clients and colleagues alike, he’d never really committed to drumming up new business. It was his least favorite part of the job, and he’d always felt uncomfortable stepping into the salesperson role.

Early Retirement Guide: 40 is the new 65 by Manish Thakur

Airbnb, diversified portfolio, financial independence, hedonic treadmill, index fund, lifestyle creep, Lyft, passive income, passive investing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, side hustle, time value of money, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, Zipcar

When finishing a long day at work, it's hard to get the motivation to keep working, so it is better to find a hobby or skill you would look forward to working on. The increase in income your side hustle creates varies from each person and idea, but follows closely with how much effort has been put into it. Focus on hustles that take little to no money to start, but can be grown over time, so that if it doesn't pan out or a big change needs to occur, there isn't a large impact to your finances. Providing consulting services from knowledge earned on the job is a great way to start quickly with a low cost, and has a lot of potential to grow over the years. It will take some time to get a steady income from your side hustle, so stay committed and you're bound to see the fruits of your labor. 3.

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If it's been a while since your last raise, a simple question might be the only thing stopping it. The worst that could happen is your boss says no. It's important to convince yourself why you need a raise first before trying to convince your boss, and truly believe you deserve one. 2. Work on a side hustle. I don't mean go on the street and do the "find the ball under the cup" kind of hustle, but putting in some extra work on the side outside of your job. It could be anything from restoring free craigslist items and reselling them, refereeing little league games, running a niche website, to consulting companies using experience built up over years on the job.

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It will take some time to get a steady income from your side hustle, so stay committed and you're bound to see the fruits of your labor. 3. Work as a freelancer. Freelancing gives a lot of flexibility and freedom, without the pitfalls of needing to go to an office or keep regular hours. Freelancing while paying off debt or looking for some seed money to start your side hustle helps jumpstart both of these by providing some extra money easily. Keep in mind that we are working towards independence and an ideal life. Pursue ideas that interest you and will make you happy. Challenges: 1. Outline possible reasons why you should get a raise and back them up with recent examples 2. Write down your passions and business ideas and narrow them down to your three favorite.

The Minimalist Way by Erica Layne

cognitive load, Inbox Zero, late fees, Mason jar, retail therapy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, solopreneur, TED Talk

Maybe you’ve been wanting to revamp your resume, figure out your family holiday card, or make a photo album. For the sake of this example, let’s imagine that you have a side hustle—a passion project you work on in the fringe hours of your life. Now notice the difference between these two mind-sets: I’m sitting down to work on my business. I’m sitting down to produce for my business. You could work endlessly on your side hustle, popping from one thing to the next. A half-written blog post here, a social media post there. But what if you sat down to produce something for your side hustle? If you gave yourself two hours, could you record a podcast episode, write a chapter of your e-book, or schedule your social media shares for an entire month?

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A true minimalist knows that no one can do it all; he’s given himself permission to prioritize the most important work and to let less important tasks fall as they will. Use the following strategies to help you prioritize your work and bring more focus to your most important tasks. And if your work happens to be more utilitarian at the moment, please feel free to apply any of these strategies to a project, side hustle, or hobby outside of your workplace. 1. ASK YOURSELF WHAT ONLY YOU CAN DO It may take years of studying yourself to be able to answer this question, but I believe we all have a set of gifts that are uniquely our own—and that we magnify our impact on the world when we discover and use those gifts.

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I’m not saying you have to suddenly quit your job and start traveling the country in a van (although if that’s where your heart is leading you, then by all means, go for it!). But you can make small shifts toward the work/life balance you envision, from taking a class, to putting more energy into your side hustle, to blocking out time to travel, to simply spending more quality time at home—starting today. 5 family life At 11 years old, my oldest son has lost all of his baby chub; he’s traded it in for visible ribs and lengthening arms and legs. Recently, I sat in a camp chair facing the ocean, and he stepped in front of me to tell me something.

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demand response, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, financial independence, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, Google Chrome, helicopter parent, impulse control, Jean Tirole, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, meta-analysis, Minecraft, New Journalism, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, working poor

After all, full-time jobs with benefits are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.32 The harder it gets to make a conventional, nine-to-five living, the more people have to fill their weekends, evenings, and other spare moments with moneymaking side hustles like these. I know more people like Alex than I could ever possibly name. The gig economy has arrived in full force, and it’s swallowed up the free time and brain space of every driven Millennial artist I know. Ricky drives for Uber in the mornings and evenings when he’s not busy giving singing lessons and performing in choirs. Dio used the app Wag to find work as a dog walker, supplementing the income he made as an ice cream shop manager. I used to edit people’s academic papers for about twenty dollars an hour on Upwork, until I got too busy to fit that side hustle into my life anymore.

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He knows, more intimately than most of us, that the comfort and security his work has brought him could dry up at any moment. As someone with a prison record, he can’t dive into the workforce with the same ease that many of us can. So even though his schedule is filled with speaking engagements, teaching opportunities, and paid writing gigs, Eric keeps signing up to participate in paid clinical trials and other side hustles. He never says no to a writing or performance opportunity, even if it means traveling in the middle of the night from one city to another. He still fears that if he doesn’t keep pushing himself to the limit, he will descend into laziness and never recover. I’ve talked to dozens and dozens of overworked people, and this fear is one almost all of them share.

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We see the pressure to overwork in nearly every industry and professional field. Smartphones, laptops, and digital work tools such as e-mail and Slack have made it harder than ever for us to leave our work behind when we go home for the day. And thanks to the rise of the “gig economy,” the pressure to fill even our spare moments with additional labor and “side hustles” has expanded our workloads even more. The Workweek Is Getting Longer The Industrial Revolution brought with it the rise of the industrial, warehouse-based workplace.7 Factory employees were toiling all day long in dangerous, dark conditions, unable to make time for anything in their lives other than sleep.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Marketplace, June 9, 2016. https://www.marketplace.org/2016/06/09/economy/does-middle-class-life-cost-more-it-used. Apple Inc. “2017 Supplier List.” Apple Supplier Responsibility Program, February 2017. https://images.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf. Baab-Muguira, Catherine. “Millennials Are Obsessed with Side Hustles Because They’re All We’ve Got.” Quartz, June 23, 2016. https://qz.com/711773/millennials-are-obsessed-with-side-hustles-because-theyre-all-weve-got/. Badel, Alejandro, and Brian Greaney. “Exploring the Link between Drug Use and Job Status in the U.S.” U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, July 2013. https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/July-2013/Exploring-the-Link-between-Drug-Use-and-Job-Status-in-the-US.

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TaskRabbiters pitch in to assemble furniture, rake leaves, or even stand in line to buy theater tickets or a newly released iPhone. In some cases, these contract jobs are a godsend because they help workers who only get part-time hours elsewhere to supplement their income, as laborers have done since the beginning of time. We often think of millennials in these jobs, the masters of the art of the “side hustle,” but the numbers show it isn’t just millennials doing contingent work. A quarter of the working-age population in the United States and Europe engage in some type of independently paid gig, some by choice, but many out of necessity. People who find work through apps like Lyft and TaskRabbit get a lot of attention, but they are the tip of the iceberg.

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See Wartzman, “Populists Want to Bring Back the Blue-Collar Golden Age”; and Oxfam America and Economic Policy Institute, “Few Rewards.” 45 “For workers, the American corporation used to act as a shock absorber”: Wartzman, End of Loyalty, 5. 46 the numbers show it isn’t just millennials doing contingent work: Baab-Muguira, “Millennials Are Obsessed with Side Hustles.” 46 A quarter of the working-age population in the United States and Europe engage in some type of independently paid gig: Manyika et al., “Independent Work.” 46 the number of people working in contingent jobs balloons to over 40 percent of all American workers: Pofeldt, “Shocker: 40% of Workers Now Have ‘Contingent’ Jobs.” 46 of all the jobs created between 2005 and 2015, 94 percent of them were contract or temporary: Katz and Krueger, “Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements.” 46 Many of these jobs of the new economy pay poorly: Dews, “Charts of the Week”; Vo and Zumbrun, “Just How Good (or Bad) Are All the Jobs Added?”

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

My hope is that the insights in this book will be not just eye-opening but also useful and practical on your own entrepreneurial journeys. Some founders may try to conform to certain narratives, build teams in specific ways, or shape their startups to fit stereotypes. Here, we’ll use data to figure out what really matters. You will learn that those who had a bug for building and leading projects or side hustles had a much higher chance of creating a billion-dollar company, and that while having almost ten years of work experience is the average, many of them didn’t know anything about the industry they were about to disrupt—and many never anticipated the level of success they achieved. We will see that creating highly differentiated products is important, but being first to market is not.

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Those projects weren’t about striking it rich so much as scratching the itch to create. Looking at the data, one can see that the best preparation to start a multibillion-dollar company is to create a $10 million–plus company first. The best preparation for that is to start something—anything: a hobby project, a side hustle, maybe a school club. Some Super Founders had as many as four previous $10 million–plus outcomes. Not everyone who starts a billion-dollar company is a Super Founder. Founders can land on their big idea without much past success, or even with a lot of past failure. The key observation seems to be that these founders have each had a journey.

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I came from a totalitarian country, so I had this notion of wanting my communications to be private. I don’t want the government reading my email. And so while I was figuring out what I’m going to get a PhD in, I was thinking of crypto. This is before “crypto” meant Bitcoin. This is crypto in the original sense of the word. So in college, I had this side hustle project called the SecurePilot. If you need to log into a really secure corporate network or a campus network, you need a onetime password generator sometimes followed by standard algorithms, but a lot of times they’re actually half-baked yet secret algorithms. And so I realized that around me were all kinds of system administrators that carried around these various little physical password generators.

