Airbnb

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

by Brad Stone  · 30 Jan 2017  · 373pp  · 112,822 words

-20161221-JV-PC Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Upstart Introduction PART I: SIDE PROJECTS CHAPTER 1: THE TROUGH OF SORROW The Early Years of Airbnb CHAPTER 2: JAM SESSIONS The Early Years of Uber CHAPTER 3: THE NONSTARTERS SeamlessWeb, Taxi Magic, Cabulous, Couchsurfing, Zimride CHAPTER 4: THE GROWTH HACKER

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City PART III: THE TRIAL OF THE UPSTARTS CHAPTER 10: GOD VIEW Uber’s Rough Ride CHAPTER 11: ESCAPE VELOCITY Fights and Fables with Airbnb CHAPTER 12: GLOBAL MEGA-UNICORN DEATH MATCH! Uber versus the World Epilogue Photos Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Brad Stone Notes Newsletters For Tiffany

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have criticized the company for worsening the housing shortage in desirable urban areas, driving up housing costs, and skirting hotel taxes. In late 2016, Airbnb actually sued New York City and its hometown, San Francisco, over legislation that threatened the company and its hosts with thousand-dollar fines every time

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. Zoning laws and hotel and guesthouse ordinances kept commercial activity out of residential neighborhoods and ensured that hotel rooms were up to safety code. Airbnb and Uber substituted the self-policing tools pioneered by internet marketplaces like eBay—riders graded their drivers and guests evaluated their hosts, and vice versa

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. Uber and Airbnb have also come to represent, at least to some, the overweening hubris of the techno-elite. Critics blame them for everything from destroying the

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peaceful neighborhoods to bringing unrestrained capitalism into liberal cities. Some of that is overheated, but there were consequences to their approaches that even Uber and Airbnb did not anticipate. At the center of this maelstrom are the young, wealthy, charismatic chief executives: Travis Kalanick and Brian Chesky. They represent a

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become regulators and housing activists. Some of them are looking to score political points by vilifying a high-profile target; others are legitimately worried about Airbnb’s impact on housing affordability. Unlike his friend Travis Kalanick, Chesky presents himself as a sympathetic ally of those in the latter category. “We

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started the company.” As for the book project, he was game. Over the ensuing year, I spoke to Chesky, his co-founders, and top Airbnb executives. The company’s PR representatives were helpful though understandably nervous about the outcome, soliciting questions for interviews ahead of time, sitting in on conversations

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starting,” he said. “Uber was my idea; that was his idea.” McCloskey remembers that Kalanick had reached the same conclusions as the founders of Airbnb. The internet could allow travelers to find luxurious yet cheap accommodations while also offering a far more interesting traveling experience. “He was frustrated by VRBO

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of the car-service startups that preceded Uber. An online home-sharing service called Couchsurfing won devotees and attention five years before the rise of Airbnb. It wasn’t bad timing, stubbornness, or chronic niceness that doomed it, but something just as deadly in the cutthroat world of business: idealism

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Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, right down to Couchsurfing’s weighty mission statement (“to connect people and facilitate inspiring experiences”). Even the brand names Airbnb and Couchsurfing were similar, each implying an uncomfortable night’s sleep that could leave one sore in the morning. Unlike Chesky, Fenton grew up

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blistering controversy. Such opportunists would flock to the site anyway, and cities were forced to consider how to deal with them and whether to regulate Airbnb like conventional hotels. The founders seemed to move slowly on everything. McAdoo remembers them as being a little too “wonderfully frugal,” reluctant to spend

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to improve the popularity of their products and services. Blecharczyk, it turned out, was an exceedingly good one. That makes the mysterious rise of Airbnb in the year after its graduation from Y Combinator easier to understand. Two other apartment-listing services were far larger: Couchsurfing, which was still laboring

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far more provocative and cocksure Kalanick showed up for their joint interview wearing pink socks. Moderator Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch asked Chesky about reports that Airbnb was raising a massive round of funding that could value it at a billion dollars—unicorn territory. “Can’t comment on that, unfortunately,” Chesky

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a sister site called Airizu for the Chinese market, and an aggressive plan to hire four hundred employees and managers in countries around the world. Airbnb, whose founders still interviewed and discussed each potential employee to painstakingly measure for “culture fit,” had only some twenty workers in San Francisco and

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with current and former employees from the time, the payment was either never authorized or never sent.) The primary person she had talked to from Airbnb was the brainy Blecharczyk, who was filling in for a recently departed head of customer service while Chesky interviewed numerous potential replacements. Blecharczyk, EJ

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managers modeled themselves after Chesky. In Moscow, Jung hired Eugen Miropolski, a former Groupon exec, who promptly rented out his home and started living in Airbnbs around town, just as Chesky had done in San Francisco. In Paris, Olivier Grémillon, a former McKinsey and Company consultant, planned community meet-ups

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increasingly beleaguered web portal, and by 2011, wanted to believe in another corporate cause. That’s when she started reading in the tech press about Airbnb. Impressed by the startup’s gathering momentum, Johnson stealthily orchestrated her own hiring. Instead of sending an unsolicited e-mail to Brian Chesky, she

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procedures, mishandled cross-examinations of witnesses (including the building inspector who had confronted the Russian guest), and was constantly asked to rephrase questions—all while Airbnb’s high-priced attorneys sat quietly in the audience. “I was in so far over my head, it was just ridiculous,” Warren says. Five

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Schneiderman, the top law enforcement officer in the state, were inclined to agree. They felt that despite its proclaimed intentions to aid the city, Airbnb was actually resisting requests to combat illegal hoteliers and hadn’t earnestly pursued efforts to collect the required 14.75 percent hospitality taxes.17 Though

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Observing closely now were lawmakers from cities around the world, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, and countless others, who were watching Airbnb spread in their cities too. They all had the same worries about home-sharing websites and technologies that appeared to radically disrupt their local economies

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, with undetermined consequences. The subpoena and accompanying blizzard of media coverage sent shudders through the ranks of Airbnb users in New York City. Journalist Seth Porges had been renting out a spare bedroom in his two-story duplex in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, since

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and many other cities had to make, the choice between guaranteeing affordable housing for residents and offering new hotel rooms for out-of-town guests. Airbnb, its critics believed, was removing residential properties from the market as well as deliberately blurring the lines between shared rooms and absentee hosts. Schneiderman

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company was the more ethical operator. Uber started rampaging over local transportation laws when it appeared competitors might capture strategic ground. Chesky knew that Airbnb violated the strict housing regulations of New York City and elsewhere but pushed ahead anyway, and the site neglected to stop its own users from

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share of stock to the public. As the companies swelled in size, value, and ambition, the world grew increasingly concerned about their impact. For Airbnb, the company’s influence on housing prices, its effect on residential neighborhoods, and its occasionally awkward attempts at compromise with major cities drew new protests

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and other ridesharing services, led the anti-Uber crusade with angry, sometimes violent protests in countless cities around the world. The upstarts Uber and Airbnb, frequently named in tandem by sharing-economy proponents and critics, were the defendants in a global trial during this time of uninhibited growth. The

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twelve-hundred-square-foot vertical “green wall,” made up of hundreds of plants spanning three floors, and outfitted a dozen conference rooms to look like Airbnb listings in Milan, Paris, Denmark, and elsewhere. Another conference room was modeled after the founder’s original apartment on Rausch Street, while a larger

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in their homes, though there was no way to determine whether the hosts had actually installed them. The Yuh tragedy epitomized the dueling realities facing Airbnb at the start of 2014. It wanted to be seen as an innovative hospitality brand bringing strangers together and providing authentic, intimate travel experiences.

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on where their sympathies lay. Regulators, left-wing politicians, hotel CEOs, union leaders, affordable housing advocates, and angry neighbors tired of carousing guests saw Airbnb as nothing but a rule breaker from the far-away land of arrogant, entitled billionaires. Investors, hosts, property owners struggling to make their monthly mortgage

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had been put into place to protect residential neighborhoods from too much commercial activity. So Unger was among those inclined to look askance when unlicensed Airbnbs started popping up across Portland, particularly since his business remained curiously slow even after the city emerged from the recession in 2012. By the

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hotels and their powerful employee unions. Both were well organized and deep pocketed, and both had strong relationships with local governments. A lawyer working for Airbnb on the attempted settlement in New York City said that within twenty-four hours, the hotel unions and their representatives scuttled any prospective deal, insisting

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feared. They required hosts to register with their cities, but, despite the fanfare that accompanied the deals, few did. In the face of this, Airbnb refused to put in place restrictions to force compliance—for example, requiring hosts enter valid registration numbers or preventing a host from listing multiple properties

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and keep his house—the spare room was great to have available for visits by his sister and nephew. So he decided to give Airbnb a try. Airbnb exceeded Kwan’s expectations on all counts. Over the years he met travelers from dozens of states and countries and stayed in contact

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selling their homes to permanent residents. The issues facing San Francisco pitted new residents against old, techies against nontechies, and centrist Democrats against progressives. Airbnb was a tempting wedge issue in this fight, a way to muster opposition to the tide of gentrification under the banner of a universally appealing

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A few days before the vote, seventy-five protesters banging drums, blaring horns, and chanting “No more displacement in this city!” occupied the atrium in Airbnb’s swank headquarters. They spent ninety minutes there, delivering angry speeches and releasing clusters of black helium balloons that carried posters with words like evictions

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walking around the Grande Halle and attending speeches and seminars with whimsical names like “Hospitality Moments of Truth,” were disarming and inspiring. They were Airbnb’s most persuasive evangelists. Here was a group that loved the company and what it stood for, demonstrating a kind of loyalty and passion that

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their guests’ profiles and post photos and facts about their home so that visitors weren’t surprised when they arrived. Since they started listing on Airbnb, the couple had hosted several dozen groups of Americans, including some university students and their professor. The biggest challenge, they found, was that American

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asked citizens to anonymously report violators. Offenses were punishable by fines of up to one hundred thousand euros.36 That same year, Tokyo battled over Airbnb and considered draconian restrictions for the new phenomenon of house rentals, called minpaku in Japanese. In a moment of surprising candor, one lawmaker revealed

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seen them demonstrate anything other than trying to maximize their revenue,” said Murray Cox, a “data activist” and creator of the website Inside Airbnb, which scraped the Airbnb website to collect independent data on hosts. In May 2016, Gregory Slenden, an African American from Richmond, Virginia, filed a civil rights lawsuit

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.39 There was academic backing for his claims; Ben Edelman, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School, had published two studies showing that Airbnb users were statistically less likely to host or stay with minorities.40 Slenden’s charges sparked an uproar. Using the hash tag #Airbnbwhileblack, African

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lowest since the great recession. Some industry observers blamed the new competition.46 There were new investors, bigger valuations, more employees. By mid-2016, Airbnb had twenty-six hundred workers. More than half had joined in the previous twelve months. Departments doubled or tripled in size, disrupting any hope employees

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the world’s richest, most valuable, most scrutinized upstart freed himself and his colleagues to finally confront the future. Epilogue By the end of 2016, Airbnb and Uber no longer resembled gangly, adolescent startups. They had thousands of employees, offices around the world, and ranks of experienced executives. In many

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.sfgate.com/business/article/DeSoto-S-F-s-oldest-taxi-firm-rebrands-6087480.php. 3. “Why Couchsurfing Founder Casey Fenton Is Unfazed by Competitors like Airbnb,” Mixergy, March 30, 2015, https://mixergy.com/interviews/casey-fenton-couchsurfing/. 4. Ryan Lawler, “Lyft-Off: Zimride’s Long Road to Overnight Success,” TechCrunch,

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10. Andrew Chen, “Growth Hacker Is the New VP Marketing,” http://andrewchen.co/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study/. 11. “Airbnb Announces New Product Advancements and $7.2M in Series A Funding to Accelerate Global Growth,” Marketwired, November 11, 2010, http://www.marketwired.com/press-release

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,” Billboard, June 17, 2011, http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1177428/spotify-raises-100-million-but-remains-stuck-at-1-billion-valuation; Geoffrey Fowler, “Airbnb Is Latest Start-Up to Secure $1 Billion Valuation,” Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111904772304576468183971793712. 4. Eric Mack,

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to Become First Sharing Economy Billionaires As Company Nears $10 Billion Valuation,” Forbes, March 20, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2014/03/20/airbnb-cofounders-are-billionaires/#2a6b41b641ab. 5. James Lo Chi-hao, “Backpacker Dies from Carbon Monoxide Poisoning,” China Post, December 31, 2013, http://www.chinapost.com

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy

by Leigh Gallagher  · 14 Feb 2017  · 290pp  · 87,549 words

also opened up access to different kinds of neighborhoods than traditional tourist zones, so you could have an experience that felt more local, an advantage Airbnb heavily pushes. These elements were particularly powerful for millennials, who have exhibited a growing dissatisfaction with big brands and a greater sense of adventure, and

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The easiest is those 140 million “guest arrivals” since its inception. Its 3 million active listings—80 percent of which are outside North America—makes Airbnb the largest provider of accommodations in the world, bigger than any hotel chain. (With its acquisition of Starwood, Marriott International has the largest inventory of

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and industrialization came along, that personal feeling was replaced by “mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences,” and along the way, “people stopped trusting each other.” Airbnb, he wrote, would stand for something much bigger than travel; it would stand for community and relationships and using technology for the purpose of bringing

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company invited people to draw their own versions of the logo—which, it was announced, would stand for four things: people, places, love, and Airbnb. To say Airbnb can be idealistic at times is an understatement, and while its customers seemed to embrace the concept, the media were more skeptical. TechCrunch called

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University School of Hotel Administration, that he started thinking more seriously about the actual experience the company was offering. He decided they needed to transform Airbnb more deeply from a tech company into a hospitality company. Shortly after that, Chesky read the book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from

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venture funding. Guesty, a professional management service for hosts, started by Israeli twin brothers, is one of the largest: hosts give Guesty access to their Airbnb accounts, and it handles booking management, all guest communication, calendar updating, and scheduling and coordinating with cleaners and other local service providers, for a fee

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always good. 4 The Bad and the Ugly * * * * * * Our product is real life. —BRIAN CHESKY OF COURSE, HUMANITY IS NOT always well behaved, and despite Airbnb’s idealism-filled promise, there is an obvious question here: How can you smush all these strangers together and not have things go wrong? After

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privacy policy prohibited the disclosure of any information regarding Plush’s account, but if Loughlin’s local law enforcement wanted to investigate, they could contact Airbnb’s law-enforcement liaison, who would cooperate with any investigation. She added that she was committed to doing everything she could to advocate for Loughlin

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the admirable goals of trust building and accountability, he suspected they may have an unintended consequence as well: facilitating discrimination. Conducting a field experiment of Airbnb—because it was the largest such platform and because it required users to post large photos—Luca and his team found that nonblack hosts were

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a full home, were held constant. “Overall, we find widespread discrimination against guests with distinctively African-American names,” the researchers wrote. The researchers focused on Airbnb because it was the “canonical” example of the sharing economy, but they cited previous research that found similar issues on other online lending sites, such

