Airbnb

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

Weaver and Kayla Deru, “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning at Motels, Hotels, and Resorts,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, July 2007. 98 According to the National Fire Protection Association: Richard Campbell, “Structure Fires 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 in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, September 16, 2016, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2701902. 101 rejections stopped: Shankar Vedantam, Maggie Penman, and Max Nesterak, “#AirbnbWhileBlack: How Hidden Bias Shapes the Sharing Economy,” Hidden Brain, NPR, podcast audio, April 26, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/04/26/475623339/-airbnbwhileblack-how-hidden-bias-shapes-the-sharing-economy. 101 “your XXX head”: Elizabeth Weise, “Airbnb Bans N. Carolina Host as Accounts of Racism Rise,” USA Today, June 2, 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/06/01/airbnb-bans-north-carolina-host-racism/85252190/. 102 the experts’ recommendations: Laura W. Murphy, Airbnb’s Work to Fight Discrimination and Build Inclusion, report to Airbnb, September 8, 2016, http://blog.airbnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/REPORT_Airbnbs-Work-To-Fight-Discrimination-and-Build-Inclusion-pdf. 104 “we would probably not accomplish our mission”: “Airbnb Just Hit 100 Million Guest Arrivals,” onstage discussion with Brian Chesky and Belinda Johnson, moderated by Andrew Nusca, at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference, Aspen, Colorado, uploaded on July 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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The company wouldn’t exit hypergrowth for quite a long time—it is still in it—but more key executive hires would come, as would a move in 2013 into huge new headquarters. Airbnb had gone from being called the “eBay for space” in Silicon Valley elevator-pitch parlance to becoming a standard that other start-ups were modeled after: Boatbound pitched itself as the Airbnb of boats, dukana was to be the Airbnb of equipment, and DogVacay was the Airbnb for dogs. These days, Airbnb is a juggernaut. There are more than 2,500 employees, including 400 engineers and a customer-service department that’s bigger. And that’s just inside the company. There is also the most important constituency in the Airbnb story, and it lies outside the four walls of its headquarters: the hosts and the travelers; in other words, the millions of people who turned Airbnb from a company into a movement. 3 Airbnb Nation * * * * * * Uber is transactional; Airbnb is humanity.

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While Keycafe serves customers beyond just Airbnb, including dog walkers and other service professionals, Airbnb and property managers are more than half its business, and the company is one of the stronger Airbnb “bolt-ons”: it is an official partner in Airbnb’s Host Assist platform, which integrates some of these vendors into its website, and Brown and his business partner have raised almost $3 million, more than most of the other ancillary services. “As Airbnb has become larger and the valuation and sheer scale of the company has grown, it’s kind of a known play in the venture space,” Brown says. Airbnb has been gathering hosts informally since the beginning, but in 2014 it formalized these efforts with the launch of Airbnb Open, its first global summit of hosts.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

But the naiveté of twenty-six-year old CEOs, the hubris of their venture capital advisers, and the narrowness of vision of the hacktivists, still fighting the battle of the 1990s and promoting open source, do not bode well. Bibliography Airbnb. “Airbnb Economic Impact.” The Airbnb Blog—Belong Anywhere. Accessed May 9, 2015. http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/. ———. “Airbnb’s Economic Impact on New York City.” The Airbnb Blog—Belong Anywhere. Accessed May 9, 2015. http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnbs-economic-impact-nyc-community/. ———. “Building Trust with a New Review System,” July 10, 2014. http://blog.airbnb.com/building-trust-new-review-system/. ———. “One Way Forward: After the Crash, Keeping the Roof Overhead, Airbnb Stories.” Airbnb. Accessed May 9, 2015. https://www.airbnb.com/stories/new-york/one-way-forward. ———.

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Chapter 3 1 Botsman and Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. 2 Chesky, “Shared City.” 3 Chesky, “Who We Are, What We Stand For.” 4 Baker, “Barclays: Airbnb Usage To Surpass Hotel Cos., But Not For Business Travel.” 5 Robinson, “Update from Barcelona: Airbnb Policy Blog.” 6 Bradshaw, “Lunch with the FT: Brian Chesky.” 7 Airbnb, “Airbnb Economic Impact.” 8 Airbnb, “One Way Forward.” 9 Said, “Airbnb Profits Prompted S.F. Eviction, Ex-Tenant Says.” 10 Marritz, Two True Stories from the Airbnb Wars.” 11 Airbnb, “Sandy’s Impact.” 12 Coscarelli, “Airbnb Poster-Child Was Evicted for Airbnb-Ing a Converted Barn She Didn’t Own.” 13 Hantman, New York: The next Steps. 14 Electronic Frontier Foundation, Airbnb, Inc. v. Schneiderman; Internet Association, “The Internet Association Files Amicus Brief to Quash the NYAG Subpoena against Airbnb.” 15 Chesky, “Who We Are, What We Stand for.” 16 Tam, “New York AG’s Office.” 17 Flamm, “Strange Bedfellows in Airbnb Dispute.” 18 Krueger, “On Behalf of Regular New Yorkers, Sen.

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Schneiderman; Internet Association, “The Internet Association Files Amicus Brief to Quash the NYAG Subpoena against Airbnb.” 15 Chesky, “Who We Are, What We Stand for.” 16 Tam, “New York AG’s Office.” 17 Flamm, “Strange Bedfellows in Airbnb Dispute.” 18 Krueger, “On Behalf of Regular New Yorkers, Sen. Krueger Responds to Airbnb’s ‘Three Principles.’” 19 Tiku, “Airbnb’s New Office Has a Replica of the Dr. Strangelove War Room.” 20 The Office of New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, “Airbnb in the City.” 21 Airbnb, “Airbnb’s Economic Impact on New York City.” 22 Bingham, “The Sharing Economy: Q&A With Airbnb’s Chip Conley.” 23 UNWTO, “Annual Report 2013.” 24 Kassam, “Naked Italians Spark Protests against Antics of Drunken Tourists in Barcelona.” 25 Essers, “Amsterdam Using Airbnb Listing Service to Identify Illegal Rentals.” 26 Haverkort, “Airbnb Is Allowed in Amsterdam.” 27 Hantman, “Good News from Amsterdam.” 28 News, “Amsterdammers Can Rent Their Homes to Tourists via Airbnb after All.” 29 Hantman, “More Good News in Amsterdam.” 30 News, “Amsterdammers Can Rent Their Homes to Tourists via Airbnb after All.” 31 van Daalen, “Airbnb to Collect Tourist Taxes in Amsterdam.” 32 News, “Amsterdammers Break Airbnb Rules: Long Lets with Too Many People.” 33 Robinson, “Moving Forward in Barcelona.” 34 Robinson, “Update from Barcelona: Airbnb Policy Blog.” 35 Kuchler, “Airbnb to Collect and Remit Taxes for Hosts in Paris.” 36 French, Schechner, and Verbergt, “How Airbnb Is Taking Over Paris.” 37 Schofield, “Short-Let Apartments Spark Paris Row as Airbnb Thrives.” 38 French, Schechner, and Verbergt, “How Airbnb Is Taking Over Paris.” 39 Njus, “Portland Legalizes Airbnb-Style Short-Term Rentals.” 40 Peltier, “Airbnb Faces Big Fines in Portland If Hosts Don’t Get City ­Permits.” 41 Mesh, “City Commissioner Nick Fish Berates Airbnb Lobbyist.” 42 Davies, “Activists Vow to Buy Abandoned Cinema and Save Rome’s Bohemian Soul.”

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

“Airbnb Memorandum in Support of Petition to Quash Subpoena,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/document/airbnb-v-schneiderman-memo-law. 19. “Airbnb Introduces Instant Bookings for Hosts,” ProBnB, October 12, 2013, http://www.probnb.com/airbnb-introduces-instant-bookings-for-hosts. 20. Daniel P. Tucker, “Airbnb Won’t Comply with Subpoena from New York Attorney General,” WNYC, October 7, 2013, http://www.wnyc.org/story/airbnb-wont-comply-subpoena-new-york-attorney-general/. 21. “Airbnb’s Economic Impact on the NYC Community,” Airbnb, http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnbs-economic-impact-nyc-community/. 22. “Ruling in Airbnb’s Case in New York,” New York Times, May 13, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/05/13/technology/ruling-airbnb-new-york.html. 23.

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(Courtesy of Airbnb) A teenage Nathan Blecharczyk at home in Boston, already running a successful internet business. (Courtesy of Airbnb) The original AirBed & Breakfast website in October, 2007. (Courtesy of Airbnb) The Airbnb founders (from left: Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky (seated), and Joe Gebbia in their Rausch Street Apartment. (Courtesy of Airbnb) Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia with his seat cushion, CritBuns, “the ultimate sitting tool.” (Courtesy of Airbnb) The Airbnb founders outside the Y Combinator startup incubator in Mountain View, Calif. (Courtesy of Airbnb) The Airbnb co-founders (From left: Blecharczyk, Chesky, and Gebbia) in their first offices in 2010.

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Michael Arrington, “The Moment of Truth for Airbnb As User’s Home Is Utterly Trashed,” TechCrunch, July 27, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for-airbnb-as-users-home-is-utterly-trashed/. 16. EJ, “Airbnb Nightmare: No End in Sight,” Around the World and Back Again, July 28, 2011, http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb-nightmare-no-end-in-sight.html. 17. Ibid. 18. Drew Olanoff, “Airbnb Ups Its Host Guarantee to a Million Dollars,” Next Web, May 22, 2012, http://thenextcom/insider/2012/05/22/airbnb-partners-with-lloyds-of-london-for-the-new-million-dollar-host-guarantee/. 19. Brian Chesky, “Our Commitment to Trust & Safety,” Airbnb, August 1, 2011, http://blog.airbnb.com/our-commitment-to-trust-and-safety/. 20.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor , William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy
Published 15 Mar 2020

“A New Wrinkle in the Gig Economy: Workers Get Most of the Money.” New York Times, July 20, 2016. Cox, Murray. 2017. “Airbnb as a Racial Gentrification Tool.” New York: Inside Airbnb. http://insideairbnb.com/reports/the-face-of-airbnb-nyc.pdf. Cox, Murray, and Tom Slee. 2016. “How Airbnb Hid the Facts in New York City.” http://tomslee.net/how-airbnb-hid-the-facts-in-nyc. Cui, Ruomeng, Jun Li, and Dennis Zhang. 2016. “Discrimination with Incomplete Information in the Sharing Economy: Field Evidence from Airbnb.” SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2882982. Cullen, Zoë, and Chiara Farronato. 2018.

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Mehmet’s detailed findings are contained in his PhD dissertation, “ ‘Sharing’ in Unequal Spaces” (Cansoy 2018), and various papers, such as “Gentrification and Short-Term Rentals: Re-assessing the Rent Gap in Urban Centers” (Cansoy 2019a); “The Fault in the Stars: Public Reputation and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality on Airbnb” (Cansoy 2019b); and “Who Gets to Share in the ‘Sharing Economy’: Understanding the Patterns of Participation and Exchange in Airbnb” (Cansoy and Schor 2019). For pioneering research on Airbnb also using scraped data, see Slee (2015) and the work of Murray Cox, who posts research on the website Inside Airbnb, http://insideairbnb.com. 32. The “average” Airbnb listing in this example is an entire unit up for rental that cannot be instantly booked, is located in New York City, with all other listing properties (distance to city center, number of people accommodated, number of days the unit was available to be booked, average nightly price, number of listings by the same host, number of listings in the same area) and neighborhood properties (number of Airbnb listings in the area and population of the area) at the sample mean.

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Can the public reputation systems really eliminate discrimination? Our research helps answer these questions. Our Airbnb Study: The Reproduction of Structural Disadvantage After Airbnb declined our offer to study racial discrimination using its data, we decided to collect our own. Mehmet Cansoy took the lead and scraped Airbnb data from 104 metropolitan areas across the country, eventually yielding about two hundred thousand listings.31 We also purchased data from a company that was doing something similar. Here I’ll focus on findings from 335,000 listings in the ten biggest Airbnb markets, for which we’ve done extensive analysis. In contrast to the studies I’ve discussed so far, ours differs in that we don’t link the property listings back to individual hosts.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy
by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle
Published 12 Mar 2019

The entrepreneurial ethos is best highlighted by comparing the bookings pages of Airbnb’s website with the pages for hosts. The opening page of the Airbnb website (see fig. 5) emphasizes sharing and community: the text announces, “Welcome Home,” and the company’s tagline is “Belong Anywhere.” According to the company’s website, Airbnb is “your home, everywhere.” There’s even a video on “how Airbnb hosts create a sense of belonging around the world.” Figure 5. With messages like “Welcome Home,” Airbnb presents prospective guests with the idea of an open and accepting community. Screenshot by author. The section targeted at hosts, “Earn money as an Airbnb host,” is focused on the financial- and personal-control aspect of hosting (see fig. 6).

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He plans to add more he said, possibly even under phony accounts to avoid legal scrutiny.”50 Other documented Airbnb empires include a San Francisco stockbroker who rented six different apartments in order to “create a makeshift hotel that could net him almost $100,000.”51 In some cases, sharing economy services are used to pad the incomes of the already wealthy. In 2014, the New York State attorney general released a report highlighting Airbnb’s illegal listings, finding that as many as 72 percent of Airbnb listings in New York were illegal. This report, Airbnb in the City, found that although more than 90 percent of hosts in New York City rented two or fewer units on Airbnb, 1,406 hosts (6 percent) during a four-year period acted as “commercial users,” running larger operations that administered as many as 272 unique units each.

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But, as in the case of Kitchensurfing chefs, not all Airbnb hosts identified as entrepreneurs. And as noted earlier, many hosts were Strivers and a few would fall within the category of Strugglers. There are also a few notable differences between the sort of people who become Airbnb hosts and the sort who work with Kitchensurfing. For instance, while some Kitchensurfing chefs engaged in their food work full time, few Airbnb hosts only hosted. Most had full-time occupations or identities outside Airbnb, whether as students, lawyers, writers, or small business owners, and their Airbnb work was a side hustle or part-time effort.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

The first large Internet-enabled peer-to-peer market, eBay, was founded in 1995, went public in 1998, and it remains visibly successful as I write this book in 2015. Why did it take until 2007 for Airbnb and the others to emerge? What was missing until recently? Airbnb—Design Your World Right I first met Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, as a dinner guest in the summer of 2013, at a loft in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, where I mingled with a group of Airbnb hosts, NYC entrepreneurs, and sharing advocates. Chesky, a designer who trained at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), sees his foray into entrepreneurship with Airbnb as being part of the fifth chapter of his life. “I really loved hockey growing up,” he recounted when we spoke in the spring of 2015.

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There are numerous subtle legal and human aspects that shaped the evolution of Airbnb’s interaction with the attorney general. Some of the key events played out as follows. Airbnb responded to the request by issuing a public statement in which the company reiterated its commitment to work with, not against, local governments. While acknowledging that there may be a few “bad actors” abusing their platform to operate illegal hotels, Airbnb argued that it was unfair to penalize thousands of hosts acting in good faith in order to stop a small number of illegal hotel operators and slumlords that were never part of the Airbnb vision. In a statement posted on the Airbnb site on October 6, 2013, David Hantman, their global head of public policy at the time, assured hosts that “in the days ahead, we’ll continue our conversations with the attorney general’s office to see if we can work together to support Airbnb hosts and remove bad actors from the Airbnb platform.

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It’s helping me achieve my dreams by providing me with a source of income that makes it possible for me to focus my energy on preparing for a new career where I can help people through better public policy.2 Mishelle’s “Save Airbnb in New York: Legalize Sharing” campaign eventually received over 200,000 signatures (far beyond the initial goal of 20,000), and the campaign’s grassroots feel and widespread publicity added credibility and texture to Airbnb’s own responses. To many, the campaign drove home the fact that Airbnb’s hosts were not slumlords. As signatures on the petition grew, the face of Airbnb hosts became clearer. Although there were indeed hosts who were renting out multiple units in a hotel-like manner, it turned out that a majority of Airbnb’s hosts represented a remarkable cross-section of New Yorkers from all five boroughs and from neighborhoods that rarely benefit from the city’s tourist industry, from grandmothers in Harlem to hipsters in Williamsburg to families on Staten Island.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems
by Lauren Turner Claire , Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier
Published 14 Oct 2017

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/2011/ 07/25/airbnb-from-y-combinator-to-112m-funding-in-three-years/. 4 VentureBeat, 19 June 2014, http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/19/uber-and-airbnbsincredible-growth-in-4-charts/ and Airbnb website at www.airbnb.co.uk/about/ about-us. 5 www.airbnb.co.uk/about/about-us. 6 CB Insights, 1 August 2016, www.wired.com/2015/12/airbnb-confirms-1-5-billionfunding-round-now-valued-at-25-5-billion/. By the end of 2014, Airbnb had raised over $800 million. ‘Airbnb Is Raising a Monster Round at a $20B Valuation’, TechCrunch, 27 February 2015, http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/airbnb-2/. 7 G.

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Piggybacking on existing networks There are many tales of platforms igniting by piggybacking on existing networks. The most famous one is Airbnb. Craigslist had many users who looked for listings other than the standard hotel experience, which was precisely Airbnb’s target market. To attract guests, Airbnb developed an integration with the Craigslist platform as early as 2010.7 It offered hosts who listed properties on Airbnb the opportunity to automatically publish them on Craigslist. To attract hosts, Airbnb also developed a hack that spammed people posting listings on Craigslist, offering them to list on Airbnb.8 Both hacks allowed Airbnb to grow their guest and host base at almost no cost.

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The company is estimated to be worth $30 billion,6 which means that in less than 10 years, the travel accommodation platform has become one of the most valuable privately owned start-ups, worth more than the largest hotel chains Wyndham, Intercontinental and Hyatt, who own extensive portfolios of prime real estate globally. And Airbnb owns no property. While there’s been an overwhelming response from customers, Airbnb’s high-growth success story has not been without resistance from 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 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.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
by Robert Bruce Shaw , James Foster and Brilliance Audio
Published 14 Oct 2017

They work to define and prioritize impactful work with the rest of their team including product managers, designers, data scientists and others.” nerds.airbnb.com/engineering-culture-airbnb/. 10Own Thomas. “How Airbnb Manages Not to Manage Engineers.” 11The importance of experience in Airbnb is suggested when realizing that the head of what most firms call human resources is called the head of employee experience at Airbnb. His job is to enrich what employees experience at Airbnb—creating a sense of belonging through a wide range of factors, including the 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 Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). 14“Top Three CEO Bindspots,” Build, December 5, 2011. 15Vijay Govindarajan and Anil K.

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He wondered what it would feel like to have a meeting in that room—wouldn’t it be more interesting, more fun, and more productive than sitting in the boring conference rooms found in most corporations? At the Airbnb headquarters in San Francisco, each conference room is a nearly exact replica of an Airbnb rental somewhere in the world. Attend a meeting at Airbnb and you may be working in a room that replicates one of its apartment rentals in Paris. Or you may find yourself in a replica of Frank Sinatra’s former home in Palm Springs, which is also a listing on the Airbnb website. At most firms, you find photographs of the firm’s products or customers in the lobbies or on conference room walls—Airbnb, as in many areas, goes one step further. The company also provides a range of benefits, including free gourmet food three times a day.

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The company went from having $100 million in startup funding to $5 million before it turned profitable. Airbnb and Netflix were focused on survival. 5Austin Carr, “Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans,” Fast Company, March 17, 2014. The CEO noted about his firm’s annual objectives, “If you can’t fit it on a page, you’re not simplifying it enough . . . . I told my team they have to put the entire plan on a page this big by next week—same size font.” 6“PandoMonthly: Fireside Chat with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky,” Pando Daily, January 14, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yPfxcqEXhE. 7Carr, “Inside Airbnb’s Grand Hotel Plans.” 8Owen Thomas, “How Airbnb Manages Not to Manage Engineers,” Readwrite, June 5, 2014, readwrite.com/hack. 9See Airbnb’s website: “Making this environment possible requires a few things.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

Back in 2010, Airbnb was a tiny startup that had just raised its Series A, a company’s first round of significant funding. It was still a small player in the online short-term rentals industry, especially compared to the leader in that market, Craigslist. Craigslist had more traffic and more listings than Airbnb did, but Airbnb’s site provided higher-quality listings and better customer support. In an effort to grow its network, Airbnb created an unofficial “integration” with Craigslist. The feature was called “Post to Craigslist” and it allowed any host to post their listing on Airbnb to the relevant section of Craigslist with a few clicks.

