Back when the world seemed bright and ambitious—another century, it might have been—I managed to convince myself, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that what I really needed in my life was an assistant. This was December, the month when traditionally I can no longer outrun the clerical tasks that have stalked me since the middle of the year. I had weeks of crinkled receipts to expense: the year-end tax on negligence. I was halfway through the process of contesting the charge on a vaccine shot that my insurance company had refused to cover, and I had to transcribe hours of interviews before I could begin to write—the only use of my time which generates an income. As a moonless night wore on, filled with snacking and monsters, I futzed with the formulas in my sad expense spreadsheets and knew that these were hours of life I’d never get back.
In the matter of assistant-having, I was not (as Titian might have said of Venus) without models. My introduction came the first time I answered a peer’s e-mail and realized with a start that we were not alone. “Julianne can help us find a time,” my correspondent wrote. Who? But here was this unknown person in the CC field, suddenly at my side like an attendant bearing Q-tips in a German men’s room. I felt betrayed and then, immediately, envious. Tuesday or Wednesday? Why didn’t I have one of these e-mail lurkers? I reflected for a moment and remembered that I couldn’t afford one.
This made me doubly a loser. People usually get recognized and elevated for the achievements they have time to make, not for the hours they spend maintaining filing systems. One answer to the primal question about Wonder Women and Men—how do they do it?—comes down to help: bookkeepers, housecleaners, lawyers, strategists, and nannies. Many of the best have managed thus. Mark Twain, not thought to be a highfalutin man, enjoyed the help of a private secretary and a butler (named Claude). Mother Teresa had personal assistants (her good deeds seemingly did not extend to paperwork), and Malcolm X depended on a secretary whom he’d hired away from this magazine. Highly effective people may share certain habits, but what they usually share more generously are tasks that get in the way of their being highly effective.
Odd, then, that, in an age of harried two-income households, assistantship is on the wane. Over the past twenty years, the number of people in the U.S. employed as executive secretaries and administrative assistants has more than halved, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which expects assistantship across industries to decline nine per cent by 2029. In part, that’s due to changes in the nature of the work: bits of what a secretary would have done thirty years ago are handled today by technology and by jobs with different titles. But the shift is economic, too. Assistance positions are often among the first to go when companies cut costs, and financially strapped middle-class workers have less to spend on help outside the office, even if they need it more.
The problem of efficiency, productivity, and how to make a market out of some but not really enough disposable income is an obvious target for startup tech, and the brigades have already come through. “If you think about what exists in the movie ‘Her’ or ‘Iron Man’—a super-powerful assistant service that knows you and takes care of the world around you—it’s a really healing version of the future,” the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Sam Lessin told me not long ago. In 2015, he co-founded a company, called Fin, that released a virtual-assistant app with actual humans on the other end. The competition was weak; the closest most of us have got to “Her” is Siri (a known moron), Alexa (a known snoop), or that officious paper clip from the nineties. But Fin, like other companies, ultimately gave up on virtual assistance (it now does data analytics), because the business turned out to be hard. People anticipate human error from human assistants, but from tech they want perfection. And the model was strained by employee management. “You end up hiring thousands and thousands of people to get the scale,” Lessin said.
Faced with personnel challenges, some assistance startups have turned to poor nations abroad. A wage that’s illegal in the United States will keep you well fed in Kenya, American entrepreneurs have noticed. Lately, some companies have sought to shift the burdens of a struggling American middle class to workers in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and elsewhere. To manage the mundane tasks of their narrow worlds, the thinking goes, small businesses and busy parents can turn to the wider one.
One of those companies is Invisible Technologies, which launched in 2015 and now has staff in thirty-five countries, from Malaysia to Ghana, Serbia to Pakistan. It emerged in part from the idea that great savings can be harvested from the developing world. “Labor is incredibly cheap, and the biggest arbitrage opportunity in the world is the fact that you’ve got the largest labor market in history, with people who are connected to the Internet, speak English, and have amazing attitudes,” Francis Pedraza, Invisible’s thirty-one-year-old C.E.O. and founder, told me. “The ability to tap into that and create things is infinite.”
Besides these savings, Invisible grew from two ideas, one about bigness and the other about smallness. The bigness idea was that processes in a business or a life ought to be managed by one entity—a virtual super-assistant who can deal with anything. The smallness idea was that complex processes can be broken down and run in bits. Pedraza’s inspiration, on the latter point, was Henry Ford. “Every year, the price of Ford motor cars kept dropping and the quality kept improving,” he said. The key was separating production into simple tasks, such as screwing in a single lug nut, and then snapping those tasks together like Legos on the factory floor, allowing processes to be built without hiring new teams, then tightened to the inch.