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members’ online photos and profiles. As the Harvard researchers pointed out, “While the photos are precisely what help create a feeling of humanity on the Airbnb platform, they can just as easily bring out the worst of humanity.” Discrimination, the researchers wrote, suggested “an important unintended consequence of a seemingly-routine

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in particular—New York City, San Francisco, Berlin, and Barcelona, among others—regulators and lawmakers have dug in their heels with particular tenaciousness. And as Airbnb has grown bigger over the years, the intensity of the opposition has escalated. (Those same laws govern HomeAway, VRBO, and other short-term-rental platforms

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as smooth as the ascending line on these companies’ unfettered growth charts. It highlights how deeply emotional issues around housing can get. The struggle over Airbnb in New York and elsewhere has also pitted Democrat against Democrat, has brought together strange bedfellows, and has made it hard sometimes to discern just

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and by failing to comply with traditional hotel-safety regulations. Perhaps most critically, they said the proliferation of units dedicated solely to renting out on Airbnb—so-called illegal hotels—removes housing from a market that is already in a serious affordable-housing crisis, driving prices up further for everyone. A

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campaign manager behind Bill de Blasio’s mayoral victory, who conceived and ran a multimillion-dollar grassroots campaign laser-focused on a single message: that Airbnb helped middle-class New Yorkers. The hallmark of the campaign was a television ad called “Meet Carol,” which featured an African American widowed mother who

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against multiple listings. In some places—he uses Lake Tahoe as an example—a municipality may actually want property-management companies to manage listings on Airbnb (and in 2015 the company piloted property-manager partnerships in some vacation-rental markets). It’s another way to reach potential vacationers and bring them

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and should take thousands of apartments off the market,” says Murray Cox, an affordable-housing activist and founder of data provider Inside Airbnb, another outside provider of Airbnb data. The bigger Airbnb got, the more the conflict in New York escalated. Aside from the law, short-term rentals are forbidden by most landlords

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, and some began adding riders in their leases prohibiting tenants from using Airbnb, implementing stricter protocols for having guests, and adding cameras and hiring private investigators to catch tenants in the act. Related Companies, the largest owner of

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head of the powerful Service Employees International Union. It spent more on advertising. It sponsored marathons. (Perhaps predictably, on the eve of the newly named Airbnb Brooklyn Half Marathon, protesters showed up wearing T-shirts that said “#RunFromAirbnb.”) But it had powerful, well-funded forces lining up against it (REBNY, the

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of this ignorant bill!” the actor tweeted), the bill passed on the last day of the legislative session, dealing a sudden and unexpected blow to Airbnb. Airbnb maintained that the bill was introduced unfairly, the result of what it said was an eleventh-hour backroom deal brokered by special interests that ignored

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granny flat or an in-law unit. Such units lend themselves particularly well to home sharing (and they are fittingly, somewhat thorny to regulate). At Airbnb, the ADU houses the entire mobilization team, policy communications and operations, and other departments, including social impact and strategic research—some two hundred staffers all

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an opportunity the rest of us missed.”) It all makes for a fascinatingly dynamic situation in which hotel companies are simultaneously funding the fight against Airbnb, cautiously engaging with it, and experimenting how to tap into the short-term-rental trend themselves, whether through trying out their own concepts, buying

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midsize businesses whose employees travel infrequently, but the company had also signed a few heavy hitters, like Morgan Stanley and Google. A few months later, Airbnb announced partnerships with American Express Global Business Travel, BCD Travel, and Carlson Wagonlit Travel—the heavyweights of the corporate-travel business, who handle the back

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perhaps most significantly, instead of focusing on vacation destinations in resort areas, it focused on cities. Despite the attention paid to the treehouses and tepees, Airbnb’s actual invention was that it was an almost entirely urban phenomenon from the very beginning, taking root with millennial travelers who were city-focused

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site who switched; they were an entirely different kind of customer. After dismissing it for so long, the hotel industry slowly started to confront its Airbnb Problem. Executives started talking openly about it at industry events. At the 2016 NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference, a series of CEOs took the

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needed to double down on its strengths. (Skift described the CEOs’ reactions as “surprisingly tepid and generic, especially compared to the rabid consumer excitement surrounding Airbnb.”) Some, though, said the industry needed to take note. Javier Rosenberg, COO and EVP of Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, the parent of Radisson Hotels in

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a smile, really takes care of you for five, six, seven days—how do we, from a leadership perspective, how do we bottle that?” Airbnb or no Airbnb, the hotel companies were already well under way in reshaping their businesses to win over millennials, their new massive customer base whose habits and

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a legitimate model for more widespread adoption going forward. One area in which lodging-industry analysts are already pushing hotels to get closer with Airbnb is distribution. Airbnb has become a robust marketing platform that reaches millions of eyeballs; some hotels already see it as a way to attract guests. Globally, there

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Mad Men days, a Halloween-costume contest, or an annual Oktoberfest party where Blecharczyk traditionally shows up in lederhosen. Much of this is replicated at Airbnb offices around the globe. And there’s that idealism again. Employees across disciplines, from financial planning to project management, bring up the company’s “belonging

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” mission unprompted. Recently, community chief Douglas Atkin has been developing a version of the “belong anywhere transformation journey,” the metamorphosis Airbnb intends for its guests to experience, that applies to its internal culture, calling it the “belong here transformation journey.” The goal is the same: you

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variety of existing players across the spectrum: traditional tour operators, Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, and even Lonely Planet and Condé Nast Traveler all at once. When Airbnb blazed its disruptive trail in shared accommodations, it did so by accident, tapping into something unexpectedly wondrous and huge and viral. With this launch, it

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top legal and policy minds, he designed against possible backlash. “Social-good” experiences, conceived in concert with local nonprofits, represent 10 percent of the experiences Airbnb will offer. The company has an ambitious partnership with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to host “wish trips” and help build experiences. And Chesky and

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opportunities and consequences. And for that reason, as colorful and complex and successful and fraught as this company’s history has been so far, the Airbnb story is likely still just beginning. Acknowledgments * * * * * * This book came together quickly and with a village of help, but there are two people without whom

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Estate,” Urban Land Institute Fall Meeting, October 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03kSzmJr5c0. 20 losing their patient: Brian Chesky, “1000 days of AirBnB,” Startup School 2010, YouTube, uploaded February 12, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L03vBkOKTrc. 21 “have some please?”: “Obama O’s,” YouTube, uploaded

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in Hotels and Motels,” National Fire Protection Association, September 2015. 100 relative to nonblack hosts: Benjamin Edelman and Michael Luca, “Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, no. 14-054, January 2014. 100 compared with white guests: Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination

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, https://www.airbnbaction.com/compactdetaileden/. 114 forty-one per year:Growing the Economy, Helping Families Pay the Bills: Analysis of Economic Impacts, 2014, findings report, Airbnb, May 2015, https://1zxiw0vqx0oryvpz3ikczauf-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/New-York-City_Impact-Report_2015.pdf. 114 rental housing by 10

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Institute Fall Meeting, October 6, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03kSzmJr5c0. 140 told the Globe and Mail: Shane Dingman, “A Billionaire on Paper, Airbnb Co-founder Feels ‘Great Responsibility’ to Do Good,” Globe and Mail, December 17, 2015, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/careers-leadership/a

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Sorenson,” Surface, August 5, 2016, http://www.surfacemag.com/articles/power-100-hospitality-arne-sorenson. 159 “a city could do”: Sarah Lacy, “Fireside Chat with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky,” PandoDaily, YouTube video, posted January 14, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yPfxcqEXhE. 160 got some attention: Sam Biddle, “Love Note

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investors, 17–18 lite version, 12–14 media and press coverage, 19–20 original idea, 8–9 redefining of, 28 Y Combinator and, 23–29 Airbnb advantages, xiii company building, 35–38 competition (see competitors) consumer support for, 133–37, 146–47 contact phone number, 95–96 core values, 36,

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–55 scale of, 126–27 super-users, 67–69 user experience, 41–47 valuation of, xii, 31, 47, 161 workspace, 183–84 Airbnb Friendly Building Program, 130 “Airbnb law,” 128 Airbnb Open, x–xi, 69, 74, 76–78, 133, 190–91 Airdna, 111, 116, 126, 131, 151 Airizu, 49–50 AllThingsD (website), 47

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, xi, xvii, 41, 87, 106, 149–50 Wimdu (Samwer brothers), 48–50 See also hotels compression pricing, 144 Conair internship, 1–3 Concur, 145 conferences Airbnb and corporate travel, 145–46 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, 166–67 Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech, 103, 131, 187 International Council of Societies of Industrial Design

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Greg, 30–31, 35–36, 164 McCann, Pol, 74, 116, 117 McChrystal, Stanley, 173, 186 McGovern, George, xvi, 167 McNamara, Robert, 166 media and press Airbnb in pop culture, xv–xvi, 60–61 at conventions (2009), 38 Democratic National Convention coverage, 19–20 “Meet Carol” television ad, 112 negative exposure, 50

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80–82, 86, 91 presidential inauguration, 28 “Meet Carol” television ad, 112 Meyer, Danny, 191 Michael (original guest), 8, 10 Mildenhall, Jonathan, 64 millennials as Airbnb early adopters, xii, xiii, 59, 66, 150–51, 157–58 apartments and, 129–30 hotel industry and, 141, 152 as mobilizing force, 134 New York

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Priceline, 148, 154, 198 pricing, as issue, 27, 99–100 privacy policy, 87, 115 product evolution, 59–60 product/market fit, 34–37 professional operators, Airbnb, 111 profit and earnings, 73, 110, 112–13, 127 property management, 129 Proposition F, 128–29 prototype operations, 177–78 R Rabois, Keith, 31 racial

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150 Shatford, Scott, 116, 131 Shaw, George Bernard, 135, 136, 159 Shepherd, Carl, 133, 150 Short, Rochelle, 202 short-term rentals advertising ban on, 121 Airbnb listings, 150–51 Berlin, 126 fines and violations, 129 history of, xvii, 149 hotels and, 141, 153–54 intimacy of, 79 legality of, 106, 125

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail

by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster and Brilliance Audio  · 14 Oct 2017  · 280pp  · 82,355 words

, the book publishing division of American Management Association. To sign up, visit our website: www.amacombooks.org EXTREME TEAMS EXTREME TEAMS WHY PIXAR, NETFLIX, AIRBNB, AND OTHER CUTTING-EDGE COMPANIES SUCCEED WHERE MOST FAIL ROBERT BRUCE SHAW To J. Richard Hackman and his passionate quest to build better teams CONTENTS

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embrace bold new approaches that go beyond what is found in conventional firms. The seven companies profiled in this book are Whole Foods, Pixar, Zappos, Airbnb, Patagonia, Netflix, and Alibaba. I selected these firms based on several criteria. I sought firms with a track record of significant growth and financial

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what people thought was impossible by selling shoes on the Internet and, in the process, fighting off larger and more well-funded competitors.29 Airbnb created a whole new category of hospitality and now offers more rooms each night than any of America’s largest hotel chains. Netflix drove Blockbuster

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“Make people happy,” “Win more of our members ‘moments of truth.’”33 • Year founded: 1997 • Revenue: $6.77 billion (2015) • Number of employees: 2,450 Airbnb: Online peer-to-peer marketplace for people to rent rooms, apartments and homes around the world. Founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk

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made significant mistakes over time. Alibaba failed to act as quickly as needed to deal with counterfeiters using its sites to sell their goods. Airbnb failed to respond effectively to safety issues when they arose in the early years of the company. Netflix failed to meet its customer expectations when

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to touch people through its movies. Zappos sees its highest calling as creating happiness, not only for customers but for the world at large. Airbnb wants to create a sense of belonging and community, providing lodging where people feel at home wherever they travel. Those with a cynical bent view

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not only their members but the world at large—unlike cults, often secretive, which ultimately take advantage of their members and are destructive to society. Airbnb, for example, is described by some as a cult-like company. Its founders shared an unwavering conviction that they could change the way people

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tested and refined, now produces millions of annual guest rentals in 91 countries.19 It provides a benefit valued by millions of people. If Airbnb was a cult in the beginning, it evolved into something else—perhaps a contradiction of sorts in being a secular religion. The challenge for cutting

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now has over 600 people) and offering what eventually became a $1 million host guarantee program (which pays for damage resulting from a rental). Airbnb also developed, over several years, practices to give both its hosts and guests more background information about each other, in order to increase the level

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firm’s safety processes continue to evolve and now include verifying the identification of those renting rooms and user ratings of both hosts and guests. Airbnb, demonstrating its grittiness, used the initial crisis it faced to improve how it minimizes risk of future adverse events and, in so doing, increased

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in the development of products for the firm’s individual users due to the limits of the engineering resources within the company. Recognizing its mistake, Airbnb clarified the priorities and redeployed its resources. The lesson learned, however, was that more is not better when it comes to priorities. The following

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priorities. Focus also requires that those selected priorities be executed at a high level. Otherwise, failure to do so will be evident to all. Airbnb, for instance, has recently focused on developing its mobile toolkit—viewing it as essential to drive its growth and meet its customers’ needs. Success

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7 It believes the people want an experience of community and connection, in contrast to staying in a more impersonal hotel. Toward this end, Airbnb broke down the experience of travelers into 15 discrete steps, starting with a guest finding a room on its website, followed by successive steps in

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success. The company then goes one step further—it gives its people the freedom to select which projects they want to work on.9 Airbnb engineers are encouraged to change teams if there is another project within the company that better matches their interests or skills.10 This practice is

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have the greatest impact when they are involved in projects that are of personal interest to them. This approach makes sense when one realizes that Airbnb values, above all, experience—and, more specifically, enriching the experience of its customers as well as employees.11 Top-down control, from this viewpoint,

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but it does clarify who is the go-to person or subgroup in moving a particular priority forward. Many leaders, as is the case in Airbnb, feel that having a single point of accountability results in greater progress (versus everybody owning everything). Netflix calls these individuals decision owners. The other

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apartment. She said that it would be magical. The next morning, one of the founders came back with his camera and took the photos. Airbnb slowly expanded this option for hosts and now has thousands of freelance photographers around the world taking professional-quality shots of their hosts’ rental units

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They can then suggest titles that fit each customer’s personal preferences and viewing habits. These successes, however, hide the fact that most experiments fail. Airbnb’s first three website launches failed to attract customers, and it was only the fourth launch that proved successful. But cutting-edge firms keep pushing

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culture—notably, the value of playing with new ideas that will generate new business opportunities.35 Another approach to fostering productive defocusing is found at Airbnb. Each week, the firm has what it calls “demo days.” People in the company demonstrate for others, usually those from other teams, what they

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employee experience (who assumes the responsibilities of a traditional human resources leader and more) leads a team that is dedicated to creating memorable experiences for Airbnb employees. Every point of connection that an employee has with the company is examined and improved with this goal in mind (including functions such

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’s emphasis on enhancing experience is how it manages its hiring process. The team responsible for this process delineated each “touch point” in the Airbnb interactions with potential hires and sought to make them as positive as possible. This included a personal acknowledgement of each application, regular updates on the

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in the firm to speak to those who are rejected to provide feedback and encouragement.8 The emphasis on experience also impacts life at the Airbnb headquarters building, where people can work in any location they prefer (for example, the conference room, library, or cafeteria) or work remotely. The

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design, the company wants its employees to stay connected to its customers, and giving them money to stay in its rentals promotes that goal. Airbnb’s focus on experience recently resulted in it displacing Google as the highest rated “great place to work” on an annual survey conducted by the

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the startup mentality evident when the firm was founded—with an emphasis on a shared passion for the work and an intense drive to succeed. Airbnb Belonging: Foster a feeling of community and connection among employees. Enhance the experience of those who work in the company. Netflix Freedom and Responsibility:

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statements of intent, require a high level of commitment and creativity on the part of a firm and, in particular, its leadership. All In Airbnb goes to great lengths to make work meaningful for its employees. First, it is an ideologically driven company with a larger purpose of creating trust

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their supervisors will initiate changes that ensure the highest level of employee engagement with the work itself. A third element of making work meaningful at Airbnb is the attention paid to the work environment. The company wants people to feel fully supported in their work and connected to their coworkers—

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of saying this is that people in cutting-edge firms create the conditions that help people be comfortable with the discomfort that comes with conflict. Airbnb provides an example of a company that strives to create a positive work environment but one that values honest dialogue. When an internal survey

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built on innovative ideas that overturned the existing order of things within their industries. Netflix is disrupting the media industry through its streaming service. Airbnb is disrupting the hospitality industry through its peer-to-peer model. Alibaba is disrupting the way business is done in China through its e-commerce

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relationships to the breaking point while managing the very real downsides of doing so. For leaders like Reed Hastings of Netflix or Brian Chesky of Airbnb, pushing their organizations to the breaking point, pushing beyond what others believe is possible or even desirable, is not the problem. The risk they

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The other lesson from extreme teams is that culture is most productively viewed through the lens of what people experience while working in a group. Airbnb, for example, looks at a wide range of factors that influence employee experiences, with a focus on creating a sense of community and belonging.