The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard by Chris Guillebeau

Bernie Madoff, drop ship, Ethereum, fail fast, financial independence, global village, hiring and firing, housing crisis, independent contractor, messenger bag, passive income, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, Steve Jobs, telemarketer

They’ll be able to repay you later . . . To the buzz, Chris Guillebeau About the Author Chris Guillebeau is the New York Times bestselling author of The $100 Startup, Side Hustle, The Happiness of Pursuit, and other books. During a lifetime of self-employment that included a four-year commitment as a volunteer executive in West Africa, he visited every country in the world (193 in total) before his 35th birthday. His daily podcast, Side Hustle School, is downloaded more than two million times a month. He is also the founder of the World Domination Summit, an event for cultural creatives that attracts thousands of attendees to Portland, Oregon every summer.

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Other titles by Chris Guillebeau Side Hustle The Happiness of Pursuit The $100 Startup The Art of Non-Conformity Portfolio / Penguin An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2020 by Chris Guillebeau Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

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Everything we do is based on these simple principles. Get some sleep and I’ll see you at Lava Java bright and early! Best, Clarence The Third Way A Manifesto No one should depend on a single paycheck for their entire income. And now, there’s no good reason why you have to. Whether you call it a side hustle, a small business, or just “something you do for extra money,” you can use this model to create more freedom for yourself. To start, follow these five guiding principles. If you get stuck, come back to them. The answer is probably found in some part of the model.* 1. Everyone’s an expert at something.

Crushing It! EPB by Gary Vaynerchuk

augmented reality, driverless car, fear of failure, follow your passion, imposter syndrome, Mark Zuckerberg, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk

Or post pictures on Instagram of your pet hedgehogs wearing tiny hats. Thanks to the proliferation of platforms and the migration of TV and magazine viewers to the Internet, there is room for many, many more experts and personalities to create a lucrative, sustainable ecosystem that promotes and grows their businesses or even side hustles. It’s a great time to be a fashion model, for example. There was a time when there was room for only a handful of superstars to see themselves featured in editorial fashion spreads and on the runways. Then there were maybe a thousand in the middle getting steady commercial work in print and TV.

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But she also became known as the person who knew how to edit videos and could help you figure out the privacy settings on your Facebook page, which would not have been remarkable in Silicon Valley but was unusual in Ohio at the time. It was friends living on the West Coast who informed her that social-media management was a real job. And she thought, I could get paid to do this? That’s when the side hustle started. After getting home from her day job, sometimes as late as seven p.m., she’d buckle down to the freelance work. The first small businesses she approached were already overwhelmed by all the content they had to create for Facebook and Twitter, and now here’s this person telling them they had to make videos, too?

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Decades of testing, experimentation, and life experience led to his and his son’s “overnight success.” Growing up, Dan had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but upon graduating from college with a young family, he applied his degree in global business and finance to a position as a pharmaceutical sales rep. The money was good, but for years he put up websites and dabbled in side hustles, or, in his words, “little random small businesses that totally failed,” in the hopes that one would take off and allow him to leave his steady job. When YouTube came along, he put up videos of his kids and wife to share with the rest of his family, who didn’t live near him in Utah. He’d always monetized his websites with Google AdSense, throwing up little pop-up ads, and he did the same for the YouTube videos even though he’d never made any money this way.

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli

Airbnb, asset allocation, Big Tech, bitcoin, buy and hold, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial independence, Hans Rosling, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, lifestyle creep, mass affluent, mortgage debt, oil shock, payday loans, phenotype, price anchoring, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Sam Altman, side hustle, side project, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, time value of money, transaction costs, very high income, William Bengen, yield curve

For example, the control your spending faction might claim that making your coffee at home (instead of buying it at Starbucks) can save you up to $1 million over the course of your lifetime. On the other hand, the raise your income group may argue that it’s far easier to earn extra income through a side hustle than to question your every spending decision. Technically, both sides have valid points. Going back to our equation from the prior chapter, savings is defined as: Savings = Income – Spending Therefore, in order to increase your savings, you either have to increase your income, decrease your spending, or both.

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Cons: Lots of upfront investment and constant marketing. 5. Climb the Corporate Ladder Of all the ways to grow your income, climbing the corporate ladder is the most common and also the most despised. There is this prevailing attitude that working a 9 to 5 job is somehow less worthy than working for yourself or starting your own business or side hustle. But, if you look at the data, a 9 to 5 is still the way that most people build wealth. In fact, the best chance that many Americans have of becoming a millionaire is through a professional degree (e.g., doctor, lawyer, etc.). As The Millionaire Next Door stated about a group of millionaires studied in the late 1990s: “As a group, [millionaires] are fairly well educated.

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Max’s argument is quite clear—if you want access to the best angel investments with big, outsized returns, then you have to be deeply embedded in that community.⁷⁴ Research on this topic supports Max’s claim, finding that time spent on due diligence, experience, and participation were all positively correlated with an angel investor’s long-term returns.⁷⁵ How Do You Invest in Small Businesses? You can’t do angel/small business investing as a side hustle and expect big results. While some crowdsourcing platforms allow retail investors to invest in small businesses (with other opportunities for accredited investors), it is highly unlikely they are going to have early access to the next big thing. I don’t say this to discourage you, but to reiterate that the most successful small business investors commit more than just capital to this pursuit.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Her customers, if they were out there as Carol believed, would benefit from her products in much the same ways. And that is the key to finding an idea, whether you are actively on the hunt for one or simply open to the possibility. No matter what kind of business you are thinking of starting—whether it’s a product or a service, whether it’s your side hustle or your main thing, whether it’s for men or women, kids or adults—the intersection of personal passion and problem solving is where good ideas are born and lasting businesses are built. Trusting her mother’s instincts, Lisa invested $100 in materials, table rental, and flowers for decoration, and then put her items up for sale for the first time.

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Initially, just as an outdoor events company, popping kettle corn in their garage and selling it outside supermarkets, Little League baseball games, and Minnesota Vikings football games in the freezing Minnesota winter. That they would end up building a business defined by beautifully branded and packaged popcorn that flies off grocery store shelves across North America was as much a shock to them as to anyone, because in the beginning this whole thing was just a side hustle. A psychiatric nurse practitioner and middle school teacher, respectively, Angie and Dan were looking for a way to make a little extra money that they could put away for their children’s college educations. The kids were just three and five years old when their parents started to kick around ideas.

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“Somehow I stumbled across a site that said, ‘Make thousands of dollars every weekend popping kettle corn,’” Dan said. “I didn’t even know what it was.” His ignorance of the sweet-and-salty treat did little to suppress his appetite for the offer this website presented. For the low, low price of $10,000, a couple in Gig Harbor, Washington, who’d made this their side hustle, would send them a big kettle with all the equipment, a tent, and a table. No recipe. “I remember distinctly the phone call,” Angie said. “I’m in the middle of a patient takedown, and my husband’s on the line. So I run back to the nurses’ station, and he’s on the other end and he says, ‘Ange what do you think about kettle corn?’

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

But there is always a story. As soon as you get your language back, you can tell it. Part 4 Do You Wanna Be a #BossBabe? i. Roses are red Money is green The American Dream Is a pyramid scheme Hey girl! I LOVE your posts. You have SUCH a fun energy!! Have you ever thought about turning that energy into a side hustle? Let me ask you a question ;) If there were a business where you could work part-time from home but make a full-time living, would that interest you at all? Because that’s what I’ve been up to. Some people are super closed-minded to stuff like this which limits their opportunities, but you seem open to new things, which is exactly what it takes to be successful!!

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“Clean beauty” MLMs with chicer, updated packaging pivoted to populating their seller bases with “micro-influencers”—women with small blogs and a few thousand social media followers who could be tempted by an unctuous DM about how their feed is amazinggg and would they like to add a second stream of income while becoming part of the clean beauty “movement”?! Pairing deliciously with the glamorous image of a self-employed influencer, this hipper generation of MLMs pitched itself as the perfect side hustle. The nimble direct sales industry always finds a way to reinvent itself—the capitalist cockroach that just won’t stop reincarnating. iii. Hey lady! Just wanted to send a reminder that we’re in the business of changing lives here!! Yes, we’re making money, but it’s so much bigger than that . . . it’s a MOVEMENT.

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a series of grievous reports: Andy Newman, “The ‘King’ of Shambhala Buddhism Is Undone by Abuse Report,” New York Times, July 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/nyregion/shambhala-sexual-misconduct.html. Part 4: Do You Wanna Be a #BossBabe? i. “Have you ever thought about turning that energy into a side hustle?”: Eric Worre, “The Hottest Recruiting Scripts in MLM,” Network Marketing Pro, https://networkmarketingpro.com/pdf/the_hottest_recruiting_scripts_in_mlm_by_eric_worre_networkmarketingpro.com.pdf. LuLaRoe: Charisse Jones, “LuLaRoe Was Little More Than a Scam, a Washington State Lawsuit Claims,” USA Today, January 28, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/28/lularoe-pyramid-scheme-duped-consumers-washington-suit-says/2700412002/.

