Goldman Sachs Puts Crowdsourcing To The ‘Shark Tank’ Test

Crowdsourcing is all the rage in the digital economy, and now Goldman Sachs is using that method in hopes of finding — and making big money from — the next hot startup. The move comes amid the expanded use of crowdsourcing for a variety of tasks vital to payments and commerce.

Here’s the news, according to CNBC: A Goldman Sachs program called GS Accelerate enables Goldman employers to pitch their bosses on potential new companies. “The lure for participants was simple: Survive the rigorous six-month culling process, and winners can ditch their day jobs to run a new company backed by Goldman,” the report states. In March, in fact, 500 submissions were entered — five won funding by Goldman Sachs. “Winning projects include a software platform for the alternative investment industry called Scribe and an app store for user-generated programs called Panorama,” the report added.

Crowdsourcing is fast becoming the cool kid at the cafeteria, and not just because Goldman Sachs is embracing the tool.

Cybersecurity Push

Take online security as another ongoing example.

Indeed, cybersecurity is one of the main tasks in the world of digital commerce and payments, and it’s a task that is getting more attention from consumers, companies, regulators and others. But there’s a big problem in this realm — a shortage of cybersecurity experts, the people with the training and expertise to defend retail and payments from increasingly sophisticated online criminals.

That shortage served as the foundation of a recent PYMNTS discussion with Jay Kaplan, CEO and co-founder at Synack, which bills itself as a crowdsourced penetration testing platform, a company that finds online security vulnerabilities for its clients. Synack was started about six and a half years ago, he said, with its founders all having cybersecurity experience at the federal government level.

Some 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will need to be filled by 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. “There is a massive talent crisis,” he said, and companies looking to increase their defenses against fraud, data breaches and hackings will have to deal with that issue. “Even if you hire a big consulting firm” to map out potential holes in an organization’s cybersecurity, he told PYMNTS, that work is limited by what the particular consultants know and don’t know. “If you miss just one vulnerability,” he said, that can lead to financial and reputational — and perhaps even regulatory — disaster for that business.

Not only that, but just 4.2 percent of federal cybersecurity workers are aged 30 and under. That compares to nearly 14 percent who are at least 60, according to figures from June 2018. Those people are charged with protecting the country’s digital infrastructure via jobs in such departments and agencies as the Department of Defense, CIA, Federal Election Commission and Department of Energy (which designs, tests and creates nuclear weapons for the U.S., among other tasks).

To help solve that problem, Mastercard recently launched a program called the Cybersecurity Talent Initiative — backed by Microsoft, Workday and 10 federal agencies (including the ones listed above) — that seeks to place recent college grads with relevant educational backgrounds into federal cybersecurity jobs, after which those professionals can stay on or join the private sector, and possibly see their student loan debt wiped out.

Delivery Solutions

Retailers are also tuning to crowdsourcing to solve delivery problems.

Here’s one way that can work: Imagine getting paid to go home. (Really, take a moment and do so. Feels nice, right?) Now, imagine not only getting paid to go home, but doing so in a way that pleases one’s employer, neighbor, girlfriend’s boss or the person on the other end of that daily, mundane trip.

It’s not a fantasy, but a reality for a growing number of drivers in the United States. That includes, as Roadie CEO Marc Gorlin said, a Delta ticket agent in the California Bay Area who, through Roadie’s digital technology, delivers misplaced bags to travelers who happen to be located along the route that the agent uses to drive home after shifts.

“He takes a bag once or twice a week,” Gorlin told Karen Webster during the latest edition of the PYMNTS Matchmakers interview series. “He’s basically getting paid to go home.”

The general experience can apply to retail goods, including groceries. After all, the principle is the same, no matter the retail sector: using a digital platform that crowdsources from big commerce ecosystems to provide more efficient deliveries of goods.

You can bet on more tasks put to the crowdsourcing tests — and more entrepreneurship, too, assuming Goldman Sachs succeeds with its new program.