Pedraza has brown hair, streamlined into a short crop; a long, chiselled face; and a predilection for what he calls “books by dead people.” (“You should distrust the New York Times best-seller in the airport bookshelf,” he told me. “Trust ‘Self-Reliance,’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson, because people are still reading Emerson today.”) When I met him, he had just heard of Philip Roth for the first time, possibly because Roth had recently been alive. Some of Pedraza’s colleagues amiably call him crazy. He is known for saying uncommon things in surprising ways. “Ideas are almost like aliens trying to come into the real world, and we’re just pregnant with them,” he has said. He has published more than two thousand essays on his Medium blog, and during this summer of unrest he wrote against “silencing all disagreement as evidence of oppression”—a position that he also claimed for Socrates, Diogenes, Tiresias, the Jewish prophets, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Pedraza keeps a Roman gladius in his closet, for athletic practice, and speaks of “human potential” in the way some people talk about their favorite football team. He sees Invisible as a tool for realizing that potential by breaking past the clutter of modern life; he describes the company’s workflow as a “digital assembly line.”
Compared with sprawling labor-for-hire marketplaces like the site Upwork, where users enlist jobbers for specific tasks such as copywriting or data processing, Invisible is about order and scale. Most of the assistance it does is for entire companies. For businesses of one—say, a hapless writer—it offers an “executive support” service, which connects an individual with a virtual character to whom he or she can assign wishes and tasks.
Pedraza named his own assistant character John Keats, for his favorite dead poet. The character is not puppeted by one person: behind him is a team of people, which, unlike a real assistant, can do an endless number of things at once. When Pedraza includes John Keats’s address on an e-mail—for example, an e-mail about meeting with me—a hidden system moves into action. One meeting is broken into multiple tasks, appearing in a queue on the company’s proprietary delegation software, where they are claimed by workers around the world. Someone in, say, Bangladesh goes into Pedraza’s Google calendar to find times; someone else, maybe a few continents away, in Guatemala, compiles a briefing memo about the participants. Often, in Pedraza’s case, the tasks are not strictly professional. He recently had John Keats book him an elaborate laser hair-removal procedure he’d been hoping to get. (“There was some, you know, confusion about what, uh, areas were covered by this,” he said. “Invisible just handled it for me.”) Sometimes, he has John Keats trawl through his first- and second-degree connections on LinkedIn for contacts who might be interested in Invisible, and begin corresponding with them from his e-mail account, under his name. Some express interest, and meetings are set up. Until Pedraza goes to those, the whole process churns on like a software update in the background of his life. He likes to sign his e-mails (or someone does) “Efficiently yours.”
The average pay for foreign workers at Invisible—known as “agents”—is five dollars an hour. High-performing agents can make up to ten. “We are gathering all of their training data, all of their performance data,” Pedraza told me. Agents are monitored in an endless screen share, with superiors looking over their shoulders all the time to see what they’re doing and how long it’s taking. Instead of replacing humans in slow parts of the assembly line with robots (Ford’s practice), the company writes software to speed through rote steps once they’re set.
Offshore outsourcing, which included more than fourteen million workers in 2018, has been linked to unemployment and wage stagnation in the American workforce: it’s harder to get a raise if your competition abroad works for much less. Pedraza often boasts that Invisible, which hires six per cent of applicants, is more selective than Harvard. At the moment, in fact, Harvard’s acceptance rate is five per cent, and many people go there because it is thought to open wormholes to the world of the élite, while most agents at Invisible simply want a decent job.
Once, it was big companies such as Nike or Google that did most outsourcing. But today the practice appeals to small businesses weathering COVID-19. Invisible’s revenue has more than tripled since the beginning of the year, and its agents in the developing world now handle some of the clerical work involved in setting restaurants up on several of the largest food-delivery platforms. We hear a lot about changes to the American labor market during the pandemic, but this one is likely to linger when it ends.
“In mid-April, we had to let forty per cent of our company go,” the director of revenue operations at one mobile-commerce startup told me. “Before, we probably had ten people doing the work—but the reality is that Invisible is doing such a good job, and we’re seeing such cost efficiencies, that post-coronavirus we’re maybe not considering employing for these tasks again.”
In a spirit of adventure, I signed up with Invisible myself. Over e-mail, I was introduced to my new assistant, William Blake. (Not my favorite poet, but whatever.) I had planned to ask for his help transcribing an interview, but I faltered at the crucial question. How to address him? “William” felt ludicrous. “Blake”? Unfair to art. I settled on “Mr. Blake”—appreciative and respectful, like Mr. Darcy, Mr. Robot, Mr. Shawn—and wrote him a long, solicitous set of instructions. An eighty-five-hundred-word transcript came back the next day.
