Is a One Person Company (OPC) just another type of Uber driver?

No stable salary. No benefits. No employment relationship. The Uberization of white-collar work?

5 points | by Bobby_Liu 13 hours ago

4 comments

  • NishanStepak 11 hours ago
    It depends on the skill level. A one person company is called a consultant, basically a person who is willing to do the things in the company that no one wants to do whether they are easy or hard. There is an irony in this. Often the more people don't want to do the thing in question, the more the consultant gets paid.
    • Bobby_Liu 7 hours ago
      Agree. A consultant with pricing power is very different from a disguised employee. The line seems to be whether you can set terms, choose clients, and build leverage.
  • junaid_97 7 hours ago
    I think if you are building SaaS: specifically, a self-serve SaaS (no sales/demo call), then you can build a scalable 1-person company
    • Bobby_Liu 35 minutes ago
      But saas is dying, right?
  • thinkafter 11 hours ago
    It depends. For drivers, it’s basically been captured.

    For say, peer-to-peer car or vacation rental (e.g. Turo, Airbnb) you have some one man companies but the top hosts on the platform is usually an established company often with a staff of employees.

    It’s not until you tap through to see they have tens of thousands of trips, dozens of cars in each city, etc.

    So when you say Uber driver - it may work in the “driver” category only. In pretty much the rest of the gig economy there is a lot of room for both solopreneuers and SMB.

    The “gig economy” may well end up just being “the economy”.

  • gitowiec 10 hours ago
    It's common way of an employment in IT in Poland. SII and other big outsourcing companies offer mostly only B2B employment. And this sucks
    • Bobby_Liu 7 hours ago
      Yeah, that’s the case I had in mind: B2B in form, employee-like in practice, with more risk pushed onto the individual.