In this Tech Cocktail Sessions talk, Kanyi Maqubela—partner at the seed‑stage Collaborative Fund—opens with a personal anecdote and frames his presentation around a core fear: rising unemployment in an economy increasingly driven by the creative class. He references R.H. Coase’s 1937 essay The Nature of the Firm to argue that the 20th‑century economic model built on large, hierarchical firms is being supplanted by a 21st‑century model of collaboration. Using a “time‑traveler” metaphor, he illustrates how work patterns have shifted from full‑time, single‑employer jobs to part‑time, freelance, and gig‑based arrangements, noting that roughly one‑third of Americans now lack traditional full‑time employment. Maqubela outlines four emerging forms of collaborative activity: (1) collaborative creation (e.g., GitHub’s forking model), (2) collaborative consumption (e.g., Airbnb, Skillshare), (3) collaborative distribution (e.g., Kickstarter crowdfunding), and a nascent fifth category he calls “synergistic collaboration,” where diverse participants pool spare time and expertise in community‑focused projects. He provides concrete case studies—GitHub, Airbnb, Skillshare, Codecademy, Kickstarter—to illustrate each pillar. The talk then shifts to systemic challenges: how a collaborative workforce accesses social‑security, health‑insurance, and physical infrastructure such as office space, citing companies like LiquidSpace and Shared Desk that enable shared work environments. Maqubela explains Collaborative Fund’s thesis: seed‑stage investments in platforms that embody collaboration, believing that the internet has “liquified” markets and created economic empowerment opportunities. The Q&A segment surfaces practical advice for startups seeking contact, clarifies the nature of capital pools, probes the definition of collaborative infrastructure, and addresses concerns about a potential “bubble,” which Maqubela dismisses as unlikely given the scale and growth of the internet today. Throughout, his tone is conversational and optimistic, with a measured acknowledgment of risks.
Chapters
Tech Cocktail Sessions, educational and inspirational talks from experienced startup founders, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders.
Actually, I want you to pronounce your name. I want to hear this.
I'm gonna do it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just like the hand.
My name is Kanyi Maqubela.
Mine sounded exactly the same.
I was born in Johannesburg. I'm a South African. I grew up in I work in Boston and live in San Francisco. Very happy to be here. I was going to talk about marketplaces, but having been here, I've been inspired and so wanna take it higher level, and I wanna talk about a fear which has inspired my work with Collaborative Fund. And that fear is pretty basic. It's unemployment.
Yeah.
In 1937, R.H. Coase, C-O-A-S-E, wrote this essay called "The Nature of the Firm." It was an essay that was revolutionary for its time and famous for those who are econ wonks among you. And it talked about how the firm was gonna be the central organizing feature of commerce. It was a way to aggregate inventory, centralize distribution channels, and make it really easy to assess and match consumer demand. It made sense. The 20th century was marked by the firm. The 21st century won't be. The 21st century, in my belief, will be marked by collaboration. Put another way, Richard Florida is an urban theorist that some of the Downtown Project and Vegas Tech Fund folks have spoken eloquently about. He describes this really lovely anecdote talking about a time traveler. If a time traveler was in 1900 and he went to 1950, His first week in 1950 would blow his mind. Cars, skyscrapers, distributed electricity, telephones in every home. It would have been shocking for that time traveler. After about 3 or 4 weeks, maybe even a month, he probably would have gotten used to it, however, because things were mostly the same. People would go work at their very big company, They'd get there in the morning, they'd leave right before dinner, they'd get home for dinner, and that would be that. A time traveler who would leave from 1950 and get to 2000, his first week would be great. Still cars, still skyscrapers. In fact, I think planes might move a little slower now than they did in 1950. And telephones everywhere, they just don't have the cords anymore. But as he spent more time here, he'd realize that everything was actually completely different. People were working part-time, half-time, no time. People were— the workers were black, they were women, they were gay and they were out. And the more time he spent, the more he would realize that this creative class, these knowledge workers who were completely different from the paradigmatic 1950s organization man, We're driving the economy. And he would think, "Wow, the world has changed." And so that's what we want to invest in, and we want to try and solve that fear, that unemployment fear. 1 in 3, I believe is the