Interview with Bill Monk- Economy of a Start Up by risa
by Risa Dickens
you can read part 1 of this series at: History of a Start Up.
I don’t know about other people, but my current relationship with money is probably unhealthy. Money looms large on my list of goals because I feel the dragging weight of not-enough-money around the neck of almost every good idea and good relationship I have.
I want to get enough money to not think about money, and yet I pour my energy into jobs that don’t pay, and I am not alone in this regard. So I asked Chuck Groom of Bill Monk:
Why did you decide this (BillMonk) was a project worth your labour and time?
and then I added:
What is the revolutionary potential you see in BillMonk?
and:
What could be some cascading effects of the wide adoption of BillMonk?
because I like to hear other people’s versions of the future.
Anyway, here’s what Chuck Groom had to say:
It took all of 10 minutes for me to commit to this idea, which is kind of weird because usually I need at least a week to commit to anything. There are a lot of reasons.
- I want BillMonk for personal use. A lot. I run into sharing-bill situations with friends all the time, and it always vexes me because (a) it’s hard work to split bills, but (b) it’s socially awkward to owe someone, but (c) if I pay the bill or over-pay my part, that can cost money and, sometimes, make me grouchy. Also, as a geek, I’m all about efficiency, and the whole affair seems like an awful waste of peoples’ time and social capital.
So I had a desire to solve the problem for myself, but the chain of thought that followed from that was that it was worth doing at a larger scale — and that if it was worth doing at a large scale, it must be done on a global scale.
Which leads to the question of social implications. I shall now proceed to ramble. 
I want BillMonk to be a ubiquitously available tool for people who are ever in a situation where they want an easy way to accurately remember debts with friends.
We DO NOT want friends to record everything into BillMonk. That would be the death-knell of countless relationships and and would ruin lots of potential friendships. A really important part of having friends is to make life easy and enjoyable for one another, which involves a lot of small favors. That’s great, and BillMonk shouldn’t touch that.
My experience is that friends have a lot of guilt and suspicion about money, and it creates strain. BillMonk adds a huge dose of objectivity to your dealings, and is the perfect way to deflect blame or guilt — it’s just a fact that person X owes person Y $40.51. So BillMonk, we hope, defuses negative feelings about friends, and reduces one’s sense of guilt (at imagined debts).
Which brings me to any broader point: I think most people are uncomfortable with money. Money is weird. You can use it to make problems go away. You have to work hard to get it. But… what is it? What is it worth to you? Do you worry about not having enough money but spend it too quickly when you have it — why?
We’re not going to answer questions of what money means, but we will show you how it is flowing between you and your friends so you at least can make better sense of your world. Which can be scary for some people; perfect information is not always a welcome thing. And so that’s one interesting change BillMonk could have, just to force people to be more aware of how they are spending their money. I think this is probably a good thing, or at least the kind of thing your parents would approve of.
Taken to an extreme, you could pin a lot of worries onto the BillMonk informal economy, like drug deals or tax evasion or some exotic money laundering scheme. But that has nothing to do with BillMonk proper. BillMonk makes is convenient for people to track amounts owed. Joe Evil could equally well record debts with Bob Evil using email or pen-and-paper.
Let’s switch gears and look at BillMonk from the economic standpoint. This gets really interesting.
BillMonk is an economy. It is different from a hard currency economy because it is informal and based on trust. We (Bill Monk) might say “Joe owes Bob $15″- but Joe can’t go to court for this. However, if Joe refuses to pay Bob, he loses social capital and trust. (We are even considering ways of establishing a person’s trust rating, if it can be done in a way that doesn’t invade privacy or violate impartiality). The BillMonk economy of debts costs trust instead of hard cash. Our business plan is to offer services (for a fee) that bridge the BillMonk economy and the hard-cash economy.
That’s it for part 2. Here are some questions we’d like to hear your thoughts on:
what do you think could be other possible future effects of Bill Monk?
what does the future of money look like from your perspective?
how do you think Bill Monk could change the social dynamics of friendships and people’s relationship with their money?
what does this say about people’s current relationship with their money?
*coming up*: Chuck Groom waxes eloquent on personal privacy and Web2.0
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