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how employees experience the company, such as the design of the corporate office or the ability to work remotely when needed. These factors at Airbnb are managed primarily at a company level, but the concept of focusing on and enhancing member experience holds true for teams as well. Start-

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‘co-worker’ relationships found at most other companies.” 42Most of these firms also have critics who find fault with their business model or practices. Airbnb, for example, is found wanting by some who believe it operates in a manner that crowds out low-cost housing in urban areas by turning

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_EN.pdf. 26Graham describes the best founders as being cockroach like—in that they will survive anything, including a nuclear winter, while others perish. See Airbnb, “Conversation with Paul Graham,” YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrWavoJsEks. 27“Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird,”

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genius.com/Alfred-lin-lecture-10-company-culture-and-building-ateam-part-i-annotated. 15Glassdoor. Posted 7/15/2013. www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Airbnb-RVW2979155.htm 16Patty McCord, former human resources head of Netflix, quoted in “The Woman Behind the Netflix Culture Doc,” firstround.com/review/The-woman-behind

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Market Co-CEO Walter Robb,” Great Place to Work, www.greatplacetowork.com/storage/documents/interviews/gptw-whole_foods_interview.pdf. 23Adam Bryant, “Brian Chesky of Airbnb, on Scratching the Itch to Create,” New York Times, October 11, 2014. 24Adam Byant. “Can You Pass a C.E.O. Test?” New

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design of the workspace, communication and education efforts, the food in the company cafeteria, and a variety of recognition and reward programs. 12Thomas, “How Airbnb Manages Not to Manage Engineers.” 13These questions are similar to those proposed by Peter Drucker in his famous five questions in The Five Most Important

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decisions. 26This past year, domestic DVDs accounted for just over 8 percent of the firm’s revenue. 27Greylock Partners, “Blitzscaling 18: Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale,” November 30, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=W608u6sBFpo. 28See Scott Berkun, “How Do You Build a Culture of

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track Chapter 7: Teams at the Extremes 1Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.” 2Ed Catmull at Pixar. Brian Chesky at Airbnb. Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia. Reed Hastings at Netflix. Tony Hsieh at Zappos. Jack Ma at Alibaba. John Mackey at Whole Foods. Note that these

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are listed below accountability culture of for key priorities Adler, Paul, on common goals Agassi, Andre Aggarwal, Pankaj Ahrendts, Angela, on culture at Apple Airbnb “all in” culture at conflict at culture at experimentation with priorities at hiring at innovation at lack of processes at management at missteps of obsession

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on obsession on purpose of Pixar on removing personnel on stagnation of business on teams CCMP Capital Chase, Charleen Chen, Julie Chesky, Brian on Airbnb’s missteps on cultural fit on priorities as rated by employees Chouinard, Yvon on childcare centers on conflict on culture as founder of Patagonia on

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of company culture in hiring process importance of and leadership style risks of focus on at Zappos culture of accountability addressing in failing team at Airbnb of “all in” at Amazon of autonomy in building teams changing your current as characteristic of extreme teams climate vs. cognitive and emotional of

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vs. hard at Starbucks strong vs. weak themes for of transparency at Whole Foods “culture deck,” of Netflix dailies, at Pixar “demo days,” at Airbnb Disney, Walt Disney Animation creative process in culture change at as failing team distractions, from key priorities double-bind Dropcam Duckworth, Angela, on grit eBay

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Netflix on priorities on relationships vs. results Heckscher, Charles, on common goals Heilman, Madeline E. Herrin, Jessica, on hiring highly aligned hiring process at Airbnb cultural fit in at Pixar at Zappos holacracy Holbrook, Richard, on conflict House of Cards (television show) Housman, Michael Hsieh, Tony on culture on customer

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service as founder of Zappos influence of, at Zappos ideas conflict about generation of IDEO incremental innovation ingroups innovation at Airbnb at Google incremental at Netflix at Whole Foods Inside Out (film) internal competition Ives, Jony, on results vs. relationships Jobs, Steve communal culture created

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process at obsession at performance evaluation at personnel management by teams at work reviewed at playful culture plussing postmortems, at Pixar power issues priorities at Airbnb in building teams as characteristic of extreme teams context setting for development of priorities, (cont.) experimentation with identification of simplifying processes benefits of drawbacks

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differences on Netflix “culture deck” Scanlon, Dan, on communal culture Schein, Ed, on culture Schultz, Howard, on emotional connection self-awareness The Sheet, at Airbnb social capital social cohesion social loafing social perceptions social skills societal impact (of company) soft culture Sparta Systems Stanton, Andrew director of Finding Nemo on

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a competent professional person should be sought. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Shaw, Robert Bruce, author. Title: Extreme teams : why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and other cutting-edge companies succeed where most fail / by Robert Bruce Shaw. Description: New York City : American Management Association, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy

by Tom Slee  · 18 Nov 2015  · 265pp  · 69,310 words

. Traditional Yorkshire saying To my mother, Audrey Slee Contents 1 The Sharing Economy 2 The Sharing Economy Landscape 3 A Place to Stay with Airbnb 4 On the Move with Uber 5 Neighbors Helping Neighbors 6 Strangers Trusting Strangers 7 A Short History of Openness 8 Open Wide 9 What

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efforts of millions of collaborators to make something that is new and global and different, and it inspired the building of web sites such as Airbnb’s. Starting with Napster, file-sharing sites challenged industries that are based on copyright and private ownership, such as music, movie-making, and professional

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make meaningful connections, connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we’ve lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces like Airbnb, like Kickstarter, like Etsy, that are built on personal relationships versus empty transaction.1 It’s also why stories in the mainstream press tended

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combines real estate with technology, plays into the “sharing economy” trend that has captivated investors in recent years, thanks to hit companies like Uber and Airbnb. Both companies infused established industries (car services and vacation rentals) with a high tech touch, and as a result, both companies have garnered valuations

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well as baffling boundaries drawn by participants. TaskRabbit, an “errands” site, is often included, but Mechanical Turk (Amazon’s online labor market) is not. Airbnb is practically synonymous with the sharing economy, but traditional bed and breakfasts are left out. Lyft, a ride service company, claims to be in, but

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against unfair and unreasonable obstacles.11 But in addition to being Board Chairman at Peers, Douglas Atkin is Global Head of Community and Mobilization at Airbnb. Airbnb is not the only company involved in Peers: much of the organization’s funding came from “mission-aligned independent donors” and foundations, but those

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independent donors included investors and executives of Sharing Economy startups. Peers leader Natalie Foster traced the idea for the organization back to seed money from Airbnb that started a “conversation among stakeholders” at Purpose, an organization that creates “21st century movements.” 12 Douglas Atkin was also a co-founder of

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does not own, operate, manage or control accommodations, nor do we verify private contract terms or arbitrate complaints from third parties.” 12 The stories that Airbnb leaves out start to paint a different picture, which exists alongside the stories it promotes: a picture of neighbors, landlords, and tenants left frustrated

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The people offering a place to stay on HomeAway tend to be professional property managers who look after a number of vacation rental properties. Unlike Airbnb, these sites have existed largely without conflict with regulators for years. Counting the value of these disparate types of accommodation is probably impossible, but

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it’s clear that the “Airbnb versus Hotels” story is a long way from a true history. The narrative of incumbent corporate hotel megachain versus scrappy young, idealistic startup turns

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severe than the web site data suggested: the report found that the 6% of hosts with more than two listings made up 36% of Airbnb’s revenue. Airbnb continues to drive its narrative of low-intensity tourism by emphasizing that its listings are scattered around New York’s neighborhoods, claiming that “82

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neighbors are consistently having new and different people stay in their apartments or houses, it becomes a problem. Scale is central to the conflicts around Airbnb. The company emphasizes its commitment to cities and community, but it doesn’t seem to understand how real communities work, and the balances that

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with the unregulated apartment down the street that has none of these expenses. Ironically, it is the “human scale” part of the tourism industry that Airbnb is damaging. City governments are concerned about tax revenue, zoning rules, and consumer protection (who pays when things go wrong?). Civic activists are concerned

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affordable housing. Will it drive up rents? Will popular but affordable neighborhoods get gentrified? The debates are fiercest in tourist destinations, which are Airbnb’s biggest locations, and Airbnb must be seen against the backdrop of a continually and rapidly growing tourist industry. Worldwide, the number of international tourists has doubled in

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the anti-consumerist talk of the advocates, these scaled-up Sharing Economy companies are just as consumerist as those they have disrupted. LYFT Zipcar and Airbnb are not alone. Lyft is another company that has traded on the goodwill generated by its founding ideals of community and sharing, before the

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who request disability-accessible vehicles. Uber has opposed this legislation too, saying that it could “place excessive regulatory burdens on private vehicle-for-hire companies.” Airbnb also asserts that requirements for non-discrimination and disabled access do not apply to most properties advertised on its site, and disability advocates have argued

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that the Airbnb web site fails to help disabled people find appropriate accommodations (there is no way to search for listings that provide disabled access, and few

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listings say whether they are accessible).66 Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft each take steps to nudge or encourage their service providers to provide disabled access, using language that emphasizes their commitment to

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have expanded, however, the driver population more closely matches taxi drivers and this opportunity to discriminate has faded. Discriminatory behavior does affect minority hosts on Airbnb. The listings include pictures of hosts and guests, so allowing any discriminatory tendencies among the user base to be expressed. Researchers Benjamin Edelman and Michael

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to any place of public accommodation.71 Discriminatory tendencies will show themselves if there is the opportunity to do so. The taxi, Uber, and Airbnb systems each let those tendencies express themselves in different ways. A similar effect happens when comparing methods of traffic policing. Individual traffic police officers can

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happens when competition forces an evolution of business models. TASKRABBIT The first company in the space was TaskRabbit, which started at the same time as Airbnb, Lyft, and others. The listing for TaskRabbit on the business information web site CrunchBase describes the moment when the company founder had her idea:

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peer, informal, decentralized, and community-driven, and it is those qualities that Sharing Economy advocates claim can be scaled up by using internet reputation systems. Airbnb and BlaBlaCar both describe themselves as “a trusted community marketplace;” Lyft’s one million rides show “the power of community.” Instead of passing on comments

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; part of the region’s belief in the value of entrepreneurship,11 so now Sharing Economy companies have coined a word for “people as companies.” Airbnb hosts, Lyft drivers, and TaskRabbit errand-runners are “micro-entrepreneurs”: the self as corporation, and one’s reputation as personal brand. If investment in

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the ratings are at very high values. Rating system designers typically see curves like this as a problem: are there really so many more excellent Airbnb experiences than there are excellent restaurants? Commonly suggested causes are filtering (only customers with a good experience are rating the site), or bias (customers

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find an extensive collection of generally less-dramatic (and less substantiated) cases at http://www.airbnbhell.com. Uber has had more high-profile scandals than Airbnb, with cases of assault (both driver on passenger and vice versa), threats, hacked user accounts, and accidents. The companies’ responses to these events is

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on the number of critical reviews that guests ­provide.24 Other efforts are trying to squeeze more critical information from what is already there. Airbnb is using natural language processing to parse critical comments from review texts.25 Researchers have shown that taking missing reviews into account can give a

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of exchange that goes beyond straightforward market transactions; it is central both to the broader appeal of the Sharing Economy and to the story that Airbnb tells about itself. ­Chesky’s words echo those of Mark Zuckerberg, who started a letter to potential Facebook investors this way: “Facebook was not

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service provider, to build enormous market power over service providers.35 The dispute is often presented as one between scrappy startups and big corporate incumbents (Airbnb versus chain hotels in particular) and yet history suggests that these big players will find a way to coexist. Instead, those who are more

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addresses of those hosts, making it almost impossible for democratically elected city governments to manage the impact of tourism on some their most valuable neighborhoods. Airbnb also demands homogenization: it operates in 34,000 cities and chafes at the inconsistency of regulations; but each city is different and the inconsistency,

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a common. The reputation system itself, with all the evaluations and ratings that populate it, becomes a valuable common resource. Individual ratings of hosts on Airbnb contribute to the non-commercial collective tending of trustworthy information about the standards of accommodations. As with any other commons, market driven motivations are anathema

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regulations that balance the interests of companies and the communities in which they live, or that balance the interests of companies and service providers. Airbnb’s relentless promotion of tourism over every other aspect of a city’s well-being shows that its commitment to cities and to communities stops

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providing universal access provisions. In Chapter 4 we saw Uber and Lyft claim that access for the disabled is not their problem; suggestions that Airbnb’s platform inadvertently enables the propagation of racial profiling have met with the same response. Successful Sharing Economy companies avoid the expense of wages by

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, is now falling to one side. Reputation systems are a front for companies being able to “deactivate” users and to impose their own discipline: Airbnb ejects hosts from its platform when it is politically expedient (as recently happened in Los Angeles9), and Uber fires drivers at executives’ whim. The Sharing

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other marketplace lending companies argued that they do not provide loans, just as Uber does not provide rides, Handy does not provide cleaning services, and Airbnb does not provide accommodation. As a result, their business model fell into a regulatory gap.10 Since then, and particularly since a significant rate