latest figure, Americans are not full-time employed with a traditional job as measured by the IRS or the Census Bureau. That is not an unemployment statistic that is normal because people have all sorts of other jobs. They're freelancers, They might be full-time freelancers, they might be unemployed, they might be part-time employed. There is a lot of fluidity there, and it's my strong conviction that that number isn't going down. That number may be going up, 'cause firms aren't gonna suddenly get bigger and start hiring. One of the most valuable firms in the world, in the history of creation, employs, I think, fewer than 50,000 people, and that's Apple. And so then there's this question for me, which is, "Does technology create jobs or does it kill jobs? And if it kills jobs, what are we gonna do?" And that takes me back to collaboration, and that's where I think there's an incredible opportunity and where the Downtown Project and Las Vegas are in the midst of one piece of what I think is a really, really exciting puzzle. So in terms of collaboration, you may wonder, "Well, what do you mean exactly by collaboration?" 'Cause sharing doesn't make me any money. Working together isn't a job. And I used to think there were 3 major categories, but having been here, there's a 4th. And maybe you guys can help me name it as I go through them all. So the first is creation, collaborative creation. For those of you who are software nerds out here, you may have heard of something called GitHub. And you may have heard of a term within GitHub called forking. GitHub is this incredible collaborative software tool where a software developer will write a line of code and another developer at another company somewhere else in the world, you know, who name it, right, will build on top of that and write his own line of code. And they'll take theirs and they'll use it for whatever service they want to use it for. They'll go in there and they'll get another basket and they'll use it for whatever they want to use it for. That's just in software. It's coming in hardware. Collaborative creation. Then there's consumption. How many people, show of hands, are familiar with Airbnb? That's a pretty good number. Airbnb. How many people, show of hands, are familiar with Skillshare? Oh yeah, we're talking. That's one of our investments with Collaborative Fund and an incredible organization. Consumption is this example of the sharing economy. You may have read The Economist where it talks about the sharing economy and how sharing is clearly the future and sharing is the path forward. Collaborative consumption is this idea that we all have these fallow assets. There's all this inefficiency out there. I don't use my car all the time. I've got spare rooms. I've got spare change. I've got spare time. And instead of taking those things and letting them lie fallow, what if I put them into marketplaces and traded them with people? Drive my car when I'm not using it. Stay in my room when I don't need it. I'll make some money on the side. Learn the skills that I'm not using. And it works. Avi Flombom is a famous case for Skillshare. He made $127,000 in one year teaching on Skillshare. And this was just the skill that he had as a part-time job, and he quit his job and went to do that full-time. He goes, "Hello." And then there's distribution, right? Distribution is increasingly becoming collaborative as well. And show of hands, how many people are familiar with Kickstarter? This is a savvy crowd. So the idea of crowdfunding, or peer-based funding, is taking hold. In Kickstarter, it's projects. It's an in-kind donation. But imagine if you wanted to start a restaurant, and instead of getting a bank loan, you get everybody in my community to give me a $5 loan. It's here. And it's powerful. And what I'm seeing here with the Downtown Project and with the work Tony, Tech Cocktail, these guys have done is unlocking the capacity of collaboration in development from the ground up in real tangible asset development. It's deeply collaborative. You're all drawing from your own resources. You're taking your spare time and you're contributing it here. It's apparent to me. I lived in Las Vegas. I was in North Las Vegas, I guess you could call it, right by Andre Agassi on MLK. Yeah. I was working for the Obama campaign. This was in 2008. It was, with no exception, the most important and most invigorating and hardest thing I've ever done in my life. And it was because we were trying to create community, and we were trying to empower community and inspire community. And politics aside, that's something worth doing. And since I've been back here, it's astounding to me to see how much has happened so quickly. And so much of it is a matter of collaboration. And so I thank you guys for showing that to me. 'Cause it's great. That's all I got.
Now we're gonna take some questions. So who's got the first question? All right. You had the last question too. You want another sticker? That's what it is. Oh, okay.
