The Future of Work: Joust CEO Lamine Zarrad
Jo Ann Barefoot
Today’s guest is Lamine Zarrad, co-founder and CEO of Joust.
I love this episode because it weaves together so many of our favorite themes on Barefoot Innovation. Lamine tells the story of his very unusual childhood as a refugee from the Soviet Union whose family fled with just the clothes on their backs. He describes making it to the United States and then traveling a path that has been almost as unusual, including serving in the Marines and US intelligence, working on Wall Street, being a banker in Texas, starting several tech firms and -- my favorite -- being a National Bank Examiner at the Comptroller of the Currency (where I was once Deputy Comptroller). This rich mix of experience brought him to some powerful insights, which in turn led to the founding of Joust,
Joust is a platform that’s making financial management easy for independent professionals.
Lamine believes we’re moving to a new economy built around small enterprises, rather than big ones. He echoes the thinking that’s being offered by Hemant Taneja in his important book Unscaled. The argument is that 20th-century industrialization rewards scale -- big, centralized, hierarchical organizations. Today’s technology, especially artificial intelligence, is undoing that. Instead, it’s going to reward small enterprises that can excel in targeted products and markets, which will be able to achieve scale not by centralizing, but rather by attaching to platforms that make the scale available, whether it’s for managing the enterprise or serving customers.
(That, of course, will raise a different challenge, which is how to manage the centralized power of the new platforms -- but we’ll leave that for another day.)
Joust is betting that this is the future -- the gig economy, with most people being entrepreneurs. That, in turn, will profoundly change the nature of the workforce and the structure of labor. Lamine thoughtfully walks us through his vision about the questions this will raise, the principles to hold to, how people will protect themselves and be protected by the government, and much more.
Links
More on Lamine
Lamine Zarrad is the co-founder and CEO of Joust. He began his entrepreneurial journey as a refugee, going on to serve in the U.S. Marines, and then building expertise around banking regulations and financial services. With Joust, Lamine combines his passion for inclusion with his banking skills to create the nation’s first, all-inclusive banking services app for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and the self-employed.
Understanding the struggles of his audience, Lamine and the Joust team also created the first-ever invoice guarantee product, PayArmour, giving users the option to receive same-day funding for their unpaid invoices.
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We have wonderful episodes in the queue. We will have a remarkable conversation with Congressman Bill Foster, who chairs the House of Representatives Task Force on AI. We have a show with Jeff Dyer of BYU about his book, Innovation Capital. We recorded a show at Money 2020 with Richard Teng of Abu Dhabi Global Market. We have a fascinating conversation with Greg Becker, CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, and one with David Reiling, CEO of Sunrise Banks. And I’m excited to say we’ll have several shows with heads of US federal regulatory agencies, coming up in the New Year.
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ABA Financial Crimes conference in Washington, sharing the stage on AI with Gene Ludwig and Gary Shiffman.
Paris Fintech Forum, January 28-29, Paris, France
Innovate Finance Global Summit, April 20-21, London, UK
Shared Assessments Third Party Risk Summit, April 29-30, Arlington, VA
LendIt Fintech USA, May 13-14, New York, NY