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, a coalition of tenants’ groups, neighborhood associations, affordable housing advocates, elected officials, and hotel workers who have banded together to challenge the impact of Airbnb on the city, and the issue has reached a high profile within the city council. A similar group, ShareBetter SF, has set up in San

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://www.ticotimes.net/2015/08/22/uber-says-will-support-drivers-fined-police-costa-rica. Edelman, Benjamin, and Michael Luca. Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com, 2014. E.J. Dickson. “Gross, Sexist French Uber Campaign Features ‘Sexy Girl’ Drivers.” The Daily Dot, October 22, 2014. http://www.dailydot.com

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/the-truth-about-bbb-and-uber-10-facts-you-should-know/. Internet Association. “The Internet Association Files Amicus Brief to Quash the NYAG Subpoena against Airbnb.” Press Release, November 8, 2013. http://internetassociation.org/11082013airbnbamicusbrief/. Isaac, Mike, and Natasha Singer. “California Says Uber Driver Is Employee, Not a Contractor.” The

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, 2013. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-27/ebay-style-loans-lure-summers-to-mack-in-wall-street-asset-craze. LeWeb. Douglas Atkin—Airbnb—LeWeb London 2013. Accessed August 28, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp2Hlp2TP-M. Lewis, Peter. “Couchsurfing: The Meltdown Continues.” Our Mechanical Brain,

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Quality, 211–19. CRC Press, 2009. http://www.crcnetbase.com/doi/abs/10.1201/b10305-24. Schofield, Hugh. “Short-Let Apartments Spark Paris Row as Airbnb Thrives.” BBC News, December 26, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30580295. Schor, Juliet. “Debating the Sharing Economy,” October2014. http://www .greattransition

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December 52013. http://www.wired.com/2013/12/google-homejoy-funding/. Zervas, Georgios, Davide Proserpio, and John Byers. “A First Look at Online Reputation on Airbnb, Where Every Stay Is Above Average.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, January 28, 2015. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2554500. Zipcar

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. “Green Benefits,” n.d. http://www.zipcar.com/universities/how/greenbenefits. Endnotes Chapter 1 1 Tanz, “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other.” 2 In a completely different context, I am following the example of MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax

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.” 63 Wieczner, “Why the Disabled Are Suing Uber and Lyft.” 64 Trautman, “Will Uber Serve Customers With Disabilities?” 65 Strochlic, “Uber.” 66 Redmond, “Does Airbnb Have an ADA Problem?” 67 Peterson, “Uber Does Not Care about Racism, It Cares about Money.” 68 Wilonsky, “On the Same Day Dallas Task Force

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Krueger, “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States.” 70 Edelman and Luca, Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com. 71 Todisco, “Share and Share Alike?” 72 Norris et al., “Black and Blue.” 73 Norris, “The Sociological Implications of Smart Surveillance Systems.” 74

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Naughton, “Meet Tech’s New Concierge Economy, Where Serfs Deliver Stuff to Rich Folk.” 29 Haque, “The Servitude Bubble—Bad Words.” Chapter 6 1 Clampet, “Airbnb CEO Responds to Illegal Rentals Story.” 2 Friedman, “And Now for a Bit of Good News . . .” 3 Brooks, “The Evolution of Trust.” 4 Strahilevitz,

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and Watts, “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market.” 14 Zervas, Proserpio, and Byers, “A First Look at Online Reputation on Airbnb, Where Every Stay Is Above Average.” 15 Kane, “The Big Hidden Problem With Uber?” 16 Bercovici, “Uber’s Ratings Terrorize Drivers And Trick Riders. Why

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23 Chesters and Smith, “The Neglected Art of Hitch-Hiking: Risk, Trust and Sustainability.” 24 Fradkin, “Search Frictions and the Design of Online Marketplaces.” 25 Airbnb, “Building Trust with a New Review System.” 26 Nosko and Tadelis, “The Limits of Reputation in Platform Markets: An Empirical Analysis and Field Experiment.” Chapter

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy

by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle  · 12 Mar 2019  · 349pp  · 98,309 words

of herself as an entrepreneur, but TaskRabbit tells her she is, and that the service is “incentivizing” her entrepreneurship through its commission structure. Yet successful Airbnb entrepreneurs (discussed further in chapter 7) are described by the platform as “bad actors” who are using the service to run de facto hotels, instead

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to low-cost or free products. As the sharing economy grew, free services were replaced with fee-based services. Couchsurfing.com was largely usurped by Airbnb.com; clothing swaps were replaced with Tradesy.com, an online designer-clothing reseller marketplace. Instead of cutting expenses through sharing, the focus moved to growing

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apartment, and she let her guests know. Unfortunately, the worker was there for several hours and repeatedly needed to be buzzed in, effectively transforming the Airbnb guests into de facto doormen for most of a workday. The guests were understandably frustrated and requested a rent reduction. “We were really nervous. . . . [

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attention. PLAN FOR THE BOOK In chapter 2, I provide a background on the sharing economy and an overview of the four platforms I studied: Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit, and Kitchensurfing. I discuss participant recruitment and worker demographics in more detail and frame my research within the larger literature available to date

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that connect people for the purposes of distributing, sharing, and reusing goods and services.”1 The concept encompasses everything from multibillion-dollar companies such as Airbnb (room rental) and Uber (on-call taxi service) to free durable-goods-sharing sites such as Neighborgoods. Definitions of the field vary and often

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loss) and provide reputational information on sellers to reduce the risks of financial transactions with strangers. • Increased utilization of durable assets. These services, such as Airbnb and its earlier, free predecessor, Couchsurfing.com, allow some people to earn additional money to supplement traditional incomes, while providing others with low-cost access

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videos purchased from different Amazon accounts. Although these are definitely sharing activities—and involve more sharing than is entailed in renting out an apartment on Airbnb—this is simply the technological equivalent of family members accessing the same communal DVD collection or family-room bookcase. If family members’ acts of sharing

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between host and guest. This avoidance of contact is so prevalent that in an undergraduate observational study I conducted in the East Village, a popular Airbnb neighborhood, I found numerous lockboxes allowing hosts to exchange keys without any human interaction whatsoever. While the sharing economy may market itself as bringing people

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worker and firm and the resulting workplace risks encountered by sharing economy workers. The majority of sharing economy workers—including Uber/Lyft drivers, TaskRabbit runners, Airbnb hosts, and Handy cleaners—are independent contractors. In recent years, the number of workers classified as independent contractors has grown steadily as employers seek to

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and my family,” though only 71 percent of respondents agree that working for Uber actually makes them better off financially.46 In New York City, Airbnb launched a public relations campaign “highlighting its positive economic impact on the city’s predominantly-black neighborhoods, from Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn

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Ellis Law, which allows landlords to leave the rental business, is a legally acceptable reason for eviction, these newly vacant apartments are often turned into Airbnb rentals, making thousands of dollars more profit each month.57 A recent Economist report on the digital revolution acknowledged the growing divide between a few

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why are any of its workers homeless? PARTICIPANT RECRUITMENT AND METHODOLOGY I drew my data from seventy-eight in-depth qualitative interviews with twenty-three Airbnb hosts, twenty-two TaskRabbit workers, nineteen Kitchensurfing chefs, and fourteen Uber drivers/messengers. These four services were chosen because they illustrate the diversity of businesses

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within the sharing or gig economy: incredibly successful, well-funded companies worth billions (Uber and Airbnb), an established but somewhat struggling start-up (TaskRabbit), and a relatively new upstart (Kitchensurfing).62 In addition, these companies were also chosen for their ability

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thousands of dollars (high-capital investment).64 However, whereas Uber skills are fairly minimal (being able to pass a driving test and background check), successful Airbnb hosting requires a level of communication with guests; successful hosting also requires creating a listing that will appeal to travelers (high-skill requirement). Table 1

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s true that hotels, too, experience rowdy guests and destroyed rooms, hotel rooms are known for their neutral and often nondescript decor. By comparison, many Airbnb locations are private homes with numerous unique personal effects. Additionally, the requirement that hotel guests provide a credit card and driver’s license or passport

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comply with local laws and regulations.” Yet, as mentioned earlier, research shows that guest screening and discrimination remains prevalent.71 In order to rent on Airbnb, hosts and guests must create profiles that include a full name, birthday, sex, and contact information. Although the profile process notes that sex and

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strategy. Peers, a grassroots organization that aimed to “to grow the sharing economy” was started in 2013 with the support of twenty-two partners, including Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Lyft, and several foundations. While not directly funded by the platforms, donations from “mission-aligned” independent donors, such as platform executives and investors, have

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check that looks for criminal records within the last seven years; critics have alleged that even such minimal background checks have been easily sidestepped.1 Airbnb relies on Facebook or LinkedIn identity verifications, while the Kitchensurfing marketplace’s background checks for chefs seem to have been limited to a test meal

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part of the cost of business. Eventually, as the platform’s market share increases, localities find themselves effectively strong-armed into letting the service operate. Airbnb has likewise established itself by breaking laws against illegal hotels and making it easier for people to enter a highly regulated, and taxed, industry without

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outside the sharing economy. TaskRabbit and Uber have low skill-barriers and are open to virtually anyone, while Kitchensurfing Tonight has high skill-barriers, and Airbnb and the Kitchensurfing marketplace have high capital- and skill-barriers. Just as in the mainstream marketplace, the work that requires higher levels of capital and

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after serving his family a particularly elegant meal, or ponders as a postretirement career. The platforms themselves also contribute to this divide—on Kitchensurfing and Airbnb, workers can highlight their experience and include multiple photos of themselves and their product (food or housing). Marketing is much more important. TaskRabbit allows profiles

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and information about one’s experience, but with a rigid character limit. While Airbnb and Kitchensurfing have response-time requirements, they are much more generous than those of TaskRabbit and Uber (twenty-four hours, compared to thirty minutes or

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Kitchensurfing apart from the other gig economy services described in these pages? Three words: skills, capital, and choice. As noted in chapter 2, Kitchensurfing and Airbnb present higher skill or capital-investment barriers. While the Kitchensurfing Tonight service didn’t require capital investment—the service provided the food to be cooked

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Lyft know exactly when a driver arrives, picks up a passenger, where he goes, and when he drops them off. With required in-app communication, Airbnb and TaskRabbit track response times and record written communication. Furthermore, the crowdsourced nature of peer review allows for constant evaluation. While not every client gives

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seeking to go into business for themselves as independent consultants and contractors. Even workplaces that are part of the gig economy, such as Uber, TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Munchery, and Kitchensurfing, pay their professional workers as employees. Why should frontline workers be treated any differently? Allowing workers who seek part-time, flexible work

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, several Kitchensurfing chefs mentioned being hired to cook for company meetings or parties, and other businesses and organizations have announced that Uber car services and Airbnb room rentals will be reimbursed on expense reports just like taxi and hotel expenses. 15. Rogers and Henson (1997:224). 16. Rogers and Henson (

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Marketplaces in the 21st Century: Building Community through Sharing Events.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 11(4):303–15. Alden, William. 2014. “The Business Tycoons of Airbnb.” New York Times Magazine, November 25. Alexandersen, Christian. 2017. “Uber Raises Rates in 8 States, including Pa., to Fund Injury Protection Insurance for Drivers.” PennLive

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Times, July 10. Aronowitz, Stanley, and William DiFazio. 1994. The Jobless Future. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arrington, Michael. 2011. “The Moment of Truth for Airbnb as User’s Home Is Utterly Trashed.” TechCrunch, July 27. Asante-Muhammed, Dedrick, Chuck Collins, Josh Hoxie, and Emanuel Nieves. 2016. The Ever-Growing Gap

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21. Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. 2010. What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Collins. Bradford, Harry. 2014. “Most Airbnb Rentals Go Perfectly: Then There Are These Horror Stories.” Huffington Post, July 29. Brescoll, Victoria L., Jennifer Glass, and Alexandra Sedlovskaya. 2013. “Ask and Ye

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The Economist Left- or Right-Wing?” September 2. ———. 2015. “Digital Taylorism.” September 10. Edelman, Benjamin G., and Michael Luca. 2014. “Digital Discrimination: The Case of Airbnb.com.” Harvard Business School, Working Paper No. 14-054. Edelman, Benjamin G., Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky. 2017. “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence

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Feige, Edgar L. 1990. “Defining and Estimating Underground and Informal Economies: The New Institutional Economics Approach.” World Development 18(7):989–1002. Fermino, Jennifer. 2015. “Airbnb Taking Up 1 out of 5 Vacant Apartments in Popular New York City Zip Codes: Study.” New York Daily News, July 15. Fiegerman, Seth. 2014

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, May. Galinsky, Ellen, James T. Bond, and Kelly Sakai. 2008. 2008 National Study of Employers. New York: Families and Work Institute. Gallagher, Leigh. 2017. The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Garling, Caleb. 2014. “Hunting Task

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. 2015a. Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. ———. 2015b. “The Unsavory Side of Airbnb.” American Prospect, October 15. Hirsch, Barry T., and Edward J. Schumacher. 1998. “Unions, Wages, and Skills.” Journal of Human Resources 33:201–19. Hochschild, Arlie

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Over.” Reuters, July 23. Levintova, Hannah. 2016. “Uber Just Got Hit with Another Legal Fight.” Mother Jones, October 7. Lev-Ram, Michal. 2014. “Uber and Airbnb Are Complicating Corporate Expense Reports.” Fortune, July 29. Lewis, H. Gregg. 1983. “Union Relative Wage Effects: A Survey of Macro Estimates.” Journal of Labor Economics

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Employment Relationship in Anglo-American Law. New York: Greenwood Press. Lorber, Judith. 1994. Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lorenzetti, Laura. 2014. “Airbnb’s Valuation Set to Reach $13 Billion after Employee Stock Sale.” Fortune, October 24. Lovece, Frank. 2010. “New Law Bans Short-Term Co-op and

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. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Poston, Ben, and Andrew Khouri. 2015. “Ousted Tenants Sue after Their Former Rent-Controlled L.A. Apartments Are Listed on Airbnb.” Los Angeles Times, December 17. Potts, Monica. 2015. “The Post-ownership Society.” Washington Monthly, June–August. Price, Emily. 2016. “This ‘Uber for Dog Poop’ App

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11. Roose, Kevin. 2014. “Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem?” New York, September 18. Rosario, Frank, C.J. Sullivan, and Joe Tacopino. 2014. “Airbnb Renter Returns to ‘Overweight Orgy.’” New York Post, March 14. Rosenfield, Jake, Patrick Denice, and Jennifer Laird. 2016. “Union Decline Lowers Wages of Nonunion Workers

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Difference.” Gender & Society 9(1):8–37. Whalen, John. 1995. “You’re Not Paranoid: They Really Are Watching You.” Wired, March 1. Whitford, Emma. 2016. “Airbnb: We’re Bringing ‘Economic Opportunity’ to NYC’s Black Neighborhoods.” Gothamist, April 21. Williams, Joan C., Mary Blair-Loy, and Jennifer L. Berdahl. 2013. “Cultural