So what is your— what is A, are you still in Vegas? And B, what part of— what company are you part of now?
Well, am I still in? I'm currently in Vegas. Collaborative Fund is a seed fund where I'm one of a few investment partners. It's a seed fund, so we take two kids and a PowerPoint, or two kids and a PowerPoint and a few customers, but they're eating mostly ramen, and we give them investment and we help them grow. And so Kickstarter is an example of that. Skillshare is an example of that. Codecademy is an example of that. And we invest on the thesis that, for lack of a better way to describe it, if the 20th century was about the firm, the 21st century is about collaboration. And Steven spoke very eloquently about the inflection point, I guess, that we hit where the digital natives became the driver of the zeitgeist. And we were all listening to what the digital natives are thinking about. And part of that has to do, frankly, with collaboration. And a lot of that has to do with the internet. Because what the internet has done is it has empowered this collaboration. Because RH Coase's theory has fallen apart. The notion of getting from supply and demand is turning on my computer now. It's so efficient. And when it's so efficient, we can all transact in such fluid and exciting ways. It liquifies markets is the wonky phrase for it. So we think that there's— a lot of economic opportunity there, both from an investment standpoint and an economic empowerment standpoint from the participants in these marketplaces.
What is your, like, what do you like to focus on? What's your favorite, or what's your—
What's my favorite category?
What's your favorite category, or what do you want to focus on?
Education, for sure. Yeah, and so Codecademy and Skillshare are two cases of it. Codecademy is probably a collaborative creation tool along the lines of GitHub, and Skillshare, you guys are obviously familiar with.
So, all right, next question.
So if we're a young startup and we wanted to have a conversation with you, how do we go about doing it?
And, um, first name@collaborativefund.com. But I think I also have more business cards than I know what to do with, so get at me.
Would you be open to a small spiel after this is done?
Yes. Thank you. That's why I'm here.
All right, get a sticker, just really fun. Uh, back in the back, I'm gonna get some exercise. All right, here we go.
Hi there, so you've talked about collaboration almost versus the firm, but there's this sort of this area for, for infrastructure. I mean, collaboration, you know, being part of Kickstarter, where do you see that, that, uh where does the infrastructure come from? How do you qualify it? How do you define it?
That's a, it's a brilliant question, and I'm not sure which of the following questions you have, you asked me, but I'm going to try and answer them all because I love talking about each one of them. So one of these infrastructure questions is, if I'm an Airbnb host and a Skillshare teacher and have a Kickstarter project, I might not need a real job because I've got plenty of income. But that also means that, am I paying into Social Security? Where am I getting my health insurance? How about that infrastructure? Because the United States' infrastructure from an insurance standpoint on the two biggest ones, health and Social Security, comes from employers and is powered by the employment infrastructure. So that is an open question right now and a challenge to everybody. Let's think about how the prosumer, who's the business that looks like a consumer and vice versa, gets access to those social services and pays into those social services, 'cause that's critically important. But then on the other side of the coin here, firms provide things like office space. They provide things like wireless internet. There are some things for which having a huge pool of capital whereby you can make very concentrated investments is critical. You can't just distribute it to the in the so-called mesh, right? And so it's a process, it's not a light switch, but here's a great example of it. There's a couple of companies, one is called Liquid Space, excuse me, and another one is called Shared Desk. And these are companies where you can go onto it and you can rent out a room in your office to co-work to anybody else who wants it. And Microsoft is doing this, AT&T is doing this, Accenture is doing it for their own employees and for anybody else who wants to come.. And the notion of a workspace and a desk and a cube and the physical geographic infrastructure that is also associated with employment is also becoming more fluid, is also becoming more collaborative. And that gets me excited too because that's just one aspect of it. Internet is, in terms of sharing spectrum, in terms of paying for it, is increasingly gonna become collaborative as well. So it's gonna be a process, but I don't think there's any aspect of our current infrastructure which can't do with a little bit of peer sharing in a good way.
Great question. Great answer. Clarification, you mentioned a large pool of capital. It's not actually a pool, right?
Like a swimming pool? It's not a swimming pool.
