All posts by Arjen Lentz

Dad, parallel entrepreneur, cook, gardener, explorer, philosopher, tinkerer....
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Currency: Time instead of Money?

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The Spanish are doing an interesting experiment: In Spain They Swap Money for Time, essentially allowing time-banks.

While the article (IMHO incorrectly) wonders whether there is anything anti-capitalist about the ideas (I don’t think they are), there is nothing intrinsically wrong  with using a different currency to money. The problem typically lies with governments, which rely on

  1. skimming economic value-add activity (sales tax, GST, VAT, BTW, MwS, etc) to raise revenue;
  2. applying monetary controls, usually exerted by an independent central bank.

So the actual issues that need to be resolved are really quite funky. Of course you can give and charge interest on time, and you can tax it – but the taxing does not immediately translate into government revenue. If you wish to maintain a form of sales tax, then either people will have to owe the government a fraction of their time, or there needs to be a conversion to money.

If the government were a participant in the same time-economy, it could use the “time revenue” it raises to get things done, either directly (same people doing part-time work for the community) or indirectly (time “spent” through other companies in the system).

While money is not a necessity for an economy to work, it is a convenience – a convertable/neutral common currency. Having multiple currencies is generally not liked by governments as it affects their control, regardless of the merits. Just think of countries where the USD or EUR is the effective currency because the local one has become worthless (with huge inflation problems). Either that, or barter-style trade tends to pop up when countries are in tough economic times. People do what is practical to get by. But if authorities choose to actively allow/promote this activity and adjust the government processes to work with it, I think it can be made to work.

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Creating free time for what you want

For a little while this morning, as every week, I helped in the class of one of my stepdaughters, at a local school. Last year I did a talk in my daughter’s class. If there is an excursion, I can volunteer to go along and help.

I can drop of kids to school rather than before school care, I can pick up kids from school rather than using after school care, and have time to help with homework and do other things most afternoons.

Other people working for me have the same freedoms.

We have time for all this because I’ve designed my company to enable it. Of course people need to be present and do stuff a certain amount of time every week – but the processes in the company don’t rely on me (or someone else) being there at set times, and that’s the key difference.

It’s one aspect of how one can practically address Upstarta Principle #9: “Focus on people (internal and external), prevent stress.”

That may seem easy, but if you look about various processes in companies that generally require multiple people doing sub-tasks, such as doing payments including payroll, you tend to find interesting dependencies on people and very specific times. Often people don’t realise this any more, as they’ve become used to being in the “right” place at those times.  Changing a process is not easy, but it is possible with proper understanding of how these things work – just deciding to change is not good enough and generally results in a lot of pain (and no change).

See if you can come up with another example of such person/time dependent processes within your organisation, and post a comment here! If you want help with changing, it’s best to contact me directly as there’ll be quite a bit of communication (and real time on your end) required to make such things happen.

Upstarta Labs

Upstarta Labs – Your Office

So you’re an independent contractor, small business , soon-to-be-Startup or non-profit, and wondering about shared office space. Shared because otherwise it’s too big a financial commitment, but also because of the social benefits.

There are actually quite a lot of shared spaces around, but many disappear as quickly as they are launched – they appear to be lacking a solid economic foundation?

Incubators are abundant too, but do they provide what you want? They tend to be a bit more costly per desk, and while they provide business guidance, it comes in many flavours and there it generally involes aspects of external funding and demands for equity that you might not care for.

Upstarta Labs is a self-funded initiative to provide fun co-working space with mentoring for Upstarta-minded people. Costed at $300/desk/month it’s almost 50% cheaper than most other serious spaces. A new space can start when there are about 15 people “subscribed” for that location, while the maximum is 20-25 (depending on the available floor space). Upstarta handles the office leases, insurance and other necessary logistics, as well as providing additional online services and coordinating publicity and activities. There are no external stakeholders or dependencies, so money stays inside the organisation.

At your local Upstarta Labs space, you bring your own trestle table (get one at a hardware or office store!) and sure it’ll be ok for you to shuffle around in the space (within reason) and make it even more fun. You won’t be just renting a space, you’re becoming a member of a like-minded little tribe or family. This is what makes the co-mentoring aspect work: when you discuss an idea or problem you’re working on, you won’t have to keep explaining the context.

You will get to know everybody else in the space, as depending on which days you and they are there each week, there’ll be at least one day of overlap with each person! There will also be some casual desks available, however we first need to organise the main subscribers so we have a solid foundation.

Brisbane (probably South Brisbane) and Gold Coast are the most likely first locations where we attain “critical mass” to open a space, but we’ve done the maths for all Australian capital cities in terms of lease costs, rates for desk spaces, and other factors. So even if you’re elsewhere and interested, let us know now!

For more info, see Upstarta Labs. Express your interest today using our Google form.

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Reviewing the Upstarta Principles

After three successful years, it’s time to take a peek at the Upstarta Principles and see if any changes can be made that would improve them further. They’ve worked really well, but perhaps we can make a sentence clearer with fewer words, remove things that don’t belong, and so on.

One idea I have is to add a Principle #0:

“All choices have consequences; inaction is also a choice.”

This appears to be a recurring theme in Upstarta blog posts as well as in talks and mentoring activity, and it’s somewhat fundamental to everything else hence the idea to make it the first item.

This, and a few other suggested changes, are on the Upstarta Principles page. You can comment/discuss on this post, or discuss via email. Looking forward to your input!