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But rather than lettings viewers respond to the listing through Craigslist, the Craigslist posting would send them back to Airbnb to book a reservation. The end result was that Airbnb was able to divert a lot of consumers from Craigslist to booking reservations on Airbnb. At the same time Airbnb was taking traffic from Craigslist, the upstart company was also tapping into Craigslist’s network of hosts. It allegedly used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist posters. The emails didn’t appear to come from Airbnb itself but from an individual who simply wanted to inform the poster about another vacation rental site they should “check out.”

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These issues should help put the controversy surrounding companies such as Airbnb and Uber in perspective. Challenging the legal status quo is well-established territory for platform companies. In Airbnb’s case, major companies in the hotel industry are unhappy that their platform competitor gets to skirt local hotel regulations and safety standards. They have pushed local regulators to crack down on Airbnb hosts, most notably in New York City. According to one report, as many as three quarters of Airbnb rentals in New York City, one of Airbnb’s largest markets, are illegal.30 Yet this hasn’t stopped the company from continuing to grow, and it hasn’t stopped many hosts in New York from continuing to do business.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

Just a few months later, determined to acquire the resources needed to outscale the Samwers, Brian raised $112 million in additional venture capital. Airbnb then embarked on an aggressive international expansion plan, including the acquisition of Accoleo, a smaller and more affordable German Airbnb clone, that allowed Airbnb to compete directly with Wimdu in its home market. By the spring of 2012, Airbnb had opened nine international offices, setting up shop 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.

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This can take many forms, ranging from formal in-person meetings to electronic communications to things as seemingly neutral as office layout and design. Airbnb, for example, employs a wide range of channels to maximize cultural transmission. The weekly e-mail cofounder Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue 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 Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture.

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Systemic risks may require an immediate, “stop the presses” response. In 2011, for example, an Airbnb host in San Francisco came home and discovered that an Airbnb guest had trashed her house and stolen her possessions, including her grandmother’s jewelry. Airbnb’s initial response, which was to coordinate with the police department and compensate the host financially but to emphasize that such incidents would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, may have been legally sound, but didn’t address the systemic issue—hosts losing trust in Airbnb. After he recognized the magnitude of the problem, Brian Chesky took decisive action.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

Bixi, B-cycle, CitiBike, DecoBike, Hubway, Social Bikes, and Velib are “like Zipcar for bikes.”3 Hello Health is “like Zipcar for online concierge medicine.”4 Ziplens is “like Zipcar for photographers.”5 SnapGoods is “like Zipcar for Gadgets.”6 And Cohealo is “the Zipcar for hospital gear.”7 Other platforms aggregate the excess capacity of assets that were 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 there have been many start-ups that describe their business as “like Airbnb for x.” GetMyBoat is “like Airbnb for boats.”8 HovelStay is “like Airbnb for adrenaline junkies on a budget.”9 And Rover.com is “like Airbnb for your dog.”10 Both Zipcar and Airbnb are examples of access platforms that, through slicing or aggregation of excess capacity, enable users to get more value out of an asset by using it more conveniently and cheaply than they could before.

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I’ll admit that I failed to tap into the potential of excess capacity in cars because of insurance issues. But Airbnb did spring into action—1,400 Airbnb hosts in the New York metro area offered up rooms for free to those who needed them.26 The Airbnb website wasn’t structured for zero-cost rooms, and frankly, the connection between displaced families and Airbnb hosts was not well communicated. Some matches were made and real families benefited, but most rooms went empty. Still, the idea of using existing communities and platforms to respond to disasters took hold. Lessons were learned, and in 2013 Airbnb launched a disaster response initiative that makes it easy for Airbnb hosts to provide space for people in need when disasters strike.27 Since then, hosts have opened their door to displaced residents in response to emergencies around the world, including in San Diego in response to major fires; in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia for people affected by the Balkan floods; in London, Sardinia, and Colorado after serious flooding hit those regions; in Kefalonia after an earthquake hit the island; in Toronto and Atlanta following severe ice storms; and in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan.

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There were more than a hundred “power hosts,” with ten or more units listed.15 Shortly after turning the data over to the attorney general, Airbnb went through its New York listings, identified 2,000 that were clearly from institutions, and took them off the site. Airbnb says it removed them because they didn’t reflect Airbnb’s brand or service aspirations. It is unlikely that any of the top ten earners remain on the platform. From Airbnb’s perspective, when it was deep in the everyone-welcome phase, the goal was to make adding a listing as easy as possible. Today, the company has moved beyond that. “It’s not just vetting listings coming in,” said Chip Conley, Airbnb’s head of global hospitality and strategy.

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment
by Sangeet Paul Choudary
Published 14 Sep 2015

This cycle, driving viral growth, is repeatedly observed across diverse startups. In a move that is now a part of startup folklore, Airbnb reverse-engineered an integration with Craigslist that allowed hosts on Airbnb to post their listings (value units created on Airbnb) simultaneously on Craigslist. Travelers on Craigslist (the external network, in this case) would see the listing and join Airbnb to make a booking. Over time, this integration, in combination with several other initiatives from Airbnb, created the repeatable cycle mentioned above and led to Airbnb’s rapid growth early on. INCENTIVES FOR VIRAL GROWTH An ongoing theme that we note through most of this book is the design of incentives for users.

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Craigslist’s inability to cater well to high-risk interactions makes it especially susceptible to competition in these categories. ANOTHER AIRBNB? Airbnb famously leveraged Craigslist to solve its chicken-and-egg problem. It allowed hosts to post their listings to Craigslist and directed travelers back, from Craigslist to Airbnb, for the transaction. Additionally, it also lured sellers on Craigslist to list on Airbnb, offering a better transaction experience. More importantly, Airbnb has built a strong reputation system to build a worldwide community of travelers and hosts. It allows both parties to rate each other and has focused on building a huge corpus of reviews.

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It invests in acquiring and owning more rooms and optimizing its business to maximize occupancy. Airbnb solves the same needs, leveraging platform scale. It doesn’t own any rooms, nor does it need to create more rooms physically to scale. Airbnb demonstrates that value lies not in owning resources but in managing the exchange of services in the ecosystem. Airbnb scales an ecosystem of service providers, most or all of which are distributed and autonomous. Unlike hotels, which invest in resource creation, platforms like Airbnb invest in creating better trust mechanisms that identify and differentiate good behavior from poor behavior and minimize interaction risks.

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
Published 27 Mar 2016

Journalist Jessica Pressler recorded some of the choicest comments in New York magazine. One poster had been supplemented with the observation, “Airbnb accepts NO Liability.” Another had been marked with the scrawl, “The dumbest person in your building is passing out a set of keys to your front door!” And on several posters, the phrase “for New York City” had been replaced with a different handwritten conclusion: “Airbnb is great for Airbnb.” The war of the posters reflected a bigger conflict already being waged in New York City and in other cities around the world where Airbnb was expanding its foothold. Airbnb’s corporate image advertising campaign was part of an expensive lobbying and public relations program designed to counter what the company viewed as an unfair assault by regulators, business rivals, and misinformed members of the media and the general public.

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This means continually scouting the real estate 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 allow guests to find, reserve, and pay for rooms as they need them. But Airbnb applies the platform model to the hotel business: Airbnb doesn’t own any rooms. Instead, it created and maintains the platform that allows individual participants to provide the rooms directly to consumers. In return, Airbnb takes a 9–15 percent (average 11 percent) transaction fee for every rental arranged through the platform.1 One implication is that growth can be much faster for Airbnb or any rival platform than for a traditional hotel company since growth is no longer constrained by the ability to deploy capital and manage physical assets.

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One of the crucial decisions a platform manager must make—and often reconsider as the market evolves—is 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 images. In response, an extension developer now offers professional support under the rubric of “Airbnb photography service” to create compelling images that should make an Airbnb host more successful. Extension developer Pillow (formerly known as Airenvy) supports hosts on the platform by providing tools to simplify property listing, guest checkin, and cleaning and linen delivery.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

The opportunity in China is massive, since tourism is a major force in the country’s growing economy.11 The most popular destinations for Airbnb guests are Shanghai and Beijing, and Shenzhen is seeing the fastest growth. Going local, Airbnb reviews every listing, monitors the quality of listings, inspects homes, and counsels hosts on design and in-home services. For hosts of more luxurious properties, Airbnb provides decor consultations, photography tips, and top placement in search results. Airbnb offers an academy for hosts to learn the dos and don’ts of hospitality by attending workshops, offering live chats on WeChat, and watching educational videos. Digging deeper into the Chinese market, Airbnb recently launched a Plus service in China that features beautiful homes, gracious hosts, and hotel-like features for peace of mind.

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Such localized aspects of its Chinese business probably were never imagined by cofounder and billionaire Brian Chesky when he dreamed up the homestay concept with two cofounders in San Francisco in 2008. Airbnb had a running start in China because of some natural advantages. It’s in the travel business and is inherently a global company. Airbnb wisely hired from within the region rather than fly in newbies from California to run China operations. But management turnover in China has haunted Airbnb. The landing team for Airbnb in China was Henek Lo from investment trading positions at JPMorgan and Macquarie Group in Hong Kong and Robert Hao, a cofounder of two Hong Kong–based e-commerce startups. Within a few years, they grew the team to more than 100 and turned China into Airbnb’s fastest-growing market globally by focusing on partnerships, policy, branding, social marketing, community building, and inventory growth.

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She’s stayed at an architect’s Qing dynasty home in Yangshuo, a remote village in southwest China with a view of the mountain peaks that are printed on China’s 20 RMB currency. Amazing! At Airbnb in China, guests can learn how to make Chinese soup dumplings or listen to Chinese opera, and then share their stories of experiencing local, authentic China on a content site that Airbnb developed to create awareness and inspire travelers to China to try out and get accustomed to the home-sharing concept. Airbnb is really making an effort in China, but those efforts aren’t always successful. A promotional campaign recently offered 100 Airbnb free nights and experiences to Millennials who didn’t have a chance to travel within the past year, and got 10,000 sign-ups.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
by Michael A. Cusumano , Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
Published 6 May 2019

Many platforms take great care in limiting their liability. Airbnb stated in its June 2017 updated terms and conditions that, “as the provider of the Airbnb Platform, Airbnb does not own, create, sell, resell, provide, control, manage, offer, deliver, or supply any Listings or Host Services. Hosts alone are responsible for their Listings and Host Services. . . . Airbnb is not acting as an agent in any capacity for any Member.” And with regard to its role within potential disputes, Airbnb stated that, “while we may help facilitate the resolution of disputes, Airbnb has no control over and does not guarantee (i) the existence, quality, safety, suitability, or legality of any Listings or Host Services, (ii) the truth or accuracy of any Listing descriptions, Ratings, Reviews, or other Member Content (as defined below), or (iii) the performance or conduct of any Member or third party.”

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The way Airbnb attracted early members was ingenious and added value for both market sides, but this strategy also differed from how Airbnb expanded. For Airbnb to send photographers to each new member’s residence was not easily scalable and financially unsustainable. More important, it was not necessary to continue subsidizing professional photo shoots. By initially subsidizing professional photos, Airbnb set a high bar for the quality of property photography on the Airbnb website. This practice soon became the new norm: Property renters would invest on their own in professional photography to differentiate themselves from other renters. In effect, Airbnb initially incurred a cost that raised expectations within the ecosystem and later simply took advantage of competition among the property owners.

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New York Times, August 29, 2018; and Sui-Lee Wee, “Didi Suspends Carpooling Service in China After 2nd Passenger is Killed,” New York Times, August 26, 2018. 27.Uber, “Community Guidelines,” https://www.uber.com/legal/community-guidelines/us-en/ (accessed July 3, 2017). 28.Airbnb, “Community Commitment,” http://blog.atairbnb.com/the-airbnb-community-commitment/ (accessed July 5, 2017). 29.David B. Yoffie and Dylan Minor, “Upwork: Creating the Human Cloud” (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, Case #9-717-475, May 2017). 30.Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook Will Use Artificial Intelligence to Find Extremist Posts,” New York Times, June 15, 2017; and TripAdvisor, “Review Moderation and Fraud Detection FAQ,” https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect.html (accessed July 3, 2017). 31.Airbnb, “Updated Terms of Service,” https://www.airbnb.co.uk/terms (accessed July 3, 2017). 32.Annabelle Gawer and Michael A.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
Published 20 Apr 2015

. [>] The founders also had: Vella and Bradley, “Airbnb CEO—‘Grow Fast but not Too Fast.’” [>] Airbnb ended up with: Tomio Geron, “Airbnb Hires Joie de Vivre’s Chip Conley as Head of Hospitality,” Forbes, September 17, 2013, http://www.Forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/09/17. [>] In fact, Airbnb: Salter, “Airbnb: The Story Behind the $1.3bn Room-Letting Website.” [>] Airbnb has become: Thompson, “Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on Building a Company and Starting a Sharing Revolution.” 8. Breaking the Rules [>] When spring arrived: “Politics Drowns Water Bonds,” San Jose Mercury News, March 23, 2014. [>] After three years: Josh Richman and Paul Rogers, “Brown Declares California Drought Emergency,” San Jose Mercury News, January 17, 2014, http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_24933924/. [>] Much of California: Heidi Gildemeister, “What Is a Mediterranean Climate?

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Sales spiked, but that was the problem—it was only a spike. Joe and Brian kept Airbnb afloat by selling gimmicky breakfast cereal, and surprisingly sold several hundred boxes of “Obama O’s” and “Cap’n McCain” on eBay. The big picture was, however, that Airbnb was floundering, with a few initial rules that cried out for improvement. A much-needed turning point came when Airbnb joined Y Combinator. Y Combinator is a “seed accelerator” providing financing, advice, and connections to cohorts of early-stage ventures, but its headliner mission is helping entrepreneurs improve very fast. At this point, Airbnb’s entrepreneurs began multitasking different ways to learn.

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This was another opportunity to learn—this time through presenting Airbnb’s story and getting feedback and insights from peers. These dinners created a relentless weekly rhythm of stepping back to reflect, getting feedback and ideas, and heading back to work. Another way of learning was through tailored expert advice. The Airbnb founders gained two pivotal insights from Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham that critically reframed their conception of what to do. One piece of advice was counterintuitive—forget about growing Airbnb, and instead focus on creating the perfect Airbnb experience. Graham’s argument was, “It’s better to have a hundred people love you than to have a million people like you.”

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

Airbnb had begun to rally its hosts as a way of fighting back against city governments, which made users’ bond with the platform even more critical. So Airbnb relaunched its brand, with a brand story made for the age of new power. Douglas Atkin, an Airbnb executive with the unusual corporate title “Global Head of Community,” summed it up as “creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere.” Airbnb’s new logo was not designed to be admired, but to be remixed and adapted by different affinity groups within the Airbnb community. The soft, malleable, inverted heart (or pretzel, depending on your perspective) drew a level of online engagement perhaps best summed up by Fast Company’s headline: “This Tumblr shows everything Airbnb’s new logo looks like, in addition to a vagina.”

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Hilton Hotels & Resorts remains the stylish, forward thinking global leader of hospitality—and we help make traveling easier with our smart design, innovative restaurant concepts, authentic hospitality and commitment to the global community. Airbnb’s brand voice is built to cultivate a sense of community and participation, and executives are betting that this will be a key source of competitive advantage—because it makes it far less likely that Airbnb hosts or guests will move to the next platform when one emerges. Airbnb now spends millions holding an annual gathering of thousands of its most active hosts, building solidarity and esprit de corps the way a church or Rotary Club might. Going further, it has invested in supporting local groups of hosts as part of a decentralized “home sharing club,” supported by Airbnb but led by its most involved members.

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“This Tumblr shows”: Joe Berkowitz, “This Tumblr Shows Everything Airbnb’s New Logo Looks Like in Addition to a Vagina,” Fast Company, July 21, 2014. “Most brands would send”: Austin Carr, “Airbnb Unveils a Major Rebranding Effort That Paves the Way for Sharing More Than Homes,” Fast Company, July 16, 2014. “optimal distinctiveness”: M. B. Brewer, “The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 17 (1991): 475–482. “We used to take belonging for granted”: Brian Chesky, “Belong Anywhere,” Airbnb blog, July 2017. www.airbnb.com. “Take me to the Hilton”: “About,” July 2017. www.hilton.com.

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
Published 24 Apr 2017

Michael Carney, “Brian Chesky: I Lived on Cap’n McCain’s and Obama O’s Got Airbnb Out of Debt,” January 10, 2013. Pando (blog), accessed September 13, 2016, pando.com/2013/01/10/brian-chesky-i-lived-on-capn-mccains-and-obama-os-got-airbnb-out-of-debt/; Chen, “Growth Hacker Is the New VP Marketing”; Dave Gooden, “How Airbnb Became a Billion Dollar Company,” Dave Gooden (blog), June 31, 2011, accessed September 13, 2016, davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/; Rishi Shah, “Airbnb Leverages Craigslist in a Really Cool Way,” GettingMoreAwesome (blog), November 24, 2010, gettingmoreawesome.com/2010/11/24/airbnb-leverages-craigslist-in-a-really-cool-way/. 12.

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Alex Schultz, “Lecture 6: Growth,” How to Start a Startup (blog), startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/. 9. Palihapitiya, “Facebook on the Path to 1 Billion Users.” 10. Jordan Crook and Anna Escher, “A Brief History of Airbnb,” slideshow at TechCrunch (n.d.), techcrunch.com/gallery/a-brief-history-of-airbnb/; “How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business,” First Round Review (n.d.), firstround.com/review/How-design-thinking-transformed-Airbnb-from-failing-startup-to-billion-dollar-business/. 11. Austin Carr, “19: Airbnb,” Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies 2012, February 7, 2012, fastcompany.com/3017358/most-innovative-companies-2012/19airbnb. 12.

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A good rule of thumb is: whether you are selling a service, or a physical product, or some kind of information or content, the value of your incentive should be as closely aligned to that as possible. Cash offers can work also, but for the best effect, it’s important that they’re also related to the core value of the product. Airbnb offers a $25 incentive for both inviters and invitees to use toward a future stay booked through Airbnb. Here, using messaging tied to the product or brand matters; in Airbnb’s case they use language suggesting that customers share the great experience of living like a local that Airbnb delivers, rather than just blatantly offering the cash. Similarly, for our grocery app team, offering a referral program where each shopper using the app gets a $10 discount on their next grocery order makes good sense, as it acts as a onetime discount on their purchase.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross
Published 4 Sep 2013

He closes with a mention that both Vidyard and Airbnb have shared parentage. “Thanks and let me know—we’re very glad to be YC!” His message is forwarded to Venetia Pristavec, the manager in charge of Airbnb’s videos. Airbnb presently is using the video service of Vid Network, a startup that does the video hosting and analytics that Vidyard plans to offer. But Pristavec says that Airbnb is looking for a new video provider. Unfortunately for Vidyard, Airbnb has narrowed the field of replacement candidates to a pair of big names in video hosting, Ooyala and Brightcove. Clearly, Airbnb has decided to move away from relying on a startup and instead shift to a much larger company as its video supplier.

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Having a shared lineal connection to YC would not be a sufficient basis for the far larger company to rely on a not yet hatched startup. When Michael Litt looks at Airbnb’s Web site, which makes use of videos, he sees a natural home for Vidyard’s services. Airbnb’s AirTV section has videos of the more unusual lodging listings or colorful Airbnb hosts—its nickname is “the ‘Cribs’ of Airbnb.” Vidyard’s software is not finished, but Litt goes after Airbnb, sending an e-mail to the cofounders, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. It is the very first week of the summer session. Always Be Closing. The subject heading of Litt’s first e-mail message is “AirTV—Current YC company looking for some quick insight!”

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Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984) extricates the word “hacker” from derogatory associations. To Levy, “hacker” simply means “those computer programmers and designers who regard computing as the most important thing in the world.” He traces the hacker culture back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the late 1950s. 6. “Airbnb Celebrates 1,000,000 Nights Booked!” Airbnb blog, February 24, 2011, http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-celebrates-1000000-nights-booked. The company launched its service in August 2008, before it was funded by YC. CHAPTER 1: YOUNGER 1. http://jasonshen.com/. In early years, the blog had the longish subtitle of “A Blog on Conquering Fear, Doing Great Work and Making Things Happen.”

