Category: Business

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Artificial Intelligence Business What I’m Up To

Catch our webinar about rethinking the way we pay for knowledge work in the age of AI this Thursday, July 10!

On Thursday, July 10 at 2:30 p.m. Eastern (11:30 a.m. Pacific / 1830 UTC), tune in to a webinar on rethinking the way businesses pay for knowledge work featuring:

✅ Fatin Kwasny, Founder and CEO of Fractio
✅ Yours Truly, Sales Engineer at Fractio

If your business is still pricing or accepting labor from knowledge workers…

  • by the hour,
  • by the project,
  • or even worse, by retainer or
  • by time & materials…

…you’re already losing — and AI will only make it worse.

In this webinar, we’ll discuss how:

  • Companies are leaking up to 50% of labor spend due to idle time, misaligned scopes, and outdated compensation models.
  • AI as a capital cost is shifting the rules of value creation — and why time-based knowledge work is the next labor bubble to burst.
  • A usage-based labor model like Fractio’s can eliminate muda (a Japanese term for wastefulness that the Six Sigma crew like to use) and protect your bottom line in a future where efficiency is non-negotiable.

We’ll also show some actual data from companies already seeing at least 10x ROI by shifting how they price or accept knowledge work.

Join us this Thursday, July 10 at 2:30 p.m. Eastern (11:30 a.m. Pacific / 1830 UTC) for our webinar, From Time to Throughput: Rewriting Labor Economics in the Age of AI!

It’ll be an entertaining, informative discussion, featuring 45 minutes of presentation followed by a 15-minute Q&A session.

Click here to register for this FREE online event.

Fractio is a SaaS that enables companies to pay for knowledge work on a “per-thing-done” basis instead of the less efficient per-hour, per-project, or on retainer. (Think paying for a rideshare versus paying for a taxi.)

At Synapse Summit 2025, Fractio was the winner of the of the Startup Innovation Award, which recognizes emerging ventures that are making waves and redefining what’s possible.

Categories
Business Systems

I’ll admit it: I thought Skype had already shut down

Once upon a time, “Skype” was synonymous with “audio chat” and then “video chat.” But that was a while back, and Zoom, Slack, Discord, and (grudgingly) Teams have taken over.

I hadn’t used Skype in so long that I’d thought the service had already been shot down — but that’s actually happening in May, according to Microsoft’s article, The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams .

So my first reaction was “Skype is still around?”

My second reaction:

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Business

Resume-generating events

At last night’s meetup held by the Tampa Bay Product Group, presenter Jamel Canty put up a slide with a phrase I’ve always liked, but haven’t seen in a while:

“Resume-generating events.”

He was using it in the same sense as a similar phrase: career-limiting move: an action, behavior, or colossal screw-up that leads to your dismissal, which in turn necessitates your generating revised resumes as you start a new job search.

“Resume-generating event” also has another meaning: a major warning sign at a company (examples: an ominous all-hands meeting, a merger or acquisition, a Boeing-style product failure) that causes employees of a company to start looking for work elsewhere.

Given the current work environment, assisted by the culture’s general slouch towards authoritarianism and the balance of power favors management, expect to see this phrase used more often.

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Artificial Intelligence Business Hardware

Quit your bellyachin’ about NVIDIA’s share price

Yes, NVIDIA’s share price took a 17% beating yesterday, but if you stop thinking like a day trader, you’ll remember that even with yesterday’s losses, the price has more than doubled over the past 365 days.

Breathe.

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Business Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay Innovation Center’s IdeaSprint Bootcamp for new B2b startups — Wednesday, January 15th!

Tampa Bay Innovation Center (TBIC) is holding an IdeaSprint Bootcamp for new B2B startups on Wednesday, January 15th from 5:00pm – 7:30pm!

It’s going to be an abbreviated, but very intensive program is perfect for B2B software startups that are less than 9 months old. It will cover strategy, product development, and market validation and is for first-time startup founders, who could benefit from the planning activities and tools, and aren’t ready to commit to a full-time program.

The tl;dr

  • What: IdeaSprint Bootcamp
  • When: Wednesday, January 15, 5:00 — 7:30 p.m.
  • Where: Tampa Bay Innovation Center (1101 4th St S, St. Petersburg)
  • Application deadline: Apply by Friday, January 10!
  • Find out more and register here

Details

Who’s the IdeaSprint Bootcamp for?

  • Aspiring founders who are building a tech product
  • First-time tech innovators with an idea for a tech product

What should attendees expect?

  • Expert-led workshops
  • Peer-to-peer learning
  • An understanding of Tampa Bay’s ecosystem of tech resources

What categories of startup are eligible?

  • Enterprise software (including SaaS)
  • FinTech
  • MedTech
  • AgTech
  • SpaceTech
  • Energy storage & management
  • Robotics

Please note:

  • TBIC’s elevator was damaged by the storm and will not be accessible. Attendees must be able to use the stairs.
  • This in-person event is open to founders located in the Tampa Bay region.
  • This program is limited to 20 companies; applications must first be approved, and founders will be notified via email in advance of the program. Please make sure your contact information is correct.
  • This program is exclusively for product companies, consultants or service providers will not be accepted.

 

Categories
Business Humor

The eternal dance of the independent contractor

“The eternal dance of the independent contractor:” a painting from an old western paperback featuring two cowboys having a “High Noon” style showdown. One cowboy says “What’s your rate?” and in response, the other says “What’s your budget?”

It’s funny because it’s true.

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Business Entrepreneur Reading Material What I’m Up To

Experiment #3 for 2024: “Million Dollar Weekend”

Cover of the book “Million Dollar Weekend” by Noah Kagan with Tahl Raz.

My third experiment for 2024 involves trying out the ideas from Noah Kagan’s new book, Million Dollar Weekend.

ℹ️ In case you’re wondering: my first experiment of 2024 was to turn my layoff experience into a series of articles; the second was to take a chance working with a pre-seed startup.

Why conduct such an experiment? For now, let’s just say that current circumstances make it necessary, and hey, if anyone can pull off this kind of thing, it would be me.

The general idea of Million Dollar Weekend is that you can start a lucrative business by doing the following:

  • Identify a problem that you can solve
  • Solve that problem in a way that is hard to resist and profitable
  • Test your solution at low (or no) cost by preselling it before you build it.

The prerequisite for the Million Dollar Weekend process is a certain amount of unmitigated gall. Time and again in the book, Kagan states that two things hold people back from starting businesses:

  • Fear of starting
  • Fear of asking

Kagan’s methodology is to start by trying out an idea, seeing if someone will pay for that idea, and then either refining that idea or coming up with a new one and repeating the cycle.

The methodology anticipates rejection, and in fact, it says that in selling your idea, you should aim for plenty of rejections. The idea is that if you’re getting rejected often, you’re asking often, and that’s what eventually leads to success.

I’ll write more as I continue with this experiment, but for now, if you’re curious, here are some resources I can point you to:

You might also find these interviews with Kagan interesting:

ℹ️ Also in case you were wondering: This is NOT a paid promo for the book — neither Noah Kagan nor his businesses have any idea who I am or how to deposit money into my bank account. I wish they did!