The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love With the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams by Tommy Baker

Cal Newport, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs

However, our brains are masters at making the novel routine, and we begin to notice a downtick in enthusiasm. Every day, energy starts to fade. We’re no longer pumped, and the process starts to take hold. Since we added to a shaky foundation, we’re a ticking time bomb. We cling on, but time continues to pass. A few months later someone asks us about the getting-back-in-shape endeavor, the side hustle, the book, the content platform, or relationship goal we had, and we simply respond: “Oh yeah…that thing. I’ve moved on.” Does this sound familiar? I know it does, because you’re here. We’ve all experienced it, and it’s my intention to ensure it never happens to you again. UNSHAKEABLE FOUNDATION When you’re in the process of buying a home, you rarely ask about the foundation.

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These leaps in life are about making bold decisions in the moment, without any guarantee on the other side. It’s the moments where you know what to do, but are trembling in fear. It’s not about the size of the leap, it’s stepping into it with trust and faith. For example, the leap may look like: Committing to your side hustle, once and for all. Quitting your job and pursuing your true purpose and passion. Moving to a new environment, a new city on the other side of the country. Taking the trip and adventure that calls your heart, even if it doesn’t make sense. Asking him or her out, even when it feels uncomfortable and the “timing” doesn’t feel perfect.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

The limo-hailing idea interested Camp, Kalanick, and the others, but it was hardly the only thing any of them were working on. Camp, after all, worked for eBay, and Kalanick was still at Akamai. But neither was in the kind of role that demanded all their attention. Life inside the big companies that acquired them allowed for plenty of time to work on their “side hustles” and also to hang out with each other. In early December 2008, the duo traveled to Paris for another industry conference, this one created by Loïc Le Meur, a French blogger who yearned to break into the ranks of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Together with his wife at the time, Géraldine, he succeeded in attracting a group of many of the best young Internet personalities from the United States, who needed little arm-twisting to join a boondoggle in Paris.

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“I by no stretch hated those jobs, but I wasn’t super passionate about them,” he tells me over lunch in Manhattan Beach, a tony community near Los Angeles International Airport and not far from Campbell’s current home in Long Beach. “I just wasn’t excited to go to work on Monday.” What was getting Campbell excited was what he calls his “side hustle,” a trendy expression associated with the so-called gig economy that once would have been called moonlighting. He was intrigued by personal finance, suddenly having some considerable disposable income, and so in 2012 he started a blog targeted at people like himself. It’s called Your Personal Finance Pro, with the tagline “Financial Advice for Young Professionals.”

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

He wore mismatched Hello Kitty socks and ate lemons, including the rinds. At the urging of his libertarian father, Dmitry, he took an interest in the cryptocurrency called bitcoin. He soon became absorbed. While still in high school, he launched an online news site called Bitcoin Magazine as a side hustle, persuading cryptocurrency fans to pay for his lucid essays about digital money and cryptography. Upon finishing high school, Vitalik used the proceeds to travel the world and talk to others with big ideas about bitcoin and how to improve it. He hit Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, and bitcoin’s ground zero, San Francisco, where, like many others, he spent a short stint hanging out at Coinbase’s Bluxome Street office.

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Good advice is not always heeded, and in this case, the politics and power struggles went on unabated as Balaji pushed out designers and a head engineer. Also toppled was Mike Lempres, the veteran legal fixer who had tried to get Brian to warm to Washington, DC. Lempres had worked at the top levels of the Justice Department and once, as a side hustle, he had served as mayor for the affluent Silicon Valley town of Atherton. But none of this compared to what he saw at Coinbase in late 2018. “I’ve been the mayor of a California town, but I’ve never seen a place as political as Coinbase,” he said on his way out the door in the spring of 2019. Lempres would remain philosophical about his ouster and still speaks warmly of Brian, if not of his lieutenants.

The Frugal Life: How a Family Can Live Under $30,000 and Thrive by Kate Singh

dumpster diving, side hustle, white picket fence

It can be downright drudgery. However, this isn't that often and it usually means I need a day off. There are many days I look about me in gratitude and feel blessed that I have this sweet home when so many struggle with housing or high rent. I've done the commutes from hell and worked in the offices and had the side hustle cafe jobs to pay off debt. I know what it's like to wake in the dark to an alarm clock and get home in the dark to an empty, cold apartment and eat cereal for dinner. So, when I smell a pot of stew simmering on the stove and hear music coming from the living room, when I sit for my afternoon tea or coffee and watch a sitcom on TV in the middle of the day while pretending to fold laundry, or when I have lunch outside with my boys and talk about all the things five and seven-year-olds talk about, I am loving this job!

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Lumped with ad sales, those products helped YouTube rake in more than $20 billion that year, hitting the goal Wojcicki set back in 2015. And YouTube began spreading its wealth more widely again, quietly expanding the pool of creators eligible for payments since slicing that number in 2018 after its scandals. During 2020 countless new broadcasters turned to YouTube for money, a side hustle in a profession less than two decades old. By the following year, the company would announce that more than two million creators were in its partner program—not quite the sum before the 2018 reduction but still one of the largest, most complicated payments systems on the planet. YouTube reignited a marketing program, “Creators for Change,” that handpicked stars to talk about issues like bullying and racism.

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See creators CookieSwirlC channel, 240 cooking videos, 248 coolhunters (community managers) and comment section, 94 curation role of, 56–57 and makeup tutorials, 188–89 and PewDiePie, 221 replaced by algorithms, 99–102, 122, 399–400 “Spotlight” page of, 208 Stapleton’s move to, 207, 208 trends tracking of, 208 Cooper, Anderson, 89 Cooperstein, Ezra, 112 copyright and acquisition offers, 51 and advertising, 108 and Content ID, 74 creators’ evasion of filters, 149 and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, 1998), 35, 36, 37 early days of YouTube, 25–26, 52 in Europe, 365, 371 and Johnson’s content, 120 Pozner’s copyright claims, 327 screeners’ involvement in, 319–20, 327 and takedown requests, 33–34 three-strikes rule, 138 and Viacom negotiations/lawsuit, 61, 62, 97–98 Cosmic Panda (website redesign), 158 costumes, popularity of, 305–7 Coulter, Ann, 86 counter-speech, 216, 217 Couric, Katie, 98 COVID-19 pandemic, 374–76, 377–78, 385, 390, 397, 399 Craven, Wes, 101 Creative Artists Agency (CAA), 72 Creative Lab of Google, 147, 207–8 creators and ad-friendly mandate, 267–68, 274, 282–83 and Adpocalypse (boycott), 288–90, 300, 310 ads removed from content of, 267–68 and algorithms of YouTube, 297 analytics dashboard of, 157 anonymous, 172–73 Black creators, 261–62, 293, 338–39, 378 and bullying problem at YouTube, 262–63 burnout of, 385, 392 camaraderie among, 40 and celebrity status, 40–42, 248 (see also stars/celebrities of YouTube) and changes to algorithm, 155, 156–60, 164 and comments removed from kids’ videos, 371 commercial agreements of, 67 complaints from, 268, 332–33 conservative and right-wing, 268–69 control over types of ads, 347 and COVID-19 pandemic, 390 and culture of YouTube, 254–55 data provided to, 117 departures from YouTube, 257, 385–86 difficulty of work for, 254–55, 256–57 dollar-sign indicators for, 268 efforts to organize, 288, 393 and egalitarian claims of YouTube, 393 endemic, 248 flaunting/bending rules, 149 frustrations of, 256 and grants from YouTube, 112, 134 and harassment policies, 366–67 increasing success of, 78–79 lines between persona and performer, 280 mass deletion of accounts (Elsagate), 314 merchandising and sponsorship opportunities, 392 and Originals series of YouTube, 253–54, 261 penalty box for troublesome, 235, 292, 296, 327, 346 people of color as, 40, 159, 339 playbook for, 129 recruited to MCNs, 182–83 rewarding trusted, 368 and “Rewind 2018” video, 351–52 and rights to material, 133 and rival video services, 78 and shooting at San Bruno offices, 331–35 side hustles of, 382 term origins, 130 transgender, 382–83 trust deficit growing in, 160 trust in judgement of, 323–24 video responses between, 39 volume of uploaded material, 6, 49, 140, 215–16, 389 and watch time of users, 157, 158–60 and Wojcicki, 261, 373 women’s experience as, 303 and YouTube Creator Summit, 250–51, 253, 262, 289–90 See also partner program; payment and income of creators; stars/celebrities of YouTube; specific creators “Creators for Change” program, 382 Creator Summit, 250–51, 253, 262, 289–90 Credit Suisse, 51–52 Crowder, Steven, 366, 367, 370 Cruikshank, Lucas (Fred Figglehorn), 65–66, 69, 77–78, 131, 169 “Crush On Obama” (Key of Awesome), 88 Cruz, Ted, 342, 367 cryptocurrencies, 390 Cuban, Mark, 49 curation team.

