What If We Built Businesses That Actually Worked for People?

By Nick Stirling | ~7 min read

The economy is growing. The stock market keeps setting records. And yet, millions of people feel like they’re falling behind — as clearly demonstrated by the results of our latest presidential election.

It only takes a few Uber rides or food deliveries to realize something’s off. Gig work was never meant to be a full-time career—it was designed as a side hustle. But for millions of people, it’s become the only option. Not by choice, but by necessity. We’ve built an economy that prioritizes efficiency and convenience over stability and dignity.

While some workers choose gig work for flexibility, Pew Research found that nearly a third rely on it as their primary source of income, often because they lack better alternatives.

During the 2020 Presidential election cycle, I found myself drawn to Andrew Yang’s platform—not just for his policies, but for his willingness to challenge something foundational: how we define success as a country. For decades, we’ve treated GDP growth as the headline metric of national progress. But GDP says nothing about whether people are healthy, safe, or fulfilled. It doesn’t account for rising mental health crises, crumbling social trust, or the fact that millions of people work full-time and still can’t make ends meet.

Yang proposed something different—a shift from measuring how much we produce to measuring how well we’re doing. His “Human Capital Scorecard” put forward a simple idea: if our economy is thriving, people should be thriving too. It tracked things like mental health, childhood success rates, and median income relative to cost of living. Alongside frameworks like the OECD’s Better Life Index, it offered a more complete picture of what progress should mean.

I didn’t really think Yang had a chance—not least because he was a political outsider, but also because he was a self-professed nerd with a voice that sounds a little like Kermit the Frog (you’ll hear it every time now. Sorry!). But his platform stuck with me—and it still does.

Progress for Whom?

We’re often told that technological change is painful in the short term but good in the long run. That jobs lost to automation will be replaced with better ones. That markets will sort it all out.

That’s a comforting story—but it’s not playing out that way.

Disruption doesn’t happen cleanly. When people lose good jobs, they don’t just bounce into new ones. They suffer. Marriages break down. Addiction rises. Violence creeps in. Communities take generations to recover, if they recover at all.

I think about my late uncle, who spent his entire life in Farnworth (once a thriving textiles town), just north of Manchester in the UK. When I arrived for university to commence at university in Manchester in 2004, my uncle drove me around the area, pointing out some of the old factories and industries he remembered as a boy. Most were gone. Some buildings still stood, crumbling and graffitied. Others had vanished entirely. That part of England was transformed during the economic restructuring under Thatcher—and while change is inevitable, progress didn’t arrive for everyone. Many towns lost not just their jobs, but their sense of identity.

If you want to feel the emotional weight of that kind of loss, this song by The Enemy evokes this better than anything I could write.

Brookings found that job displacement from automation disproportionately affects less-educated, lower-income, and non-urban workers—and the new jobs that emerge rarely land in the same places or with the same people.

We’re racing toward a future powered by AI, robotics, renewable energy, and precision agriculture—all of which have the potential to create abundance. But abundance for whom?

There’s no rule that says technological progress must benefit everyone. The MIT Work of the Future initiative has warned that unless business models and policy evolve, automation is likely to increase inequality, not reduce it. Consumers are already being squeezed—on housing, healthcare, food—while wealth pools at the top.

If human labor becomes obsolete in more sectors, what exactly are we working toward? A world where capital wins by default? A permanent underclass?

These aren’t just philosophical questions—they’re design questions. And the answers depend on the models we choose to build.

Another Path Is Possible

I’m not holding my breath for Congress to fix all of this. But entrepreneurs don’t have to wait.

We can choose to build companies that generate real economic value and create good jobs. These two goals aren’t mutually exclusive—they’re mutually reinforcing.

Imagine if the collective goal for entrepreneurs was to:

Create companies that solve one or more problems for millions of people, generate significant shareholder value, and create thousands of meaningful jobs for hardworking, talented people.