Like Scrooge McDuck or anything like that?
There is a Scrooge, but it's not a pool. Yeah, that's a good question though. Thank you. Good to know.
When you first opened up, you mentioned that there were various forms of collaboration. And that you sensed a fourth type of collaboration here that you were just conjuring in your mind. You didn't get to that.
You know what? I don't know what it's called. Can you describe some of the phenomenon? I'll describe some of the phenomena. So that's an excellent question. Thank you for asking. So in collaborative consumption, which is very zeitgeisty and is the sharing economy and is what you see in newspapers, is clearly the I'm an individual. I have got extra stuff. Let me make money off of that extra stuff or get some value out of that extra stuff. Collaborative creation is let's work together to create something more quickly, more efficiently, or at least more enjoyably. And collaborative distribution is let's find new capital flows, let's find ways to get money that spreads among us rather than through a hub out to the spokes. What's happening here doesn't fit neatly into any of those categories, but it's so clearly collaborative and it does ring with aspects of this fallow assets, because people are throwing in spare time. So people are coming here for 4 days a week, for 4 days a month, for 4 days a year, but bringing their heart and soul and putting it here and leaving it here. And so there is aspects of that. And it's clearly collaborative from the perspective of distribution, because you're getting people sharing with and in and among each other here as the main source of the transactional aspects of it, more so than any hub and spoke. But it's not any one of those. It's something new and it's something I've never seen. So that's what I mean by that.
I sense the same thing and I've termed it synergistic collaboration.
Sure.
Right? Because the synergy of all these different people from different perspectives, fashion to community building to code building to selling shoes.
It's got a nice cadence to it.
It's really an amazing synergy.
And let me also just remind you that my fear is what's driving me here and is an important thing for me to emphasize is economic empowerment is the story I'm trying to tell and is the story that I imagine many people here are also trying to tell. And so, so long as that criteria is there, then I get very excited about as many creative modes of collaboration as we can discover.
Alright, I think we have time for one more question. Who's— okay, I see your hands. We'll see how long it is. We'll go here and then back over here.
So I just want to know about your time traveler. When he goes to 2050, what does that look like and what surprises him? There's a guy named Ray Kurzweil who loves to talk about that. I don't know him, but when I meet him, I'll ask him. It's a good question. That's a very good question. One thing that I know is that the notion of a job is eroding. And I think right now what's coming in its wake, or what's sitting there in the interim, is work. And some work is what you do just to make money. Some work you do for non-economic reasons. Some work you do as a creative pursuit and is really fluid, really flexible. From the content of it and from where and how it's produced and where and how it's distributed. So that part gets me excited, but as for the flying cars and talking robots, psh, you know, I don't know.
Last question.
Oh, the pressure. So thank you so much for diverting off the slides. You've really, really helped me with some thought processes. That I'm trying to discover, and I'm glad I'm here. One of the things that really we're talking about, kind of there's an undercurrent of a lot of people are talking about entrepreneurship, they're talking about this self-empowerment in terms of the economic sense, and at the same time we hear whispers of bubble, whispers of, you know, what's going on with all this stuff, and I think I know how you've helped me with that, but I want to hear you say it. So thank you.
Would you like a sticker?
Well, how deep does the rabbit hole go? But the short answer to the bubble question is I enthusiastically believe that this isn't a bubble. The internet bubble, as a quick piece of economic history from my very young and naive perspective, is that the internet bubble that burst and hurt a lot of people largely hurt a lot of people because these were public companies, and so people were exposed to the public markets. Companies don't go public like that anymore, and so there's actually limited exposure from the perspective of a bubble. So there are going to be ebbs and flows like in any market, but I think these ebbs and flows have pulled us all back now that we realize that public exposure is actually a great economic risk, one, and two, The Internet is— the Internet, the last time there was a bubble versus now is so different. There are a billion more people on the Internet now and that number is going way up. The Internet is growing at something like 40% year over year. Numbers that big don't grow that fast. That's just unheard of. And so, the infrastructure is real now. The rails are down. And they're not going anywhere. So thank you, guys.