…

See multichannel networks neutrality emphasized at YouTube, 208–9 news content on YouTube, 136–41, 142–45, 275, 325–26, 388 News Corp, 51, 60, 198 Newsweek, 36 Newton, Casey, 319 “New World Order” theories, 267 The New York Times criticisms of YouTube, 338 on Disney’s acquisition of Maker Studios, 219 on impact of medically dubious videos, 366 on lonelygirl15 ruse, 50 on recommendation system, 298 on Rubin’s sexual misconduct, 348–49 on Stapleton, 2, 354–55 on Wojcicki, 203, 211 New Zealand terrorist attack (2019), 1–2, 10, 11, 357–61, 372 Next New Networks, 129 Nickelodeon, 131, 169, 293 Nielsen and Facebook, 251 nigahiga, 39, 110 Nightmare Fuel, 7–8 Nilsen, Ingrid (Missglamorazzi; TheGridMonster) coming out video of, 282 concerns about online invective, 262–63 departure from YouTube, 385–86 makeup application videos of, 188–89 and Obama interview, 259 recruited by Vessel, 251 Vlogmas series of, 247–48, 386 and walkout at Google (2017), 350 at YouTube Creator Summit, 250 North Korean government, 287 Nussbaum, Emily, 275 O Oakley, Peter, 57 Obama administration, 143 Obama, Barack, 88–89, 193–94, 213, 259–60, 326 Obama, Michelle, 287 Obama Girl, 94, 129 “objectives and key results” (OKRs), 151–52, 175 O’Brien, Trevor, 156–58 obscene content, 100 O’Connell, Dan, 44 O’Connor, Jennie, 337, 356–57, 359–60, 371, 380 Oliver, John, 244 O’Neal, Shaquille, 133 One America News Network, 387, 388 Orgill, April, 314 Orgill, Davey, 314 Originals series of YouTube, 253–54, 261, 293 original video posted to YouTube, 21–22 origins of YouTube, 15–18, 20–23, 26 “Our Brand Mission” video of YouTube, 4–5 outages, service, 34 P P&G, 283–84, 286 Padilla, Anthony, 67 Page, Larry and Alphabet, 257 aphorisms/Larry-isms of, 147 on artificial intelligence, 230–33 and Brin’s divorce, 201 as CEO, 146–47 and daily viewers, 252 and Friday staff meetings, 81–82 Google invented by, 45 and Google’s acquisition of YouTube, 54 and Google Video, 43, 44 and Kamangar, 150 on loading speed of videos, 151 management council of (“L Team”), 177 and Mehrotra, 202 and politics, 230 at post-election staff meeting, 272 and Ramaswamy-Wojcicki dispute, 200, 203 retirement of, 401 and Rose’s interview at TED Conference, 229–31 and Rubin’s exit package, 348–49 and searchable TV database project, 96–97 and sports, 129 10x decree of, 147 and Vessel, 251 and Viacom lawsuit, 99 and Wojcicki, 198, 199 Pakistan, 143 Pan, Yu, 21, 24–25 Panchapakesan, Venkat, 228 Papadopoulos, Christina, 194 Parkland, Florida, mass shooting in (2018), 326, 329 partner program and algorithm changes, 155, 156–60, 164 creators added in 2020, 382 eligibility thresholds for, 329 launch of, 70 Machinima’s gaming of, 125 opened to all creators, 163–65, 184 origins of, 66–70 special site access of, 124–25 and taxes, 120 Wong’s attraction to, 115 and Zappin’s Maker Studios, 112 See also payment and income of creators Patrick, Matthew (MatPat), 252–53, 280, 298, 377, 392 Patriot Act (2001), 82 Paul, Jake, 384 Paul, Logan, 321–24, 338, 352, 383–84 payment and income of creators and Adpocalypse (boycott), 288–90, 300, 310 and algorithm changes, 159 and creator economy of YouTube, 5, 258, 390, 391 “demonetized” creators, 268, 310 eligibility thresholds for, 329 engagement based (Moneyball proposal), 337–38, 341 equalized across creators, 329 inconsistent levels of, 173 inequities in, 258 as innovation of YouTube, 6 of kidfluencers, 396 as life changing, 115, 304 made available to everyone, 163–65 in most recent years, 391 and multichannel networks, 183–84 origins of program for, 66–70 by other social media platforms, 390, 391 of PewDiePie/Kjellberg, 8–9, 220–21, 279 as privilege, not right, 324 redesign of compensation system, 258 reduced without explanation, 255 and right-wing content, 227 and shooting at San Bruno offices, 337 and side hustles of creators, 382 slashed for creators of kid content, 368, 394 system managing, 255 unrelated to advertising, 392 and Zappin’s Maker Studios, 112 PayPal, 19, 20, 24–25, 52 pay-per-view business model, 130–31, 132–33 pedophiles, 313, 356, 371 penalties applied to users, 31 “penalty box” for troublesome creators, 235, 292, 296, 327, 346 Penna, Joe (MysteryGuitarMan), 158–59, 220 Penna, Sarah, 128, 159, 220 Pentagon deal of Google, 341–42, 349, 355 people of color as YouTube creators, 40, 159, 339 Pepe (cartoon frog), 275 Peppa Pig videos, 308, 309, 320 Peretti, Jonah, 190 perks at YouTube offices, 148 Perry, Katy, 91 PETA, 38 Peter Bjorn and John, 57 Peterson, Jordan, 301 PewDiePie and ad-friendly mandate, 274 and algorithms of YouTube, 275 and alt-right, 277–78 antisemitic content of, 277–78 “Call of Duty: Black Ops: Wager Match: Gun Game,” 123 celebrity of, 219 and changes to algorithms, 161–62 content shift of, 274–75 and counter-speech, 217 and “Death to all Jews” sign (Fiverr clip), 9, 277, 278, 279, 280 “DELETING MY CHANNEL AT 50 MILLION,” 273–74 and Disney, 219, 278 fan base/subscribers of, 8, 9, 161, 162–63, 187, 218, 280, 352, 354 “FUNNY GAMING MONTAGE!” 

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

According to one prominent study, the 2007–2009 Great Recession produced the strongest such effect: perhaps the “need” for extra work has been reframed by the gig economy as a positive opportunity for “extra” income. In effect, the work culture that promotes the idea that everyone should get a side hustle puts a positive sheen on the declining economic prospects of male (and female) breadwinners. The sharing economy draws on these histories, delegitimizing and feminizing work by pigeonholing sharing-economy jobs as mere side hustles. Even when drivers and other gig economy workers depend on their earnings for major household expenses, like mortgages, college tuition, or medical expenses, the pervasive notion that these are just “side gigs” dismantles expectations about what these jobs should provide.

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning by Tom Vanderbilt

AlphaGo, crowdsourcing, DeepMind, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake it until you make it, functional fixedness, future of work, G4S, global supply chain, IKEA effect, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

The smallest waves at Rockaway gave me a little charge when I saw them on the surfcam. Where a friend might complain that the waves were not up to a certain standard, the fact that they were waves was usually enough for me. There was nothing I was bored about in surfing. Did I hope to get better? Of course. But surfing was not my job, not my side hustle, not even my life’s passion. It was just another of my “capricious and tenacious enthusiasms,” in the words of the writer James Dickey. I wanted to be as good as it took to keep it being fun for me. If I’m doomed to be a mediocre surfer, I’m okay with that. The word “mediocre,” after all, comes from Old Latin, meaning “halfway to the top.”

…

This was something I’d heard from various motor-skill researchers: As cool as it might sound, you don’t want Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi teaching your kid’s basketball or soccer camp. He would struggle to explain what he does, much less break it down for a nine-year-old. Like many New York enterprises, Wolf’s juggling was a side hustle. An avid birder, she spent most of her time working on the website for Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology. Her roommate used to clown for now-defunct Ringling. “He’s not with the circus anymore, but he tours all over, with people like Britney Spears. Clowns in New York get a lot of gigs, actually.”

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

And if you can’t get a job without a portfolio, and you can’t build a portfolio without internships, and you can’t afford to work for free to snag those internships—then, in theory, only a certain sort of person (read: a person with means, a person with private funding from their university, a person who can take out even more loans to cover an internship while they’re in school) can afford to provide “hope labor.” Some of us were only able to take on internships because we were living at home. Others, to make ends meet, relied on parents, or student loans, or side hustles. Many gave up the dream of finding work in their desired field entirely. But that didn’t mean the overarching idea that you should do what you love, no matter the cost, faded away. Sofia, a white woman who grew up “privileged as fuck,” had a string of unpaid internships at small museums and Sotheby’s before graduating from a small liberal arts college with a degree in art history.

…

“Then there are dress-up days at school, wholesome crafts that are supposed to improve fine-motor skills while avoiding screen time, and the need for everything to have a theme.” If a traditional leisure activity like, say, knitting, is actually pleasurable, mothers feel pressure to monetize it: Erika, who lives in a Boston suburb and describes her family as “struggling financially,” finds herself endlessly reading articles on Pinterest such as “21 Totally Legit Side Hustles for Stay-at-Home Moms.” “I’m constantly wondering if I could start a knitting business,” she says, “instead of just relaxing with a hobby I get pleasure out of.” “Time studies find that a mother, especially one who works outside the home for pay, is among the most time-poor humans on the planet,” Schulte writes in Overwhelmed, “especially single mothers, weighed down not only by role overload but also what sociologists call ‘task density’—the intense responsibility she bears and the multitude of jobs she performs in each of those roles.”16 Marielle Cloin, who studies family time use in the Netherlands, explains the problem to Schulte as “role overload”: “the constant switching from one role to the next.”17 In five minutes, a mom can go from texting a friend who’s been struggling to chopping fruit for a kid’s snack to checking a recipe online to regulating a sibling argument in the next room to trying to listen to her partner tell her about their day at work.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

The essays were shaped in part by the harsh conditions of Missouri, the state I call home, a state that had long been the bellwether of American politics and now served as the bellwether of American decline. But the crisis I documented was nationwide: rising political paranoia, opportunity-hoarding by wealthy elites, a “post-employment economy” of side hustles and unpaid labor, the weaponization of digital media by dictators and extremists, and the catastrophic consequences of unchecked corruption. These were not abstract concerns. The cumulative effect was a collective agony intensified by the all-American shame of seeing systemic breakdowns as personal failings.