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Uber Passenger.” Bustle, February 26. Youshaei, Jon. 2015. “The Uberpreneur: How an Uber Driver Makes $252,000 a Year.” Forbes, February 4. Yuhas, Alan. 2015. “Airbnb Hosts Return to Find Home Trashed after ‘Drug-Induced Orgy.’” The Guardian, April 30. Zelizer, Viviana A. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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University Press. Zervas, Georgios, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers. 2015. “First Look at Online Reputation on Airbnb, Where Every Stay Is above Average.” Social Science Research Network, January 28. Zinn, Howard. 1999. A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present

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171; Lyft, 171; personal responsibility and, 181–82; TaskRabbit, 56, 171; Uber, 52–53, 171; worker control and, 64, 171 entrepreneurship: overview, 6, 23, 31; Airbnb and, 44; capital requirements for, 40; democratization of, 5, 6, 34, 186; independent contractor status and, 206–7; inequality and, 38, 183, 186; Kitchensurfing and

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, 30 injuries. See workplace injuries instability, 37–38 Instacart, 41, 172, 190, 207 Instant Book service, 170 Institute for Policy Studies, 195 insurance coverage, 184; Airbnb and, 45–46, 131; Postmates and, 110–11; TaskRabbit and, 114; Uber and, 145 insurance requirements, 2, 46, 111, 114, 145, 167, 222–23n64

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sexual interactions, 133 Lyman, Stanford, 124 MacArthur Foundation, 62, 224n1 makerspaces, 9, 27, 31 Makespace, 190 Managed by Q, 190, 207 manual labor, 41 marketing: Airbnb, 160; image and, 30; by Kitchensurfing, 57; Kitchensurfing, 160; Kitchensurfing and, 163–64; as peer-to-peer connection, 21; of self, 181 marketplace model: Kitchensurfing

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, 39, 39–41; necessity of shared rentals, 132; rent-controlled residents, 41; renter protections, 41; short-term rentals, 19–20, 40, 149–50. See also Airbnb repeat business: Kitchensurfing Tonight, 58; TaskRabbit, 56, 80 research methodology: case studies, 7; critical perspective and, 7–8; Hawthorne effect, 232n24; interview matrix, 216–17

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism

by Robin Chase  · 14 May 2015  · 330pp  · 91,805 words

. When you can connect and share assets, people, and ideas, everything changes, not just how you rent a car. Google, eBay, Facebook, OKCupid, YouTube, Waze, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Duolingo—all are part of this transformation of capitalism. Web 2.0, the sharing economy, crowdsourcing, collaborative production, collaborative consumption, and network effects are

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World Wide Web. But by 2014, investment into companies whose core assumptions mirrored the ones we pioneered in 2000 had exploded. Sharing houses and apartments, Airbnb raised $450 million in that year. Sharing travel and costs on long car trips, BlaBlaCar raised $100 million. Disrupting the status quo in urban transportation

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to abundance. Etsy, an online marketplace for makers, is not like a really big craft fair. eBay is different from both classifieds and yard sales. Airbnb is much more than a listing of 1 million bed-and-breakfasts. What distinguishes and transforms these activities is that platforms connect, organize, aggregate, and

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empower the participating peers. Without the platform—without Airbnb, Etsy, Lyft, TopCoder, or OpenStreetMaps, to name a few—the peer co-creators would not engage, the leveraged excess capacity would be limited, and the

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individually too small to bother with and make them into something reliable and consistent, thus creating enough value to make tapping into those resources worthwhile. Airbnb, which allows people to rent out all or a portion of their own homes, is definitely the company of reference here, and in recent years

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amenities, a description, photos, and contact information). Appropriately so, since this is what is needed at a minimum to rent your house to someone, and Airbnb isn’t interested in facilitating other activities. Wide-open ones, such as GitHub and Google Docs (as well as the most open of all, the

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6 million in revenue and two hundred employees. Jordi, now twenty-eight, is its chief technology officer. Sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and Airbnb could not exist without co-creators, people who reach out to friends, strangers, and colleagues across the Internet. These platforms need peers. And the advantages

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of a hunter-gatherer economy. I stumbled across a tweet that describes just a subset of the new economy: “Thinking of renting house out on #Airbnb and then putting on my #Uber hat & chauffeuring guests around using #Zipcar.”15 Gretchen, the artist-therapist-mom, sums it up: “Etsy allows people

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to try out something new with minimal expense. Other new options (Airbnb, for example) allow people to have a little added income while experimenting as well. There is a shift away from the traditional work environments, and

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are looking for more freedom and flexibility. So many of these new ways of making money allow such freedom.” I asked Joe Gebbia, one of Airbnb’s co-founders, to describe a surprising or unanticipated aspect of his journey from humble start-up to a globe-spanning enterprise with a multibillion

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the enthusiasm felt by people doing what they want to do, on their own terms, rather than what they’re assigned to do. Using the Airbnb platform, thousands of enterprising individuals have been able to create their own opportunities, without some corporate boss deciding whether they were right for the job

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soap. The figure below shows how the old-fashioned, physics-constrained, business-as-usual trajectory compares. What happened? The magic of the Peers Inc model. Airbnb’s platform unlocked excess capacity, built a compelling platform for participation, and the peers collaborated to provide the service in almost every place where people

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way. The rooms existed, already built and paid for in cities and countries around the world, albeit owned by hundreds of thousands of different people. Airbnb made it simple and financially compelling for people to become micro-hoteliers. The company sent skilled interior photographers into major markets to capture interiors in

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organizing and aggregating it in a way that was useful to consumers. Impressively, the growth in paying guests matched the growth in rooms. Source: Airbnb And Airbnb is not an outlier. BlaBlaCar lets people driving between cities sell the empty seats in their cars to others going the same way. In 2014

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to grow—it leverages what is at hand, repatterning existing assets into vast new utility and value. This is the gift of a peer partnership. Airbnb and BlaBlaCar could not have done this on their own. The peers have been integral in building and financing these infrastructures. WhatsApp is another mind

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efforts, without access to peers’ assets and labor inputs, can never approach these growth rates. Consider that for an individual to list her apartment on Airbnb, she needs to clean it, photograph it, write a description, and then market it to her social networks, all before earning a rental. Now

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and thus market potential. The amount of structure built within the platform determines the amount of variation you let in (see the figure below). BlaBlaCar, Airbnb, and especially Zipcar are very closed platforms. Peers can operate only within constrained and limited choices, resulting in relatively uniform collaboration (and products and services

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). With GoLoco, only car trips can be shared; with Airbnb, only beds. With Zipcar, people can choose the specific car and time they want; they can make suggestions about improvements and complain about problems, but

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see too many lackadaisical peers, it would have been simple to raise the standards, making it harder and more complicated to sign up. Chip Conley, Airbnb’s head of global hospitality, told me that as the company and the number of listings has grown, they now warn and then delist nonresponsive

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question is, transform it into what? A different cover on the same deal flow? Or a totally different group of lenders? In some city markets, Airbnb has seen the same takeover: professionals using the platform to market their apartments, condos, and houses. In early 2014, after a battle of several months

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, the New York State attorney general received data on New York rentals from Airbnb for the period from January 1, 2010, through June 2, 2014. The attorney general’s analysis, released in October 2014, drew on the anonymized data

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code bases to build whatever they please. When those Harvard undergraduates started coding Facebook, they turned immediately to existing open-source tools. As an Inc, Airbnb is responsible ultimately to its board of directors, many of whom are investors and who could choose to change the vision if it proved more

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’s time to add more staff or rules to protect minority interests to make it so. Again, all of this requires increasing escalation and effort. Airbnb has created a group of seventy-five “trusted testers” drawn from their 30,000 “superhosts,” those with the most experience. These testers participate (unpaid)

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in vetting design and rule changes, as well as making recommendations. Airbnb’s fifteen largest markets also have dedicated community managers as an on-the-ground resource to connect the company more closely to its hosts. Give

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have ratings 15 percent higher than those who don’t participate. In July 2014, a poorly vetted change was introduced into the thumbnail descriptions of Airbnb listings. The change removed the number of reviews each specific listing had because guest feedback showed that they didn’t understand the purpose of the

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to the listing descriptions, and used design to clarify its meaning. Thirty hosts active in this write-in effort were invited to become part of Airbnb’s trusted testers. Share best practices with all peers. This is another example of a complete reversal from the playbook of traditional capitalism. In the

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sharing of best practices, exploring new ideas, and problem solving in an informal, low-pressure setting. We can see all of those things happening in Airbnb’s groups. And a new NGO, Peers.org, is trying to serve as a convener and service provider to support freelancers working in the collaborative

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without any moving violations in the last three years, for example). Regulators who seek to regulate at the individual peer level (for Uber, Lyft, or Airbnb) should really target their regulatory efforts at the platform, not the peer level, in order to maximize the potential for participation. Instead of requiring every

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Drupal, has observed that “society is undergoing tremendous change right now—the sharing and collaboration practices of the Internet are extending to transportation (Uber), hotels (Airbnb), financing (Kickstarter, Lending Club), and music services (Spotify). The rise of the collaborative economy, of which the open source community is a part, should be

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under lockdown. New ways to address bad actors—reputation and trust systems—do change behavior and minimize negative contributions, as they did for eBay sellers, Airbnb hosts, and Uber drivers, who become more conscientious and professional in response to the potential for bad ratings. Examples of institutional courage to adopt the

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as a service. In the second transition, companies create marketplaces, which enable buyers and sellers to transact around their brand. In addition to the obvious Airbnb example, Patagonia, Ikea, and Levi’s are all offering used-goods marketplaces where people can get “gently loved” apparel and furniture from other customers.

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4). PLATFORM ECONOMICS: WILL ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY LEAD TO A LESS FAIR SOCIETY? What happens to the economy as Peers Inc structures expand and grow? As Airbnb grows, value is being created in three significantly new ways. One, the platform itself adds a lot of value by organizing the excess capacity. Two

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taking an underutilized resource (spare bedrooms and temporarily empty apartments) and pressing them into use for the benefit of their owners. At the same time, Airbnb is cutting the price of travel for visitors. Regular hotels may feel some pressure, but that is only to be expected when a resource as

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—and this has enormous value. It is this third part of the value pie that the Incs generally eat as well. Venture capitalists recently valued Airbnb at $10 billion in 2014, surely taking this network value into consideration.27 At first, everybody seems better off. But if we explore all

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possible outcomes of a quickly growing platform, we see that many midrange hotels might go out of business as people opt for Airbnb for everything except the luxury market. Full-time jobs in hotels will be lost, and the wealth will be distributed between homeowners making additional money

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as independent contractors and Airbnb, the platform operator, sitting in the center making a healthy profit. In the future, these kinds of collaborations between efficient platforms and participating peers will

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(tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions). Nor are they appreciating that while investors see zero returns for many years, the very first Airbnb hosts are making money off each and every transaction. It can take hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of transactions before a platform breaks even

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this approach should be familiar to you: transformed economics, co-investment by the peers, potential to scale rapidly. In the earliest days of Bitcoin, Lyft, Airbnb, and Waze, the peer participants didn’t buy new assets to participate because the value to them was too uncertain. As the platform grew and

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platform. It’s an efficient way for people to volunteer support, but it needs the Peers Inc model to coordinate and provide accountability. This new Airbnb disaster response group is kept apprised of disaster response updates. When it partners with a city or state in advance of anticipated disasters (now there

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’s a crazy thought!), Airbnb can use its standard communication tools to prepare hosts by sending out emergency preparedness materials and inviting them to training programs. We are still in

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a limit to this process, but it is far above our current standard of living, and will rely on vastly fewer material resources! This is Airbnb + Zipcar + Lyft + G-Auto + La Ruche + LinkedIn + Facebook + OKCupid + SoundCloud + Spotify + Twitter + openData + eLance-oDesk + Peerby + Yerdle + Etsy + Fiverr + mesh networks +GPS + smartphone apps + YouTube

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, June 26, 2014, www.xconomy.com/boston/2014/06/26/ma-warns-ride-sharing-car-sharing-drivers-of-insurance-risks. 27. Scott Austin, “How Does Airbnb’s $10 Billion Valuation Size Up?,” Digits blog, Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2014. 28. Roxane Googin, “The Techonomy, Get Used to It,” High

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, www.thegrommet.com/tech-gadgets. 23. Personal correspondence with Jules Pieri, September 26, 2014. 24. Personal correspondence with Nirmal Kumar. 25. Ibid. 26. “Airbnb Disaster Response,” https://www.airbnb.com/disaster-response. 27. Ibid. 28. Guifi.net website, https://guifi.net/en. 29. Veniam, the company I most recently co-founded, is

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-its-global-policies/movie-review/41630766.cms. 7. David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner (New York: New Society Publishers, 2014). INDEX Agricultural model, 235–237 Airbnb, 38 benefits to peers, 50 cumulative totals, 74, 75 disaster response initiative, 244 empowering individuals, 58–59 excess capacity, 77–78 implementing constraints, 107 power

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parity, 127 power users, 116–117 predictive platform, 45 and regulation, 154 triumph over established hotel chains, 74–76 types of value created, 185 Airbnb Groups, 128 Ajema, Daniel, 130 Algorithms, transparency, 129–130 Alibaba, 37 Amazon, as Peers Inc configuration, 88–89 Amoruso, Sophia, 55–56 Anderson, Chris, 53

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and platforms, 72–73 platform as advocate, 127 supporting, 158–161 See also Freelancers; Micro-entrepreneurs; Peer organizations Peers, beneficial uses of platforms, 49–60 Airbnb, 50 autonomy, 56–59 eBay, 55–56 Etsy, 51 Minecraft, 51–52 online dating sites, 52 sex worker sites, 52–53 3D Robotics, 53–54

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Power balancing between creators and peers, 99–100 parity, 126–133 sharing for community building, 133–136 See also Peer power Power imbalance, 114–126 Airbnb, 116–117 apps and platforms, 119–123 driving platforms and drivers, 123–124 kernel hackers, 116–118 lending institutions, 115–116, 120 monopolies, 124–

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

by Arun Sundararajan  · 12 May 2016  · 375pp  · 88,306 words

by Humaira Faiz, Sydnee Grushack, Andrew Ng, and Jara Small (on inclusive growth in the sharing economy); Jonah Blumstein, Valeriya Greene and Eric Jacobson (on Airbnb and city regulations); Andrew Covell, Varun Jain, and June Khin (on the organization of sharing economy platforms); Phil Hayes (on surge pricing); Dmitrios Theocharis and

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streaming music services Spotify, Pandora, and iTunes; a high-rise Ramada Inn versus a tree house for rent on the peer-to-peer accommodation platform Airbnb; full-time workers seated ear-to-ear in endless rows versus an Internet-based freelancer marketplace. As straightforward as an illustrated children’s book,

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constructing dedicated units for short-term accommodation—hotels—why not tap into the millions of sometimes-empty apartments and spare rooms around the world? The Airbnb way could thus be a compelling microcosm for why the economic fundamentals of crowd-based capitalism are simply superior to those of the industrial era

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the distinction between the two economies—commercial and sharing—will get increasingly blurred. Some hybrids that may take the form of commerce leading sharing, like Airbnb, or a form where commerce is leveraged but sharing is the real objective (for example, the time banking platform TimeRepublik where time rather than money