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

cid=AEN20160223003651315. 6 “I kind of felt powerless”: Jordan Novet, “Go Board Game Champion Lee Sedol Apologizes for Losing to Google’s AI,” VentureBeat, March 12, 2016, http://venturebeat.com/2016/03/12/go-board-game-champion-lee-sedol-apologizes-for-losing-to-googles-ai. 6 “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company”: Tom Goodwin, “The Battle Is for the Customer Interface,” TechCrunch, March 3, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface. 7 over a million people: Ellen Huet, “Uber Says It’s Doing 1 Million Rides per Day, 140 Million in the Last Year,” Forbes, December 17, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/12/17/uber-says-its-doing-1-million-rides-per-day-140-million-in-last-year. 7 one of 300 cities in 60 countries: Anne Freier, “Uber Usage Statistics and Revenue,” Business of Apps, September 14, 2015, http://www.businessofapps.com/uber-usage-statistics-and-revenue. 7 640,000 different lodging options: Chip Conley, “Airbnb Open: What I Learned from You,” Airbnb (blog), November 25, 2014, http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-open-chips-takeaways. 7 191 countries: Airbnb, “Airbnb Summer Travel Report: 2015,” accessed January 11, 2017, http://blog.airbnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Airbnb-Summer-Travel-Report-1.pdf. 7 a yurt in Mongolia: Airbnb, “Nomadic Life in the Countryside,” accessed January 11, 2017, https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/13512229?s=zcoAwTWQ. 7 James Joyce’s childhood home: Airbnb, “James Joyce’s Childhood Home Dublin,” accessed January 11, 2017, https://www.airbnb.ie/rooms/4480268. 7 4,500 shops across the United States: Wal-Mart, “Our Locations,” accessed January 13, 2017, http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-locations. 7 $180 billion of property and equipment assets: US Securities and Exchange Commission, “Form 10-Q: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.,” December 1, 2016, http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000104169/2b25dfe5-6d4a-4d2d-857f-08dda979d6b9.pdf. 7 number of Chinese people using Alibaba’s apps: Alibaba Group, “Consumer Engagement Driving Growth for Mobile Taobao (Alizila News),” June 28, 2016, http://www.alibabagroup.com/en/ir/article?

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language=en. 209 “High reputation beats high similarity”: Ibid. 209 “can actually help us overcome”: Ibid. 211 SoulCycle: SoulCycle, “All Studios,” accessed February 6, 2017, https://www.soul-cycle.com/studios/all. 217 But if it’s costly to switch: See, for instance, Paul Klemperer, “Markets with Consumer Switching Costs,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 102, no. 2 (1987): 375–94; and Joseph Farrell and Garth Saloner, “Installed Base and Compatibility: Innovation, Product Preannouncements, and Predation,” American Economic Review (1986): 940–55. 219 more than $15 billion in loans: Douglas MacMillan, “Uber Raises $1.15 Billion from First Leveraged Loan,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-raises-1-15-billion-from-first-leveraged-loan-1467934151. 221 The lodging-industry benchmarking company STR: Bill McBride, “Hotels: Occupancy Rate on Track to Be 2nd Best Year,” Calculated Risk (blog), October 17, 2016, http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2016/10/hotels-occupancy-rate-on-track-to-be_17.html. 221 In Los Angeles the daily hotel rate: Hugo Martin, “Airbnb Takes a Toll on the U.S. Lodging Industry, but Los Angeles Hotels Continue to Thrive,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-airbnb-hotels-20160926-snap-story.html. 223 Airbnb was responsible for a 10% decline: Gregorios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry,” last modified November 18, 2016, http://cs-people.bu.edu/dproserp/papers/airbnb.pdf. Chapter 10 THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY: THE EMERGENCE OF THE CROWD 229 the author Robert Wright: Robert Wright, Twitter page, accessed February 6, 2017, https://twitter.com/robertwrighter. 229 “Most newsgroup traffic”: Robert Wright, “Voice of America,” New Republic, September 13, 1993, http://cyber.eserver.org/wright.txt. 230 “The things [the Net] changes”: Ibid. 231 An estimated 130 million books: Leonid Taycher, “Books of the World, Stand Up and Be Counted!

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But in all of these cases, the companies in question held long-lived assets, like licenses and contracts, that are important to the industry and thus valuable. Uber and Airbnb have none of these. Uber has no claim on any vehicle or medallion in any city in the world, and Airbnb has no long-term contract with any lodging owners anywhere. Yet both companies quickly reached millions of customers and billions in valuation, making the success that Goodwin observed all the more remarkable. At the time of his column, over a million people each day “took an Uber” to get somewhere in one of 300 cities in 60 countries, and Airbnb offered 640,000 different lodging options in 191 countries, ranging from a yurt in Mongolia to James Joyce’s childhood home in Ireland.

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy
by Robert Peters
Published 18 May 2014

Before they were shut down, Airbnb had an option for users to cross post their available accommodation listings to Craigslist, which created inbound links both for the individual user, but also for the Airbnb platform. This is one of the more infamous and technical of the “great” growth hacking stories, and worked brilliantly until AirBbB began to directly contact Craigslist users. Those people had no idea who or what AirBnB was and began to complain that the company was using a “black hat” hack. The interactions AirBnB attempted to initiate were fairly aggressive, going out to Craigslist users who had specifically indicated they did not want to be contacted by commercial entities. While AirBnB was working outside of the Terms of Service for Craigslist, they characterized the relationship as “symbiotic.”

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If a self-promoter of any kind starts an AMA and refuses to answer hard questions, they are likely to be savaged by the Reddit community. AirBnB The San Francisco company Airbnb was founded in August 2008. It currently has more than 500,000 listings for lodgings available for rent in 34,000 cities and 192 countries. A wide variety if spaces are included, from whole house to rooms and even some private islands! The service’s success was largely dependent on a brilliant albeit questionably ethical growth hacking strategy involving Craigslist. Before they were shut down, Airbnb had an option for users to cross post their available accommodation listings to Craigslist, which created inbound links both for the individual user, but also for the Airbnb platform.

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This claim is highly semantic since Craigslist didn’t offer a public API in 2009. The AirBnB hack was a reverse engineered stealth integration. The engineers created a bot that automatically posted listings to Craigslist by logging in, acquiring a URL, filling in all the necessary information, and allowing the AirBnB user to hit the “post to CL” option. The coding behind the hack was complex and capable of jumping through a number of hoops on the Craigslist end, including the default anonymous address provided to posters. Without a doubt, AirBnB knew that if they were caught, they’d be kicked off, which is exactly what happened.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

For the most part, the people and places are not vetted, inspected, or interviewed by Airbnb. It’s up to users to determine if they want to host a guest or if they want to stay with someone based on kaleidoscopic photos of the property, detailed profiles, and other users’ reviews. As the site has grown, in fact, the founders have removed rules they initially thought would be required. They took away the initial cap on charges of $300 because they realized that people were using the Airbnb community for far more than budget accommodation. Today you can find castles for rent in England for $3,000 a night. The only fixed rules on Airbnb are that the travelers must be able to ask the host questions before they book, and rooms can’t be a commodity, which excludes most hotels.

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Hosts are not paid in full until twenty-four hours after a guest has checked in. Airbnb charges hosts a standard 3 percent service fee and travelers an additional 6 to 12 percent depending on the reservation price. Aside from turning Airbnb into a real business with a profitable revenue model that has been growing at more than 10 percent every month since they launched, the founders believe that some form of payment “puts both parties on the best behavior and makes the whole process more reliable.” When Chesky told his grandfather about the idea behind Airbnb, “It seemed totally normal to him. My parents had a different reaction.

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The same is true of Collaborative Consumption. Airbnb has received an array of top-tier traditional press, from Time magazine to CNN, but founder Brian Chesky admits it’s the “viral thing” that has enabled Airbnb to build a critical mass of more than 85,000 users in more than 115 countries in less than two years. “People want to go to work on Monday and when asked what did you do over the weekend to be able to say, ‘Well, I hosted this brother and sister from Sweden.’ ” Users want to declare their collaborative, nonowning, or sharing status. “People approach Airbnb all the time with ideas on how they can help us.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

Scale, and the beginner’s mind Brian no longer knocks on hosts’ doors or sleeps on their couches. Airbnb today is a public company that hardly resembles the scrappy little startup in the stories above. But handcrafting still matters to Brian. He relies on close contact with longtime hosts and customers for input on design and strategy. And any time he considers a bold new product direction, he instinctively imagines it through the eyes of a single user. For example, when they first conceived Airbnb Trips—an extension of Airbnb’s core business offering curated end-to-end experiences—Brian and his team began by handcrafting a vacation experience for a single customer.

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The team booked Ricardo a stay with a top-notch Airbnb host; took him to dinner parties; booked seats at a couple of the city’s best restaurants; even brought him on a midnight mystery bike tour. At the end of the trip, Brian met up with Ricardo so he could personally ask how it had gone. By the time they were done talking, Ricardo was in tears. “This is the best trip I’ve ever had,” he told Brian. Clearly, the Ricardo experiment doesn’t scale, as such. Airbnb couldn’t possibly handcraft every trip for every customer. But the lessons learned from these experiments shaped the Airbnb Trips model—showing them the most important elements to emphasize.

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If everyone I talk to thinks it’s a terrible idea, I’ll start wondering: Am I drinking the Kool-Aid in a very bad way? What I want is for some people to say, “You’re out of your mind,” and some people to say, “I see it.” I want a polarized reaction. Take my decision to invest in Airbnb as an example. David Sze, a partner of mine at Greylock Partners, thought I was making an epic mistake with that investment. I remember him saying to me, “Well, Reid, every venture capitalist has a deal that doesn’t work, which they learn from. Airbnb can be yours.” To be clear: David Sze is a super-smart VC. He invested in LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pandora. He personally returned two and a half billion dollars to Greylock’s funds.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
by Andrew Ross
Published 25 Oct 2021

Tripp Mickle and Preetika Rana, “‘A Bargain with the Devil’—Bill Comes Due for Overextended Airbnb Hosts,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bargain-with-the-devilbill-comes-due-for-overextended-airbnb-hosts-11588083336. 13.  The controversial impact of these new landlords is most visible in urban neighborhoods, where Airbnb has the greatest booking density, but they are not exclusive to cities. In Florida, Osceola County is second only to the more urban Miami-Dade County in the number of Airbnb guests and revenue. It is also the site of the first “Niido Powered by Airbnb,” the company’s line of branded apartment complexes, which allow renters to make income (shared with the company) by leasing out their unit on Airbnb for up to 180 days per year. Niido is Airbnb’s effort to move into the market created by multiunit owners of rental properties, who are essentially running small-scale lodging companies on an absentee basis. 14.  

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Such regulations are cheered on by housing advocates, who blame Airbnb and other nightly rental platforms for driving up neighborhood rents and removing affordable units from the market.13 A 2019 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that the entry of Airbnb into a community reduces the stock of long-term rentals, creating economic costs that outweigh the benefits of increasing tourism.14 A detailed McGill University study of New York City showed that two-thirds of Airbnb revenue came from likely illegal listings and that Airbnb rentals had removed as many as 13,500 units from the long-term rental market. The result was a $380 rent increase per year for the median tenant in New York City overall and an increase of more than $700 per year in some Manhattan neighborhoods. The study also found a racially disparate component to Airbnb’s impact: the neighborhoods where Airbnb properties were far more profitable than long-term rentals, placing them at particularly high risk for losing rental housing, were 72 percent nonwhite.15 Overall, the retailing of space inside private homes has morphed into a commercial opportunity for professional hosting firms or speculators who commandeer ever-greater portions of housing stock.

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Niido is Airbnb’s effort to move into the market created by multiunit owners of rental properties, who are essentially running small-scale lodging companies on an absentee basis. 14.  Josh Bivens, “The Economic Costs and Benefits of Airbnb,” Economic Policy Institute, January 30, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benefits-of-airbnb-no-reason-for-local-policymakers-to-let-airbnb-bypass-tax-or-regulatory-obligations/. 15.  David Wachsmuth et al., “The High Cost of Short-Term Rentals in New York City,” School of Urban Planning, McGill University, January 30, 2018, https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/files/newsroom/channels/attach/airbnb-report.pdf. 16.  Diana Olick, “Build-to-Rent Housing Market Explodes as Investors Rush In,” CNBC, June 26, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/26/suddenly-the-build-to-rent-single-family-housing-market-is-exploding.html. 17.  

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

,” Harvard Business Law Review 4 (2014): 235, University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law & Economics, Research Paper No. 14–41, posted December 18, 2014, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2539098. 293 “if not more than, the bottom line”: Etsy, “Building an Etsy Economy: The New Face of Creative Entrepreneurship,” 2015, retrieved April 4, 2017, https://extfiles.etsy.com/Press/reports/Etsy_NewFaceofCreativeEntrepreneur ship_2015.pdf. 293 the ouster of Chad Dickerson, Etsy’s CEO: The Associated Press, “Etsy Replaces CEO, Cuts Jobs Amid Shareholder Pressure,” ABC News, May 2, 2017, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/etsy-replaces-ceo-cuts-jobs-amid-shareholder-pressure-47167426. 293 supported more than 10,000 jobs: “Airbnb Community Tops $1.15 Billion in Economic Activity in New York City,” Airbnb, May 12, 2015, https://www.airbnb.com/press/news/airbnb-community-tops-1-15-billion-in-economic-activity-in-new-york-city. 293 helped them stay in their home: “Airbnb Economic Impact,” Airbnb, retrieved April 4, 2017, http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/. 294 A third-party economic study: Peter Cohen, Robert Hahn, Jonathan Hall, Steven Levitt, and Robert Metcalfe, “Using Big Data to Estimate Consumer Surplus: The Case of Uber,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 22627, September 2016, doi:10.3386/w22627. 294 nine million third-party sellers: Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House That Jack Built (New York: Harper, 2016), 5. 294 in order to favor more lucrative sales by big brands: Ina Steiner, “eBay Makes Big Promises to Small Sellers as SEO Penalty Still Stings,” eCommerce Bytes, April 23, 2015, http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y15/m04/i23/s02. 294 half of all private sector employment: “SBA Advocacy: Frequently Asked Questions” Small Business Administration, September 2012, retrieved May 12, 2017, https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/FAQ_Sept_2012.pdf. 295 “now drying the clothes”: Steve Baer, “The Clothesline Paradox,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1975, retrieved April 3, 2017, http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/2008/article/358/the.clothesline.paradox. 296 value as and if created: Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (London: Anthem, 2013), 185–87. 296 “a minuscule fraction”: William D.

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There is of course some offsetting loss of income to hotels, so these numbers likely deserve further scrutiny. But it’s important to note that Airbnb’s benefit is distributed more directly to ordinary people and small businesses than are the profits of large hotel chains. Across all the cities they’ve studied, 74% of Airbnb properties are outside the main hotel districts. Airbnb guests spend 2.1 times longer than the average hotel stay, and spend 2.1 times more than hotel visitors, with 41% of it spent in local neighborhoods not usually frequented by tourists. While professional Airbnb hosts play a larger role in some markets like Japan, Airbnb is increasingly enforcing a “one host, one home rule” to minimize the conversion of rental housing stock to short-term rentals.

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BUILDING A THICK MARKETPLACE What made Airbnb’s achievement possible, of course, was not just digital photography, making it easy for hosts to show off their property, but the World Wide Web, online credit card payments, and the experience of other sites that had built reputation systems and ratings to help users build trust with strangers. Airbnb had to wrap these services into a new platform, which you can define as the set of digital services that enables its hosts to find and serve guests. The primary platform service provided by Airbnb, though, is not to build a pretty web page showing off a property, to schedule rentals, or to take payments. Anyone with a modicum of web experience can do all those things in an afternoon. The essential job of an Internet service like Airbnb is to build what Alvin E. Roth, the economist whose work on labor marketplaces earned him the Nobel Prize, calls a “thick marketplace,” a critical mass of consumers and producers, readers and writers, or buyers and sellers.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

Yes, hotels may be collecting some data behind the scenes, perhaps to market to you better in the future, but they have no interest in turning you down as a patron, nor do they have the legal right to do so based on your identity. Those rules don’t quite apply with Airbnb, which encourages users to log in with their Facebook accounts and provide detailed profiles. Some Airbnb users have reported being discriminated against because of their appearances. Franklin Leonard, who owns the Black List, a script discovery and reading service in Hollywood, recounted to me a story about trying to book Airbnb lodging for a business trip. Leonard travels frequently and had had success with Airbnb in the past. Six months before a film festival, he tried to rent a house in Austin for himself and several employees, but the owner refused, saying he wouldn’t rent anything more than three months out.

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Aug. 30, 2013. tomslee.net/2013/08/why-the-sharing-economy-isnt.html. 239 “unreasonable obstacles”: ibid. 239 Atkin’s connection to Peers: Nitasha Tiku. “Airbnb’s Industry Mouthpiece Astroturfs for Donations.” Valleywag, a blog on Gawker. Dec. 11, 2013. valleywag.gawker.com/airbnbs-industry-mouthpiece-astroturfs-for-donations-1481305550. 239 Pierre Omidyar and Peers: Ryan Chittum. “Fortune Flacks for the ‘Sharing Economy.’” Columbia Journalism Review. Dec. 10, 2013. cjr.org/the_audit/fortune_flacks_for_the_sharing.php. 239 “We’ll provide everything”: Peers. “Help Fix the Law in New York.” action.peers.org/page/signup/office-drop-by-in-newyork-. 240 “You are responsible”: Airbnb. “Terms of Service.” May 22, 2012. airbnb.com/home/terms. 241 Uber financing program: Mark Milian.

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But the message had already been communicated: Leonard and his employees weren’t welcome there, and the reasoning was fairly clear. Leonard began changing how he styled his Airbnb profile. “As it is, I do everything I can to make clear that I’m a responsible tenant,” he said, “typically either mentioning that I’m in town with the company that I founded and run or that I’m traveling with my fiancée. “After this event, I actually changed my profile photo on Airbnb to one with my fiancée [who isn’t black] and I together. Sad but true. Got the idea from another black man on Twitter who had had similar experiences.” Despite tweeting a complaint at Airbnb, which encourages Twitter feedback from users, Leonard never heard from the company.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

Another of Andreessen Horowitz’s venture investments is Airbnb, a peer-to-peer marketplace founded in 2007 that allows anyone to rent out a room in their home, transforming it into a hotel. By the end of 2013, Airbnb had topped 10 million guest stays from an active list of 550,000 worldwide properties in 192 countries that included spare rooms in homes, castles, and yurts.111 And in February 2014, the 700-person startup raised a $475 million round of investment at a valuation of $10 billion,112 which makes it worth about a half as much as the $22 billion Hilton corporation, a worldwide chain with 3,897 hotels and 152,000 employees. Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky describes the company as a platform of “trust” in which the reputations of guests and of hosts will be determined by feedback on the network.113 But Airbnb has been beset by such a scarcity of trust from the authorities that 15,000 New York City hosts were subpoenaed in May 2014 by New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman because they may not have paid taxes on their rental incomes.

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What the Financial Times calls a “regulatory backlash”45 has pushed Uber to limit surge pricing during emergencies46 and forced Airbnb hosts to install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in their homes.47 “Just because a company has an app instead of a storefront doesn’t mean consumer protection laws don’t apply,” notes the New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who is trying to subpoena Airbnb’s user data in New York City.48 A group of housing activists in San Francisco is even planning a late 2014 ballot measure in the city that would “severely curb” Airbnb’s operations.49 “Airbnb is bringing up the rent despite what the company says,” explains the New York City–based political party Working Families.50 The answer is to use the law and regulation to force the Internet out of its prolonged adolescence.

