Overnight Success: Bringing the Gig Economy Onchain
Gabby Dizon joined Draper University VP Chris Joannou on the Overnight Success podcast to unpack his journey as a founder and how YGG is helping to redefine the gig economy through Future of Work.
For online gig workers, centralized platforms like Upwork provide valuable exposure to international markets. However, these platforms typically profit by paying workers in lower-income countries far less than what their clients are charged overseas. Additionally, the workers have no long-term upside in these platforms to which they contribute so much value. Web3 creates decentralized earning opportunities for those seeking project or task-based work, enabling them to unlock access to a new model of the gig economy. Through its Future of Work (FoW) vertical, YGG connects skilled communities to Web3-powered AI and DePIN platforms, where contributors can earn tokenized rewards for their work and grant them ownership in the ecosystem.
At the sidelines of Consensus Hong Kong, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon joined Draper University VP of Ecosystem Growth Chris Joannou to record an episode of the Overnight Success podcast. Draper University is a leading accelerator founded by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, with a strong track record in Web3 investment through partners such as Tezos, Algorand, and VeChain.
In this episode of Overnight Success, Gabby sits down with Chris to discuss his founder journey, the importance of creating products that serve the community, and the potential of AI and gaming in crypto. The following is an excerpt from the conversation, where Gabby explains YGG’s mission to aggregate communities and provide them with economic opportunities, training, and reputation. He emphasizes that the developing world can benefit from working online and onchain, where contributors gain a more equitable stake by becoming part-owners of the networks they support.
Listen to the full recording on YouTube.
Overnight Success: Pioneering Play-to-Earn
Chris (08:39): Are you guys doing some of this AI stuff as well?
Gabby (08:45): YGG's mission is to aggregate communities and present them with opportunities where they can earn and own their own assets. Last year, we started a vertical called Future of Work. This was when we noticed that there are a lot of decentralized data labeling tasks available.
So, we partnered with some of these companies and then, apart from play-to-earn, which is basically playing a game or doing tasks around the game and getting paid for it, we started venturing into AI and DePIN-related tasks, where you would do data labeling, for example, and get paid for it in crypto, similar to a quest in play-to-earn gaming, but doing it for non-games.
Chris (09:26): Like a crypto Upwork.
Gabby (09:29): What you're doing is that you're aggregating communities. You're giving them tasks to do. We're also training them, and then giving them reputation when they do that.
Chris (09:39): They’re their own boss. Entrepreneurs.
Gabby (09:43): Exactly. I think a lot of the economy is not only going online — there are already many ways we can make money online — but also onchain. I think that the developing world, especially, can take advantage of this. Not just get paid in kind of an Upwork way, where I get paid $5 an hour for a task that costs $50 elsewhere. I want these people to have ownership in the networks that they help create.
That’s the big mission. I think we're less than 0.1% of the way there, so we want to bring a lot of these skilled workers, these people who are doing freelancing or outsourcing, we want to bring them to a place where not only are they getting paid for their jobs, but they're also kind of owning a piece of a network as as they do it. I think as crypto matures, you will get to own a piece of these networks that can become very large over time. That can be very meaningful for people, especially in places like the Philippines, Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America.
You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.
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