An Overview Of Braintrust As A Web3 Marketplace Reinventing The Future Of Work (Gabe Chat Clip)

12 Sept 2021 · 3 min

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2:33

In this clip, the speaker explains Braintrust as a decentralized talent network that connects enterprise demand for highly skilled technical talent with a global supply of engineers, product managers, and designers. The demand side includes Fortune 1000 companies and organizations such as NASA, Nestlé, and Porsche, many of which are located in regions lacking local talent. The supply side consists of a worldwide pool of technical professionals across several deep‑dive categories. Braintrust’s business model charges zero percent rake to talent, allowing them to keep 100% of earnings, while enterprises pay a flat 10% fee on transactions, keeping the network at break‑even. The platform is built as a decentralized open‑source project: only about 20 core team members across six functional groups, supported by thousands of contributors worldwide. The company deliberately raises minimal venture capital and pushes governance and development to the community, presenting a novel way to construct a marketplace.

Chapters

Braintrust is a decentralized talent network. So if you think all of you are really familiar with the marketplace model, so essentially on— I'll say that the ask side of the marketplace or the demand side of the marketplace are clients that want to hire highly skilled technical talent, engineers, product managers, designers, folks like that. It started with like a lot of kind of SMB and then has grown up and now we have 100 of the Fortune 1000 companies. NASA, Nestlé, Porsche, all these big companies that essentially have an insatiable appetite for highly skilled technical talent, but yet are located in places like St. Louis and Omaha, Nebraska, where those people simply don't exist. So that's kind of like the— I'll say that that's the ask side or the demand side. The other side is actually all of these highly skilled technical talent from around the world, ranging from You know, there's kind of like 4 or 5 categories that we're really deep into right now. Obviously, this model expands to all knowledge work categories, but you have to kind of start with a wedge and start with, with these highly skilled talent. So those are kind of the 2 sides of the marketplace. The way the business model works is we take 0% rake from the supply side or from the talent side, so they get to keep 100% of what they earn. All the fee, all the rates and stuff are totally transparent. So there's no like black box, there's no markups, like all that kind of stuff. And then on the enterprise side, we take a flat 10% above the transaction. And essentially the network runs at a break-even using that 10%. So we have— yeah, that's the basics of how the fee structure works. And then when I say it's a decentralized talent network, we actually have not a single engineer that is employed by Braintrust. There's actually 6 kind of like core teams that are actually building the Braintrust network, and then thousands and thousands of contributors like an open source project. So I think there's only about 20 core team members on Braintrust, yet we're a global network. So it's kind of just a very It's a totally new way of building a marketplace, which is basically raise the absolute minimum of venture capital that you can raise and decentralize as much as possible to the community and contributors around the world.