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Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 83. 107 Marc Andreessen, “Why Bitcoin Matters,” New York Times, January 21, 2014. 108 Ibid. 109 Colin Lecher, “How Did a $10 Potato Salad Kickstarter Raise More than $30,000?,” Verge, July 7, 2014. 110 Sarah Eckel, “You Want Me to Give You Money for What?,” BBC Capital, May 1, 2014. 111 Ryan Lawler, “Airbnb Tops 10 Million Guest Stays Since Launch, Now Has 550,000 Properties Listed Worldwide,” TechCrunch, December 19, 2013. 112 Sydney Ember, “Airbnb’s Huge Valuation,” New York Times, April 21, 2014. See also Carolyn Said, “Airbnb’s Swank Digs Reflect Growth, but Controversy Grows,” SFGate, January 27, 2014. 113 Thomas L. Friedman, “And Now for a Bit of Good News . . .” New York Times, July 19, 2014. 114 Will Oremus, “Silicon Valley Uber Alles,” Slate, June 6, 2014. 115 See Dan Amira, “Uber Will Ferry Hampton-Goers Via Helicopter This July 3rd,” New York, July 2013, nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/uber-helicopter-uberchopper-hamptons-july-3rd.html. 116 Jessica Guynn, “San Francisco Split by Silicon Valley’s Wealth,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2013. 117 Paul Sloan, “Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and Beyond),” CNET, December 19, 2011, news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57345138-93/marc-andreessen-predictions-for-2012-and-beyond. 118 Mark Scott, “Traffic Snarls in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber,” New York Times, June 11, 2014. 119 Kevin Roose, “Uber Might Be More Valuable than Facebook Someday.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

Among other restrictions, it also limited short-term rental hosting to permanent city residents. In response, Airbnb took its lobbying efforts from City Hall to the streets. Before the election, the company bought sneering billboards that advertised how much money they had contributed to the city: Dear SF Tax Collector, You know the $12 million in hotel taxes? Don’t spend it all in one place. Love, Airbnb Of course, Airbnb had only paid those taxes after a fight. A second billboard carried on impudently: But … if you do spend all $12 million in one place, we suggest burritos. Love, Airbnb The anti-Airbnb measure was defeated, but turnout was significantly lower than the previous year and the winning side represented a mere 18 percent of eligible voters.

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“There’s one key,” Liam said. “One key?” I said. “For everybody?” A voice called out from across the room: “You have twenty-four hours to tell Airbnb the place isn’t as advertised.” Uh-oh. What else was wrong with it? Liam showed me the wall-mounted light in the hallway where they stashed the interior door key. To reach it required long arms or a leap. There were more tricks to learn, as a consequence of the possibly illicit nature of this type of rental arrangement and the evident stinginess of our Airbnb hosts. The Condo Hackers never came in through the front door, Liam explained. It was too conspicuous. I followed Liam down to the ground-floor garage, then outside to the rear of the building.

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Bad tips and an eviction notice. The well-off newcomers couldn’t help but rub it in. Airbnb, which had perhaps more than any other company contributed directly to the displacement of San Francisco tenants by taking some six thousand units off the long-term rental market, addressed its critics with open contempt. Neighborhood activists placed a municipal referendum on the November 2015 ballot that would have forced the venture-capital-backed startup to compete fairly with existing hotels and rental homes. The measure included provisions to ensure that Airbnb hosts paid taxes, stayed up to code, and reported occupancy and earnings.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

They made over $30,000 in profits from the cereals, which helped them continue building Airbnb. Eventually, a year and a half after founding, the startup landed a spot in Y Combinator. Paul Graham accepted them specifically because they were “cockroaches”: they were tenacious and had tried everything to survive, including selling cereal. Graham was looking for cockroaches during the 2008 recession. During a YC dinner, the co-founders met Greg McAdoo, a partner from Sequoia Capital, and they walked up to pitch him. “In two weeks, we had a term sheet for a $600,000 seed round,” Chesky said.3 Things changed for Airbnb from that point on. Looking back, Airbnb’s success seems as though it should have been a foregone conclusion.

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Companies in this category range from Slack, a workplace chat app designed to replace emails, to Gusto, a startup that handles human resources, payroll, and benefits. Another group, representing about one-fifth of billion-dollar companies, focuses on directly saving people money. Airbnb, for example, started as a cheap alternative to a hotel—though now the platform offers much more to its users than just cost savings. All of Airbnb’s early customer-facing materials focused on being affordable. A smaller percentage of billion-dollar startups focus on convenience, like Instacart, a grocery-delivery company that saves its customers a trip to the store. In the group of random startups, just one-third focused on productivity, while 19 percent provided convenience and 13 percent saved money.

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The key is for entrepreneurs to connect their fundraising with concrete and tangible milestones while giving themselves enough cushion and room for errors and delays. AN INVESTOR IN AIRBNB, DOORDASH, HOUZZ, ZIPLINE, AND MORE INTERVIEW WITH ALFRED LIN OF SEQUOIA CAPITAL Sequoia Capital, one of the most successful and longest-running venture capital firms in history, doesn’t need an introduction. Its portfolio includes Apple, Atari, Yahoo, Google, Oracle, YouTube, Stripe, Dropbox, Cisco, Zoom, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Alfred Lin, one of Sequoia’s partners, focuses mostly on consumer internet companies. Lin sits on the boards of Airbnb, Zipline, Houzz, and DoorDash, among other companies. I spoke with Alfred to learn more about how he became a venture capital investor and joined Sequoia, and how founders should think about fundraising and approaching VCs.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

In recent years, anti-Airbnb graffiti has popped up on the walls of cities where it is a dominant force. “Stop Airbnb and tourism” and “Our cities turn into commodities” in Athens. “Fuck Airbnb” in Venice. “One Airbnb tourist kicks out 2 to 3 students out [sic] of our city,” in Coimbra, Portugal. (These were protests against algorithms as well as the overall dominance of American Silicon Valley companies.) Barcelona and Berlin became known for strict regulation of Airbnb, limiting who could rent out their spaces on the platform and for how long. There was a backlash against Airbnb as a company, protesting its aggressive fees and lax approval of unreliable hosts.

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In 2018, Shagun Jhaver, at the time a PhD candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, worked with two Airbnb employees to conduct a sociological study of the company’s users. They analyzed how the platform’s hosts—who rented out their homes on the service for income—interacted with and felt about Airbnb’s algorithmic recommendation, search, and ratings systems, which helped renters find and book their listings. Jhaver and the other researchers coined the term algorithmic anxiety for the hosts’ “uncertainty about how Airbnb algorithms work and a perceived lack of control,” the team wrote in their findings. Hosts worried that the search algorithm was unfairly ignoring them or prioritizing other properties.

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In 2019, on a story assignment, I traveled to Iceland to experience its tourism boom, which was hitting a peak just prior to the pandemic halting global travel altogether. I stayed in an Airbnb rather than a hotel, selecting an apartment in the small stretch of downtown Reykjavík. Through the Airbnb search function I made sure the apartment was close to an industrial-chic coffee shop called Reykjavík Roasters, which I had identified in advance on Google Maps. The Airbnb was modeled on an industrial loft, with floor-to-ceiling windows opening to a view out over the miniature skyline. For decor, the identity-less apartment had a huge print of a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge, which made me feel like I hadn’t gone anywhere after leaving New York.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

THE MYTH OF TECHNOLOGICAL EXCEPTIONALISM Taxi drivers have protested that Uber violates the laws that regulate their industry by operating without permits,57 but Uber maintains that it is not a taxi company—it’s a technology company that uses neutral algorithms to merely facilitate connections between consumers and drivers. Meanwhile, the growth of Uber has quickly become a threat to the highly regulated taxi industry’s monopoly on chauffeur services. Companies like Uber and Airbnb separate themselves from their predecessors, taxis and hotels, by emphasizing the altruistic premise of their “sharing” platforms. Airbnb argues that it is a technology platform, like Facebook, YouTube, or Google, that connects hosts with guests. In conflicts with Airbnb, the hotel industry alleges that the company operates illegal hotels: hosts rent out their spare rooms or homes to traveling guests but do not have to comply with the safety regulations that govern hotels or bed and breakfasts.58 Likewise, Facebook, which is in the business of sharing news, resists being categorized as a media company.

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The gratitude logic of “accept our contribution, but don’t expect us to submit to governance in this space” was similarly visible in an advertising campaign by Airbnb in San Francisco. A sample ad plastered to a bus stop shelter read, “Dear Public Library System, We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later.” The condescending ads, which hinted broadly at the city’s ingratitude for the taxes that Airbnb’s business generates, followed an $8 million lobbying campaign by the company against San Francisco’s 2015 ballot measure Proposition F. Voters ultimately rejected the proposition, which would have restricted short-term rentals and thus undermined Airbnb’s short-term-rental business model.11 Gratitude logic is part of how Uber drums up popular support for its regulatory evasions.

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Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky, “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, September 16, 2016, www.benedelman.org/publications/airbnb-guest-discrimination-2016–09–16.pdf. 26. Sam Levin, “Airbnb Gives In to Regulator’s Demand to Test for Racial Discrimination by Hosts,” The Guardian, April 27, 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/27/airbnb-government-housing-test-black-discrimination. 27. Alex Rosenblat, “Uber’s Drive-By Politics,” Motherboard, May 27, 2016, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gv5jaw/uber-lyft-austin-drive-by-politics. 28.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models
by Barry Libert and Megan Beck
Published 6 Jun 2016

Evan Bakker, “Bankers Across the Globe Expect Major Tech Companies to Cut Into Their Retail Banking Business,” Business Insider, March 18, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/bankers-expect-their-retail-banking-revenue-to-fall-2015-3. 2. Barry Libert, Yoram (Jerry) Wind, and Megan Beck Fenley, “What Apple, Lending Club, and Airbnb Know about Collaborating with Customers,” HBR.org, July 3, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/07/what-apple-lending-club-and-airbnb-know-about-collaborating-with-customers; and “What Airbnb, Uber, and Alibaba Have in Common,” HBR.org, November 20, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/11/what-airbnb-uber-and-alibaba-have-in-common. 3. “Did You Know? Facts from Our Executive Compensation and Benefits (ECB) Proprietary Databases,” Alvarez & Marsal, issue 8, November 10, 2014, http://www.alvarezandmarsal.com/sites/default/files/files/Age-CEO-CFO-COO.pdf.

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PALMER, former Dean, the Wharton School; former CEO, Touche Ross (now Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited) “The Network Imperative is a must-read because professional relationships, business models, and the way we position value in only three to five years will be changed to a point that is difficult to grasp. Lead the change in your company, or be prepared to eat dust.” —JEROME PERIBERE, President and CEO, Sealed Air “Today’s management education is focused on the firm. It is clear that networks like Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon require us to rethink management education if our future leaders are to have any chance of survival and growth. The Network Imperative is a must-read for all business, public policy, and academic leaders—today’s and tomorrow’s.” —DAVID C. SCHMITTLEIN, John C. Head III Dean, MIT Sloan School of Management “One of the most insightful and practical books on how networks are creating future competitive advantage.

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With the growth of digital platforms, organizations can now expand their network connections rapidly and at very low cost. Today’s leading organizations are network-centric and are creating remarkable economic returns by capitalizing on network advantages, such as co-creation with their customers (Facebook); digital platforms (Amazon); shared assets (Uber and Airbnb); and big data insights (Netflix and Google). Leaders and investors who want to participate in the network revolution need to envision their future, and the future of their industry, based on intangibles and networks or risk falling behind. The Network Imperative provides the why and how to survive and thrive in the age of hyperscale digital networks.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

On the campaign against discrimination on Airbnb, see “Airbnb Has a Discrimination Problem. Ask Anyone Who’s Tried to #Airbnbwhileblack,” by Aja Romano (Vox, May 6, 2016). Airbnb’s report in response to the accusations is titled “Airbnb’s Work to Fight Discrimination and Build Inclusion,” by Laura W. Murphy (September 8, 2016): http://blog.atairbnb.com/​wp-content/​uploads/​2016/​09/​REPORT_Airbnbs-Work-to-Fight-Discrimination-and-Build-Inclusion.pdf?3c10be (accessed September 2017). The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing’s allegations against Airbnb are contained here: www.dfeh.ca.gov/​wp-content/​uploads/​sites/​32/​2017/​06/​04-19-17-Airbnb-DFEH-Agreement-Signed-DFEH-1-1.pdf (accessed September 2017).

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Two months after the viral explosion of #AirbnbWhileBlack, however, when the company received complaints from California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing alleging that it “may have failed to prevent discrimination against African American guests” and “may have engaged in acts of discrimination” itself, Airbnb retreated. “While Airbnb simply operates a platform and is not well positioned to make determinations regarding the booking decisions Hosts make in each case,” the company said in a legal response, “Airbnb has recognized on its own based on available data that some third-party hosts on its site are likely violating Airbnb’s policy against racial discrimination, and that its policies and processes have, to date, been insufficient fully to address the problem.”

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“It’s not an emphasis of this ideology,” Ferenstein said. Suffering can be innovated away. Let the innovators do their start-ups and suffering will be reduced. Each entrepreneurial venture could take on a different social problem. “In the case of Airbnb, the way you alleviate housing suffering is by allowing people to share their homes,” Ferenstein said. An Airbnb ad campaign along these lines featured older black women thriving now that the entrepreneurs had helped them to rent out rooms and make extra money. Of course, many poor people don’t own homes or have a surplus of space to rent out. And many African Americans find it difficult to rent on the platform—hotels can no longer easily discriminate by race, but spare-room hoteliers often do.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 9 May 2022

Chapter 6: Hacking Luck to Your Advantage Airbnb: The Airbnb story has been told many places, including by Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy (New York: HMH Books, 2017). “Idea times Product times Execution times Team times Luck”: Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s manifest destiny,” New Yorker, October 3, 2016. how luck influences large companies: Jim Collins, Great by Choice (Good to Great) (New York: Harper Business, 2011). Airbnb’s bookings dropped: Corrie Driebusch, Maureen Farrell, and Cara Lombardo, “Airbnb plans to file for IPO in August,” Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2020.

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And allow millions of people, around the world, when they are out of town—to drum for Barry Manilow or for any other reason—to make some extra cash by renting out their place. Airbedandbreakfast.com was rebranded as Airbnb—and immediately began to get traction. Sure, few people wanted to set up an air mattress in their apartment and serve breakfast to out-of-town visitors. But it turned out that millions of people around the world wanted to rent out their empty places. (The full Airbnb story is told in Leigh Gallagher’s excellent book The Airbnb Story.) There was one remaining problem: the Airbnb team needed money to continue their business. They were in the midst of the Great Recession; investors around the world had tightened their belts.

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Remarkably, he also just happened to have spent the past year and a half analyzing the vacation rental market. He had determined that the market was actually worth $40 billion, far more than what others thought. He met the Airbnb team and was immediately ready to send a check for $585,000. Airbnb now had a product people wanted and the money to get their idea off the ground. They were now on the path to a multibillion-dollar valuation. As Tad Friend wrote in the New Yorker, Airbnb’s rise “seems replete with luck.” There was the lucky meeting of Seibel in Austin. There was the lucky encounter with the perfect investor, McAdoo, at Y Combinator. And of course, there was Manilow’s drummer.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

It’s about using other nonmonetary assets to solve problems that you would otherwise hire someone else to solve or throw money at—assets like your time, your effort, your network, and your own talent and ingenuity. Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, and Nathan Blecharczyk leveraged every one of those resources in 2007 and 2008 to bootstrap their way into the peer-to-peer online hospitality platform that we know today as Airbnb. Airbnb began as a website called Airbedandbreakfast.com that was designed to offer a place to stay for attendees of large conferences once all the hotel rooms in the host city were sold-out. The idea came to Joe one day in September 2007 as he sat at home surfing the internet, wondering how he was going to make rent and not lose a friend.

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The idea worked. They got a ton of press and they sold all the cereal. I was absolutely blown away by this part of the Airbnb story. But it triggered a question: What was the point? How was this really going to help Airbedandbreakfast.com? Joe’s answer was that it wasn’t. Or, more precisely, that it didn’t really matter. “At $40 a box times 500 boxes, we made $20,000 in breakfast cereal,” Joe explained, “which was just enough to pay off our credit cards.” Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s didn’t fuel the Airbnb rocket ship, but it kept them going long enough for them to get accepted into Y Combinator’s winter class that year.

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Personally, I think they had the answers to their big “why” questions right from the beginning—sleeping in someone’s house on an air bed, like a sleepover, makes you feel like you’re a part of the city you’re traveling to, whereas staying in a national chain hotel can make you feel apart from it—but it took them some time to get it. Once they did, however, once they began to connect more dots, and those dots began to connect to their own stories and to something deeper going on in the culture, the evolution of Airbedandbreakfast.com into Airbnb began in earnest and set them on the unicorn’s path. The stories of Bumble and Airbnb are unique to themselves, but what is true across industries and across time is that all businesses are stories, and all stories are a process. They are a mechanism for thinking deeply about yourself, your product or service, your employees, your customers, your market, and the world.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Still, nothing concrete resulted from these meetings—not from Google, not from Apple, and not even from another startup closer to WeWork in age and valuation: Airbnb. In multiple meetings with the San Francisco home rental startup, Neumann pitched Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, on a plan to reinvigorate WeLive and spread it around the world. Chesky, despite a smaller valuation of $35 billion, had much of the credibility in Silicon Valley Neumann seemed to crave. Airbnb lost less money and had a more efficient business model; Chesky was respected by many top venture capitalists. Neumann angled to cultivate a partnership. He told Chesky that WeWork and Airbnb would build ten thousand apartment units they would rent on Airbnb. Chesky’s initial reaction was that ten thousand was a bit small for Airbnb to get involved.

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For employees holding stock options—which generally varied from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars when they were issued—their stock was now worth over ten times more than when Benchmark invested two years earlier, at least on paper. Just four years old, WeWork was already the billion-dollar company Neumann had envisioned when he was opening the first building. Still, he wasn’t close to being done. Airbnb would soon nab a $10 billion valuation, and Neumann saw himself in that stratosphere. More and more, he was portraying WeWork as a tech company. WeWork was part of the sharing economy; it needed offices just as Uber and Airbnb needed cars and apartments, he told investors. Its tech was cutting edge, he’d say. The entrepreneur who could barely use a MacBook managed to pepper references to technology effortlessly into his pitch.

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WeWork was a by-product of the same mass delusion that raised the valuations of “tech” companies higher and higher. Investors saw a physical social network with amazing growth rather than a collection of people paying market rents for office space that had losses growing just as fast as revenue. When Neumann told them WeWork was like Uber and Airbnb, the investors focused on the few parallels between those businesses rather than numerous fundamental differences, including how Airbnb and Uber are asset light and don’t have costly fifteen-year leases for their homes and cars. These investors were considered the smart money—the ones investing on behalf of wealthy families or endowments or pensions who had their pick of advisers.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

“An Update on Our Work to Serve All Stakeholders.” Airbnb Newsroom, 28 Jan. 2020, news.airbnb.com/serving-all-stakeholders/. 10. Volz, Dustin, and Kirsten Grind. “Airbnb Executive Resigned Last Year over Chinese Request for More Data Sharing.” The Wall Street Journal, 20 Nov. 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-executive-resigned-last-year-over-chinese-request-for-more-data-sharing-11605896753?mod=mhp. 11. Volz, Dustin, and Kirsten Grind. “Airbnb Executive Resigned Last Year over Chinese Request for More Data Sharing.” The Wall Street Journal, 20 Nov. 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-executive-resigned-last-year-over-chinese-request-for-more-data-sharing-11605896753?

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It made a nice little chart that described the relationships that Airbnb hoped to have with its various stakeholders.9 Chesky was lionized for the announcement. But it turns out the handy chart conveniently omitted one of one of Airbnb’s most important stakeholders: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). About seven months before Brian Chesky’s declaration of love for stakeholders, Airbnb hired Sean Joyce, a former deputy director of the FBI, as its first “chief trust officer.” The purpose of the role was to protect users’ safety on the platform. Yet in a move that Airbnb tried to sweep under the rug, Joyce resigned before the end of the year over concerns about how the behemoth was sharing data on millions of its users—without their knowledge—with the Chinese Communist Party.

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Guests and hosts are at the top of Airbnb’s stakeholder list. Yet it was stealing and sharing data from both of these stakeholders to share it with an even more important one. According to The Wall Street Journal, Joyce left because he was concerned that Airbnb wasn’t transparent with its users about the data that it regularly shares with the CCP. And Airbnb continued to expand the scope of data that it shared.10 Regularly shared data about American users includes phone numbers, email addresses, and the content of messages between users and the company, according to unidentified sources within Airbnb. Chinese officials privately approached Airbnb with an unwritten request for even more data, including so-called “real-time data,” about the users.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising
by Ryan Holiday
Published 2 Sep 2013

The necessity of that jolt—needing to get it any way they can—has made start-ups get very creative. Let’s look at Airbnb again. The company’s most effective marketing tactic (besides making a great product) would never have been conceived or attempted by a pure marketing team. Instead, the engineers coded a set of tools that made it possible for every member to seamlessly cross-post his or her Airbnb listing on craigslist (because craigslist does not technically “allow” this, it was a fairly ingenious work-around). As a result, Airbnb—a tiny site—suddenly had free distribution on one of the most popular websites in the world.

