The problem

The structure of employment is shifting radically. People are increasingly oriented towards freelance work: in the US, freelancers will become the workforce majority over the next decade, with over 50% of millennials already freelancing. This has been fuelled by the popularity of portfolio careers (where professionals maintain more than one job) as well as the flexibility it gives employers looking to cut overhead costs. This has been reflected by the success of freelancer marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork. 

Yet this shifting paradigm is riddled with problems of its own. The current process relies heavily on referrals—yet this system is fundamentally broken. Freelancers have their own cold-start problem: if you rely heavily on referrals, how can you establish yourself in the first place? That’s not to mention the world of challenges surrounding conscious and unconscious bias.

Moreover, the growth-at-all-costs model of existing platforms favours quantity over quality, creating marketplaces that are saturated and inconsistent. If this is the case, how can you trust the quality of the talent you are engaging with?

The solution

Prism is a smart marketplace where talent—initially contractor-developers and associated technical roles—can find matches to appropriate opportunities. Built on-chain, this aims to remove a number of the challenges surrounding existing centralised freelancer platforms.

Prism bridges the gap between talent and employers efficiently and equitably through on-chain reputation-building. Both contractors and companies earn tokens through the platform: contractors, for completing jobs; companies, for being good employers. You can also earn tokens for helping fellow community members, and participating in governance decisions.

All this results in a 'trustless' labour market, where these tokens replace referrals (imbuing trust) from your immediate network.

To overcome the problem of saturation and inconsistency, the network will be highly curated to ensure each freelancer and enterprise is fully vetted, trusted, and verified.

The team

Eniola Elijah Ajuwon (Founder & CEO)

Eniola already has extensive experience working in web3 and blockchain. As well as launching a previous blockchain project around fan engagement, Eniola became the first individual in the UK to tokenise himself ($ENIOLA), raising 15 ETH from 40 backers. Prior to this, Eniola was a director of Arkisites, a consultancy advising on DEI in the tech sector, covering academia and industry.

[You can follow Eniola's progress here]

Why we’re excited to invest

Damian Routley, Chief Commercial Officer at Founders Factory, says: “Building on the signals we see within both the creator and gig economies, where workers uncouple themselves from the established paradigm of employment, motivated by a greater share of value or more flexibility, the future of work is likely to be one where people engage in packets of micro-work with multiple organisations simultaneously.

“In this world of greater transience, ease of finding the next project (for talent) or finding qualified talent (for hiring managers), alongside the ability to rapidly validate talent’s credentials and experience, becomes of utmost importance. That’s why we’re building Prism. The fantastic Eniola has joined us to lead the business and I’m thrilled to work with him as we launch and scale the service over the coming months.”

What Prism wants to get out of the programme

• Create buy-in from our first set of superfans. This could be users, investors, founders or anyone who is just curious about what we are building.

• Release a stable MVP with the support of the user groups we are aiming to serve.

• The founding team to increase their knowledge and network bases regarding the future of work.