Jon McNeill

In other words, humans were switches.

And sometime in the late 60s, early 70s, Bell Labs invented an electronic switch that would do this.

And by the end of the 70s,

There was a lot of hand-wringing that there were 800,000 people, pillars of our communities that were employed as operators, and 100% of those jobs were going away.

And sure enough, by the late 70s, early 80s, 100% of those jobs had gone away.

Those humans were replaced by electronic switches.

But what people couldn't see while they were doing the hand-wringing was what was going to happen on the other side.

And what happened on the other side was now that a long distance call is free, doesn't require human labor, just requires electrons, now you could offer toll-free calls.

And so some entrepreneurs said, I'm going to use these toll-free calls.

There was a single area code, 1-800, and I'm going to create businesses.

1-800-Flowers, 1-800-Junk, 1-800-Insurance, 1-800-this, that.

And what those 1-800 numbers required was now centralized answering of phone calls because now people were calling like crazy because it was free.

And so this industry got created called call centers and support centers.

And a few years into the 1980s, there were now millions of people employed in call centers.

Hundreds of software firms that were created.

And my first startup was a software firm in the 90s serving call centers because the technology was still nascent.

When people were just deploying electronic switches and people were like lamenting the end of these jobs as operators, nobody could see on the other side that these entrepreneurs were going to create toll-free dialing.

They were going to create businesses on top of toll-free dialing.

And on top of that, there were going to be this whole layer in our economy called call centers that millions of people are going to be employed in.

We just have the creativity to see the other side.