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That is what growth hackers have taught us. Run down the list of the start-ups we’ve talked about in this book, from Hotmail to Airbnb to Groupon to Spotify, and see the startling fact: tactics that no one would have previously described as “marketing” turned out to be the marketing steroids behind their business growth. For Hotmail, it was inserting an e-mail signature at the bottom that turned every e-mail sent by one of its users into a pitch for new users. For Airbnb it was craiglist infiltration, which allowed Airbnb hosts to use the site as a sales platform. For Groupon and LivingSocial it was their referral offers that paid users to share deals with their friends.

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This was clearly a better market, but the founders sensed they could improve the idea further, so they pivoted slightly to target the type of traveler who didn’t want to crash on couches or in hostels but was looking to avoid hotels. This did better still. Finally, based on feedback and usage patterns, they shortened the name to Airbnb, abandoned the breakfast and networking parts of the business, and redefined the service as a place for people to rent or book any kind of lodging imaginable (from rooms to apartments to trains, boats, castles, penthouses, and private islands). This was explosive—to the tune of millions of bookings a year in locations all over the world. Airbnb had a good idea in 2007. The founders could have spent all their time and energy trying to force the “let people crash on your floor and feed them breakfast” angle and created a small business around it.

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design
by Alvin E. Roth
Published 1 Jun 2015

Booking a room with an Airbnb host was a little like that. So Airbnb had to figure out how a market with many hosts offering one room at a time could compete more effectively with hotels. Price was obviously important. But it was the spread of smartphones that helped Airbnb close the speed gap, and that may have mattered even more than price. Today, as hosts manage their reservations on their smartphones, they don’t have to wait until they return home to confirm a booking—they just check their phones. They can also, as soon as the room is booked, immediately update their Airbnb listing to remove its availability.

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This is why the rise of mobile communications has been so important for the development of many Internet markets: smartphones shorten response times. Consider Airbnb, which makes a market between travelers looking for a nice, cheap place to stay and hosts who want to rent out their underused guest rooms and apartments. When Airbnb started in San Francisco in 2008, most people communicated with the Internet via computers. So if you wanted to make your guest room available for visitors the following week, you might use your laptop to post it on Airbnb in the morning before leaving for work. When you came home in the evening, you would check to see whether anyone had expressed an interest—and if so, you would confirm his or her booking.

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As a potential guest, you might have had to wait a whole day to find out whether the room you wanted was still available, and if you learned at the end of the day that it wasn’t, you would have had to start over. You can see the problem. Airbnb’s business model worked well enough in the beginning, when the market was small and the travelers were intrepid young people on tight budgets who were willing to take the time to find a good deal. Airbnb’s competitors in those days were similar Web services, such as the London-based Crashpadder (acquired by Airbnb in 2012) and the Toronto-based iStopOver (acquired by the Berlin-based 9Flats, also in 2012). Competition in those days was based largely on attracting more and more hosts and travelers in order to make the market thicker.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

Fast-forward to today: Airbnb is effectively the world’s largest hotel chain without owning a single hotel room. It has more than 800,000 listings in 34,000 cities. It has housed more than 20 million people. With a valuation of $20 billion, Airbnb is worth more than twice as much as Hyatt, and Brian has gone from being unable to afford the rent to being a billionaire. At the conclusion of Chesky’s creation story, he always says, “It’s like the United Nations at every kitchen table!” While the idea that Airbnb is bringing people from around the world together is cute, it masks the economic reality. Airbnb has succeeded in bringing eBay’s trust-through-algorithms-and-ratings model to lodging and built a business around it.

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In the case of lodging, as with Airbnb, increased stock takes a scarce resource and makes it more abundant and therefore affordable. It lowers hotel room rates and transfers some of that value to people with a spare bedroom while also creating new value. While Airbnb rents castles and lodges the likes of Charlie Songhurst, its data also show that it is allowing people to travel who otherwise could not and is making it possible for people to stay on vacation longer. Where a typical tourist stay is three nights, the average Airbnb guest stays for five nights. Finally, Airbnb extends the opportunity for supplemental income to hundreds of thousands of households.

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eBay’s business is based: “Online Extra: Pierre Omidyar on ‘Connecting People,’ Bloomberg Businessweek, June 19, 2005, http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/195874-online-extra-pierre-omidyar-on-connecting-people?type=old_article. It has more than 800,000 listings: “About Us,” Airbnb, https://www.airbnb.com/about/about-us. With a valuation of $20 billion: Ingrid Lunden, “Airbnb Is Raising a Monster Round at a $20B Valuation,” TechCrunch, February 27, 2015, http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/airbnb-2/; “Hyatt Hotels Corporation (H),” Yahoo! Finance, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=H; “#1006 Brian Chesky,” “The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-chesky/. At the conclusion of Chesky’s creation: Steven T.

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want
by Diane Mulcahy
Published 8 Nov 2016

The Gig Economy gives us options to rent or access cars (Zipcar, Uber), bikes (Hubway, Citi Bike), fully furnished apartments and homes (Airbnb, Onefinestay), clothes (Rent the Runway, Le Tote), jewelry (Haute Vault), and just about anything else. With the ability to access so much so easily, we need to come up with pretty compelling reasons to buy. There’s even a lifestyle emerging built on the foundation of the access economy. Prerna Gupta, a serial entrepreneur, wrote about her experience living what she calls “the Airbnb lifestyle.”1 She and her husband lived in several countries over the course of the year, staying in temporary Airbnb housing in every location and carrying all of their possessions in a few suitcases.

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To evaluate the possibility (and financial impact) of renting, start with online calculators that can give you a preliminary idea of the financial differences between renting and buying both a home and a car.11 Accessing housing instead of owning it might make more sense at various stages in your life. If renting doesn’t sound appealing, there is a new “Airbnb lifestyle” of accessing housing that might be more interesting. Returning ex-pats Elaine Kuok and David Roberts wrote about the year they spent living “home-free” in Airbnb apartments around New York City to explore a variety of neighborhoods.12 Their lifestyle offers them flexibility they couldn’t have if they were committed to a year-long lease or a multidecade mortgage. I contacted David on Twitter for an update, and, as of this writing, he and Elaine are enjoying a second year of their home-free lifestyle.

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CFP Board, “New Research Shows Most American Households Do Financial Planning, but the Extent of this Planning Varies Greatly,” September 18, 2013. www.cfp.net/news-events/latest-news/2013/09/18/new-research-shows-most-american-households-do-financial-planning-but-the-extent-of-this-planning-varies-greatly CHAPTER 9 1. Gupta, Prerna, “Airbnb Lifestyle: The Rise of the Hipster Nomad,” Tech Crunch, October 3, 2104. techcrunch.com/2014/10/03/airbnb-lifestyle-the-rise-of-the-hipster-nomad/ 2. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, “Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit,” February 2016. www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data/pdf/HHDC_2015Q4.pdf 3. Wolff, Edward N., “Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1962–2013: What Happened over the Great Recession?”

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

You can’t stay the same.”2 Zadeh and Chesky realized that in order to come up with something completely new, they needed to give themselves the time and space to experiment—something they’d had when they launched the company, purely because of circumstance, but hadn’t been prioritizing as Airbnb grew. They created a small dedicated team within the company, led by Chesky, whose first mission was an afternoon at Fisherman’s Wharf, a scenic spot overlooking San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge, where out-of-towners flock and souvenir shops abound. The result, which came several years later, was the launch of Airbnb Trips, a trip-planning service that marks the company’s first major expansion. In Chapter 8 you’ll learn more about what came between that afternoon and the product launch, and about Airbnb’s structure, which allows both for the maintenance of its core product and for experiments with new ideas, like Trips.

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These stories illustrate what that process has looked like in a variety of settings. AIRBNB’S SECOND FOUNDING Trips, which I first talked about in Chapter 1, marks Airbnb’s second founding. But before Trips was launched, it languished for a while because the company wasn’t focused on it even as it continued to grow its core business. The urgency Brian Chesky felt about ushering his company into its next phase had sent him back to the inspirations that had made it a success in the first place. Among them was the book that had motivated him to move to San Francisco and start Airbnb: Neal Gabler’s biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

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In 2006, you probably never would have even thought of renting a stranger’s apartment instead of checking in at the Hilton. As of this writing, more than 100 million people have,1 thanks to Airbnb. At its core, the company is already experimental. If it weren’t, it never would have uncovered a whole hidden market and grown in just ten years to a valuation of $30 billion. So what more could startup thinking possibly bring to a company that very recently found huge success by disrupting an entire market? A few years after Airbnb launched, the company’s original team started looking around for growth opportunities. They’d added new features to their existing product, including user verification and host insurance to increase confidence in the platform, and they’d formed a partnership with Concur Technologies to capture business travelers.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Local Motors, an ExO, accomplishes the same thing for just $3 million—a 1,000x improvement, albeit not to the same production scale. Next, consider Airbnb, a company that leverages users’ extra bedrooms. Founded in 2008, Airbnb currently has 1,324 employees and operates 500,000 listings in 33,000 cities. However, Airbnb owns no physical assets and is worth almost $10 billion. That’s more than the value of Hyatt Hotels, which has 45,000 employees spread across 549 properties. And while Hyatt’s business is comparatively flat, Airbnb’s number of room-nights delivered is growing exponentially. At its current pace, Airbnb will be the biggest hotelier in the world by late 2015. Similarly, Uber, the Airbnb of cars—Uber converts private automobiles into taxis—has been valued at $17 billion.

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In the software world, Salesforce.com, which operates 100 percent in the cloud, can adapt to changing market conditions much faster than can competitor SAP, given that the latter requires customized installations onsite. We’ve already discussed Airbnb, which by leveraging its users’ existing assets, is now valued at more than the Hyatt Hotels chain worldwide. While Hyatt has 45,000 employees spread out across its 549 properties, Airbnb has just 1,324, all located in a single office. Similarly, Lending Club, Bitcoin, Clinkle and Kickstarter are forcing a radical rethinking of the banking and venture capital industries, respectively. (No retail outlets are involved in these new financial tech startups.)

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Today, it is almost impossible to find a single startup that doesn’t use AWS. We have even found a simple metric that helps to identify and distinguish emerging Exponential Organizations: a minimum 10x improvement in output over four to five years. The following shows some ExOs and their minimum 10x performance inprovement over their peers: Airbnb Hotels 90x more listings per employee GitHub Software 109x more repositories per employee Local Motors Automotive 1000x cheaper to produce new car model, 5-22x faster process for a car to produce (depending on vehicle) Quirky Consumer Goods 10x faster product development (29 days vs 300 days) Google Ventures Investments 2.5x more investments in early stage startups, 10x faster through design process Valve Gaming 30x more market cap per employee Tesla Automotive 30x more market cap per employee Tangerine (formerly ING Direct Canada) Banking 7x more customers per employee, 4x more deposits per customer Look again at Waze.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There
by Ted Books
Published 20 Feb 2013

Within the company’s first year and a half, it signed up 10,000 vehicles. Airbnb has similarly destigmatized strangers in private homes. Today, half of the company’s hosts are renting out a spare room, living alongside a stranger. The other half are turning their empty apartments over to unknown tenants. One of the older companies in the sharing space — at all of 4 years old — Airbnb has spawned its own share of mimics. “There’s such a proliferation of ‘the Airbnb of XYZ,’” Turner says, “and I think some of the models probably aren’t going anywhere, like the ‘Airbnb of toilets’ or the ‘Airbnb of dogs.’” But she predicts that services meeting the needs of both sides of a market — the givers and receivers in sharing — will succeed.

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And I think that kind of bleeds into your personal life.” This move back into city centers also coincided with the Great Recession. Those big houses and multiple cars, it turns out, were beyond many of our means. And it’s no coincidence, Turner says, that Airbnb — a company founded around shared housing — was born in 2008, just as the United States was entering a recession built on a housing crisis. For many Airbnb hosts, the spare rooms they rented through the service helped them keep their homes. City living, for all its allure, is expensive, but the sharing economy makes it possible for more people, whether they’re sharing a car because they can’t afford to own one, or a bike because they’ve got nowhere to store it.

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Sharing has its downsides, too. We’re used to the notion of sharing libraries, public parks, and train cars. But in many ways, American culture drifted away from sharing as a value when we spread out from city centers and into the suburbs. Molly Turner, director of public policy for the short-term rental lodging website Airbnb, pins the turning point to an iconic image: Richard Nixon, in Moscow, introducing Nikita Khrushchev to the modern marvel of the washing machine available for private consumption in every American home. Beginning with the era of that washing machine, Turner argues, we forgot how to share. In the so-called Kitchen Debate, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev dispute their countries’ relative merits while touring the United States exhibit in Moscow in 1959.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

How do you know you’re not renting your DC apartment to the Unabomber? He has twenty-six ratings too from prior rentals, and he left them all spotless. And there you have the Airbnb narrative. All that’s stopping Uber and Airbnb from realizing their dreams of a better, more efficient world are the villains in this laissez-faire fairy tale: the cab and hotel lobbies that profit from the old economy status quo (at the expense of the rest of us, as the Uber and Airbnb lobbies are quick to remind us) and their bureaucratic counterparts in government who are too lazy or rule-bound to care about doing what’s right. Let’s start with what we can all agree on: the Uber app is awesome.

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No, actually. Because the host seemed like a nice guy, and anyway, what goes around comes around: you don’t want to get known on Airbnb as Mr. Critical. (Ray did send a private communication to the host suggesting he wash his sheets more often.) So, yes, Airbnb is awesome: we’ve both used it a number of times since and mostly, but not always, successfully. But let’s not kid ourselves by equating the advent of smart phones to market perfection.11 In saying that Airbnb and Uber have their problems, we’re also not buying the taxi and hotel lobbies’ line that they’re merely protecting consumers from unreliable, unregulated, and sometimes outright dangerous conmen.

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Especially for the over-forty set who suffered under big taxi’s reign for most of their adult lives, there’s a head-shaking sense of amazement when you summon a cab with—literally—the touch of a button to pick you up from some godforsaken San Diego strip mall that happens to have the city’s best sushi (the taxi dispatcher said it would be “at least an hour”). It’s like having your own personal cab genie. (Just mention Uber to an iPhone-owning senior citizen, and you’ll really see what we mean.) Airbnb is an epic leap forward when compared to the epic leap of faith involved in renting a room via its predecessors, the classified ads or Craigslist. But let’s not confuse a set of groundbreaking market innovations with the end of market frictions. Yes, there are entire websites devoted to Airbnb horror stories—the trashed homes, the tenant-turned-squatter. There’s an equal number of angry rants directed at Uber. Neither of us rents our idle real estate assets when we’re out of town and not because we’re old-fashioned.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

The Domestic Workers Alliance, for example, formulated a Good Work Code in hopes that policy makers would endorse their guidelines and that platform owners would follow them. Seattle imposed a tax on Uber and gave drivers the right to unionize, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City made attempts to curb the number of Uber cars, and the city of San Francisco tried to regulate Airbnb. A third pathway is to move production outside of the market altogether. Yochai Benkler labeled this “non-market peer production,” with the most successful example being Wikipedia. And, finally, for the compensated labor market, there is a fourth approach, which is platform cooperativism, a model of social organization based on the understanding that it is hard to substantially change what you don’t own.

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These new structures embrace the technology to creatively reshape it, embed their values, and then operate it in support of local economies. Seriously, why does a village in Denmark or a town like Marfa in rural West Texas have to generate profits for some fifty people in Silicon Valley if they can create their own version of Airbnb? Instead of trying to be the next Silicon Valley, generating profits for the few, these cities could mandate the use of a cooperative platform, which could maximize use value for the community. Platform co-ops already exist, from cooperatively owned online labor brokerages and marketplaces like Fairmondo, to video streaming sites that are owned by filmmakers and their fans.

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We have to design for tomorrow’s labor market. In the absence of rigorous democratic debates, online labor behemoths are producing their version of the future of work right in front of us. We have to move quickly. Together with cities like Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro, which have already pushed back against Uber and Airbnb, we ought to refine the discourse around “smart cities” and machine ownership. We need incubators, small experiments, step-by-step walkthroughs, best practices, and legal templates that online co-ops can use. Developers will script a WordPress for platform co-ops, a free-software labor platform that local developers can customize.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

CHAPTER 5 NEW BUSINESS MODELS: MAKING IT RAIN ON THE BLOCKCHAIN Founded a month before the market crashed in 2008, Airbnb has become a $25 billion platform, now the world’s largest supplier of rooms as measured by market value and rooms occupied. But the providers of rooms receive only part of the value they create. International payments go through Western Union, which takes $10 of every transaction and big foreign exchange off the top. Settlements take a long time. Airbnb stores and monetizes all the data. Both renters and customers alike have concerns about privacy. We brainstormed with blockchain expert Dino Mark Angaritis to design an Airbnb competitor on the blockchain.

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When you want to rent, the bAirbnb software scans and filters the blockchain for all the listings that meet your criteria (e.g., ten miles from the Eiffel Tower, two bedrooms, four-plus star ratings only). Your user experience is identical to that in Airbnb, except that you communicate peer to peer on the network, through encrypted and cryptographically signed messages not stored in Airbnb’s database.2 You and the room owner are the only two people who can read these messages. You can swap phone numbers, an exchange that Airbnb blocks to preserve future revenues. On bAirbnb you and the owner could communicate off-chain and complete the transaction entirely off-chain, but you are better off completing the transaction on-chain for a few reasons.

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A world where billions of excluded people can now participate in the global economy and share in its largesse. Here’s a preview. Creating a True Peer-to-Peer Sharing Economy Pundits often refer to Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and others as platforms for the “sharing economy.” It’s a nice notion—that peers create and share in value. But these businesses have little to do with sharing. In fact, they are successful precisely because they do not share—they aggregate. It is an aggregating economy. Uber is a $65 billion corporation that aggregates driving services. Airbnb, the $25 billion Silicon Valley darling, aggregates vacant rooms. Others aggregate equipment and handymen through their centralized, proprietary platforms and then resell them.

Travel While You Work: The Ultimate Guide to Running a Business From Anywhere
by Mish Slade
Published 13 Aug 2015

I do travel for the sake of it and make sure I have trips that I take just for the hell of it and work from wherever I am. I have a base near the circus school in Glasgow, but make sure that I spend time working with other schools around the world – recently in NYC and Brazil. Most of my travel is solo and could be in a hotel, Airbnb (www.worktravel.co/airbnb) or staying with a network of friends. I would normally spend around 50% of my time outside the UK Did you do the same work before you became a digital nomad? I did with regards to telecommunications, but I slowly moved from being office-based in London to being remotely based in Scotland, to now being based wherever I like.

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There's a Mac App called World Clock (www.worktravel.co/worldclock), which is useful for checking the times back home (or around the world) for meetings etc. Shameless plug: my app World Time Widget (www.worktravel.co/timewidget) does the same thing on iPhone. Having a local SIM makes life so much easier. [See Chapter 1: Settle In Fast for more information about buying a local SIM.] Airbnb (www.worktravel.co/airbnb) can be good for finding accommodation. Blake Boles: Adventure company owner Can you provide a bit of information about what you do and how you got into it? My company, Unschool Adventures (www.unschooladventures.com), leads international trips and U.S.-based educational programs for self-directed young adults.

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I don't think I could stay in Estonia too long – it's too cold both weather-wise and interpersonally for me. But it's actually a digital destination – it has some of the fastest internet in the world, and internet-friendly business laws. I think every destination is worthy in its own right. How do you find accommodation? Booking.com (www.worktravel.co/booking), Airbnb (www.worktravel.co/airbnb), VRBO (www.worktravel.co/vrbo), FlipKey (www.worktravel.co/flipkey) and 9flats (www.worktravel.co/9flats) are all ones we've used. Sometimes we will use a rental company specific to the location, like Sakura House in Japan (www.worktravel.co/sakura). What we're looking for is the most inexpensive place we can get downtown.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose
by Nik Halik and Garrett B. Gunderson
Published 5 Mar 2018

Here are just a few examples of ways you can use the sharing economy to boost your income: Airbnb Airbnb, VRBO, and other companies allow you to rent a room or your whole home to travelers, thus earning supplemental income with existing assets. In just over seven years, Airbnb has become a multibillion dollar company with more than two million listings across 190-plus countries. There are many things to consider before starting an Airbnb service, including municipal laws (many cities don’t allow it); competing rates in your area; and the costs of hosting, such as cleaning, higher utility bills, taxes, and Airbnb’s payment processing fee (6 to 12 percent).