…

The quote is from Trump’s 2004 CNN interview with Larry King, who you remember as a celebrity interviewer from your childhood but who was paid $225,000 in 2011 to do a puff piece interview with a Kremlin-friendly oligarch and whose show now airs on Russian state media, because seemingly everyone on earth now has a side hustle with the Kremlin.43 But since calming down and obeying the leader are the orders of the day—the orders, repeated like the drumbeat of a racing heart—you decide to see what he has to offer: Caller: I’d like to know how you handle your stress. Trump: I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

This mirrors the increasing demands in today’s workplaces for people to play roles that go far beyond their more narrowly defined job descriptions—and to play across disciplines and skills. There’s an excellent chance your new marketing hire is learning to code on her lunch break. It is the era of the “side hustle”—a recent survey showed that almost a third of millennials now have an extra job on the side. • Founders are all-in and always on. They benefit from greater flexibility and autonomy than nine-to-fivers, but the boundaries between their work and their lives tend to be blurry. Of course, there is a dark side to this founder feeling.

…

The company goes public: Portia Crowe, “Snap Is Going Public at a $24 Billion Valuation,” Business Insider, March 1, 2017. “He just wants”: Austin Carr, “What Snapchat’s High-Profile Exec Departures Really Tell Us About CEO Evan Spiegel,” Fast Company, October 20, 2015. A Bentley University survey: “Millennials at Work,” Bentley University, November 11, 2014, 13. It is the era of the “side hustle”: CareerBuilder, “Millennials Significantly Outpacing Other Age Groups for Taking on Side Gigs,” PR Newswire, September 29, 2016. The reality that three: Deborah Gage, “The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2012. A survey by ManpowerGroup: “Millennial Careers: 2020 Vision Facts, Figures and Practical Advice from Workforce Experts,” ManpowerGroup, 2016.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

There are also a few notable differences between the sort of people who become Airbnb hosts and the sort who work with Kitchensurfing. For instance, while some Kitchensurfing chefs engaged in their food work full time, few Airbnb hosts only hosted. Most had full-time occupations or identities outside Airbnb, whether as students, lawyers, writers, or small business owners, and their Airbnb work was a side hustle or part-time effort. Part of this divide derives from the fact that while Airbnb hosting can require multiple emails or being on call part of the time, it is often less labor-intensive and time-consuming than creating a menu, shopping for ingredients, and cooking for clients. Additionally, while Kitchensurfing chefs often hired assistants to help with large events, they were still expected to show up for such events.

…

So, it’s like it was strangely enjoyable to sort of leave the office at one in the afternoon and go down to some apartment and clean it up and welcome a guest, which is so different from the general cerebral work that I do on a day-to-day basis. A small, temporary change of pace can be interesting. Joshua would probably never consider cleaning houses for a living or working as a hotel’s front desk clerk, but as a short-term side hustle it has its appeal. At the end of our interview, he noted that he was moving cross-country and hiring his fiancée’s undocumented immigrant mother to manage the key distribution and cleaning. As he put it, he and his business partner “want to do as little manual labor as possible, turn [Airbnb listings] into passive income.”

The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

When producers such as Dr. Dre, Timbaland, and Lil Jon work on tracks for other artists, they don’t just produce the records they make, they also brand them, appearing in the videos and singing hooks, often cross-promoting their own product lines at the same time. For commercial hip-hop stars, having several side hustles is as important as having several clean pairs of kicks. Hip-hop is a game of braggadocio, and conspicuous consumption is no longer enough to impress. The more you can successfully build 188 | THE PIRATE’S DILEMMA and extend your brand and still manage to keep it real, the more you can exaggerate your swagger.

…

Aside from the requisite clothing line, sneaker deal, and Hollywood career most rappers now feel naked without, “Bigg Boss Dogg” has his own brand of pornographic DVDs, malt liquor, foot-long hot doggs, a skateboard company, a youth American football league (the Snooperbowl), and a line of action figures, not to mention endorsing everything from mobile phones to scooters to “Chronic Candy.”* A more diverse line of side hustles is hard to imagine, but Snoop pulls it off by endorsing products that reflect his personality. Hip-hop artists create business empires as a form of self-expression the way the rest of us build MySpace pages. Hip-hop instills passion in its fans and then demands participation, making entrepreneurs out of even the most reluctant.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

“But many of these workers do not earn enough to adequately support their families, even at a subsistence level.”6 Meanwhile, mid-wage jobs were hollowed out while high-paying ones took much longer to bounce back.7 The recession especially affected heavily unionized sectors like the building trades because home and large office construction stalled after the housing crisis. In the wake of the recession’s economic fallout, Americans scrambled to find work, creating an opening for new start-ups to sell low-wage workers and the unemployed on the concept of a “gig” or “side hustle.”8 Once viewed as temporary, these types of jobs quickly became a permanent feature of the economy. Uber and TaskRabbit were both founded in 2008; they were joined in 2011 by Postmates, in 2012 by Instacart and Lyft, in 2013 by DoorDash, and by Shipt in 2015. The emergence of the gig economy worsened working conditions nationwide and rapidly expanded the ranks of low-wage, hyperexploited workers.

…

Rosenblat quoted in Bloomberg: “It was dire economic straits that gave birth to the gig economy in the first place. Uber and Lyft sprang from the 2008 financial crisis—a time when many people were willing to accept that any work was better than none at all. Americans rallied around the concept of a ‘side hustle,’ and governments effectively endorsed the practice by declining to get involved in the smartphone-based labor markets taking shape.” Joshua Brustein, “The Gig Economy Was Built to Thrive in a Downturn—Just Not This One,” Bloomberg, May 5, 2020, www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2020-05-06/the-gig-economy-was-built-to-thrive-in-a-downturn-just-not-this-one. 9.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

“Fuck you, I’ll buy you out—get out of my face,” the American recalled replying, and sent Nick away with $250,000. Nick remembered it differently, saying he parted because the company “struggled with software,” and he saw a better path through the same space with tech friends in London. Nick’s next venture began with a side hustle: he was great at throwing parties. It was the core of his personality, really, the exterior of a smooth insider with the calculation and thin skin of the outsider he sometimes felt like—gay and Jewish and half-Hungarian. He had the connections to get the right people to come, and the neurosis to care whether they did.

…

Drudge’s biographer Matthew Lysiak later reported that Drudge had offered Andrew a 25 percent stake in the website version of his email newsletter that he was launching. But Andrew wasn’t willing to give up his industry job, much as he hated it, for such an uncertain venture, and so they parted instead with a handshake deal that The Drudge Report would be Andrew’s side hustle. Between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., Andrew would be the one posting its links, and Matt would pay him “what he could.” Andrew was awed by the meeting. “That guy is going to change the world,” he told his girlfriend as the Geo Metro drove away. Working for Drudge was a dream of relevance and power.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

At some point, though, some of Wythenshawe’s once-utopian social homes have ended up in the hands of private landlords. Dan and Amy’s owned ‘a few’ in the area, all similarly modest family homes intended as municipal housing. Landlording wasn’t his main job, Amy told me. He worked in construction by day – buy-to-lets were his pension, his lucrative side hustle. He was, Amy said, ‘absolutely wadded’. This – one of the ugliest aspects of the housing crisis – is rarely addressed: that turning houses into assets and not homes has emboldened some ordinary people who are perfectly happy to screw their neighbours out of the right to decent shelter, because it makes them wealthier.

…

Three of them told me they were ‘cousins’. They were originally from Hungary. Their friend was also from Hungary. They all came here for work. The most talkative cousin called himself George,* but wouldn’t tell me his real name because, as well as doing shifts in production in a nearby foam factory, he had a side hustle: selling phones and cars on Facebook but not paying tax on that work. The other two did ad hoc gardening and casual construction jobs. In practice, that’s one area where immigration actually forms part of the solution to the housing crisis: in 2015 the Chartered Institute of Building noted that any caps on immigration would harm housebuilding rates, as not enough British-born workers were either trained or interested in careers in construction, and migrants had been filling the gap.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Spain Bears Much of the Pain’, New York Times, 14 February 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/business/spain-europe-middle-class.html. 72 Jennifer Szalai, ‘Going for Broke, the Middle Class Goes Broke’, New York Times, 27 June 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/books/review-squeezed-alissa-quart.html. 73 Sarah Graham, ‘Meet The Young Nurses Who Need A Side Hustle Just To Pay Their Bills’, Grazia, 12 July 2017, https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/meet-young-nurses-need-side-hustle-just-pay-bills/. 74 ‘Nursing Shortage: 52% of US Nurses Say It’s Gotten Worse’, Staffing Industry Analysts, 12 November 2019, https://www2.staffingindustry.com/site/Editorial/Daily-News/Nursing-shortage-52-of-US-nurses-say-it-s-gotten-worse-51871; in both the US and UK academics can fall into this trap too.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

A corporate executive that starts new divisions or spins off a company from inside an existing company is more entrepreneurial than someone owning an equity stake and merely following the directions of their partners. Freelancers that take no initiative to build new systems that improve their work or sales process could be less entrepreneurial than an employee with a side hustle that’s making it happen. These are simply generalizations intended to demonstrate that although there’s not a name for it, you can invest in entrepreneurship as a skill set just like you can knowledge. Investing in Entrepreneurship Once we see entrepreneurship as an asset or resource that can be invested in, we can apply similar, basic economic concepts towards it and start making better, more reasoned decisions.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

—Originally published July 1, 2014 PART II The Post-Employment Economy Surviving the Post-Employment Economy A lawyer. A computer scientist. A military analyst. A teacher. What do these people have in common? They are trained professionals who cannot find full-time jobs. Since 2008, they have been tenuously employed—working one-year contracts, consulting on the side, hustling to survive. They spent thousands on undergraduate and graduate training to avoid that hustle. They eschewed dreams—journalism, art, entertainment—for safer bets, only to discover that the safest bet is that your job will be contingent and disposable. Unemployed graduates are told that their predicament is their own fault.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

Gupta sat on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, which surrounded him with some of the wealthiest investors in the world. One investor, citing the paydays of private equity tycoons, described Gupta like this: “I think he wants to be in that circle. That’s a billionaire circle, right? Goldman is like the hundreds of millions circle, right?”¹² Right. So Gupta found a lucrative side hustle. In 2008, as Goldman Sachs stared at the wrath of the financial crisis, Warren Buffett planned to invest $5 billion into the bank to help it survive. As a Goldman board member Gupta learned of this transaction before the public. It was valuable information. Goldman’s survival was in doubt and Buffett’s backing would surely send its stock soaring.