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with some cases at both ends of the spectrum, and many more in between. Let me illustrate this point with a few examples. Accommodation: Couchsurfing, Airbnb, OneFineStay Short-term accommodation platforms are among the most high-profile and high-use peer-to-peer platforms, transforming how people travel both domestically and

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important economic hubs on the web, neither exemplifies the sharing economy’s most interesting economic activities. The transactions are quite different from those on Uber, Airbnb, Handy, or Getaround. In many ways, these differences explain why eBay and Alibaba came of age many years before the sharing economy did. First,

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that brand and platform certifications continue to play in today’s sharing economy. While there are other platforms that provide shared short-term accommodation (like Airbnb), or urban transportation (like Lyft and Uber), these platforms’ brand recognition continues to be a powerful factor in shaping their growth. In this respect,

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the crowd has moved from simply providing ideas (open innovation) to providing actual services (crowd-based capitalism). Put differently, might one think of Uber and Airbnb as simply giant “micro-outsourcing” operations, with hundreds of thousands, and maybe soon, millions of small providers? I believe it is more useful to think

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drivers are constrained by their auto loans. **In some cities, Uber’s staff may send information to drivers suggesting when to be available and where. ***Airbnb has a pricing tool built into the platform. ****TaskRabbit makes active suggestions, and perhaps restricts many customers from browsing all available providers. My MBA students

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. Our research suggests wide variation across different platforms. Many resemble markets that facilitate entrepreneurship, whereas others look more like hierarchies that employ contractors. Along with Airbnb, Etsy, and BlaBlaCar, labor platforms like Upwork and Thumbtack, social dining platforms like VizEat and Eatwith, the local tour guide exchange platform Vayable (founded

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residences are used intensively, even a small fraction of spare capacity leads to a high latent rental value because the underlying asset is so valuable. Airbnb’s success is a testament to the potential in unlocking this latent rental value. Additionally, much like how the asset specificity associated with certain commercial

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is concerned with the design, production, and distribution of goods through collaborative networks. By contrast, collaborative consumption seeks to maximize assets through their shared redistribution. Airbnb and Getaround are good examples. The third category involves collaborative forms of finance, such as Funding Circle and Kiva, or Bitcoin (which enables people to

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that facilitate a greater level of peer-to-peer trust in decentralized marketplaces will emerge, much like the different layers of the trust infrastructures from Airbnb and BlaBlaCar facilitate high-stakes intermediated peer-to-peer exchange today. For example, as of 2015, Traity, the reputation service we discussed in chapter

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firms.18 As a greater fraction of economic activity is conducted by individuals who either have more fluid relationships with firm-market hybrids like Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy, or are building expertise as small-scale entrepreneurs like David from RelayRides, quantifying these labor economic impacts of digitization gets increasingly complex.

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one such non-financial benefit: “Hospitality is really the idea of making somebody feel like they belong; it’s about welcoming somebody.” Chesky added that Airbnb is “not necessarily completely changing people, but we’re changing a little bit of their mindsets.” As Chesky further explained, “I myself have changed

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of micro-entrepreneurs would cause the loss of many of the economies of scale that 200 years of progress have yielded. After all, can an Airbnb host ever produce short-term accommodation more efficiently than a specialized group of professionally trained hotel employees working as highly optimized teams in dedicated real

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ones, new economic activity will be enabled. Put differently, we grow the pie, rather than simply carving it up differently. Consider our now-familiar example, Airbnb. Hotels deliver a wide range of accommodation options. However, there are many dimensions of the hotel experience that are standard: hotel rooms are located in

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also be rentable), and the relationship between price and amenities is far more variable. And the variety is even greater when one considers sites beyond Airbnb. Couchsurfing offers spare couches; OneFineStay offers luxury homes within what otherwise resembles a white glove, full-service experience; Debbie Woskow’s LoveHomeSwap offers vacation

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that requests were fulfilled about 70% of the time), and correspondingly, there is no guarantee that you will actually get a customer for your Airbnb or Getaround listing when you list it for rental. The discussion above illustrates why we need systematic economic analysis to uncover the eventual effects of

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on the bed-and-breakfast industry, but not through direct competition. Rather, these businesses appear to be “collateral damage” in the ongoing regulatory tussle between Airbnb and New York City. See, for example, http://observer.com/2014/12/manhattan-bed-breakfasts-face-extinction and http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140921/HOSPITALITY

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http://video.pbs.org/widget/partnerplayer/2365538931. 28. Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John Byers, “ The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” Boston University School of Management Research Paper No. 2013–16, May 7, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2366898

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and institutions that fail to confront and solve new problems of societal complexity. —Douglass C. North, from his Nobel Prize Lecture, December 9, 1993 When Airbnb’s cofounders were developing their peer-to-peer accommodation platform, hotel regulations were the least of their worries; Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk were plugging holes

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225,000 New Yorkers using the platform. By 2013, cities around the world were grappling with the regulatory challenges raised by sharing economy platforms like Airbnb. The United States Conference of Mayors issued a resolution that summer in support of the economic potential of the sharing economy, and Brooks Rainwater, the

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be rented by long-term residents.3 A coalition of legislators and homeowner associations called “Share Better” launched in 2014 to generate grassroots opposition to Airbnb. The organization’s website proclaims: “Far from being a harmless service where New York City residents can share their homes with guests to the City

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also advised New York City hosts to consult their own lawyers in order to determine the legality of their specific rentals. The evolving situation involving Airbnb and New York State provides an interesting microcosm of many of the regulatory issues I discuss in this chapter. State and city government resistance

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like rent control and population growth are the primary contributors to the shortage of affordable rental housing in San Francisco.) The level of acrimony toward Airbnb from the hotel industry is captured well by the statements made by Vanessa Sinders, Senior Vice President and Head of Government Affairs of the American

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even be aware that these regulations exist. It also seems likely that if most of the micro-entrepreneurs who populate peer-to-peer platforms like Airbnb and Etsy were aware of industry regulations, they may never have pursued their small business ideas in the first place. Regulations, therefore, might create

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on the “regulation as an intervention to correct market failure” approach, viewing the challenges raised by the sharing economy through this lens. As platforms like Airbnb, Lyft, Getaround, and Etsy disrupt old economic systems rooted in firm-to-consumer interactions and individual ownership, we are witnessing myriad regulatory issues. These issues

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any regulatory requirements, conducts in-person driver screenings that also include criminal background checks and an assessment of driving history. Similarly, as of July 2013, Airbnb employed 300 people in its customer-service unit, and 50 of them were dedicated to promoting trust and safety. Externalities: When Others Bear the Consequences

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However, today’s sharing platforms have brought these informal exchanges into the mainstream economy, creating service providers who are “in between” personal and professional—like Airbnb hosts who rent out their apartments when they travel, or Lyft drivers who transport people commercially for a few hours a week. This blurring of

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importance of brand cannot be underestimated in today’s sharing economy. We are still a population that places its faith in brand names: platforms like Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber understand this; eBay understood this when they created Power Sellers; and BlaBlaCar understands this when they place an explicit certification of

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capabilities (if a driver is noncompliant, they are simply disconnected from the application and can no longer get any business). Returning to the example of Airbnb: while no comparable state-wide government-sanctioned solutions have emerged in the United States, different self-regulatory systems are already playing a large role in

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directly with the government, which is something occasional hosts seem reluctant to do. It also sidesteps privacy concerns resulting from mandates that digital platforms like Airbnb turn over detailed user data to the government. There is also significant opportunity for the platform to build credibility as it starts to take on

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employees’ paychecks as they are issued but contractors, who receive a 1099 from an employer at the end the year, pay directly to the government. (Airbnb is withholding hotel taxes in a growing number of cities, an administrative convenience that clearly shouldn’t alter its hosts’ employment status.) Third, who supplies

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tools they need to complete a job while contractors are expected to supply their own tools. (Would the centrally provided Uber driver app, or the Airbnb/Etsy software that every host and customer uses be considered a “tool”?) Fourth, can disciplinary actions be taken against the worker? While independent contractors may

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providers to use its own centralized assets. A second dimension relates to pricing, supply, and merchandizing. For the most part, most sharing economy platforms—TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Getaround—allow their providers to choose when they, their assets, or their services are available. This forces providers to “learn” how to

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flexibility, but provides a pricing tool for hosts that may be based in part on a centralized revenue management approach. Etsy sellers, Getaround providers, and Airbnb hosts have to invest significantly in merchandizing (photos, copy that describes their products or properties, and so on), while Uber and Lyft drivers are not

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allows the creation of provider-specific customer relationships that are more entrepreneurial and less contractor-like. Again, on this front, there is variety across platforms. Airbnb allows complete freedom for guests to choose their hosts and vice versa. (There is a “book now” alternative, but that’s a choice a

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traditional trusted third party? Another dimension relates to whether the platform offers customer relationship management (CRM) mechanisms that aid a provider in their customer service. Airbnb provides a peer-to-peer messaging service that facilitates host-guest communication, while Uber’s customer support is almost all centrally provided by the platform

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In a 2014 Fast Company article, Lisa Gansky summarized the early evolution of the sharing economy by indicating that “early companies like Uber, Lyft, Quirky, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, RelayRides, and 99 Designs garnered much visibility, but these companies were funded by venture capital, with an eye on big paydays for investors—and

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once required steel and concrete investment—may shape the urban infrastructures of the future. BlaBlaCar’s national transportation networks, JustPark’s invisible parking lots, and Airbnb’s disaster-relief housing platform are early examples. The evolution of trust in society on account of people’s increased participation in the sharing economy

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Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva: The World Economic Forum, 2016). Index Abrams, Jen, 43 Access without ownership, 14–16 Accommodation platforms, 38–43, 45. See also Airbnb; Couchsurfing increased variety and consumption with, 121 rental market analysis, 125–130 Acemoglu, Daron, 144 Achamore House, 105 Additive manufacturing, 57–58 Adomavicius, Gedas, 112

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Adverse selection, 139 Aggarwal, Bhavish, 116 Airbnb, 2, 3, 6, 29, 45, 48, 106, 139, 159, 197, 203. See also Accommodation platforms blurring of boundaries and, 141–142 convenience of, 128

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, 207n4 Kickstarter, 41 Kiva, 41–42 venture capital, 25–26, 42–43 Peer-to-peer rental market, 14–16, 79–82, 125–130. See also Airbnb; Drivy; Getaround; RentezVous; SnapGoods, SnappCar; Stylelend; Turo Perez, Tom, 179 Permissionless innovation, 146 Petersmeyer, Wrede, 134 Pick, Francesca, 24 Piketty, Thomas, 123–124 Platform,

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Rainwater, Brooks, 131 Rajaram, Anand, 97 Ranchordàs, Sofia, 146–147 R3CEV, 100 Re/code, 183 Recording Industry Association of America, 59 Reder, Libby, 187 Regulation Airbnb and, 131–135, 154 blurring of boundaries, 8, 27, 46, 76, 141–142, 148, 171 delegated through data, 155–158 economic institutions and brand-based

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh  · 14 Apr 2018  · 286pp  · 87,401 words

on the upswing now, but the painful early days were still fresh in their minds, and they weren’t looking for another battle. * * * When the Airbnb founders first met, Paul Graham, the highly regarded founder of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator (YC), told them flat out that their idea was

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), to invest. Now, nearly four years later, it seemed like all the hard work was finally starting to pay off. Having celebrated its millionth booking, Airbnb had plenty of working capital, and it was clear that the concept was valuable. But when you’re successful, you attract competition. And sometimes that

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competition represents a deadly threat. In Airbnb’s case, that threat was three brothers from Cologne, Germany: Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer. They had become billionaires by analyzing successful US companies, rapidly

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(MyVideo), Twitter (Frazr), and Facebook (StudiVZ) before founding their own start-up studio, Rocket Internet. In early 2011, Brian and his team started noticing that Airbnb users were being spammed by a new company named Wimdu. Wimdu had apparently just received $90 million—the largest investment in a European start-up

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, a major Swedish investment company that had partnered with the Samwer brothers. The problem? Wimdu’s business model and website looked like a knockoff of Airbnb’s. Wimdu was founded in March 2011, and, within weeks, the Berlin-based company had hired a staggering four hundred employees and opened twenty offices

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across Europe. Meanwhile, the original, but much smaller, Airbnb had raised only $7 million, had just forty employees, and operated out of a single office in San Francisco. As a first-time CEO, Brian

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, roughly 10 percent of its valuation at that point, to acquire this competitor. Here was the question weighing heavily on Brian and his team: Should Airbnb follow Groupon’s strategy and just buy the knockoff company? Brian’s gut instinct was to say no. Integrating Wimdu’s finance-centric and metric

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drives “lightning” growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency, even in an environment of uncertainty. It’s a set of specific strategies and tactics that allowed Airbnb to beat the Samwer brothers at their own game. Just a few months later, determined to acquire the resources needed to outscale the Samwers, Brian

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in London, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Moscow, and São Paulo. Bookings had grown ten times since that previous February, and in June 2012 Airbnb announced its ten millionth booking. “The Samwers gave us a gift,” Brian admitted many years later in our Blitzscaling class. “They forced us to scale

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faster than we ever would have.” By choosing to grow at a breakneck pace, Airbnb had achieved a dominant position in its market. Despite the initial advantages that the Berlin-based Wimdu had in human resources, financial capital, and European

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and discomfort of blitzscaling your company, Or accept what might be the even greater risk of losing if your competition blitzscales before you do. Was Airbnb’s decision to expand into European markets—a move that could have stretched the company so thin as to destroy its core business—either efficient

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or certain? Hardly. Airbnb could easily have failed, burning through all its capital while essentially ceding the European market to its copycat competitor Wimdu. Yet the risky decision proved

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talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs and CEOs, including those of the world’s most valuable companies, such as Facebook, Alphabet (Google), Netflix, Dropbox, Twitter, and Airbnb. (You can hear a number of these conversations on my podcast, Masters of Scale.) Even though the stories of their companies’ rise were very different

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a member of the founding team at PayPal; as the cofounder, CEO, and now executive chairman at LinkedIn; as a leading investor in Facebook and Airbnb; and as an investor at Greylock Partners, where I worked with many other billion-dollar companies, such as Workday, Pandora, Cloudera, and Pure Storage. My

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that dwarf those of most publicly traded companies. Due to my role at Greylock Partners, I can’t comment on the valuations of Dropbox and Airbnb, but they occupy a similar place in the ecosystem. Consider the case of two very similar companies, Twitter and Tumblr. Both had brilliant, product-oriented

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to store) increases far more slowly than the value created for the customer and thus the revenues Dropbox can collect from those customers. Uber and Airbnb also built large businesses at incredible speed based on novel business models rather than unprecedented new technologies. If technological innovation alone were enough, federal research

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), and Yahoo! (Yahoo! Mail) controlled most consumer online identities when those social networks first emerged. Alibaba beat eBay in China. Uber outflanked the taxi companies. Airbnb has more room listings than any hotel company in the world. These success stories are technology companies, sure. But as we’ve seen, technological innovation