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There are many things to consider before starting an Airbnb service, including municipal laws (many cities don’t allow it); competing rates in your area; and the costs of hosting, such as cleaning, higher utility bills, taxes, and Airbnb’s payment processing fee (6 to 12 percent). Your listing will be displayed on Airbnb’s website, and you can also cross-promote it using any free social media platforms or your own website. Airbnb arbitrage is the process of renting out a property that you do not own but rent for yourself. An arbitrage opportunity exists where you generate more money renting out the property on Airbnb than it costs you to rent from the landlord, providing you free rental status. If you want to rent on Airbnb, but have a landlord, approach him or her and get permission to rent out the space. Offer your landlord something on the income side, perhaps a flat rate or a percentage of all Airbnb earnings on the property.

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Offer your landlord something on the income side, perhaps a flat rate or a percentage of all Airbnb earnings on the property. One of Garrett’s clients, Demi, was a single mom and yoga instructor. She heard about Airbnb and started renting out two bedrooms in her personal residence. She generated enough cash flow from those bedrooms that she was able to buy another home, move out, and then rent out the whole house. She now earns between $1,000 and $1,800 a month from her Airbnb property. Uber/Lyft You can earn money on your schedule. You give rides when you want and earn as much as you want, with the potential to make great money. Thirty hours of driving per week can generate up to $1,000 on average.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit
by Marina Krakovsky
Published 14 Sep 2015

With its feedback system and fraud department, eBay serves as a pretty powerful watchdog in protecting buyers from unscrupulous and incompetent sellers—and in eliciting the very best behavior from good sellers such as Ann Whitley Wood.28 Craigslist provides a lot of value as a Bridge, but it does very little in the way of policing the trading activity it facilitates, a shortcoming that’s opened up entrepreneurial opportunities for the hundreds of specialized start-ups that do a better job of ensuring honest buyer and seller behavior in a particular niche (on top of better user interfaces with more specialized search tools). Perhaps the best-known of these “spawn of Craigslist”29 is Airbnb: you can rent (or rent out) a room through Craigslist, but how comfortable would you be dealing with a stranger directly?30 In his book Game-Changer, David McAdams contrasts Airbnb, an effective Enforcer, with a rival company, HomeAway (which runs the site VRBO.com, Vacation Rental By Owner). Unlike Airbnb, HomeAway allows property owners to get away with deceptive descriptions of their rentals31—in part because, unlike Airbnb, it allows individual owners to opt out of reviews.32 Now, you might be saying that VRBO is not trying to be an Enforcer.

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The number rises to $10,000 for Gold, $25,000 for Platinum, and an astounding $150,000 per month for Titanium. 17.You must also get consistently high feedback scores from your buyers: fall anywhere below 98 percent positive feedback, and you lose your PowerSeller status. 18.Interview with Ann Whitley Wood, September 24, 2013. 19.Along the same lines, a recent article pointed out that large players also dominate the Prosper Marketplace (where two-thirds of the lenders are hedge funds and other large institutions) and that nearly half of the hosts on Airbnb had at least three listings on the site, suggesting these hosts weren’t just renting out a spare bedroom. See William Alden, “The Business Tycoons of Airbnb,” New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2014. 20.Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, John Swanson, and Kate Lockwood, “The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment,” Experimental Economics 9, no. 2 (2006): 79–101. 21.Nira Yacouel and Aliza Fleischer, “The Role of Cybermediaries in Reputation Building and Price Premiums in the Online Hotel Market,” Journal of Travel Research 51, no. 2 (2012): 219–26. 22.Michael Anderson and Jeremy Magruder, “Learning from the Crowd: Regression Discontinuity Estimates of the Effects of an Online Review Database,” The Economic Journal 122, no. 563 (September 2012): 957–89. 23.Michael Luca, “Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 12–016. 24.Carl Shapiro, “Premiums for High Quality Products as Returns to Reputation,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (November 1983): 659–79. 25.Investing in a storefront is one of several ways sellers can elicit trust among buyers.

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Quality: Exclusion by Platforms with Network Effects,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, 11–125. 11.Julia Angwin, “Putting Your Best Faces Forward,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2009. 12.Note the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity; by giving users the opportunity to establish a track record under a given pseudonym, a system that allows pseudonyms combines the best features of anonymity with the best features of real names. For a discussion of some of the economics of pseudonyms, see Eric J. Friedman and Paul Resnick, “The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms,” Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 10, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 173–99. 13.Airbnb does something similar. See Itay Fainmesser, “Exclusive Intermediation,” SSRN Working Paper, March 17, 2014. 14.Julie Weed, “For Uber, Airbnb and Other Companies, Customer Ratings Go Both Ways,” New York Times, December 1, 2014. 15.Gary Bolton, Ben Greiner, and Axel Ockenfels, “Engineering Trust: Reciprocity in the Production of Reputation Information,” Management Science 59, no. 2: 265–85. 16.For example, compare TripAdvisor (which enables anyone to post a review) with Expedia (where only customers can post a review): although someone can post a fake review on either site, it is much more costly to do so on Expedia.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

In sum, LinkedIn is the Bruce Jenner of this analysis: a great athlete who did a lot of things well . . . after all, Bruce won an Olympic gold medal for the decathlon, and was on the box of the Wheaties I ate in elementary school (sorry, Caitlyn, you’ll always be Bruce to me). But Jenner was never a gold medalist in any of those individual sports. He was, to use an old phrase, “A Jack (now Jill) of all trades, but master of none.” Airbnb It would be tempting to say Airbnb is the Uber for hotels, and move to the next candidate. However, there are stark differences that illuminate Airbnb’s competitive strength, relative to Uber, and how the T Algorithm can be used to influence strategy and capital allocation. While they both are global and enjoy access to cheap capital, their product has substantially different variance.

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Both have achieved this. However, the liquidity Airbnb has garnered is more impressive and harder to replicate. Uber needs a mess of drivers and people looking for rides to build a business in a city. Uber’s cash hoard gives them the ability to ramp up a city, as can other ride-hailing firms with sufficient capital. However, Airbnb needed to achieve a critical mass of supply in one city and demand (awareness) in many others—people visit Amsterdam from all over the world. There is competition for Uber in every major city, as a firm only needs to establish liquidity in one market. Airbnb needed, and reached, scale on a continental and then global level.

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Airbnb needed, and reached, scale on a continental and then global level. Airbnb’s and Uber’s valuations (at time of this writing) are $25 billion and $70 billion, respectively. However, I believe Airbnb will surpass Uber’s value by the end of 2018, and Uber will register the mother of all write-downs as word spreads regarding their lack of product differentiation and regional competitors take an awful income statement ($3 billion in losses on $5 billion in revenues in 2016) and make it worse. Airbnb is the most likely “sharing” unicorn to become the Fifth Horseman. Their weakest point is their lack of vertical integration (they don’t own any apartments), meaning Airbnb doesn’t have the same degree of control over the customer experience as the Four.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

And how many strangers want to be down the hall? Answer: a lot! By 2016, there were sixty-eight thousand commercial hotel rooms in Paris and more than eighty thousand Airbnb listings. Today, if you go to the Airbnb website you can choose to stay in one of hundreds of castles, dozens of yurts, caves, tepees with TVs in them, water towers, motor homes, private islands, glass houses, lighthouses, igloos with Wi-Fi, and tree houses—hundreds of tree houses—which are the most profitable listings on the Airbnb site per square foot. “The tree house in Lincoln, Vermont, is more valuable than the main house,” said Chesky. “We have tree houses in Vermont that have had six-month waiting lists.

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You can sleep in the homes that Jim Morrison of the Doors once owned or take your pick of Frank Lloyd Wright houses or even squeeze into a one-square-meter house in Berlin that goes for thirteen dollars a night. In July 2014, when the World Cup soccer tournament was held in Brazil, it was only thanks to Airbnb that all the visitors had a place to stay, because Brazil had not built enough hotel rooms to house all those who wanted to come and watch the games. Said Chesky: “Roughly a hundred twenty thousand people—one in five international visitors—stayed in Brazil in Airbnb-rented rooms for the World Cup; they came from over a hundred fifty different countries. Airbnb hosts in Brazil earned roughly thirty-eight million dollars from reservations during the World Cup. The average host in Rio earned roughly four thousand dollars during the monthlong tournament—about four times the average monthly salary in Rio.

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And, finally, you needed to bring them “all together into a really well-designed interface—we were all design students—where you could do all of this with one touch,” said Chesky. Once those pieces were in place and scaled a few years after 2007, Airbnb just took off, not only because all that complexity—someone in Minnesota renting a yurt from someone in Mongolia—could be reduced to one touch, but also because it could be done in a way that parties totally trusted. In fact, the most interesting thing Chesky and his fellow Airbnb makers made was one of the most complex things to make at scale: trust. Airbnb’s founders understood that the world was becoming interdependent—meaning the technology was there to connect any renter to any tourist or traveling businessperson anywhere on the planet.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
by Warren Berger
Published 4 Mar 2014

With the 2008 Democratic presidential convention in Denver, they found the perfect place to launch—lots of people coming into town, not enough hotels. But how would those visitors, and the people with space to rent, learn about Airbnb? Gebbia and Chesky couldn’t afford ads; so they had to make news. The founders knew that the news channels would be doing stories about how crowded and overbooked Denver was. They pitched Airbnb as a “solution story” to news producers and ended up on CNN. The bookings came in and the Denver launch was a success. But Gebbia says they kept questioning, kept iterating and refining the model for another year before they felt they had it right.

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(the question that helped “invent the Internet”) Why should you be stuck without a bed if I’ve got an extra air mattress? (Airbnb’s formative question) Why can’t we find a place for out-of-towners to crash for a night or two? What if we provide more than just a mattress to sleep on? What if we could create this same experience in every major city? What if we take this idea on the road, and test it in another city? How would those visitors, and the people with space to rent, learn about Airbnb? What if you could pay online? Why are we limiting this to the US? What if we go global? Why should we, as a society, continue to buy things we really don’t need to own?

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That’s because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now? In some sense, innovation means trying to find and formulate new questions that can, over time, be answered. Those questions, once identified, often become the basis for starting a new venture. Indeed, the rise of a number of today’s top tech firms—Foursquare, Airbnb, Pandora Internet Radio—can be traced to a Why doesn’t somebody or What if we were to question, in some cases inspired by the founder’s personal experience. One such example, which has become a modern classic business story, is the origin of the Netflix video-rental service. The man who would go on to start the company, Reed Hastings, was reacting to one20 of those frustrating everyday experiences we’ve all had.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms
by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee
Published 23 May 2016

As one runner put it in 2014, “I’m ready to roll; I’m in shape; I just don’t know where I’m going to sleep.”1 In 2016, however, thousands of people in the Boston area will make rooms available to runners. They’ll list those rooms and their prices on Airbnb, and runners can search for a place that fits their needs and their budgets. As of November 30, 2015, more than a thousand places were already listed for the 2016 marathon. With Airbnb, runners will have more choices for more convenient places to stay than ever before, and many people in Boston will have some extra income. Airbnb is one of the leaders in what’s known as the “sharing economy.” That’s one of the most popular business buzzwords of 2015. A Google search of that phrase yields more than 30 million hits.

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What’s novel and what isn’t here though? Airbnb and other companies that are part of the “sharing economy” are multisided platforms. What they have in common is that they are matching up people who have spare capacity—an extra room, a car, or a lawnmower, for example—with people who would benefit from that spare capacity. That’s not a recent invention. OpenTable started helping match up restaurants with spare capacity—empty tables—with people looking to go out for dinner in 1999. Before then, people advertised their spare rooms in the classified sections of physical newspapers before there was Airbnb and before there was Craigslist.

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Slower and Faster Than You Think Glossary Notes Index Acknowledgments About the Authors Introduction MANY OF THE BIGGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD, INCLUDing Alibaba, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, News Corp., Rakuten, Tencent, and Visa, are matchmakers. So are many of the most exciting and valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, Didi Kuaidi, Flipkart, Lending Club, Pinterest, Spotify, and Uber. What these businesses have in common is that they all connect members of one group, like people looking for a ride, with another group, like drivers looking for passengers. Matchmakers are very different from the businesses that have been the staple of college economics classrooms and MBA lectures for decades.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

Rich Jervis, “Austin Voters Reject Uber, Lyft Plan for Self-Regulation,” USA Today, May 8, 2016. 48. Sam Levin, “Elizabeth Warren Takes on Airbnb, Urging Scrutiny of Large-Scale Renters,” Guardian, July 13, 2016. 49. Matt Payton, “Berlin Bans Airbnb from Renting Apartments to Tourists in Move to Protect Affordable Housing,” Independent, May 1, 2016. Also Natasha Lomas, “Airbnb Faces Fresh Crackdown in Barcelona as City Council Asks Residents to Report Illegal Rentals,” Techcrunch, September 19, 2016. 50. Caroline Davies, “Iceland Plans Airbnb Restrictions amid Tourism Explosion,” Guardian, May 30, 2016. 51. Rob Davies, “UberEATS Drivers Vow to Take Pay Protest to London Restaurants,” Guardian, August 26, 2016. 52.

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Shannon Liss-Riordan’s political ally, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, has taken on Airbnb, claiming that the $31 billion–valued home-sharing start-up is forcing up rents in large cities. In October 2016 Warren established a coalition of lawmakers from more than a dozen cities, urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “help cities protect consumers” and to study how the short-term rental market is affecting the overall rental market.48 In November 2016 regulators in New York City and San Francisco successfully got Airbnb to establish a “one host, one home” rule for new hosts as a defense against rising rents.

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In October 2016 Warren established a coalition of lawmakers from more than a dozen cities, urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to “help cities protect consumers” and to study how the short-term rental market is affecting the overall rental market.48 In November 2016 regulators in New York City and San Francisco successfully got Airbnb to establish a “one host, one home” rule for new hosts as a defense against rising rents. In an attempt to protect affordable housing, both Berlin and Barcelona have clamped down on Airbnb, with Berlin banning the renting of apartments to tourists and Barcelona aggressively cracking down on illegal rentals.49 Even Iceland, in order to control the prices of the local market, has passed a law restricting the number of days that properties can be rented out on Airbnb.50 The precariat itself is also taking to the streets in order to change the system. In August 2016, drivers of UberEATS, Uber’s food-delivery service, picketed London restaurants to demand that Uber pay them the London living hourly wage of a guaranteed £9.40 ($12.10).51 And in November 2016 there was a national protest in the United States by Uber drivers demanding a $15 minimum wage.52 In May 2016, meanwhile, the thirty-five thousand Uber drivers in New York agreed to form an organization called the Independent Drivers Guild, which would be affiliated with more traditional industrial labor unions.53 Indeed, one of the first actions of this guild was an April 2017 petition, signed by eleven thousand drivers, requiring Uber to include a tipping option in its app.54 And so I recently became able to electronically tip good Uber drivers like that polite young man from Pakistan who transported me to Shannon Liss-Riordan’s office in downtown Boston.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Published 1 Mar 2013

We want you to rely less on your reality distortion field, and rely more on Lean Analytics. Airbnb Photography—Growth Within Growth Airbnb is an incredible success story. In just a few years, the company has become a powerhouse in the travel industry, providing travelers with an alternative to hotels, and providing individuals who have rooms, apartments, or homes to rent with a new source of income. In 2012, travelers booked over 5 million nights with Airbnb’s service. But it started small, and its founders—adherents to the Lean Startup mindset—took a very methodical approach to their success. At SXSW 2012, Joe Zadeh, Product Lead at Airbnb, shared part of the company’s amazing story.

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A concierge approach in which you run things behind the scenes for the first few customers lets you check whether the need is real; it also helps you understand which things people really use and refine your process before writing a line of code or hiring a single employee. Initial tests of Airbnb’s MVP showed that professionally photographed listings got two to three times more bookings than the market average. This validated the founders’ first hypothesis. And it turned out that hosts were wildly enthusiastic about receiving an offer from Airbnb to take those photographs for them. In mid-to-late 2011, Airbnb had 20 photographers in the field taking pictures for hosts—roughly the same time period where we see the proverbial “hockey stick” of growth in terms of nights booked, shown in Figure 1-1.

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It’s amazing what you can do with 20 photographers and people’s apartments Airbnb experimented further. It watermarked photos to add authenticity. It got customer service to offer professional photography as a service when renters or potential renters called in. It increased the requirements on photo quality. Each step of the way, the company measured the results and adjusted as necessary. The key metric Airbnb tracked was shoots per month, because it had already proven with its Concierge MVP that more professional photographs meant more bookings. By February 2012, Airbnb was doing nearly 5,000 shoots per month and continuing to accelerate the growth of the professional photography program.

Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek
Published 22 Dec 2016

Whereas firms once had to spend large amounts to invest in the computing equipment and expertise needed for their businesses, today’s start-ups have flourished because they can simply rent hardware and software from the cloud. As a result, Airbnb, Slack, Uber, and many other start-ups use AWS.79 Uber further relies on Google for mapping, Twilio for texting, SendGrid for emailing, and Braintree for payments: it is a lean platform built on other platforms. These companies have also offloaded costs from their balance sheets and shifted them to their workers: things like investment costs (accommodations for Airbnb, vehicles for Uber and Lyft), maintenance costs, insurance costs, and depreciation costs. Firms such as Instacart (which delivers groceries) have also outsourced delivery costs to food suppliers (e.g.

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This chapter argues that the new business model that eventually emerged is a powerful new type of firm: the platform.10 Often arising out of internal needs to handle data, platforms became an efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded. Now this model has come to expand across the economy, as numerous companies incorporate platforms: powerful technology companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), dynamic start-ups (Uber, Airbnb), industrial leaders (GE, Siemens), and agricultural powerhouses (John Deere, Monsanto), to name just a few. What are platforms?11 At the most general level, platforms are digital infrastructures that enable two or more groups to interact.12 They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects.13 More often than not, these platforms also come with a series of tools that enable their users to build their own products, services, and marketplaces.14 Microsoft’s Windows operating system enables software developers to create applications for it and sell them to consumers; Apple’s App Store and its associated ecosystem (XCode and the iOS SDK) enable developers to build and sell new apps to users; Google’s search engine provides a platform for advertisers and content providers to target people searching for information; and Uber’s taxi app enables drivers and passengers to exchange rides for cash.

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GE, Siemens), which build the hardware and software necessary to transform traditional manufacturing into internet-connected processes that lower the costs of production and transform goods into services. The fourth type is that of product platforms (e.g. Rolls Royce, Spotify), which generate revenue by using other platforms to transform a traditional good into a service and by collecting rent or subscription fees on them. Finally, the fifth type is that of lean platforms (e.g. Uber, Airbnb), which attempt to reduce their ownership of assets to a minimum and to profit by reducing costs as much as possible. These analytical divisions can, and often do, run together within any one firm. Amazon, for example, is often seen as an e-commerce company, yet it rapidly broadened out into a logistics company.

Beginning Backbone.js
by James Sugrue
Published 15 Dec 2013

You’ll find many more case studies listed at the official Backbone web site. 11 Chapter 1 ■ An Introduction to Backbone.js Airbnb Airbnb is one of Y Combinator’s greatest success stories, providing a collaborative sharing service for people to rent living space across 192 countries. Airbnb has used Backbone in a number of its products, from its mobile web application to web site features including wish lists and matching and in its own internal applications. An example of how Backbone is used in the mobile website can be seen in Figure 1-8. Figure 1-8. Backbone features extensively in Airbnb’s technology stack While initially Airbnb used Rails in the back end with Backbone on the client side, it has evolved the mobile application to now use Node.js on the server, which also includes Backbone.

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Backbone features extensively in Airbnb’s technology stack While initially Airbnb used Rails in the back end with Backbone on the client side, it has evolved the mobile application to now use Node.js on the server, which also includes Backbone. This results in the ability to share application logic that is relevant on both sides, without the need to rewrite in different languages. You can find out more about Airbnb’s use of Backbone at its developer blog at http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-launched-our-first-nodejs-app-to-product/. SoundCloud SoundCloud is a German-based music distribution platform with the ability to upload or listen to user-created content. The team initially used Backbone as the underpinning of its mobile web application but has since utilized it for the front end of its desktop web site too, an example of which can be seen in Figure 1-9. 12 Chapter 1 ■ An Introduction to Backbone.js Figure 1-9.