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

They included more rigorous personal reflection work and a student-led Honor Code movement. Momentum increased dramatically in a community fueled by its own high standards and deep devotion, a community fully unleashed. Add “culture” to your title Culture change is often viewed as important but not urgent, a lofty side hustle you get to pursue only after you’ve done your day job. But the most successful organizational leaders we know are the ones who put culture at the very center of what they do. They’re the CEOs who implicitly replace the “e” with a “c” and interpret their roles as chief culture officers first. They’re the VPs of product or sales or operations who mentally tack on “and culture” to whatever operating title they’ve earned.

Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living by Elizabeth Willard Thames

Airbnb, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, buy and hold, carbon footprint, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, financial independence, food desert, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, index fund, indoor plumbing, lifestyle creep, loss aversion, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, passive income, payday loans, risk tolerance, side hustle, Stanford marshmallow experiment, universal basic income, working poor

Grow your wealth, which in my case is through low-fee index funds and our rental property. Embrace frugality in order to achieve all of these objectives more quickly and more sustainably. If you can’t save enough, even with a regimen of true extreme frugality, then you probably need to look for ways to earn more, either through finding a new job or adding on a second job or side hustle. There are a number of different formulas that people use to determine how much money they’ll need in order to reach financial independence, but at the most basic level, it’s a question of how much money you need to live on every year. In light of that, there are actually only three variables in the financial independence equation: income, expenses, and time.

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lock screen, microdosing, Parkinson's law, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

Jon Acuff, New York Times bestselling author, Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done “You need a system to succeed, and Free to Focus can be that system. Michael’s no-nonsense, all-helpful advice can help anyone prioritize their life to do more of what’s important to them.” Chris Guillebeau, author, Side Hustle and The $100 Startup “Overwork is a pervasive form of personal sabotage. Michael Hyatt presents a well-researched but refreshing alternative that allows us to breathe, play, and connect while still accomplishing the very best we have to offer at work. This book will restore the inner peace that makes work—and life—worthwhile.”

The Simple Path to Wealth: Your Road Map to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life by J L Collins

asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, compound rate of return, currency risk, diversification, financial independence, full employment, German hyperinflation, index fund, inverted yield curve, John Bogle, lifestyle creep, low interest rates, money market fund, Mr. Money Mustache, nuclear winter, passive income, payday loans, risk tolerance, side hustle, The 4% rule, Vanguard fund, yield curve

I can tell you, she was a White House intern in the 90s (before Monica Lewinsky’s time) and she’s burned through three passports; collecting stamps from Haiti, India, Estonia, Japan, France, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Italy along the way. The Russian border patrol once detained her, seizing her passport. She’s been a professional designer for over 15 years and outside of her day job, she’s illustrated three books and authored two. She restores and sells mid-century furniture with her poet husband as a side hustle. They met in a blizzard. All that is well and good, but when it comes to her success with this cover and working with me, my money says the key is that experience with the Russians. Cover Illustration I love the illustration on this book’s cover. I’ve been friends with Trisha Ray (www.trisharay.com) dating back to my bicycle trip thru Ireland where she and her then fiancé kidnapped me, hauled me up to Galway for a music festival and then abandoned me on the side of the road to find my own way back.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

And if you did, you would have to be escorted,” Levchin recalled. For a Jewish refugee, the badges evoked painful parallels. “I didn’t have to do this, but I had relatives who did,” he said. Levchin quit the US Army Corps of Engineers, though he kept the tag, a fraught relic from the strangest of his college side hustles. * * * By graduation, Levchin was running NetMeridian while simultaneously cramming for final exams and mulling his next step. While his friends prepared for their lives away from Urbana-Champaign, Levchin found himself tethered. NetMeridian was successful, but in a world before cloud computing, the company relied on its massive, immobile server.

…

French-born, Iranian-American engineer Pierre Omidyar had not set out to build an online auction behemoth when he coded AuctionWeb and posted it to his personal website, www.ebay.com, so named for his web consulting company, Echo Bay Technology Group. At first, AuctionWeb featured just Omidyar’s discards, including a broken laser pointer, which he listed for $14.83. When someone actually purchased it, Omidyar was astonished—and realized that his side hustle might have a bright future.II Four years later, AuctionWeb was eBay—a billion-dollar publicly traded company and a defining dot-com brand. The earliest account of a Confinity-eBay linkage came from April 1999. On April 8, Thiel and his team met with Peter Davison and Graeme Linnett, two of Confinity’s investors.

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

A researcher’s most important tasks might include designing and running studies, teaching, and applying for funding. My most important tasks are writing books and blog articles, reading research to encounter new ideas, and giving talks. In your personal life, your purposeful tasks might include spending time with your kids, working on a side hustle, or volunteering with a local charity. A perfectly productive person would focus on only the top two quadrants of the above chart. If things were that simple, though, you wouldn’t need this book. As you’ve no doubt experienced, sticking within the borders of necessary and purposeful work is much easier said than done.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

He was a boy genius who grew up in Philadelphia and graduated first in his class at Princeton at age fifteen, in 1801. Like a lot of people who finish college and don’t know what to do, he became a lawyer and hated it. He wrote in a letter that he saw his life reduced to “pleading the defenseless cases of vice and misfortune, and then dying like a mushroom on the soil which had seen me grow.” As side hustles, he ran a literary magazine and edited the journals of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. When Biddle was twenty-four, he was elected to the Pennsylvania state legislature. Fighting about banking and money was America’s national pastime in the early nineteenth century (baseball hadn’t been invented yet), and Biddle jumped into the middle of it.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

The derision we heap upon the avid stamp collector or train spotter might really be a kind of defense mechanism, to spare us from confronting the possibility that they’re truly happy in a way that the rest of us—pursuing our telic lives, ceaselessly in search of future fulfillment—are not. This also helps explain why it’s far less embarrassing (indeed, positively fashionable) to have a “side hustle,” a hobbylike activity explicitly pursued with profit in mind. And so in order to be a source of true fulfillment, a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing; that’s a sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome. My respect for the rock star Rod Stewart increased a few years back when I learned—from newspaper coverage of an interview he’d given to Railway Modeler magazine—that he’d spent the last two decades at work on a vast and intricate model railway layout of a 1940s American city, a fantasy amalgam of New York and Chicago complete with skyscrapers, vintage automobiles, and grimy sidewalks, with the grime hand-painted by Sir Rod himself.

The Minimalist Home: A Room-By-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life by Joshua Becker

Albert Einstein, car-free, collaborative consumption, do what you love, endowment effect, estate planning, Lao Tzu, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, new economy, Paradox of Choice, side hustle, Steve Jobs

Nowadays I lease a small office because I find that putting some distance between myself and home helps me concentrate on my work better. But I still sometimes opt to work from the dining room table, and I still enjoy it when I do. More and more people run businesses from home these days, whether it’s a full-time gig or a side hustle. My next-door neighbor sells stuff on eBay. Another friend runs Facebook ads for businesses. I know others who sell motorcycle tires and “survivalist gear” (whatever that is) from their homes. An estimated 26 million Americans have a home office that they could legitimately claim a tax deduction for.1 A lot of people with more traditional jobs bring work home with them to finish up in the evenings.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

Data from the Tax Data Researchers suggests there are at least 10,000 independent creatives who earn enough to be in the top 1 percent of earners. How many people try to be independent creatives? There is conflicting information here. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 51,880 “independent artists, writers, and performers,” not all of whom own their own business. However, there are also other people who have a side hustle in a creative field but don’t consider that their main profession. Other survey data suggests that 1.2 million Americans primarily make their living as working artists. This suggests the 10,000 independent creatives in the top 1 percent would make up roughly 1 percent of working artists. If this were true, the odds of entering the top 1 percent would be about as good for an artist as they would be for an average American.

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Dr. Julie Smith

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, fake news, fear of failure, meta-analysis, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, side hustle, TikTok

Values – When the demands you face are in direct conflict with your personal values. Let’s be clear. Burnout is a serious health issue. Anyone who thinks they may be experiencing burnout needs to act as soon as possible. But we also have to be realistic. Some pressures you can say no to (like taking on that side hustle on top of a 50-hour working week) but others you can’t (such as physical illness or financial pressures or the emotional strain of a relationship breakdown). When you are fighting to keep a roof over your head and feed your children every day by working two jobs, and trying to be the best parent you can in between, there is no option to just remove stress from your life and take on an idyllic morning routine of meditation and yoga.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Goodhart's law, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, late fees, meta-analysis, microaggression, Paul Graham, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, survivorship bias, Walter Mischel, When a measure becomes a target

Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.* It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.” I refer to this as the difference between being in motion and taking action. The two ideas sound similar, but they’re not the same. When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning.