Invisible’s executive-support clients are required to spend at least two thousand dollars on services per month. This is not cheap, though it’s worth noting that a full-time-ish assistant somewhere like New York costs much more. Hayley Darden, the company’s marketing director, advised me to regard Mr. Blake less as a personal assistant than as a process assistant: not good for random errands—such as haggling with Verizon customer service—but excellent with repetitive, mind-numbing chores. “Whatever you most hate doing in your life is perfect,” she told me.
I decided to assign Mr. Blake one of my saddest tasks, filing expenses. At The New Yorker, this is done via a cryptic online platform. I walked through the rigmarole with Sam Mata, one of Invisible’s “delivery managers.” He works from his home in the Dominican Republic, meeting with new clients to gauge their needs—a conversation that Invisible calls “discovery,” and that often has a therapeutic mood. (In workflows as in life, people rarely see the heart of their problems clearly.) Did I want receipts filed separately, or in bundles? Mata asked. And how often should Mr. Blake check for new ones? Darden had explained that a first-rate assistance operation would intercept the work before it even reached my radar screen. Ideally, Mr. Blake would log in to my e-mail account, look for receipts, and file them on his own.
Log in to my e-mail? I had visions of my not-favorite poet pawing over inchoate notes I’d sent myself, weird forwards from Mom, love letters I’d received in the Obama years. I could hear him snickering over embarrassing purchases, such as—just to give an extremely hypothetical example—a twenty-five-minute sleep meditation narrated by Diddy. Not to fear. The agents would use a secure-key client and never see my passwords. And, I was assured, their bosses would be watching for any funny business.
The next morning, I sat down at my desk to find ten e-mails from the dreaded New Yorker expenses portal: my submissions had been approved. My personal dashboard on the Invisible site revealed a breakdown of the job by unit cost (rounded to $1.83 per expense) and total ($27.50). I felt as if someone had broken into my home and scrubbed my bathroom while I slept. For all the quantitative specificity, though, I couldn’t see the names of the agents who had worked on the job behind Mr. Blake’s façade.
Next, I arranged for Mr. Blake to book my meetings. Mata sent me templates for Mr. Blake’s e-mails, which turned out to be a dangerous overture; my writer’s compulsions kicked in as soon as I opened them. Mr. Blake made first contact by writing:
But did “Happy to help you and Nathan connect” maybe sound slightly grudging? With that phrasing, it was easy to envision Mr. Blake as a twenty-four-year-old Bard graduate, cooler and smarter than me, returning to his three roommates each night with stories of his effete boss, Nathan, who was incapable of scheduling his own meetings and who needed to have everything printed out. I changed it to:
This had the ring of job contentment. I spent fifteen more minutes turning the sentences around before going back to my work. Ah, efficiency.
A few days later, I Zoomed with Prabhat Hira, an agent who had worked on my expense filing. He was based in New Delhi, and appeared in a collared jersey for the Gryffindor quidditch team. “The delegations I worked on for you were kind of exciting!” he said—the most enthusiasm for expense filing that I had ever heard. Hira had started working as a freelancer online in order to spend more time at home with his young family. He spoke fondly of his “journey through Invisible” and, like all the workers whom I met, described the company’s collegiality. “It feels really good to talk to people from different countries, from different cultures,” he said. Still, most of the people he was talking to were other agents. During the nearly three years he had worked at Invisible, Hira told me, I was the first client he’d ever met.
For a long time, the de-facto genre of assistantship stories was comedy, because societal roles were thought to be fixed, and straining against the order of things had funny outcomes. Malvolio, the imperious steward in “Twelfth Night,” chafes against the limits of his station and gets punished with ugly socks. P. G. Wodehouse drew on a long tradition of stories about clever servants acting beyond their master’s ken: Jeeves and Bertie Wooster are crossed by the order of things, the boss set to task and taste by his assistant, and the injustice is comic because both of them are powerless to correct this misarrangement.
In the middle of the twentieth century, the old nonsense about class and station started to fall away in the West. With the turn toward supposed meritocracy, a different literature of assistance emerged. Recent stories look more like bildungsromans; the transgression of roles is where the drama, not the comedy, comes through. “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Clouds of Sils Maria” are narratives about assistants becoming or choosing not to become, and about bosses who watch their pasts replay from the far side of life choices that they can’t reverse. Assistance may be where people start out, but it is no longer necessarily where they end up, and that knowledge makes for friction in the daily grind. The curse of opportunity is the mandate to be always striving.