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others are still paralyzed by fear is also one of the main opportunities for unexpectedly high returns, as we’ll see in the cases of Airbnb and Uber. Ideally, the market itself is also growing quickly, which can make a smaller market attractive and a large market irresistible. In Silicon Valley

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to help them achieve their goal of returning more than three times their investors’ money. When Brian Chesky was pitching venture capitalists to invest in Airbnb, one of the people he consulted was the entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman, who later became the president of the Y Combinator start-up accelerator

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interact with it—but it was technology innovation for the purposes of distribution innovation, not product innovation. “It was a kind of a novel approach,” Airbnb founder Nathan Blecharczyk said of the integration. “No other site had that slick an integration. It was quite successful for us.” Leveraging an existing network

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invest in) these network effects start-ups. Several generations of start-ups have tapped these dynamics to build dominant positions, from eBay to Facebook to Airbnb. To accomplish these goals, it’s critical to develop a rigorous understanding of how network effects work. My Greylock colleague Simon Rothman is one of

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by one set of users increases the value to a different set of complementary users, and vice versa. (Example: Marketplaces such as eBay, Uber, and Airbnb) Local Network Effects: Increases in usage by a small subset of users increases the value for a connected user. (Example: Back in the days of

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taking photographs for them. Obviously, personally visiting every host was hardly a scalable solution, so the the task was soon outsourced to freelance photographers. As Airbnb grew, the strategy shifted from the founders managing a short list of photographers, to an employee managing a large group of photographers, to an automated

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: MARKETPLACES Marketplaces represent one of the most successful business model patterns, with the dot-com era’s Google and eBay and today’s Alibaba and Airbnb standing out as examples of important, valuable companies that follow this pattern. One reason marketplaces are powerful is because they often tap into two-sided

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disagree with you; it means that smart people disagree with you! Remember what happened when Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharcyzk tried to pitch Airbnb? Investors like Paul Graham literally couldn’t imagine why people would ever use the service. This doesn’t happen because investors are dumb; most venture

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a certain speed or higher to avoid setting off a bomb creates built-in dramatic tension—especially given the famously bad traffic in Los Angeles. Airbnb works because it has a large market, because travelers spreading awareness from city to city creates virality, and because it follows the proven pattern of

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simply a matter of capturing economies of scale, as with Amazon or Walmart, but most often critical mass triggers network effects, as with Uber or Airbnb. Blitzscaling is unlikely to prove successful if another company has already achieved first-scaler advantage. During the dot-com era, both Amazon and Yahoo! attempted

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business began to take off, the company faced a terrifying competitor in the form of the Samwer brothers of Germany and their rapidly growing European Airbnb clone, Wimdu. Chesky and his cofounders were forced to make a hard decision: stick to business as usual in San Francisco and risk being trounced

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by Wimdu…or blitzscale and win. Looking back a few years later, Chesky admitted that the competition forced his hand for the better. The Airbnb/Wimdu story is becoming more common in the Networked Age. The world used to have a lot more businesses that were protected from competition by

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may choose to take on the risks you’re reluctant to assume in exchange for a chance at reaping the potential rewards. That’s what Airbnb learned when Wimdu entered its market. Blitzscaling requires capital—whether from investors or from cash flow—to fund relatively inefficient growth. If investors are willing

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and more about pursuing a differentiated (but still aggressive) strategy. For example, one of the signature strategies for blitzscaling is rapid, parallel market development. When Airbnb made the decision to blitzscale, its chosen strategy was to rapidly expand from a single office in the United States to a score of offices

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; rather, Chesky shares his thinking on a topic he considers important to the company. This broadcast communication’s length, specificity, and authenticity transmit to every Airbnb employee an understanding of who Chesky is and what matters to him. Regular e-mails to all employees are a common best practice. Blitzscaling masters

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thanks to the individual talent and hard work of founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Brian Chesky, but they blitzscale into giant companies like Facebook and Airbnb because these founders learn how to delegate. One of the most important aspects of delegation, and often the most challenging for a founder, is to

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some books on the topic, but I almost always supplement this reading by seeking out dialogue with leading experts in the field. Brian Chesky at Airbnb, another amazing learning machine, does something similar, seeking advice from mentors like Sheryl Sandberg and Warren Buffett. Brian told our class at Stanford, “If you

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assignment. Eventually the founders hired Joe Zadeh as an entry-level engineer and asked him to work with Ellie to fully automate the photography process. Airbnb worked its way through three different ways of handling photography before building any code, and has rewritten the photography system multiple times since then. It

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wouldn’t have made sense for Airbnb to start by building a scalable automated photography system; at the point when the company began this journey, the site was receiving a mere ten

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of inefficiencies you can tolerate and fires you can let burn during your blitzscaling journey, ignoring your culture is not an option. Brian Chesky of Airbnb defines culture in a simple and concise way: “a shared way of doing things.” Clearly defining the way an organization does things matters, because blitzscaling

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, Google, Facebook—are known for their distinctive cultures, regardless of their era. The same can be said for more recent start-up market leaders like Airbnb and Salesforce.com. Typically, the credit for these cultures goes to the founders. Bill Hewlett and David Packard are synonymous with the HP Way. Bob

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to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an

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culture in superficial ways—whether based on gender or race or alma mater—hire people who are additive to your culture. When Belinda Johnson joined Airbnb in 2011, she brought a very different background and experience to the young company. The founders were in their twenties; Belinda had been a lawyer

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start-up can play the same game, scale may not provide a significant advantage unless there is a massive difference in scale. For example, when Airbnb was blitzscaling, it was competing with HomeAway, an established player that had much greater scale. However, HomeAway had achieved its scale via a string of

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’s scale was actually a disadvantage! HomeAway itself was later acquired by Expedia, as part of that company’s response to the competitive threat of Airbnb. ADVANTAGE #2: ITERATION Another advantage that established companies have is the ability to make multiple, iterative blitzscaling attempts. Blitzscaling is a risky strategy, and you

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how we communicate. Marketplaces like Alibaba and eBay provide economic opportunity—some dedicated sellers even rely on them for their livelihoods. Sharing economy services like Airbnb can bring more tourism and diversity into the cities in which they operate. And Amazon is changing the entire retail industry, which affects everyone. As

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fund growth, companies are staying private longer so that they can keep making investments in blitzscaling that the public markets might frown upon. Companies like Airbnb and Xiaomi have valuations in the tens of billions, making them more valuable (on paper) than the vast majority of publicly traded companies. Because investors

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, either Reid Hoffman or the venture firm Greylock Partners, where he is a general partner, have the following relationships with companies mentioned in this book: Airbnb: Greylock portfolio company; investor and board observer Cloudera: Greylock portfolio company Dropbox: Greylock portfolio company Facebook: Greylock portfolio company; personal investment Friendster: personal investment Gladly

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: THE BLITZSCALERS Throughout this book, we tell the stories of various blitzscalers. This appendix includes brief profiles that provide basic context for the curious reader. AIRBNB Airbnb.com Airbnb is an online marketplace and hospitality service, enabling people to lease or rent short-term lodging including vacation rentals, apartment rentals, homestays, hostel beds

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You

by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker  · 27 Mar 2016  · 421pp  · 110,406 words

model underlies the success of many of today’s biggest, fastest-growing, and most powerfully disruptive companies, from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to Uber, Airbnb, and eBay. What’s more, platforms are beginning to transform a range of other economic and social arenas, from health care and education to energy

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in Austin. But they soon discovered that demand for friendly, affordable accommodations provided by local residents existed year-round and nationwide—and even internationally. Today, Airbnb is a giant enterprise active in 119 countries, where it lists over 500,000 properties ranging from studio apartments to actual castles and has served

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model that uses technology to connect people, organizations, and resources in an interactive ecosystem in which amazing amounts of value can be created and exchanged. Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba, and Facebook are just four examples from a list of disruptive platforms that includes Amazon, YouTube, eBay, Wikipedia, iPhone, Upwork, Twitter, KAYAK,

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markets for promising territories, investing in existing properties or building new ones, and spending large sums to maintain, upgrade, expand, and improve them. Upstart Airbnb is, in one sense, in the same business as Hilton or Marriott. Like the hotel giants, it uses refined pricing and booking systems designed to

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readers to determine which books will be widely read and which will not. Platforms of all kinds rely on similar feedback loops. Platforms like Airbnb and YouTube use such feedback loops to compete with traditional hotels and television channels. As these platforms gather community signals about the quality of content

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(in the case of YouTube) or the reputation of service providers (on Airbnb), subsequent market interactions become increasingly efficient. Feedback from other consumers makes it easy to find videos or rental properties that are likely to suit your

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taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”3 The community provides these resources. Strategy has moved from controlling unique internal resources and

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Huffington Post, Kindle Publishing Operating Systems iOS, Android, MacOS, Microsoft Windows Retail Amazon, Alibaba, Walgreens, Burberry, Shopkick Transportation Uber, Waze, BlaBlaCar, GrabTaxi, Ola Cabs Travel Airbnb, TripAdvisor FIGURE 1.2. Some of the industry sectors currently being transformed by platform businesses, along with examples of platform companies working in those arenas

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(formerly known as Elance-oDesk), job listings attract freelancers, and freelancers attract job listings. On PayPal, sellers attract buyers, and buyers attract sellers. And on Airbnb, hosts attract guests, and guests attract hosts. All of these businesses attract two-sided network effects with positive feedback. The importance of these effects for

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We described our findings in a paper that analyzed the mathematics of two-sided network effects.10 Today, such successful platform businesses as eBay, Uber, Airbnb, Upwork, PayPal, and Google exhibit this model extensively.11 SCALING NETWORK EFFECTS: FRICTIONLESS ENTRY AND OTHER SCALABILITY TOOLS As you can see, network effects depend

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consume. On some platforms, users engage in side switching easily and repeatedly. Uber, for example, recruits new drivers from among its rider pool, just as Airbnb recruits new hosts from among its guest pool. A scalable business model, frictionless entry, and side switching all serve to lubricate network effects. NEGATIVE NETWORK

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, giant companies relied on supply-side economies of scale. By contrast, most Internet era giants rely on demand-side economies of scale. Firms such as Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox, Threadless, Upwork, Google, and Facebook are not valuable because of their cost structures: the capital they employ, the machinery they run, or

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like the racist and sexist abuse spewed by trolls on Reddit, the murders of people found through Craigslist, and the trashing of apartments booked through Airbnb illustrate how undesirable interactions damage network effects. Designing a platform to facilitate value-creating interactions is not a simple matter. We’ll explore the challenges

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, taxi companies—and regulators—have realized that Uber is on the march to global domination of local transportation. Once ridiculed by the hotel industry, Airbnb has rapidly scaled to become a global provider of accommodation, with more rooms booked every night than the largest global hotel chains. Upwork is gradually

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of X” are working to alter consumer behavior in other arenas.10 Reconfiguring quality control through community-driven curation. When new platforms such as YouTube, Airbnb, and Wikipedia are launched, they are often widely criticized, even ridiculed. This is because, in their early stages, they fail to offer the quality

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and reliability provided by their traditional competitors. YouTube’s early content often bordered on pornography; much of it was pirated. Apartments listed on Airbnb would get raided by city inspectors responding to complaints about orgies. Wikipedia biographies declared many a living person deceased. This is the problem with abundance

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of platform-driven disruptions as de-linking assets from value, re-intermediation, and market aggregation. De-linking assets from value. The most familiar platform examples—Airbnb, Uber, Amazon—come from the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena. How do you convert a product to a platform in the business-to- business

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viral growth—a form of growth impossible in the industrial economy of pipelines and products—helps to explain the success of many other platform startups. Airbnb encouraged users with rooms to rent (hosts) to list their offerings (value units) on Craigslist (external network). Those who saw the room listings (recipients)

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and were motivated to rent those rooms became Airbnb users—and many subsequently began renting out rooms of their own, fueling the growth of the platform. OpenTable similarly encourages diners (hosts) to share their

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platforms grow on top of other networks. Instagram, Twitter, Zynga, Slide, and other platforms have achieved viral growth by leveraging Facebook as an underlying network. Airbnb spread on Craigslist; OpenTable spreads on email. However, leveraging an external network is not as simple as introducing a “Share on Facebook” button and waiting

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students on Skillshare find value in the courses made available through the site. • For producers or third-party providers: Access to a community or market. Airbnb is valuable for hosts because it provides access to a global market of travelers. Company recruiters find LinkedIn valuable because it enables them to connect

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that connect service providers with service consumers. With the rise of the freelancer economy and the spread of the online sharing economy, platform businesses from Airbnb and Uber to TaskRabbit and Upwork have sprung up to facilitate service interactions. However, most of them are faced with the challenge of capturing

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while the provider gets to keep more of the total service charge. The only loser is the platform company itself. Platforms like Fiverr, Groupon, and Airbnb solve this problem by temporarily preventing participants from connecting. These platforms try to provide all the information a consumer needs to make an interaction decision

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, without connecting the consumer directly with the producer. Groupon does this by featuring services that are largely standardized, while the less-standardized Airbnb and Fiverr provide rating mechanisms and other social metrics that indicate the reliability of a service provider, making direct contact between the parties less necessary

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the platform and retains legal control over the technology. In many cases, these two entities are one and the same. Companies like Facebook, Uber, eBay, Airbnb, Alibaba, and many others are both platform managers and platform sponsors. In this situation, control of the platform, including decisions about openness, rests completely with

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and to deliver value through tools and rules that make the core interaction easy and mutually satisfying. Core developers are responsible for basic platform capabilities. Airbnb provides an infrastructure that allows guests and hosts to interact with each other using system resources, including the search capabilities and data services that allow

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guests to find attractive properties as well as the payment mechanisms necessary to conclude a transaction. In addition, Airbnb manages behind-the-scenes functions that reduce transaction costs for guests and hosts. For example, the platform provides default insurance contracts for both parties, protecting

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reputation system a meaningful measure of user behavior. Designing, fine-tuning, maintaining, and continually improving systems like these are all elements of the work of Airbnb’s core developers. Extension developers add features and value to the platform and enhance its functionality. They are normally outside parties, not employed by the

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the extent to which the platform will be open to extension developers. A number of extension developers have enhanced the value of the Airbnb platform. For example, Airbnb’s own research reveals that properties listed with professional-quality photographs are viewed by prospective renters twice as often as those with lower-quality

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developers, including Urban Bellhop and Guesthop, make travel arrangements for guests, such as dining reservations and babysitting services. With the assistance of outside firms, an Airbnb host can offer a suite of services that compares to those provided by a full-service hotel. In order to facilitate this extension of its

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same type of service, which will reduce the profit earned by any one provider and reduce the incentive to extension developers to customize services for Airbnb users. Platforms that choose to encourage extension developers by granting a high degree of openness will usually create an application programming interface. This is one

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building software applications that makes it easy for an outside programmer to write code that will connect seamlessly with the platform infrastructure. Currently, although Airbnb has developed an API, it is not generally available to all developers that wish to connect to the platform—an indication of the middle way