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

She felt she sabotaged herself, bringing in only twenty Facebook followers, whereas her colleagues brought in hundreds. Ong noted that no one, at any level in this business, ever described their activity as ‘trolling’ or producing ‘fake news’. Everyone had their own ‘denial strategies’: the architects stressed it was merely a side hustle to their regular PR work and thus didn’t define them, and anyway they weren’t in charge of the whole political campaign; the community-level operators said someone else was leaving the really nasty, hateful comments. In any case this was the architecture of online influence, which would shift into a more aggressive gear when Duterte came to power.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

He cited the 2017 US tax bill, supported by the Business Roundtable, as an example. The lion’s share of the benefits, he argued, ended up in the hands of the top 1 percent, increasing the income inequality underlying many social problems. “What I see are well-meaning activities that are virtuous side hustles,” he argued, “while key activities of their business are relatively undisturbed.… Many of the companies are focused on doing more good, but less attentive to doing less harm.” It’s an understandable argument. And ultimately, the success of stakeholder capitalism will require a new and transparent system of corporate accountability, so that companies can be held to their commitments.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The platforms behind the gig economy like to talk about their movement as the savior of the American worker, empowering otherwise underemployed individuals to be their own bosses and live the entrepreneurial dream. After all, the drivers and laborers who make Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, DoorDash, Postmates, Fiverr, and TaskRabbit work can choose when and where they work with unprecedented control. Realistically, though, many of the workers in the gig economy need money. That’s why they’re side hustling. They’re underemployed or unemployed, and the minimal extra income they earn from these services—85 percent make less than $500 a month—is helping them make ends meet. That doesn’t sound like the ultimate in entrepreneurial freedom. But there’s something more troubling about the fact that one in four Americans is now participating in the gig economy.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

At Eckert-Mauchly, she’d been senior mathematician—“it sounded impressive enough to match the salary”—but at Remington Rand, seniority just meant more work. Beyond managing a team of programmers and overseeing custom software projects for each client, she served as clearinghouse for customer support. It was a constant battle. To say nothing of her side hustles: she was always furthering the art, working in what little spare time she had on improvements to programming technique. But it suited her to be busy. She’d had a rough patch in the years between Eckert-Mauchly’s insolvency and its acquisition by Remington Rand, her alcoholism creeping back—she was even arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in November 1949.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

Tyler and Cameron had started to view Voorhees and Ira as people who were being paid like full-time employees but only working part-time—building their own projects on the side—one of which was a Bitcoin gambling site. The twins believed BitInstant required full-time dedicated employees, not people with one foot in, one foot out. That was how they approached everything, and Charlie could understand it: you didn’t make the Olympics by being a part-timer. Ver, on the other hand, thought Erik’s and Ira’s side hustles were none of the twins’ business—whatever they were building would only further the overall ecosystem and BitInstant along with it; but it was obvious, Ver’s disagreement with the twins went much deeper than business. As Bitcoin had grown, Ver had become more and more vocal about his beliefs—you either agreed with them, or you were the enemy.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

The rise of the gig economy has allowed new multibillion-dollar companies to be built on the backs of a shadow workforce. There are millions of drivers for Uber and Lyft, hundreds of thousands of deliverymen for Instacart and Seamless, and many thousands more offering themselves up for part-time work on sites like TaskRabbit and Upwork. Some of these workers treat the jobs as side hustles, occasional gigs that provide a bit of pocket cash. But for many, gig work is a full-time occupation, only without the security of a steady paycheck, decent benefits, or an employer to hold accountable. The gig economy, which began as a way to connect people who needed an odd job done here and there with locals looking to make a little extra cash, has given rise to an entirely new kind of labor force.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

There are other big players in e-commerce, from foreign competitors like China’s Pinduoduo to national retailers like Walmart and Tesco; global brands such as GAP and Apple; marketplaces including eBay, Craigslist, and Mercado Libre; and individual stores and direct-to-consumer brands ranging from home-based side hustles to billion-dollar corporations, like Allbirds and Warby Parker. But none of them dominates the market and imagination around digital commerce in a way that comes remotely close to Jeff Bezos’s one-click powerhouse. True to Bezos’s vision of the digital future of commerce, Amazon is the ultimate everything store, a one-stop shop for anything you could possibly buy, from soup to nuts, to the pot to make that soup in and even to a tractor to harvest the nuts.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

It bothered me that the fellowship asked fellows to do virtuous side projects instead of doing their day jobs more honorably. The institute brought together people from powerful institutions like Facebook, the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, and PepsiCo. Instead of asking them to make their firms less monopolistic, greedy, or harmful to children, it urged them to create side hustles to “change the world.” I began to feel like a casual participant in—and timid accomplice to, as well as a cowardly beneficiary of—a giant, sweet-lipped lie. Who exactly were we leaders of? What had given us the right to solve the world’s problems as we saw fit? What interests and blind spots were we bringing to that problem-solving, given the criteria by which we had been selected?

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

Sir Richard was at that time an MP, as well as a major landowner in the north, and had insufficient time for the details of the London speculation. His younger brother Robert spent more time in London and appeared to be more hands-on with the development of the land, but it was clear that the successful running of this kind of scheme was no longer an elite side-hustle, but a fully professionalised operation. The management of land itself had turned into a sector that demanded a certain kind of expertise. Originally a carpenter, the estate surveyor Thomas Barlow had gained valuable experience across many of the schemes since the beginning of the new century.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

” * * * — JESS LOVE HAD been renting apartments in the Bay Area since 1989, when, at nineteen, he used the savings from years of summer jobs to make a down payment on an $89,000 condo in Palo Alto. He rented to a group of tenants while he was off at college in Connecticut and used the next spate of summer jobs to refill his mortgage and repairs account. Love graduated and went to law school and spent two decades as a lawyer, but all along the way he kept building a real estate side hustle—trading up his properties, using his nights to do repairs, putting cash flow into new buildings. Finally, he was in his fifties and quit the law firm to become a full-time investor. Love liked real estate because he was good at it. He could do basic things like lay tile and sweat copper and install water heaters and repair cabinets.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The depth and breadth of change being effected by the gig economy is unprecedented, and while the sheer number of workers that labor solely in the gig economy relative to the traditional economy isn’t yet as high as some academics once predicted it would be,12 the changes are still happening in nearly every industry, across pretty much every geography. What happens when everyone is, to a greater or lesser extent, a freelancer? What happens when everyone has to have some kind of a side hustle, because a single job isn’t secure enough anymore? That’s one of the big existential worries that Uber creates in many people, even while they, as customers, enjoy the huge convenience and cost savings it provides. Companies are increasingly boasting about how they want their employees to act as entrepreneurs—while neglecting to mention that what they really mean is they want employees to work hard, 24/7, without necessarily rewarding them like entrepreneurs, say with a piece of equity or a performance-based salary.

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

If you want to be those things, it is probably not going to work out for you to find someone in the United States. It may not be the right fit for you. This was the case for David, an incredibly smart guy I met at a client mastermind a couple years ago. At the time, David spent his days running a family business and his nights making side hustle investments that few others would want to touch. By all outward appearances, David was a success. He was smart, accomplished, and had a good deal of money. What he did not have was a life partner. David came to meet with me and other clients in Colombia, ostensibly to see how I personally invested overseas and to tour real estate for investment.

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

The company has further broadened into its own brand of electronic product lines—such as the Kindle e-book reader and the Echo speakers that “house” Alexa—which grow and support the company’s other markets for consumer goods and entertainment.9 Amazon branched into traditional retail in 2017 with its acquisition of Whole Foods Market, a high-end supermarket chain with over four hundred stores.10 The company also owns data centers and makes TV shows. It’s an impressive portfolio that has earned Amazon the name of the “Everything Store” (also the title of journalist Brad Stone’s 2013 book on the empire), and increasingly, the Everything Company.11 The chief of this megastore has several side hustles too. In 2000, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a human spaceflight company, which is intended to make the human species multiplanetary and move polluting industries off the planet.12 And he owns the Washington Post, one of the United States’ leading newspapers and a target of President Donald Trump’s “fake news” campaign.

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business by Arvid Kahl

business logic, business process, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, content marketing, continuous integration, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, domain-specific language, financial independence, functional programming, Google Chrome, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, information retrieval, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kanban, Kubernetes, machine readable, minimum viable product, Network effects, performance metric, post-work, premature optimization, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, software as a service, solopreneur, source of truth, statistical model, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, the long tail, trickle-down economics, value engineering, web application

All of a sudden, we had a product that developed a strong network effect overnight. And that feature made the business grow beyond our wildest expectations. Every day, new teachers would sign up, and since we provided a service that solved their problems well, we had incredibly high retention and conversion rates. For many of our customers, teaching from home was a side hustle. Using our product enabled many of them to turn this into a full-time source of income. We priced our service to be affordable and easily justified. We even increased our prices by 50% a year into running the business, and it continued growing nevertheless. So we coasted along, adding new customers every day, building features and making the service more reliable, and integrating deeper and deeper into the web-based teaching software our customers were using.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

When people talk about independent employment, they usually jump straight to the on-demand labor force enabled by companies like Uber, Lyft, Postmates, TaskRabbit, and Instacart. While this is the most visible form of gig work, less than 2 percent of the US labor force make their living through this “electronically mediated work,” though the number is higher if you count people who use the platforms as a side hustle. Still, this piece of the job market epitomizes the decentralized workforce. Anyone who has worked through one of these platforms knows it is a solitary affair. You have no coworkers. You set your own hours. You interact with the company only when something goes wrong with the app. For the most part, your marching orders—and your pay—are dictated by software.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

He dropped the names of respected researchers we both knew, he had some interesting ideas, and he was unfailingly polite. Neither project got off the ground, however, and that turned out to be fortunate, as he had been involved in dozens of legal cases involving fraud or misrepresentation. By most indications, our “colleague” appears to have had a side hustle as a fraudster, pretending to have credentials he didn’t and bilking people out of a few thousand dollars here and there. If we relied less on “gut instincts” and checked credentials more thoroughly, we would less often become victims of fraud. Someone who is entirely trustworthy and credible will come across that way when you talk to them—but so will a con artist.