And so, just as many assistants have been slightly terrified of their powerful bosses, a number of powerful bosses now appear to be slightly terrified of their assistants. Business kingpins fret over being sold out. Luxury-industry leaders worry about assistants absconding with goods or money. A surprising number of Hollywood types seem to share a fear that their assistants will experience a Norma Desmond moment and attack them with a weapon. In theory, Invisible’s assistance presents no such human perils. Pedraza can be sure that John Keats isn’t trying to take his job, embezzle, or have sex with strangers in his favorite chair, because John Keats is just a big tin man of fragmentary shared processes and incoherent passions.
In practice, though, the mandate to strive is spread across the globe. Even before COVID-19, Invisible had no office, and not long ago I went to visit Pedraza at his apartment and operations center in Brooklyn, a shimmering, Jenga-like glass tower on the East River. In deference to the pandemic, I had proposed a virtual meeting. But Pedraza, who described himself as being “risk-friendly,” preferred something more personal. In the lobby, one doorman guided me to another doorman, who guided me to a large elevator bank, and I went up.
The apartment where Pedraza leads a growing empire of work was not much larger than a college dorm room. The kitchen spanned a counter near the door. The rest of the space was dominated by a platform bed with an uncovered duvet.
“Sometimes I have guests here. I’ll cook a meal,” Pedraza told me. It was nice to imagine. He sat down by a desk. He was wearing a black shirt, white shorts, and white canvas shoes. I sat on a small gray couch. There was one window—the death-prevention kind that opens only a few inches.
Pedraza grew up in San Diego, with parents who come from immigrant families. (His mother, a former entrepreneur, is Persian; his father, an architect by training, was brought up largely in Venezuela and Japan.) When he was in elementary school, he was bullied. “I was ready to be friends with everybody,” he told me, “but I wasn’t willing to go through the hazing rituals of ascending the hierarchy.” At twelve, he enrolled in a five-year Skype course on “the great books of Western civilization” and his world changed. He learned to inhabit a private order drawn from books and personal dreams. On his darker days, he identified with Don Quixote. On brighter days, too. “The most wonderful and exciting future is one in which as many individuals as possible are expressing as much of their potential as possible, and everyone has their own ideas about what the future is going to look like,” he said.
Pedraza went to Cornell with high hopes, but the giant lectures vexed him. He spent a year abroad, at Oxford, and liked its one-on-one research tutorials. Back in Ithaca, he started a line of Livestrong-like bracelets that he called DoBands. Wearers would commit to doing something, such as running a marathon, and, when the task was completed, log their achievement in an online database and pass the bracelet on to someone else. When Pedraza graduated, he moved to Palo Alto and tried to launch a social iPhone app to help people achieve personal goals. He found no investors until he lucked into an introduction to the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who invested fifty thousand dollars; $2.5 million in additional funding followed. The app was called Everest, and it had around half a million downloads, but the company failed after three years. “The fatal flaw,” Pedraza told me, “was that people would quit working on their goals.”
Invisible is plainly oriented toward its clients’ achievement, but Pedraza believes that it helps its workers along, too. He’s an advocate of employee-owned business; fifty per cent of Invisible is currently in the hands of its staff. If agents in distant countries show outstanding initiative, he says, they can take equity, too. So far, only two out of two hundred and seventy-nine have reached his standard, but he holds out hope for the rest. He told me, “Invisible in its very, very long-term strategy is sort of a back door into an education company.” He means that it can serve as a kind of school: Invisible offers skills that, in theory, can be transferred to other desirable jobs. Nadine Jost, an agent in Pretoria, told me, “You have a test every week, and, if you test low, they will tell you that you need to be retrained.”
Although virtual characters like John Keats or William Blake make the interface accessible to individuals, the heart of Invisible’s business is churning through labor-intensive processes for small or medium-sized companies. “This is a juicy, juicy market,” Scott Downes, Invisible’s forty-nine-year-old chief technology officer, told me. Roland Ligtenberg, a co-founder of Housecall Pro, a business platform catering to home-service companies—plumbers, carpet cleaners, and so forth—uses Invisible to help coördinate the sorts of growth efforts that a young startup needs. “Being able to have an extra set of hands you can spin up at any moment is a huge competitive advantage—the reason being that you’re trying a lot of little things, and, once you see one working, you want not to just double down but to double down on the double-down,” Ligtenberg said. Without outsourcing, he’d have to undertake a round of hiring every time he wanted to start a new initiative—and a round of firing if it didn’t work out.
In Silicon Valley, the conventional wisdom is that companies must grow quickly and focus on a narrow band of the market (often called “going vertical”). Pedraza favors margins over fast growth—Invisible aspires to be profitable by next fall—and thinks that gains accrue horizontally: a little Lego piece is invested for one process in one industry, but it can be used in others, and the skills that agents learn have concomitant range.
