The Game-changing Economics of Fractional Availability

The Game-changing Economics of Fractional Availability

The tech world is in many ways like a large city. While we spend most of our time in a few neighborhoods, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to encounter an old friend or colleague that you haven’t talked to in years, hanging out in your corner café. So I was not surprised to hear that my old friend Antony Brydon had started a new company with a compelling value proposition, called Directly, and that he and his head of marketing, Lynda Radosevich, thought I’d like to learn about it.

I met Antony when he was CEO of Visible Path, an innovative social startup, one that was working to build the work graph — through email analysis — in the ‘00s. Visible Path was acquired by Hoovers in 2008. Perhaps they were a bit ahead of the market, but that’s a sign that Brydon & Co are generally ahead of the power curve.

 I was also not surprised that Directly’s value proposition is very, very smart: helping other companies scale their customer support capabilities by breaking out of what I think of as the skills versus wages snare (see figure 1).
The snare is this: as the necessary skill level for customer support increases, the wages that must be paid increase. This is a fundamental aspect of supply and demand.