A couple people asked me about this privately as well. I dove into it but it made the post so freaking long I decided to cut it out and just stick to the how. I’ll give a short answer here rather than write a whole second post, but understand that I understand that there’s a lot to it.

In short, the line between contractor and full-timer has gotten blurred with some of this stuff, especially at the level Uber and Lyft have reached. Anyone who has tried to turn freelancing/self-employment into a full time job will tell you it’s an investment, not an employment, and Uber and Lyft tend to blur that line.

My company uses a hybrid model. We hire traditional W2 employees. The other companies I work with are filling roles that would never be considered full time roles (i.e. there is no taxi driver equivalent).

I think the founder needs to choose one and promote it that way. Something like Deviant Art would never promise a full time job creating and selling art (hopefully). YouTube may not directly promise fame and money for being a YouTuber, but almost every teen and tween has had that dream at one time or another. There are people who do Deviant or YouTube full time and make good money at it. But that’s the exception, not the norm. It also doesn’t mean that Deviant Art or YouTubing is wrong, it was never meant to be an income replacement and doesn’t sell itself as such.

So it’s not so much the structure of the two-sided marketplace that creates the full time vs. contractor issue, it’s within each of the companies themselves where those issues boil up. I can’t say whether or not they’re fostering that lure, but at some point someone needs to figure it out before another Uber/Lyft sized model rises up where a full-time equivalent exists.