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While this can help minimize the page load time, it can lead to delays when the user does actually request the information. If your application is built with server-side technologies, such as Grails, JSP, or .NET, it is possible that you could populate some of the initial models and collections with JSON data. This technique has become more popular, especially with Airbnb making its Rendr library available to all as an open source project on GitHub (https://github.com/airbnb/rendr). This project allows Backbone code to be rendered both on the client and on the server. More importantly, it makes it easy to pass the Backbone model content to your page when it is being rendered on the browser, allowing the server to perform the bulk of the network operations.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less
by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou
Published 15 Feb 2015

Peer-to-peer sharing platforms It is now increasingly easy for individuals to share their assets, products and skills without the need for (or interference of) intermediaries. In Germany, home-owners can generate their own solar energy and sell any excess into the grid. Perhaps more dramatically, since its inception in 2008, Airbnb (a community marketplace for short-let rentals) has established a presence in 190 countries with over 600,000 listings. (Over half of Airbnb hosts rely on this market to pay their rent or mortgage.) Already the world’s fifth largest “hotel” chain (by number of beds), Airbnb is on its way to becoming the world’s largest short-stay accommodation business, without owning a single building. Similarly, Uber, a taxi service that connects users with drivers at the tap of a smartphone, has recently launched an extension called uberPOP in several European capitals. uberPOP is a peer-to-peer service that enables non-professional drivers to register their cars to transport individuals, thus earning extra income in their free time.

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The unbanked and underbanked spend 10% of their $1 trillion disposable income on fees, the same amount as they spend on food. Schulman asks:13 “Imagine if you could turn loose almost $100 billion back into the economy?” Engage restless entrepreneurs, hackers and tinkerers Airbnb, an online short-let rental company, was launched in 2008 by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, two young people with no experience of the hotel industry. By 2014, Airbnb had become the fifth largest hotel chain in the world, filling more room nights than all the Hilton hotels put together (and Hilton began in 1919). Similarly, in 2006 Frédéric Mazzella and Nicolas Brusson founded BlaBlaCar which, by 2014, had emerged as Europe’s largest car-sharing firm.

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As a result, R&D and marketing leaders at firms like Auchan are working with do-it-yourself (DIY) and crowdsourcing pioneers, such as TechShop and Quirky, to bolster and harness the collective ingenuity and skills of consumer communities. Additionally, big brands such as IKEA are linking up with start-ups such as Airbnb to develop a “sharing economy” in which consumers share goods and services. The chapter also outlines how sales and marketing managers can build greater brand affinity and deepen their engagement with customers by co-creating greater value for all. Make innovative friends. Firms such as GE and Ford are ensuring that the R&D function is lean, flexible and highly networked.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
by Orly Lobel
Published 17 Oct 2022

For example, Harvard Business School researchers designed an experimental field study, creating fake Airbnb profiles of guests looking to book vacation homes; some were white and some Black. Disturbingly, the researchers found that requests from guests with distinctively Black names were 16 percent less likely to be accepted than identical guests with typically white names. These differences persisted whether the host was male or female, white or minority. Another study compared the ratings of vacation rentals cross-listed on Airbnb and its competitor HomeAway. Airbnb visibly shows hosts’ identity; HomeAway does not. And sure enough, the researchers found users’ ratings on Airbnb to be racially biased: Black hosts often receive lower rating scores and, in turn, earn less for comparable accommodations.

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Services often contain photos and names of users, such that race and gender are often visible. Airbnb could, like traditional hotel chains, require hosts to accept guests without revealing the guests’ identities. Like HomeAway, it could hide hosts’ identities until later in the exchange. I talked with Airbnb about its solutions, and it prides itself on responding quickly—far more quickly than any administrative agency could when a complaint of discrimination is filed—to any concerns raised by hosts or guests. Airbnb describes the company as having “a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination on the platform.”

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Airbnb describes the company as having “a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination on the platform.” For example, when a gay couple arrived at a Texas bed-and-breakfast and were refused accommodation, Airbnb removed the host from its listings, refunded the money paid for the booking, and paid for a night at the hotel that the couple ultimately stayed in. The company condemned the incident: “Airbnb has clear guidelines that a host or a guest may not promote hate or bigotry.” After the Harvard experiment became public, the hashtag #AirBnBWhileBlack went viral on Twitter. Airbnb responded to the findings and outcry by creating stronger anti-discrimination policies, requiring users to actively sign a commitment to anti-discrimination, and changing the way profile photos are displayed.

Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days
by Chris Guillebeau
Published 18 Sep 2017

• SIDE HUSTLE STARTER KITS: Brief guides to several popular hustles discussed in the book • HOW TO VALIDATE AN IDEA WITH $10 AND A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT: How to use Facebook ads to get immediate feedback • WRITE A LETTER TO YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER: A template for learning more about your target market • BUY A RENTAL PROPERTY WITH A $1,575 DOWN PAYMENT: A quick primer from my go-to expert on real estate hustling • RESOURCES AND FREE STUFF: Various resources and referrals APPENDIX 1 Side Hustle Starter Kits PUT YOUR COUCH OR SPARE BEDROOM ON AIRBNB!*1 With more than one million listings, Airbnb has changed the way people travel all over the world. At the same time, it’s also opened up a gold mine of opportunities for side hustlers. If you have any kind of space where a stranger can sleep, you may be able to publish—and make money from—it on the site. Creative students have rented out their dorm rooms over semester break.

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Tenants have leased additional apartments and then sublet them every single night, pocketing the difference between what they earn in nightly fees and what they pay in monthly rent. Homeowners have built tiny cottages in their backyards to house guests. In short, you don’t need to be a real estate baron to profit from Airbnb. Here’s all you need to know to get started: BUSINESS MODEL: Rent your home (or part of your home) to a visitor. The process is safe because both parties’ identities are verified, and a mutual rating system encourages responsible behavior. WHY: A huge market of people are actively searching Airbnb listings every day, and the business is very easy to learn. AVERAGE STARTUP COST: Variable. EASE OF STARTUP: Low. LONG-TERM POTENTIAL: Medium. SKILLS REQUIRED: Customer service (quick response time matters).

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Her fiancé was from the United States, and after traveling together for a couple years, they decided to marry and settle down in Austin. Andrea enjoyed her work as a nutritionist, but her real love was animals, especially dogs. One day while she and her fiancé were staying in a rental apartment on a trip to Canada, she had an idea: “What if there was something like Airbnb, but for dogs? You know, so their owners could travel and leave the dogs somewhere better than a kennel?” A year later, she stumbled on Rover.com—a service that did exactly what she’d described, essentially providing a platform where animal-loving hosts could rent their spare doggie bed out to canine guests.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It
by Scott Kupor
Published 3 Jun 2019

But what if the service expanded to other constituents over time? Maybe then the existing hotel market would be a good proxy for total market size. Okay, but what if the ease of booking reservations and the lower price points that Airbnb offered meant that people who never before traveled decided that they would now do so—what if in fact the market for travelers needing accommodations would expand as a result of the introduction of Airbnb? As it turns out, the success of Airbnb to date seems to suggest that the market size has indeed expanded, owing to the existence of a new form of travel accommodations that never previously existed. Fortunes can be won or lost based on a VC’s ability to understand market size and think creatively about the role of technology in developing new markets.

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Perhaps the founder had a unique experience that exposed her to the market problem in a way that provided unique insights into the solution for the problem. The founders of Airbnb fit this bill. They were struggling to make ends meet living in San Francisco and noticed that all the hotels were sold out locally whenever there was a major convention in town. What if, they thought, we could rent out a sleeping spot in our apartment to conference attendees to help them save money on accommodations and help us meet our rent obligations? And thus was born Airbnb. Perhaps the founder has simply dedicated his life to the particular problem at hand. Orion Hindawi and his father, David, founded a company called BigFix in the late 1990s.

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Those are all good questions, but most VCs would probably be fine assuming that a startup going after the database market, if successful, has a big enough market to build a big company and thus become an investment home run. The more challenging aspects of market size estimation come from startups going after markets that do not exist currently or that are smaller markets today because they are constrained by the current state of technology. Take Airbnb. When Airbnb first raised money, the use case was predominantly people sleeping on other people’s couches. One could have asked the question of how many starving college students there were who would do such a thing, and have reasonably concluded—similar to the size of the mac and cheese and ramen markets, other products purchased by starving college students—that the market simply wasn’t that big.

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

Many other net stocks and companies have added to the sector’s allure and investor attention—including Booking (nee Priceline), Chewy, eBay, Etsy, Expedia, Grubhub, Lyft, Pinterest, Shopify, Snap, The Trade Desk, Twitter, Uber, Wix, and Zillow. 2020 was one of the strongest IPO years on record in terms of funds raised, and several of the highest-profile, highest-popping IPOs were Internet stocks—Airbnb and DoorDash near the top of the list, with both rising close to 100% on their first day of trading. The blockbuster Airbnb IPO was particularly noteworthy because it occurred while the company was still recording—thanks to the Covid-19 crisis—30% year-over-year declines in its bookings and revenue. Growth companies are typically expected to be, well, growing when they stage their IPOs. Airbnb was declining. And it still pulled off a highly successful IPO. Wow! Reflects a lot of trust and hope by investors in Airbnb’s secular growth opportunity post-Covid-19. A lot. And imagine how much interest there would be were TikTok—one of the fastest-growing Internet apps of all time—to announce its IPO intentions!

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Like Xerox and Coke in the past. Like Google or Twitter or Uber or Airbnb today. There’s much more to the net sector than just FANG, however. Many other net stocks and companies have added to the sector’s allure and investor attention—including Booking (nee Priceline), Chewy, eBay, Etsy, Expedia, Grubhub, Lyft, Pinterest, Shopify, Snap, The Trade Desk, Twitter, Uber, Wix, and Zillow. 2020 was one of the strongest IPO years on record in terms of funds raised, and several of the highest-profile, highest-popping IPOs were Internet stocks—Airbnb and DoorDash near the top of the list, with both rising close to 100% on their first day of trading.

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And Microsoft’s success left the desktop for the cloud long ago. Yes, the Internet is the obvious Big Change. Add up the market caps of Google, Amazon, and Facebook at the end of 2020, and you’re over $3.5 trillion. Add in the market caps of some of the other major Internet companies (Netflix, Booking.com, DoorDash, Airbnb, Spotify, etc.), and you’re well over $4 trillion. Add in the major Chinese Internet companies (Alibaba, Tencent, etc.), and you’re well over $5 trillion. That’s $5 trillion in shareholder wealth that simply didn’t exist 20 years ago. There are lots of interesting debates around how much of an impact the Internet has had on the US and global economies.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

In the US, California passed legislation in 2019 requiring companies like Uber to treat their workers as employees; litigation ensued, and continues. Other cities and states are trying to do the same, although most states have preempted local rulings on this issue. Airbnb is a similar hack of the hotel industry. Airbnb lodgings are not the same as hotels, although they serve the same purpose of short-term lodging. But Airbnb maintains that because it is not actually a hotel company, Airbnb accommodations should not be subject to any of the laws and regulations—or occupancy taxes—imposed on conventional hotels. Because Airbnb doesn’t own any properties, it maintains that it is just a technology company. The people who own the accommodations are independent contractors, and are responsible for paying taxes and complying with local regulations.

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The people who own the accommodations are independent contractors, and are responsible for paying taxes and complying with local regulations. Of course, most fail to do so. Municipalities either let Airbnb slide without paying its share of occupancy fees or try to fight back. Some sought to limit its expansion through regulation, and Airbnb sued them (while still operating), resulting in lengthy court battles. In addition, Airbnb often deployed property owners as grassroots lobbyists. Airbnb would send a message out to owners saying the city was threatening their ability to make money, even sending information about specific meetings the hosts should attend.

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doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000154315122000008/uber-20211231.htm. 124It has 3.5 million drivers: Brian Dean (23 Mar 2021), “Uber statistics 2022: How many people ride with Uber?” Backlinko, https://backlinko.com/uber-users. 124Airbnb is a similar hack: Paris Martineau (20 Mar 2019), “Inside Airbnb’s ‘guerilla war’ against local governments,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-Airbnbs-guerrilla-war-against-local-governments. 125Payday loans are short-term loans: Carter Dougherty (29 May 2013), “Payday lenders evading rules pivot to installment loans,” Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-05-29/payday-lenders-evading-rules-pivot-to-installmant-loans. 126They also operate as loan brokers: S.

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology
by William Mougayar
Published 25 Apr 2016

Think about the multitude of things and offerings that can get smart when they are trusted to perform certain operations without human assistance. Transparency and truth seeking are complementary characteristics of trust. Transparency asks the question: can we see it? Truth asks: can we verify it? HOW AIRBNB DESIGNED TRUST FOR STRANGERS What does Airbnb have to do with blockchain-based trust? A lot. There is a lesson from Airbnb, which has mastered the art of allowing strangers to sleep in your house without fear. At the onset, matching two strangers with each other and facilitating a transaction to completion is very similar to a blockchain facilitating peer-to-peer interaction between two (or more) parties that do not know each other.

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That common element is about sharing identity and reputation details. In the case of Airbnb, guests share a lot of information about themselves—a key step that helps the host in gaining confidence about trusting them. On the blockchain, identity and reputation are the primary entry-level factors that effectively lock the peer-to-peer transaction in place. Says Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder, “It turns out, a well-designed reputation system is key for building trust. We also learned that building the right amount of trust takes the right amount of disclosure.” Whereas Airbnb has designed for the human element of trust, the blockchain was designed for a parallel element of transactional trust, where the human is also part of it, but behind the scenes, and that human is represented on the blockchain via their identity and reputation status.

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The Ledger Looking Back So We Can Look Forward Unpacking the Blockchain State Transitions and State Machines— What Are They? The Consensus Algorithms Key Ideas from Chapter One Notes 2: How Blockchain Trust Infiltrates A New Trust Layer Decentralization of Trust—What Does it Mean? How Airbnb Designed Trust for Strangers A Spectrum of Trust Services Based on Proofs The Blockchain Landscape Benefits and Indirect Benefits Explaining Some Basic Functions What Does a Trusted Blockchain Enable? Identity Ownerships & Representation Decentralized Data Security Anonymity & Untraceable Communication Blockchain as Cloud Getting to Millions of Blockchains Key Ideas from Chapter Two Notes 3: Obstacles, Challenges, & Mental Blocks Attacking the Blockchain with a Framework Approach Technical Challenges Market/Business Challenges Legal /Regulatory Barriers Behavioral/Educational Challenges Key Ideas from Chapter Three Notes 4: Blockchain in Financial Services Attacked by the Internet and Fintech Why Can't There be a Global Bank?

The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
by Jim Kalbach
Published 6 Apr 2020

We could see completely new possibilities in how we thought about which problems to solve and what to build... When we realized the product was the trip, we started to see Airbnb as a lifestyle company that could believably extend into more aspects of the trip, like Airbnb Experiences. As a result, Airbnb has introduced new facets of its offering, including Airbnb Experiences. Now, travelers can book tours of a city by locals, cooking classes, museum visits, and more. By moving up from book accommodations to take a trip, they avoided strategy myopia and expanded their business greatly. Accordingly, the Airbnb offering now addresses several related jobs to be done while taking a trip. Although this example doesn’t refer to JTBD specifically, the thinking is the same and is repeatable following the steps outlined previously.

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Design and redesign all aspects of your offering to address the higher aspiration—from products and service design, to marketing messages, to overall portfolio strategy. Consider the recent story about the growth of Airbnb that shows how the young company has already expanded their business imperative and extended their market outlook. Instead of looking at the accommodation booking solution as the product, they looked at the trip or journey a customer was taking as the product. In an interview in Forbes, Airbnb designer Rebecca Sinclair discussed how they used design thinking and journey mapping to change their point of view:11 We started to say “the product is the trip” and began shifting our perspective.

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“Applying Jobs-to-Be-Done to User Onboarding, with Ryan Singer!” UserOnboard (2017) https://www.useronboard.com/ryan-singer-user-onboarding-jtbd/ IBM. “Needs Statements,” IBM Enterprise Design Thinking Toolkit (Aug 2018) https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/toolkit/activity/needs-statements Joffrion, Emily Fields. “The Designer Who Changed Airbnb’s Entire Strategy,” Forbes (Jul 2018) Johnson-Laird, Philip. Mental Models (Harvard University Press, 1983) Keuken, Maxim van de. “Using Job Stories and Jobs-to-be-Done in Software Requirements Engineering,” [Thesis, Utrecht University] (Nov 2017) Klement, Alan. “5 Tips for Writing Job Stories,” JTBD.info (Nov 2013). https://jtbd.info/5-tips-for-writing-a-job-story-7c9092911fc9 Klement, Alan.

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

Your itinerary will include a selection from the following: Facebook headquarters, the LinkedIn skyscraper in San Francisco and/or the Airbnb headquarters in SoMa (South of Market). You’ll also be taken to see a few mysterious startups, complete with pimply kids in hoodies. Two places definitely on the itinerary include the famous garage in Palo Alto where Hewlett-Packard started and Steve Jobs’s garage in Los Altos. Great photo ops. In truth, you quickly realise that the tour is really only good for ramping up your Instagram activity. Each stop has its own peculiarities: on the roof of the LinkedIn building is a huge sign constructed out of metal mesh that looks superb against the backdrop of the city skyline; Airbnb’s headquarters has bedrooms named after cities around the world; Google has colourful bicycles.

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Since 2008 house prices per square metre in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco have risen by 70, 80 and 116 per cent respectively. Renting a room in San Francisco averages $2,700 per month – with the key words here being “room” and “average”. The market for sublets is ferocious and poorly regulated: people quite literally lose their housing overnight. The competition Airbnb has brought to the hotels sector has made things even worse by removing more rooms from the rental market. Homes for sale and under construction in Oakland and San Francisco. A demonstration in Sunnyvale outside the building where the annual general meeting of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was taking place.

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(Under the McKinney-Vento Act, every school district in the country is required to count and provide assistance to homeless students, but compliance is often spotty. In February 2019, California lawmakers announced a statewide audit to investigate why over four hundred school districts had failed to identify even a single homeless student.) LIKE A MUSHROOM IN THE WOODS There are plenty of strange accommodation options on Airbnb: a flying saucer in the UK, a “hotel” shaped like a potato in Idaho, wonderful treehouses all around the world to name just a few. Despite not standing out from the list, however, the best-loved of all is a cabin measuring just ten square metres in California. An hour-and-a-half’s drive south of San Francisco, after venturing into the wooded slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains and kissing goodbye to your phone signal, at a given point you come across a little wooden house topped by a geodesic dome: the famous Mushroom Dome.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), xv–xvi. 31. Bruce Upbin, “Airbnb Could Have More Rooms than Hilton by 2012,” Forbes, June 29, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/06/29/airbnb-could-have-more-rooms-than-hil ton-by-2012/ (accessed June 18, 2013). 32. “Airbnb at a Glance,” https://www.airbnb.com/about (accessed June 18, 2013). 33. “Airbnb Global Growth,” https://www.airbnb.com/global-growth (accessed June 18, 2013). 34. Andrew Cave, “Airbnb Plans to Be World’s Largest Hotelier,” Telegraph, November 16, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/leisure/10454879/Air bnb-plans-to-be-worlds-larget-hotelier.html (accessed November 26, 2013). 35.

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These systems provide significant environmental benefits by increasing use efficiency, reducing waste, encouraging the development of better products, and mopping up the surplus created by over-production and -consumption.30 Sharing Everything Much of what we own goes unused some of the time. Sharing spare rooms or even couches has become a big-ticket item among enthusiasts. Airbnb and HomeAway are among the many start-ups that are connecting millions of people who have homes to rent with prospective users. Airbnb, which went online in 2008, boasted 110,000 available rooms listed on its site just three years later and was expanding its available listings by an astounding 1,000 rooms every day.31 To date, 3 million Airbnb guests booked 10 million nights in 33,000 cities, spanning 192 countries.32 In 2012 bookings were growing at a blistering pace of 500 percent a year, an exponential curve that would bring envy, if not terror, to any global hotel chain.33 Airbnb is expected to pass the venerable Hilton and InterContinental hotel chains—the world’s largest hotel operations—in 2014 by filling up more rooms per night across the globe.34 Like other shareable brokers, Airbnb gets only a small cut from the renter and owner for bringing them together.