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

With his deadline looming at 11:59 p.m. that night, Stewart said he still had faith that he could find 6 million masks and get them to the doorstep of the VA. The latest plan had come together just twelve hours before, when one of his contacts connected him with the former attorney general of Alabama, a guy named Troy King, a Republican lawyer who held a variety of LLCs and side hustles and whose name has often appeared adjacent to scandals in the newspaper. Further aiding his efforts was a mysterious woman to whom King had connected him, a Juanita Ramos, who allegedly had a relationship with someone on Vice President Mike Pence’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. This was the officially official one, not the Kushner Kids assembled by the president’s son-in-law.

I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Ken Thompson, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Snapchat, War on Poverty

And a few other things.” Eric Garner walked away with his head down. Even crack dealing was starting to seem impossibly beyond his grasp. — It wasn’t long after that that Esaw made an offhand comment that would change her husband’s life. While Eric was away in jail the last time, she’d picked up her own little side hustle—one she didn’t realize was illegal. “I’m selling cigarettes,” she said. Eric immediately raised an eyebrow. “Selling cigarettes?” Eric said. “And how’s that working out?” “I make a lot of money in a day with these loosies,” she explained. He paused. “How much money?” — Drug dealing was the wrong fit for Garner.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Given all of this, considerable PR maneuvering is required to make such a depressing trend palatable. Here, what in chapter 1 we called the ideology of personalization can do useful work. In its own marketing materials, Airbnb promotes itself as “an economic lifeline for the middle class.”90 An ad for Uber features an African American driver speaking of the economic necessity to have a “side hustle,” a necessity Uber allows him to fulfill while also giving him time to “chill” whenever he wants and to spend more time with his family.91 The reality of Uber in particular, however, paints a less rosy picture. Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark92 review Uber’s record of economic manipulation through surge pricing and sudden driver deactivation as well as the general opacity of its algorithmic processing from the point of view of its drivers (the company can make it seem as though there are more drivers available in a location than there actually are, simply to push worker wages down).

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

A Pattern Language, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, big-box store, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, car-free, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, mandatory minimum, market clearing, megastructure, New Urbanism, parking minimums, power law, remote working, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Seaside, Florida, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, SimCity, social distancing, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, traffic fines, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, WeWork, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

He was working on an urban forest management plan for Fullerton and rattled off a list of native, drought-ready plants. In addition to running for city council and the county Democratic committee, he drew his salary as an organizer at an environmental nonprofit and was also helping his dad restart his side hustle, a restaurant that burned down after an illegal marijuana greenhouse next door caught fire on New Year’s Eve. In short, José Trinidad Castañeda was possibly the busiest man in Orange County. He was up with the sun and still up long after it set. A good number of the issues that motivated him, though—transportation, housing policy, immigration, energy—were entangled in this seemingly obscure issue of legalizing garage apartments.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Everything changed for Zoltan and his middle-class Jewish family. Hungary allied itself with the Axis powers. In 1942, Zoltan was taken from his home to serve in a labour camp in Lipinszkaja, on the western border of Poland.2 A year later, on 20 November 1943, Zoltan tried to escape; he was shot and killed. But Zoltan’s side hustle had saved his family. The gold and diamonds he kept in the apartment became the currency Lilly used to buy Christian identity papers from the cleaning lady, whose daughter was a similar age to Susie, the Kaufmans’ eight-year-old daughter. The gold was also used to pay off the hotelier of a mountain resort, a customer of Zoltan’s, when suspicious locals forced them to flee the city.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Unbeknownst to Google, the search giant was soon buying much of its tech for the street-mapping project from one of its own employees, Levandowski, who sold the gear via a middleman. Google eventually found out about Levandowski’s ruse. Instead of firing him, Google decided to buy Levandowski’s startup for $20 million. Side hustles like 510 Systems defined Levandowski. He liked money, but what he liked more was finding hacks and work-arounds. Levan­dowski may have labored at a giant corporation, but he was still a scrappy startup guy at heart. Building a business and selling it back to Google was validating; he had found a hole in the 20 percent time system, exploited it, and won.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

They tended to prefer experiences over possessions. And a generation steeped in social networks became increasingly comfortable renting things instead of owning them: millennials rented rides (with Uber and Lyft), rented clothes (through Rent The Runway), and rented labor (through TaskRabbit). They also began to look to the gig economy for side hustles to supplement their meager incomes. By 2018, more than 40 percent of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds worked as freelancers. For almost half of the largest generation of workers, the traditional work structure that had defined twentieth-century professional life just wasn’t available anymore.

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

Isackson lived a few houses down from fellow Singer client Marci Palatella and her family, on a steep, curvy street in the hills above San Mateo. And Marjorie Klapper introduced Singer to the Sartorios, who lived a couple miles away at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac not far from Stanford. But too much scuttlebutt could torpedo Singer’s lucrative side hustle. For all his bluster and flexibility with facts, Singer ran a disciplined enterprise. He relied on parents to adhere to finely honed talking points to fend off high school counselors or college admissions officers who might question, for instance, why a student in the Bay Area was flying to L.A. to take the SAT, or why a nonathlete was suddenly being recruited for a university crew team.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Entrepreneurs with offhand questions morphed into new clients, and Safdie quickly became proficient in advising on venture capital investments, which he found more enjoyable than corporate mergers. He put up a sign next to the communal printer, saying he could provide legal services for small companies. What had started as an unintentional side hustle quickly became his main gig. Safdie sensed something was changing about the city; in the wake of the financial crisis, there was a new zeitgeist. It was all around him at WeWork, he thought, and he wanted to dive in deep. Later, he would move to two other WeWork buildings, before WeWork itself hired him as the company’s general counsel

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Liz Garbus, one of the most celebrated documentarians of the last twenty-five years, who has made films like The Execution of Wanda Jean and Bobby Fischer Against the World, credited Nevins with giving her a career. When she first met with Nevins in the late 1990s, she said it felt like “gaining access to the holy house of saints.” And if you worked with her, she explained, you were a documentarian—there were no side hustles necessary. “People talk about the Golden Age of documentaries now—with streaming and all the wonderful outlets and eyeballs out there—and it is,” she says. “But the Golden Age began if you were making a documentary with Sheila Nevins back at that time. You had financing, you had an audience, you had someone who creatively would support your mission.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Vladislav Klyushin, age forty-two, ran M13, a cybersecurity company catering to the top echelon of Russian society and government. M13’s website, for example, claims that it provides security for the Russian presidency. In 2020, Vladimir Putin bestowed the Medal of Freedom on Klyushin. The FBI, however, suspected that Klyushin had a side hustle making tens of millions of dollars on stock trading from hacked corporate-earnings information. In the spring of 2021, federal agents learned that Klyushin was traveling to Switzerland. On March 21, a private jet from Moscow touched down at Sion Airport in southwestern Switzerland. Shortly after leaving the plane, with a helicopter standing by to take him to the ski resort of Zermatt, Klyushin was detained by Swiss police and taken to a nearby prison.

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

The frugal dinner typically consisted of “one slice of bologna, a piece of Gruyere cheese, a fruit, a small container of honey and one or two cups of tea.” (Einstein, who had not yet gotten his position at the Swiss patent office, was scraping out a living tutoring physics at three francs an hour, and was contemplating a side hustle as a street violinist to keep himself fed.) The Academy read Spinoza, they read Hume, they read Dedekind’s What Are Numbers and What Should They Be?, and they read Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis. But the very first book they studied was Pearson’s The Grammar of Science. And Einstein’s breakthrough, three years later, was very much in the spirit Pearson had imagined.

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

While the talk around Millennials had once centered on their impatient ambition, it soon focused on how they were getting the shaft from the economy. Endless articles and online discussions dissected whether Millennials would ever own homes, catch up with their parents, or be able to quit their side hustles. Even as the economy improved after 2012, Millennials’ dire economic situation was a constant focus, dominating the first nonfiction books written about the generation by its own members. As a large generation following a smaller one, Millennials are beginning to flex their political muscles, impatient for change many thought should have already come.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

And it was hard to shake the icky feeling that many people had about sharing their lives with online strangers.18 The college students of the early 2000s had fewer qualms. They had grown up doing homework on a computer and sneaking late-night hours in the chaotic social world of Internet chat rooms. They file swapped on Napster until it got shut down; they added HTML flourishes to their MySpace pages. Still, Facebook started as a college kid’s side hustle, a vehicle for the silly, ephemeral musings and gossip of his fellow students, who presumably would move on to more serious things after graduation. In those early months the site’s server space was paid for by a wealthy roommate and, at one particularly cash-strapped point, by Zuckerberg’s parents.