Timeouts worked great for us; the trick we found was just to be deterministic about them. We gave our kids a countdown warning and then invariably applied the same consequences when the countdown expired. After a couple applications of a 3-2-1 countdown followed by a timeout, our kids reliably responded by "2".
The other observation I made was that it doesn't take much of a consequence at all to make this work. My initial intuition was to scale the "punishment" by the severity of the incident, but really, a 5-10 minute timeout does just as much good as a longer one, and is much easier to apply. Anything you can do reliably and without effort would, in my case, almost always work; the point is to avoid the power struggle.
Your managers are algorithms. - We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work
I'm sorry I don't buy this, I may be misreading how Exec works but it looks like Exec's are employees - not freelancers. I don't know how this would work any other way you couldn't guarantee staffing levels and "real time service" for your customers if they were independents like Task Rabbit. Not to mention Rentacoder, Odesk and 99designs all usually have some aspect of geographic arbitrage which brings down their prices. The major difference in this model is that Exec becomes entirely responsible for QC - unlike each of the other's you mention where if a person (or place) is crap that "vendor" gets downvoted out of the game. Here the only people who lose karma is Exec itself.
This brings a whole world of pain and management which none of the crowdsourced models address - payroll taxes, labor codes HR - scheduling. You're definitely not managing with algorithms. I have a good friend who runs a Doggy Day Care in SF who hires a lot of folks in this price range. He has a hard time getting 15 people who can walk dogs with a decent level of service.
There's a huge lag on this information: people can find out how much you claimed to have on your balance sheet at the time you last filed, which could be something like 18 months ago.
(Do US LLCs really not require you to file accounts? Why does everyone choose Delaware, anyway?)
It basically serves the same purpose as the Experian et al credit scoring system. The purpose is to protect creditors and customers against entering into contracts with fraudulent entities. Part of the tradeoff for limited liability.
I've done company creation and small co filing in the UK, all manually because the company had a nominal amount of money and was a "limited by guarantee". Fairly quick and easy.
I still remember the day I walked into Brian Smith's office in late 2010, at what would be my last corporate job, and he started talking to me about how we needed to start working on our own passive-income businesses, "like this patio11 guy on Hacker News." Your openness and transparency empowered me to pursue the path that I began pursuing back then. Without your transparency, I can't imagine how I would have found my way from that corporate gig to where I find myself today.
Thanks also for your willingness to work with us early on when we had to do special feature development to support your use-case. Those features ended up being a differentiator for us and helped us snag some really valuable clients since, and I'm not sure those businesses would have been so patient waiting for us.
The other observation I made was that it doesn't take much of a consequence at all to make this work. My initial intuition was to scale the "punishment" by the severity of the incident, but really, a 5-10 minute timeout does just as much good as a longer one, and is much easier to apply. Anything you can do reliably and without effort would, in my case, almost always work; the point is to avoid the power struggle.