3 Things: Anna Delvey Foundation DAO, Baby-Friendly Turo+Airbnb, Hybrid Work Consulting
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Anna Delvey Foundation DAO
Baby-Friendly Turo+Airbnb
Hybrid Work Consulting
1. Anna Delvey Foundation DAO
In February, Netflix launched a miniseries called “Inventing Anna” which chronicles the real story of Anna Sorokin, a 31-year old Russian-born con artist who pretended to be a German heiress named Anna Delvey. Between 2013-2017, she defrauded banks, hotels, and other financial institutions for hundreds of thousands of dollars while assembling a posse of friends and acquaintances who were attracted to her lavish lifestyle, supposed wealth, charm, and ambition. She was laser focused on creating a concept she called the “Anna Delvey Foundation” — a private members-only club and art foundation that would include an events venue, art studio, pop-up shops, and gallery featuring exhibitions from artists like Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Tracey Emin. She was extremely close to landing a lease on the entire Church Missions House, a 6-floor, 45,000 sq ft historic building in the heart of Gramercy in Manhattan for the foundation.
In 2019, Anna was ultimately arrested, convicted, and sentenced to serve time at Rikers Island Prison and with that, the vision for the Anna Delvey Foundation died. Given the current popularity of the show and her story, along with the rise of community DAOs and NFTs, many of which are focused on art and artists, a group of people should pool capital and create the Anna Delvey Foundation for real. Recently, a crowd of ideologically aligned individuals came together in less than a week to pool $40M worth of ETH in an attempt to purchase a copy of the constitution. NY-based artists and art lovers can do something similar and spin up an Anna Delvey Foundation DAO, sell NFTs as token-gated membership, and generate the required capital to purchase a large physical space and put on art exhibitions and other events — just as Anna had envisioned. They could focus on digital artists and showcase popular NFTs on physical screens creating the first society focused on digital art and this type of creator. You could repeat this in pretty much any city in the world or even do traveling shows and sell NFTs for tickets.
2. Baby-Friendly Turo+Airbnb
I am currently in a few different mom chat groups and I’m finding that a good chunk of the questions and topics of conversation are related to traveling with babies or toddlers and all of the complexities that it entails. If you’re flying, you need to figure out how to deal with car seats (including bases!) and strollers to and from your destination. You need to navigate renting or otherwise acquiring cribs/playpens/toys/strollers/etc and deal with childproofing and safety at your lodging. Then, you have to find baby/toddler-friendly activities to do and also potentially secure local childcare if you want to go out to dinners or get some time on your own. While a few car rental companies offer car seat daily rentals, you never know what you’re getting and oftentimes you might not be renting a car at the airport and just need transport to and from your destination. In terms of accomodations, with kids it’s often more convenient to book a house or cabin as opposed to a hotel room so that you have a kitchen and more space, but there is no way to filter for Airbnb’s (or properties on similar sites) that are set up for kids.
A company that combines the concepts of Turo + Airbnb focused solely on travel with babies and toddlers could easily become the go-to travel booking site for all families with young kids. The biggest challenges tend to be around getting to and from an airport to your destination and then the set up at your accommodations. The service would offer car rentals and rideshare options that come equipped with safety-certified car seats and home rentals that are set up for kids. You select the number of children, ages, and any other special circumstances and the car and house will be all set up for you when you arrive with cribs or bassinets, strollers, high chairs, play mats, toys, and feeding utensils. You could offer add-ons like bottle warmers, diapers/wipes, baby bath tubs, and much more that families don’t want to travel with. The company can partner with local tours, destinations, and activities that are kid-friendly or family-focused and could also work with UrbanSitter to offer vetted babysitters. Given how quickly things spread among mommy/hyper-local parent groups, focusing on this niche could become a wildly successful business without too much spend on marketing or ads.
3. Hybrid Work Consulting
We are *finally* hitting the point in the pandemic where things are starting to slowly go back to normal (or fall into a new normal). Restaurants are beginning to accept indoor diners, people are welcoming friends and family back into their homes, in-person conferences and events are taking place, and most importantly of all — offices are re-opening. For many companies, the discussion is now around what type of workplace they want to be going forward: remote-first, hybrid, or in-person (also called co-located). Prior to the pandemic, ony around 6% of employees were working remotely. From a recent Gallup poll, nearly half of all workers (and 2/3 of white collar workers) are still working fully or partly from home, and 9 out of 10 employees would like to work from home at least part time going forward. This is forcing employers to rethink how they work and also how to create a fair and equitable environment, especially if the plan is to offer hybrid work where some workers are in offices part or full-time and others are remote.
Many niche but successful business consulting companies have been built bringing consultants into offices to help with things like ergonomic setup, sexual harassment prevention, communications and media training, and DEI (diversity, equity, & inclusion). Offering hybrid work brings up many new challenges and questions for companies around everything from compensation, inclusion, communication, documentation, career progression, and much more. How do you avoid creating a 2-class citizen situation when some employees are together in an office with the executives and others are not? How do you create pay and equity bands when you have some people living in SF/NY and others spread around the country or globe? A business can focus purely on hybrid-work consulting and sell their services to companies of all sizes, stages, and industries who are navigating these waters for the first time. Given the number of companies who plan to be hybrid going forward, the business opportunity is nearly infinite right now. To my knowledge, there are currently no strong brands in this space so there is the chance to become the go-to resource for how to think about hybrid workforces. Focus on content marketing to build trust and awareness and then monetize consulting services that can include an initial assessment, manager training, ongoing check-ins, and potentially even some tools and software that you build and sell to help companies manage their hybrid workforces.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine