It’s the bottom of the first inning, the Rockies trail five to zero, and John Paller can’t stop talking about game theory. Not the product on the field—from his private table along Coors Field’s first baseline, even he can see there’s no saving the Blake Street Bombers, theoretically or other-wise, this season—but rather in the context of its intended discipline of economics.
“So if a CEO lays off 3,000 people or moves them to contract labor, the company’s ratio of profit per employee looks better, and the CEO gets a $20 million bonus for basically upending a bunch of people’s lives,” says the Denver transplant, who moved to the city in 2000 from Boise, Idaho. “That seems kind of shitty…but why demonize the CEO? He’s just doing what he’s incentivized to do. Remember, he has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize value for the shareholders. The game was designed that way as a feature, so why are we mad? We created this monster.”
Paller, the former owner and CEO of Lakeshore Talent, a Denver-based staffing, recruiting, and payroll services company, wants to change the rules of that game by reinventing how we work. His mission was partly inspired by a 2014 chance encounter at a conference in Torrey Pines, California. The meeting involved Dmitry Buterin, a tech entrepreneur and the father of Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of the Ethereum blockchain, a highly successful form of the digital accounting and cryptographic technology that makes cryptocurrency possible.
Paller and Dmitry became fast friends, and Paller started hearing more and more about Ethereum. “I was intrigued by the concept of smart contracts and blockchains, but I didn’t really understand,” says the energetic fortysomething.
