1666: Distributed - Quality Driven Tech Teams. On-Demand
Today's guest is Callum Adamson. Despite growing up in the shadow of a rockstar father Big country musician Stuart Adamson), Callum was actually raised in a household with little money. After dropping out of an Aeronautical Engineering degree, he worked unpaid at a friend's startup and slept on his floor. During this period, Callum considered the broken tech talent model. Businesses big and small now need to change at such speed that they cannot find the skilled workers to do this quickly enough without paying extortionate fixed costs for large consultancies. To address this issue, Callum founded Distributed using profits from Bitcoin investing. From a London HQ, Distributed uses its AI-enabled platform to project manage a global community of on-demand, highly skilled software developers. This connects skilled tech workers with customers such as Capita and the Ministry of Justice. They can tap into the community and use as much or as little resource as they like at any one time – for simple or complex projects – offering the time and cost flexibility of freelancers with the capacity and quality assurance of consultancies. As a result of these trends and efforts, Distributed just completed a Series A funding round and continues to grow rapidly, expand its freelance community and deliver projects for more businesses. We discuss why the tech skills gap is an illusion and how the world is full of undervalued and poorly organized resources. We also talk about why freelancing will become the preferred profession. With the advent of remote workforces and increased flexibility, people will realize they can work for multiple clients and get paid more than traditional employment. I learn how Distributed aims to provide its community with perks and career development you wouldn't usually get as a freelancer.