Pedraza’s other education goal for agents is more numinous: “Teach them how to think, teach them how to create, help them to discover their da Vincian potential.” To this end, he often chats with agents on Slack. Last year, he undertook a world tour to meet some in person. “It was a magical trip, you know, and a couple of things were eye-openers for me,” he told me. “One is that our agents are nearly all college graduates.” Pedraza tries to share his intellectual interests; for example, he posted clips of himself on YouTube reading Bastiat’s economic essays. “As a company, every day, we’ll read a chapter in a book I love,” he told me. “Right now, we’re reading Aesop’s fables. They’re wonderful, and so simple anyone can understand them.”
The hope for shared aspirations across the globe isn’t unique to Invisible. Phoebe Yao is the founder and C.E.O. of another outsourcing startup, Pareto, based in San Francisco. Its mission is to spread female empowerment; it draws on a labor pool of mostly Filipino women, whose pay starts at four dollars an hour. “Essentially what we’re teaching these women is how to think critically about the world and the world’s problems,” she told me.“We go through this monthlong process of teaching them to ask the right questions.” I asked for an example. “First, it’s that you can ask questions,” Yao said. “And then, when they ask, it’s usually things like ‘Is it O.K. that I’m doing something like this?’ ‘Is this something that you want me to be doing?’ ”
When Pedraza shares insights from his ten years of entrepreneurship, he likes to emphasize an up-and-at-’em attitude. He told me he wants agents to overcome the “mental block” to success—the voice that says, “No, I couldn’t start a company that’s worth millions of dollars.” “No, actually, you can,” he insisted to me. “Like, I know you’re in Kenya, and I know it’s harder there, but, like, look—I’ll help you.”
Yet global assistantship as apprenticeship remains more notional than actual. Not long ago, I spoke with one of Invisible’s agents in Kenya, Brighton Ooko. He is thirty years old, and he excelled as a programming student at the Multimedia University of Kenya. In 2017, he became the second agent hired at Invisible. He has since been promoted to middle management, at ten dollars an hour, and he oversees a team of fifteen. His income is a healthy one in Kenya; he bought a plot of land in Malindi and had a house built for his wife and son. But the grind is real. Ooko begins his workday at 4 p.m. and continues through to morning, logging in sixty or seventy hours a week. The nonstop nocturnal schedule, plus the business of raising a family, is less than totally conducive to flights of entrepreneurial imagination; when I asked Ooko about his long-term ambitions, he referred me to Invisible’s corporate goals.
Up in his tiny apartment in the Jenga-like tower, Pedraza was giving me a tour of everything he’d imagined but hadn’t had a chance to execute. On the little desk lay a stack of Moleskine notebooks filled with ideas: other businesses he’d dreamed up, sketches, poems. On the wall to my right were pictures Pedraza had drawn, projections of unbuilt buildings from his imagination. “I’m an amateur in the sense of the word amator,” he told me. “I think bad art is the secret to good art. You just have to do it and not let your ego stop you.”
“That’s my Narcissus,” he said, pointing to a portrait of a long face with close-set eyes. “I think narcissism—clinically, psychologically—is a very bad term, and also a term we use a lot casually, but in a classical sense it’s not necessarily a bad thing. To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” Another picture, of a black figure trapped in a gray oval, the walls closing in, was inspired by reading Heidegger. “In your inner mind you can be screaming into the abyss,” Pedraza said.
I looked around the little studio, with Pedraza’s paintings tacked up, and asked how all his amateur production fitted with his churn of global efficiency at work.
Pedraza was silent for a while. “You’re touching on an insecurity of mine—really, a nest of insecurities,” he said at last. “Am I focussed? Is all this”—he ran his eyes over the room—“a distraction?” These questions arose sometimes when he chose to read a novel or a philosophy book instead of a business book, and he feared that he was shirking, maybe not being efficient enough. He worried that if he didn’t keep up he’d be left behind, because some people were running so quickly and with such focus that, if you didn’t do the same, you risked betraying your future.
He told me this, then turned back to his computer, to check what John Keats had scheduled next. Recalled to the clockwork of his day, he seemed to shake off his uncertainty and rejoin the flow of necessary work. He’d more than halved the company’s burn rate this year. He was giving his investors reason to be pleased. “The products are getting better, and the operations are getting better,” he said. Before I left, he rose to crack open the window behind me, to catch a little of the breeze outside, and as he undid the latch I felt a wave of vertigo, although I didn’t know whether it came from looking up or looking down. ♦