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Facebook relies on users to flag objectionable content such as hate speech, harassment, offensively graphic images, and threats of violence. Service platforms like Uber and Airbnb incorporate user ratings into their software tools so consumers and producers can make informed choices about whom they choose to interact with. No system of

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far from a purely theoretical issue. We’ve mentioned some of the serious legal problems faced by platforms earlier: individuals who listed properties on Airbnb had their homes used for brothels and raves; people offering personal services on Craigslist have been murdered.21 Case law does not generally hold platforms

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twenty-four hours.45 In recent years, new platform businesses have made the same mistake as credit card companies did in the 1960s. Initially, Airbnb refused to indemnify hosts against bad guest behavior, and Uber refused to insure riders against bad driver behavior.46 Eventually, both companies realized that this

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It also takes additional measures to build trust, including having photographers certify the accuracy of the information contained in a host’s listing. By contrast, Airbnb’s competitor Craigslist has earned relatively low scores on the trust metric and has experienced a number of embarrassing scandals involving apparently sleazy platform users

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interactions is a perfectly adequate and complete measurement of the current activity flow on the site. Other platforms need to develop more sophisticated interaction metrics. Airbnb, for example, tracks the number of nights booked, which is a better indicator of value creation for this platform than simply recording the number of

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-publishing and publishing on demand, within the traditional book industry) or create an alternative pie that taps new markets and sources of supply (as Airbnb and Uber have done alongside the traditional hotel and taxi industries). Actively managing network effects changes the shape of markets rather than taking them as

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important social challenge: the need to design balanced internal governance systems and external regulatory regimes to ensure they operate fairly.1 As platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, Upwork, RelayRides, and many more play a growing role in the economy and in the social and political spheres, issues about the rights

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publishers and bookstore chains might hate Amazon, why record companies might hate iTunes, why taxi companies might hate Uber, and why hotel chains might hate Airbnb. Naturally, when criticism of platforms—including calls for strict regulation to limit their impact—comes from interested sources like these, it should be taken with

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used up. And nearly all personal homeowner’s policies in the U.S. specifically exclude coverage for “commercial activity” in the home—including rentals. Airbnb appears to be hoping that the cost of damages will somehow get pushed onto personal insurance policies administered by companies that aren’t diligent about

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are positive—economic and other benefits that businesses provide to uninvolved third parties. Some data suggest that hotel prices fell slightly after the entry of Airbnb, likely increasing the tourism business and ultimately benefiting local restaurants and other attractions.5 Other data suggest that the number of drunk driving deaths has

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Friedersdorf puts it, “The car service Uber is fighting in cities all over America to end the regulatory capture enjoyed by the taxicab industry.”11 Airbnb is facing similar battles with regulators who are influenced by long-standing relationships with the hospitality industry. In the eyes of some observers, the

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for businesses and individuals looking for goods and services created by far-flung local producers. Platforms ranging from Yelp and OpenTable to Etsy, Uber, and Airbnb have made it easy for customers to visit a single source to gain access to thousands of small suppliers. • Industries characterized by extreme information asymmetries

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New York Times, December 6, 2014. 5. Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” Boston University School of Management Research Paper 2013-16, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2366898. 6. Brad N. Greenwood and Sunil Wattal

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems

by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier  · 14 Oct 2017  · 240pp  · 78,436 words

selected business models Amazon’s ecosystem Apple’s ecosystem Google’s ecosystem Rocket life stages Hilton’s value proposition Deconstructing value propositions for multisided businesses Airbnb’s value propositions Examples of performance metrics at platform ignition Illustrative value proposition for a scaling product marketplace Mapping interactions between participants – eBay illustration Examples

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Lastly, we used our experience, greatly enriched by many discussions with friends, academics and colleagues with experience at platform firms such as eBay, PayPal, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook and Google, to develop a practical guide for those interested in designing, igniting, scaling and defending a platform. Clearly, each platform is different, but

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taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening. Tom Goodwin In 2007, designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia struggled

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hoteliers, who claim that individuals renting their rooms or entire homes to visitors represents an ‘unfair competition’ to their trade. There is emerging evidence7 that Airbnb is not only growing the market, but also increasingly competing against hotels, who have to respond with new services and lower prices. Interestingly, these lower

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prices benefit all consumers, and not just Airbnb clients. Yet Airbnb has also been under growing pressure from city authorities regarding housing regulations and tax laws. We’ll come back to these issues in Chapter

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. Many more have followed suit, reinventing entire parts of consumer industries, from media (Facebook), retail (Amazon), transport (Uber), telecoms (WhatsApp), payments (PayPal), music (SoundCloud), accommodation (Airbnb) and many other sectors. This platform colonization extends to the enterprise domain as well in an increasing number of verticals: wholesale goods (Alibaba), talent platforms

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platforms. Table 1.2 Examples of digital platforms Digital platforms connecting communities of users and producers and enabling them to transact Users Producers eBay, Alibaba Airbnb, Onefinestay Uber, Lyft Turo, Drivy BlaBlaCar, Waze Carpool YouTube, Facebook Buyers of goods Guests Passengers Car renters Passengers Viewers Amex, Visa, Mastercard Upwork, Hired Tinder

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letting-website.html. 2 Fast Company, www.fastcompany.com/3017358/most-innovative-companies-2012/ 19airbnb. Introduction to platform businesses 9 3 Following the Sequoia round, Airbnb went on to raise a series A round of $7.2 million in 2010. Wall Street Journal, 25 July 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital

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is the emergence of these digital platform models that has been the most disruptive in many sectors, including retail (eBay, Amazon), travel (Uber) and accommodation (Airbnb). This shift is far from over, and many 12 The meteoric rise of platform businesses Figure 2.1 Digital transformation from linear to non-linear

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PLATFORM A business creating significant value through the acquisition, matching and connection of two or more customer groups to enable them to transact. Examples: eBay, Airbnb, Uber While there is some overlap in terms of usage across these different definitions, we believe it is very important to be clear about what

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, but simply by connecting buyers and sellers through its online platform and being paid a small percentage of the transaction19 for this facilitation. Uber and Airbnb are in the same category. (ii) Audience builders: Some platforms focus on allowing users to share and/or consume content. This in turn attracts

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ID=980435 8 Craigslist website, www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet 9 Well-known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of the early financial backers of Airbnb, knows a thing or two about network effects. See the excellent presentation and companion article of Anu Harianna et al. on their site: http://

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other platform participants. Platforms therefore need to internalize the needs and wants of their communities and capture this in key brand attributes. Platforms such as Airbnb are taking this brand management process, in which platform participants co-create the overall experience, very seriously and use it as a way of differentiating

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Some platforms, such as Facebook, have an online-only user experience (including mobile), while others have a mix of online and offline experience, such as Airbnb or Uber. Online, the user experience is made of user journeys and touchpoints with the platform and participants. But unlike linear businesses, which have control

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in fact delivered by participants themselves. Platforms have little control but can nonetheless influence positive outcomes over negative ones. Anyone can list their home on Airbnb, but Airbnb has the capacity to prioritize hosts with the highest feedback in search results. This way of operating is a significant departure from the ‘value

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Press, 1985. 4 See A. Osterwalder and Y. Pigneur, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, self-published, 2010. 5 Airbnb website, www.airbnb.com/help/article/384/what-are-the-service-fees. 6 It is worth noting that variants of the business canvas have been proposed to

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Kickstarter backers, Reddit readers. Partners: individuals, communities, businesses or entities that collaborate with platform owners and add value for the platform participants. For example, the Airbnb management companies Guesty in the US or Hostmakers in the UK, who manage listings, bookings, etc. on behalf of the hosts. In a first analysis

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top-down estimate of classic marketing metrics such as the total addressable market (TAM), the serviced addressable market (SAM) and the target market (TM). Using Airbnb as an illustration, the TAM would be all days/nights where properties are empty, the SAM would be restricted to areas where it is possible

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key engagement metrics include value exchanged (e.g. gross merchandise value for marketplaces such as eBay or Etsy), transaction numbers (e.g. nights booked at Airbnb,7 messages sent for WhatsApp), activity or participation metrics (e.g. posts or monthly active users for social media8), expressions of interest or connections that

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budget. See E. Ries, The Lean Startup, New York: Crown Publishing, 2011. 3 While Hilton can manage and tightly control the experience of its guests, Airbnb can only influence the experience provided by the hosts. 4 Henry Blodget, 19 January 2015, Business Insider, http://uk.businessinsider.com/uberrevenue-san-francisco-2015

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queries to total search queries Matching effectiveness: • Ratio of searches to core transactions • Ratio of matches to core transactions • Quality of supplier presentation (e.g. Airbnb listings and professional photography bookings) Metrics to raise capital • Growth rate of active users and producers (above some defined activity level, e.g. Instagram daily

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, www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2010/11/24/airbnbleverages-craigslist-in-a-really-cool-way/. 8 Dave Gooden, 31 March 2011, http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-becamea-billion-dollar-company/. 9 4 May 2012, Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 9 Notes Essay, http://blakemasters. com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-

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including analytics tools showing data trends to assist sellers’ decision-making, logistical services and financing solutions. To help hosts set a price for their listings, Airbnb offers a free smart pricing tool, which automatically adjusts daily price listings based on a minimum and maximum price range and willingness to host.2

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the ignition phase. There Table 10.2 Examples of performance metrics at platform maturity New markets and ongoing growth • • • • Product/geographic market coverage (e.g. Airbnb: cities served as % of total universe) Growth of users switching sides Effectiveness of notifications for prompting transactions % of existing users total business (e.g. How

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time. Table 11.2 Matching platform objectives with pricing levers and examples Objective Possible levers and examples Rapidly grow platform membership Freemium (SoundCloud) Transaction fees (Airbnb) Membership fees with unlimited use (Match.com) Subscription for reduced fees (Ruby Lane) Credit card rewards (Amex issuing) Surge pricing (Uber) Credit card merchant

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. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships. Stephen Covey What made people suddenly comfortable with the idea of sharing their flats with strangers (Airbnb), buying second-hand goods from people on the other side of the planet (eBay) or renting their cars while they are away (Turo)? The

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a verified email and mobile phone number, and positive feedback scores are all critical components of platform participants’ online trust profiles. Companies such as eBay, Airbnb and BlaBlaCar all offer useful information on the profiles of their members. In many cases, the information is supplemented by some form of platform ranking

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driver profile Source: BlaBlaCar Trust, governance and brand 159 detailed descriptions also have a higher conversion rate. To come back to our opening example of Airbnb, the poor quality of pictures for homes being advertised in the early days was indeed a limiting factor, and dealing with this proved to be

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on trust aspects on the producer side of the platform, it is worth remembering that the credibility principle also applies to the user side. On Airbnb, hosts can check potential guests before accepting a rental. Higher-credential participants not only do better, but they also benefit the entire community and the

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track changes, spot emerging issues or even capture suggestions that do not deserve a public mention but could help the host/platform adjust its offering. Airbnb, like many other platforms, also captures NPS scores for both Trust, governance and brand 161 guests and hosts, which provides better insights into the

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co-creating value with the platform. They can also ensure that they engage with their communities on issues of strategic interest to the platform itself. Airbnb community managers are very active in mobilizing its hosts and guests on the topic of rental regulations, for example. 162 Trust, governance and brand

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benefiting them commercially as increased consumer trust in cards led to significantly more transactions. Similarly, despite an initial reluctance to cover its hosts and guests, Airbnb’s introduction of its $1 million liability insurance was instrumental in growing its market share beyond the early adopters segments.16 BlaBlaCar’s sharing model

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Craigslist, have minimal conflict resolution capabilities since they simply provide a canvas for platform participants to transact directly among themselves. However, platforms such as eBay, Airbnb or Uber need to carefully monitor the behaviour of their participants, drivers and clients alike to ensure they offer a safe and trusted environment for

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but it also provided an evolution path and status recognition that sellers could strive for. Many platforms have followed suit: Upwork has Upwork Pro freelancers, Airbnb has Superhosts, Google has Android Certified developers, etc. Brand co-evolution At the launch stage, there is so much to do, from achieving platform fit

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, acquiring and retaining users and producers, to building technical capabilities, etc. that branding can be treated as a secondary concern. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia talks about the first airbed and breakfast logo, and explains: ‘Those brand identities were created in a matter of hours, for

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value. But as the platform scales and its communities grow, a utility-driven and descriptive brand is unlikely to reach, inspire and reassure late adopters. Airbnb relaunched its website and mobile apps with a new brand identity in July 2014, with the new focus of expanding internationally and becoming a more

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our international [reach], or renting homes – it’s about belonging.’ 170 Trust, governance and brand It will be interesting to see how brands such as Airbnb will evolve over time and how their communities will influence this process. We believe that platform brands co-evolve with their communities and that participants

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downdue-to-theft/. 15 G. Parker, M. Van Alstyne and S. Choudary, Platform Revolution, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016, p. 175. 16 www.airbnb.co.uk/host-protection-insurance 17 BlaBlaCar, NYU Stern, Entering the Trust Age, 2016. Interestingly, the results were even higher for millennials. 18 Frédéric Mazzella

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do? How should platforms deal with regulation and regulators? 174 Platforms, regulation and competition When and how to regulate platforms Platforms such as Uber or Airbnb are often accused of ‘unfair competition’ and of being in breach of a raft of regulations. Such accusations, which are often brought about by established

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it is clear that some platforms also impose negative externalities – such as increased visits in formerly secure shared areas of buildings in the case of Airbnb – that need to be factored in. We also understand that it may be politically difficult for government to suddenly remove previously granted exclusivity rights (especially

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should help frame the debate with policymakers. Platforms rely on both producers and users to market themselves. This cocreation effort can extend to regulation aspects. Airbnb and Uber have successfully encouraged their communities to engage with local authorities to promote the benefits of their services. Successful platforms should also provide regulators

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New York’s taxi business: www.goldman sachs.com/our-thinking/pages/2015-10-favorite-charts.html. 11 See Zaw Thiha Tun, ‘Top Cities Where Airbnb Is Legal or Illegal’, Investopedia, updated 30 October 2015, www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/083115/top-cities-whereairbnb-legal-or-illegal.asp. 190 Platforms,

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Informatica’, Kelley School of Business Research Paper No. 16-25, March 2016. 27 See, for example, ‘The Sharing Economy in the UK’, report commissioned by Airbnb, Diane Coyle, 18 January 2016. Chapter 14 Competing against platforms We have seen how platforms are designed, ignited, scaled-up and defended once mature, but

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(eBay or Craiglist) to shared usage (Drivy and Turo for peer-to-peer car rentals, The future of platforms • • • • 209 BlaBlaCar for car-sharing trips, Airbnb for home rentals, Love Home Swap for home exchanges). Knowledge sharing, such as massive open online course (MOOC) platforms connecting students all over the world

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the-sharingeconomy#sthash.wjx6WQ6c.dpuf. 9 11 December 2015, CNN, http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/11/technology/airbnbbias-harvard/. It is worth noting that Airbnb has since implemented robust antidiscrimination provisions that are aimed at improving this. The future of platforms 215 10 See, for example, Bloomberg article dated 2

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