Technology should still do what it does best: speed, scale, precision. It can help us make fewer errors, learn faster, and access information instantly. But unless we want to sleepwalk into dystopian future of our own making, their role should be to amplify humans, not replace them. Let people do the things no machine can: care, improvise, make judgment calls, and build human relationships.

At PreFix, we’re trying to live that principle. Our amazing Home Manager team has completed tens of thousands of home maintenance and repair visits across four Texas cities, maintaining a Net Promoter Score (NPS) above 90 for more than a year. For context, an NPS above 70 is widely considered “world-class” across industries—very few companies reach that level, especially in high-touch service categories. We employ W-2 staff, not gig workers. We give our team the tools to do their best work—and the trust to own it. And all of this with a business model that is unique and scalable—one that, if widely adopted, could reshape how millions of American homes are cared for.

Our internal systems are built around human decision trees and structured workflows, enabling our Home Managers and support staff to respond consistently, efficiently, and with good judgment. As our dataset grows, we’re approaching a point where predictive AI will begin to play a role—surfacing likely issues, optimizing preventive maintenance, and highlighting inefficiencies before they cause real damage. The goal isn’t to replace people—it’s to elevate them.

You can see this kind of thinking elsewhere too. The Dutch healthcare organization Buurtzorg rebuilt the entire home care model around self-managed teams of nurses, flattening hierarchy and enabling those closest to the work to make decisions. In the U.S., companies like Guild Education are partnering with employers to help frontline workers earn degrees and credentials without quitting their jobs—turning dead-end roles into ladders of opportunity. The common thread? Systems designed to invest in human potential, not work around it.

What It Costs—and Why It’s Worth It

There’s no sugarcoating it: the tradeoff is money. If your only goal is a 100x return, this model probably isn’t for you. Traditional VC and PE are often misaligned with this approach.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, I’d argue it’s necessary. Our current trajectory—rising inequality, eroding trust, fragile institutions—is not sustainable. History shows us what happens when the gap between rich and poor becomes too wide: instability, revolt, decline. The Economic Policy Institute has extensively documented how growing inequality correlates with economic fragility and social unrest.

My advice: don’t follow the default Silicon Valley script. Build something durable. Take capital only when you have alignment on values, not just valuation. Stay close to the work—close enough that you’d feel good about your own kids being part of it.

I just recently finished Hangry by Mike Evans, the founder of Grubhub. He built a company that changed how people order food—but lost control of it along the way. It made him exceptionally wealthy, but the business ultimately became something far from the mission he started with. He’s candid about it, and it's an entertaining read. To borrow Mike's words:

"Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it."

Looking Ahead

My son turns two in September. My daughter is due just a few days later. And if I’m honest, thinking about their future keeps me up at night.

But even as a skeptic by nature, I do feel a glimmer of optimism—because unsustainable systems eventually have to change. College tuition is out of control. According to Georgetown’s CEW, the return on investment for many degrees has declined sharply—especially once you factor in the debt burden. And with global access to real-time information and learning tools, the traditional model feels increasingly out of step with reality.

Housing, too, feels like it can’t keep defying gravity. As demographics shift and population growth slows, the pressure on housing markets must eventually ease. Unless, of course, institutional investors buy everything—but that’s another blog post / rant.

I want my kids to grow up in a world that values hard work, decency, and creativity. I hope they’re never forced to choose between earning a living and doing what feels right. And I hope they get to see that building something worthwhile doesn’t have to come at someone else’s expense.

Because when companies invest in people—truly invest—the economy responds. According to the Economic Policy Institute, rising income inequality has already reduced aggregate demand by 1.5% of GDP. Why? Because middle and working-class families spend more of what they earn. That money moves—through main streets, into small businesses, and across the communities where people actually live and spend.

And here’s the thing: you can still win. You can build a company that delights customers, respects its team, and creates real investor value. It’s harder. But it’s possible.

And it’s necessary.