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Airbnb, which went online in 2008, boasted 110,000 available rooms listed on its site just three years later and was expanding its available listings by an astounding 1,000 rooms every day.31 To date, 3 million Airbnb guests booked 10 million nights in 33,000 cities, spanning 192 countries.32 In 2012 bookings were growing at a blistering pace of 500 percent a year, an exponential curve that would bring envy, if not terror, to any global hotel chain.33 Airbnb is expected to pass the venerable Hilton and InterContinental hotel chains—the world’s largest hotel operations—in 2014 by filling up more rooms per night across the globe.34 Like other shareable brokers, Airbnb gets only a small cut from the renter and owner for bringing them together. It can charge such low fees because it has very low fixed costs and each additional rental brokered approaches near zero marginal cost. Like all the new sharable sites, the lateral scaling potential on the Internet is so dramatic that start-ups like Airbnb can take off, catch up to, and even surpass the older, global hotel chains in just a few short years.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

The Long Tail revealed that niche and Andrew took advantage of it.33 How New Markets Create New Markets As the world economy continues to grow, new markets are created then fracture, creating even more new markets. AirBnB was built on the back of Craigslist. Because people would post their rooms for rent on Craigslist, AirBnB would copy over their new listings to Craigslist. People would find out about AirBnB if they were searching for rooms on Craigslist. They took one section of a bigger marketplace—short term housing on Craigslist—and built a company around it. Just like Jake and Andrew, they were able to serve that “small” market better than Craigslist.

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They would pay millions of dollars for a piece of land downtown, millions of dollars to construct a hotel, and then millions of dollars to hire staff to run it. The sharing economy version of that is a company called AirBnB, which allows homeowners to post their rooms online so people coming to visit can stay in them. It’s often less expensive than a hotel and many people like getting to know a city as a resident instead of as a tourist. Let’s say Julian has a house that he owns in Dallas, Texas. He usually has one spare bedroom, so he lists it on AirBnB as available. He has filled a market need that ten years ago would have only been available to someone with millions of dollars that could build a hotel.

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A market opportunity that would have been available to a few thousand people that could afford to build a hotel is now available to a few million people that may have a spare bedroom. There are not many more houses now in the U.S. than there were 5 years ago, but AirBnB has created more inventory (extra rooms to stay in) without creating more supply (building hotels). Uber and Lyft have done for the taxi industry what AirBnB has done for the hotel industry—anyone with a car can become a taxi driver by signing up online to drive for the service. In the past it was difficult and expensive to become a taxi driver. Some cities require drivers to invest tens of thousands of dollars to buy a medallion just to drive a taxi.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Frankin Foer, World Without Mind (Jonathan Cape, 2017) p.191. 11 Foer, World Without Mind, p. 114 12 You find the petition on the www.change.org web page under ‘Save Your Uber’. 13 The Uber Privacy Policy is available on their website. https://privacy.uber.com/policy 14 This website is archived at www.web.archive.org. Search for www.google.com, and search for the date 18 January 2012. 15 Biz Carson, ‘Airbnb just pulled out a clever trick to fight a proposed law in San Francisco’, www.uk.businessinsider.com, 7 October 2015. Shane Hickey and Franki Cookney, ‘Airbnb faces worldwide opposition. It plans a movement to rise up in its defence’, Observer, 29 October 2016. Heather Kelly, ‘Airbnb wants to turn hosts into “grassroots” activists’, www.cnn.com, 4 November 2015. 16 Since 2015, Facebook has been the biggest driver of traffic to media sites.

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Alongside it, though, is another world, inhabited by the people who are left behind in the mad rush towards progress: the ignored women in tech start-ups who complain about misogyny, the Uber drivers who can only afford to live 70 miles away and have to work on zero-hour contracts, the long-time residents who are turfed out so their landlords can rent out their homes on Airbnb. It’s a place where minorities struggle on low-wage service jobs, serving the largely white affluent tech workers. The median house value in both San Francisco and Silicon Valley is now around a million dollars, and the average rent is over three thousand per month for a two-bedroom flat: beyond the reach of almost anyone but tech workers.

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Thousands of businesses apply every year to access Y Combinator’s funding and guidance, in exchange for a small slice of their company. Sam is a Princeton dropout and frequently wears a hoodie, yet when I met him, he was only 31 years old and already a multi-millionaire. He is often described as ‘the man who invents the future’. The companies Y Combinator have funded include Airbnb and Starsky Robotics, and are now altogether valued at $80 billion. Aware of the potential turbulence that AI might unleash, Y Combinator recently started to fund a pilot in universal basic income. UBI, as it is commonly referred to, is an increasingly popular idea to deal with the possible rise of joblessness and tech-fuelled inequality.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/. Williams, Chris, Eli Brumbaugh, Jeff Feng, John Bodley, and Michelle Thomas. “Democratizing Data at Airbnb.” Airbnb Engineering & Data Science, May 12, 2017. https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/democratizing-data-at-airbnb-852d76c51770. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Williamson, Ben. “Calculating Children in the Dataveillance School: Social and Ethical Implications of New Technologies for Children and Young People.”

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For example, see book IV, title XIX of the Compilations, in particular the first law, which allows all subjects (including Indians) to benefit from the mines, and the fourteenth law, which specifies that Indians can own mines. Nevertheless, the fifteenth law allows Spaniards to “manage” the mines on behalf of the “naturally lazy” Indians, who do not know how to exploit them. 87. All quotes are from the corporate websites of the respective companies. The quote from Airbnb is from blog.atairbnb.com/open-letter-to-the-airbnb-community. 88. Benjamin, Illuminations, 253. 89. Harris, “Untimely Mammet.” Harris notes that automata such as the Mechanical Turk were referred to as mammets, a word deriving from the proper name Mohamet or Mohammed. He adds that “medieval Christian theologians used the word ‘mechanicum’ as a synonym for Muslim sorcery: they regarded Islam as a mechanical religion incapable of true life and of a meaningful future, and thus consigned it to a dead, unusable past.

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There is also the growing field of data brokers and data processing organizations such as Acxiom, Equifax, Palantir, and TalkingData (in China) that collect, aggregate, analyze, repackage, and sell data of all sorts while also supporting other organizations in their uses of data. And, finally, the social quantification sector includes the vast domain of organizations that increasingly depend for their basic functions on processing data from social life, whether to customize their services (like Netflix and Spotify) or to link sellers and buyers (like Airbnb, Uber, and Didi). Beyond the social quantification sector is the rest of business, which has also been transformed in the “great data transition.”10 Much of what ordinary businesses now do is crunch data from their internal processes and from the world around them; most businesses also depend increasingly on the work of the social quantification sector to target their ads and marketing.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs
by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips
Published 23 Jun 2015

Since the Internet revolution, with information so readily accessible, products, services, even whole businesses can be cloned and copied with ease. The Berlin-based company Wimdu, for example, is an exact replica of the successful platform Airbnb, a peer-to-peer rental market that provides an alternative to hotels. Wimdu was built by reverse-engineering Airbnb’s functions and borrowing from the site’s look and feel. Illustrating the power of iteration over pure invention, Wimdu created in a matter of months what it had taken Airbnb four years to develop. By June 2011, the company had raised over $90 million.7 Wimdu was started by three now-infamous German brothers—Oliver, Marc, and Alexander Samwer—who have a history of reverse-engineering U.S.

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Julie Zaveloff and Robert Johnson, “China Unveils a Knockoff Version of an Entire Austrian Village,” Business Insider, June 4, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-built-a-copycat-version-of-an-entire-austrian-village-2012-6. 7. Robin Wauters, “Investors Pump $90 Million into Airbnb Clone Wimdu,” Techcrunch, June 14, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/investors-pump-90-million-into-airbnb-clone-wimdu/. 8. Matt Cowan, “Inside the Clone Factory: The Story of Germany’s Samwer Brothers,” Wired, March 2, 2012, http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/inside-the-clone-factory/viewall. 9. Oded Shenkar, Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010). 10.

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These platforms permit unemployed and underemployed individuals to exchange what they do have for goods and services that they need. This trend toward “collaborative consumption” is taking place worldwide. As Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers chronicle in their book, What’s Mine Is Yours, sharing, trading, and selling idle items, time, and services is a rising trend. From Airbnb (a rental website that has gone from 120,000 listings in early 2012 to over 300,000 at the time of this writing) to Zipcar (the car-sharing service that was sold to Avis for $500 million in January 2013), people the world over are moving away from the fixed, formal “own it” model to a more fluid “exchange it” approach.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

Feeding more activity to the ledger simply cedes more of humanity and business alike to a growth-centric industrial model that was invented to thwart us to begin with. That’s the problem with any of the many new ways we have of earning income through previously off-the-books activities. On the one hand, they create thrilling new forms of peer-to-peer commerce. eBay lets us sell our attic junk. Web site Airbnb lets us rent out our extra bedrooms to travelers. Smartphone apps Uber and Lyft let us use our vehicles to give people rides, for money. Unlike many of the other platforms we’ve looked at so far, these opportunities don’t lead to power-law distributions, because a car or home can be hired only by one person at a time.

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If you need a ride, you can open Uber and see a map of the area along with tiny icons for the available cars. Pick a car based on its location, the driver’s ratings, and the estimated price. The driver finds you based on your own GPS location and your profile picture. Payment happens automatically, tip included. Airbnb is equally seamless. Enter a place and date and the Web site instantly renders a map with available options clearly indicated. Roll over any location to see a photo, details, and ratings for each. Book the room, and you’ll find out where to meet your host or pick up the keys. Like Uber, it’s unparalleled for choice and convenience.

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Only it’s not really sharing; it’s selling. In fact, just as there used to be an Internet that ran entirely on “shareware,” there were originally free versions of these new asset-renting platforms. Couchsurfing.com created a global community of people who both give and receive space in their homes. Airbnb, its commercial successor, pitches itself the same way but operates very differently—not only do boarders pay for lodging, but the vast majority of rentals are for entire apartments. Their ads show people sharing an extra bedroom and a place at the family table, but the statistics reveal that the vast majority (87 percent) of hosts leave their homes in order to rent them.37 Homes become amateur hotels, as the original residents try to live off the arbitrage between the rent they pay, the rent they earn, and the cost of living somewhere other than home.

Perfect Sound Whatever
by James. Acaster
Published 21 Aug 2019

The news story made us out to be victims of misfortune, but in reality getting stranded was the best thing that could’ve happened to us. Our holiday doubled in length, we got a new Airbnb and we continued having a fantastic holiday. Pretty soon other news outlets wanted to talk to the four of us: newspapers, TV shows and radio programmes, all wanting the scoop on our holiday for no good reason. John and Lloyd did a live interview with Sky News during which Lloyd unintentionally looked like a mobster. He thought it’d be funny to wear a USA medallion he’d found in the Airbnb, but the camera framed him in such a way that you couldn’t see the USA pendant. Plus he’s watching himself on the living room TV while the interview is taking place so he looks confused and angry throughout.

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It is Saturday, early evening, don’t leave me alone.’ • Reading 2016 music lists and buying 2016 music was now having the same effect on me that walking around listening to my iPod did – it was calming my anxieties and provided an escape at a time when both were very much needed. I bought more music while staying up late in my New York Airbnb than I’d ever bought in one sitting before. One night I veered away from the ‘best of’ lists and decided to search for projects by musicians I already liked, quickly discovering a beaut by an artist who, due to being out of the loop, I’d weirdly assumed had retired. • Andrew Broder began writing songs when he was 11, recording on a tape player with his brother, both of them playing guitars before quickly branching out onto keyboards, drum machines, four-tracks, turntables and whatever they could lay their hands on.

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It wasn’t an ‘interest’ any more; buying music from 2016 was now something I needed to do in order to feel ok. Being in New York immediately after a breakup felt confusing. On the one hand, it was my first time in the Big Apple and it was exciting to visit a new place, but on the other hand I was extremely depressed and wanted to cry all the time. Also, sharing an Airbnb with my agent wasn’t exactly ideal. Early on in the trip things went badly. A miscalculated journey meant I was late for a gig and got kicked off the bill. This one event sparked some tension that would ultimately build throughout the entire year and result in me getting dropped by my management.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

Part of the reason I don’t participate in the sharing economy is I’m an introvert, and a shy one too. Hotels are easy. Staff rarely say more than hello. But Airbnb is different. I’m staying in a home with my host. It’s like crashing with a friend you don’t know. Of course, Sophie comes highly recommended. She has a 5-star rating and dozens of glowing reviews. I’m not at all worried about safety or security. And while I’m not sure I’d want our daughters being Airbnb hosts, I’m not a complete stranger to Sophie. She’s seen my profile, references, and Facebook account. She knows I have a verified ID. Airbnb has my home address, phone number, credit card, and driver’s license. I’m about as far from anonymity as can be.

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I’m about as far from anonymity as can be. And her property is protected by a one million dollar host guarantee. Airbnb has invested in an architecture of trust that helps them scale up safely to serve millions of guests around the world. Figure 1-9. Airbnb’s architecture of trust. But like Uber they do have problems. In New York, Airbnb has been declared illegal, and landlords given big fines. In Paris, hosts unwittingly rented to prostitutes who used their home as a brothel. All around the world, neighbors are disturbed by the presence of strangers in what they thought were single-family homes.

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That’s why I’m willing to travel. Systems Thinking I’m in Silicon Valley. I’m in a cab headed to my hotel. Actually, that’s not true. I’m hitchhiking and plan to sleep with a stranger named Sophie. Okay, that’s not quite right either. But that’s how our eleven year old daughter explained my experiment with Uber and Airbnb to my wife. Yes, once again, I’m making myself uncomfortable. I’m an advisor to the School of Library and Information Science at San José State University. Since 2009, the program has embraced a 100% online model. Ironically, I’m here for a face to face meeting. And I’m using this visit to California as an opportunity to dip my toes into the infamous sharing economy.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

from cable television: Amy Mitchell et al., “Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable,” Pew Research Center, July 30, 2020, https://www.journalism.org/2020/07/30/americans-who-mainly-get-their-news-on-social-media-are-less-engaged-less-knowledgeable/. to rein them in: Kaushik Viswanath, “How Uber and Airbnb Created a Parasite Economy,” Marker, September 14, 2020, https://marker.medium.com/uber-and-airbnb-are-parasites-but-they-dont-have-to-be-36909355ac3b; Paris Martineau, “Inside Airbnb’s ‘Guerilla War’ Against Local Governments,” Wired, March, 20, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-airbnbs-guerrilla-war-against-local-governments/; Mike Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide,” The New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html.

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“This is powerful,” wrote The New York Times’s eternally optimistic tribune of globalization, Thomas Friedman, predicting that the sharing economy would allow unskilled workers to adapt to the modern economy. Wired focused less on economics and more on cultural potential. “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other,” a feature proclaimed. It argued that these Silicon Valley companies had the potential to return us to a form of “the neighborly interactions that defined pre-industrial society.” But, of course, Airbnb and Lyft also had implications beyond neighborliness. They were projects designed to reshape labor markets, removing the protections that workers had enjoyed since the New Deal, which was among the worst developments in American political history, as far as Thiel was concerned.

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Uber and Lyft drivers, TaskRabbit and Postmates workers, and the part-time hoteliers of Airbnb were not employees and couldn’t be by definition. That meant the app companies they worked for—Thiel’s portfolio companies—were under no obligation to provide for their health insurance or retirement or to negotiate with unions that represented them. There was no minimum wage for gig workers since they got paid by the gig. Moreover, this newly popular labor model wasn’t limited to the sharing economy; businesses everywhere were stripping workers of rights by switching from full-time to gig-based contract workers. Now Airbnb, Lyft, and the rest of Thiel’s portfolio provided an ideology to back up the shift.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy
by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz
Published 4 Nov 2016

By 2011, 66 percent of these young households had a vehicle.” 2. Tim Logan, Emily Alpert Reyes, and Ben Poston, “Airbnb and Other Short-Term Rentals Worsen Housing Shortage, Critics Say,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-airbnb-housing-market-20150311-story.html, accessed September 4, 2015; Laura Kusisto, “Airbnb Pushes Up Apartment Rents Slightly, Study Says,” Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2015/03/30/airbnb-pushes-up-apartment-rents-slightly-study-says/, accessed September 4, 2015. 3. Rachel Monroe, “More Guests, Empty Houses,” Slate, February 13, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/02/airbnb_gentrification_how_the_sharing_economy_drives_up_housing_prices.html, accessed September 4, 2015. 4.

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That’s not to say we should do away with new models of allocating and sharing resources, or that we should favor incumbents at all costs. But we need to be fully aware of the bargains we are striking. There are losers in the sharing economy, and they aren’t just legacy taxi companies and expensive hotels. The savings Airbnb users realize and the company’s profits are in part the result of externalities—costs that Airbnb and its users aren’t bearing. In cities big and small, there is evidence that Airbnb contributes to rent increases for residents.2 As more housing units are devoted to the sharing economy, fewer are available for locals to rent. Long-term renters have even been evicted to make room for vacationers.3 The unseen costs of the sharing economy are also borne by the increasing number of workers classified as independent contractors.

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We see evidence of this transformation in the emergence of the so-called “sharing economy.” For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers broadly to services and business models that enable individuals and organizations to share, rent, and reuse resources, often enabled by technology. If you’ve ever gotten a ride in an Uber or spent the night in an Airbnb rental, you’ve taken part in the sharing economy. The range of goods and services in the sharing economy is staggering. In addition to rides and apartments, there are platforms for renting parking spots, bicycles, private planes, and clothes. Other platforms help neighbors share tools and household goods.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

At last count, more than 576,000 hours of video are created on YouTube every day of the week. And once it’s there, it’s available at any time (unless it’s deliberately removed, of course). That’s a lot of opportunity to match almost infinite supply to demand. Imagine if Airbnb competed the same way as hotels do, with a limited supply of rooms. If Airbnb had a selection of ten rooms in New York to compete with a hotel you normally choose, the hotel would win every time. But the game changes when Airbnb aggregates far more supply on their platform. At a certain tipping point, the service locks in and provides immense value to users through access to a unique supply that they hadn’t seen before; the suppliers, in this case, make their listings stand out by various means like better photos or feedback scores that, in turn, deliver increasing value to users.

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At a certain tipping point, the service locks in and provides immense value to users through access to a unique supply that they hadn’t seen before; the suppliers, in this case, make their listings stand out by various means like better photos or feedback scores that, in turn, deliver increasing value to users. And, like YouTube, not only does Airbnb have no cost of the supply beyond their technology, the value they gain is from the competition of the supply. Today, Airbnb has more than six million listings. Because of this pattern, for users, platforms are incredible and getting better all the time. It is no wonder that we are locked into them. For suppliers, however, it can be more difficult—especially if you’re late to a platform.

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Aggregating all supply and allowing that supply to compete for audiences is how all platforms gain their power. That supply can take many different forms, but the pattern is remarkably consistent. On Facebook, the supply is you. On LinkedIn, the supply is the business you. On Amazon and Alibaba, the supply is the products and suppliers. On YouTube, it is the videos. On Airbnb, it is the rental homes. On iTunes or Spotify, it is the songs and musicians. In an app store, it is the apps. In any one of these examples, imagine the service without the sheer number of “suppliers” competing for attention. Because the platform owners don’t own the supply, they aggregate it, the supply can scale almost indefinitely without the negative impacts of holding that supply.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

He gazed at the façade of Y Combinator: the one-story building, just five miles from Google’s Mountain View campus, looked more like a sleepy suburban office park than a famous startup school that had educated the founders of Stripe, Dropbox, and other billion-dollar companies. Brian didn’t care about the place’s humdrum appearance. He knew who had gone there before him. The founders of Airbnb, a company he’d just left, had come out of Y Combinator, and so had the CEOs of other Silicon Valley stars like Doordash, Twitch, and Reddit. Brian, pale and shy-looking at first glance, exuded a quiet confidence from his trim frame and wasn’t bothered that he’d broken up with his would-be cofounder just days before, making him the rare entrepreneur to do the program alone.

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By now, he had developed a special insight of his own about the currency, one that he would soon deliver to millions of people. • • • In his startup bible, Zero to One, mercurial billionaire Peter Thiel talks about “open secrets”—business ideas that are just there for the plucking by those who are not afraid to challenge conventional thinking. Thiel gives the example of Airbnb, whose founders saw a latent market for empty rooms, and Uber, whose founders realized it was possible to replace taxis with a GPS signal and a smartphone app. The books of business writer Michael Lewis provide other examples of open secrets. In Moneyball, Lewis describes a general manager who built a winning baseball team by relying on data rather than the long-held wisdom of veteran scouts.

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Later, during the financial carnage of the Great Recession—where millions of ordinary people, including his parents, had their hard-won savings wiped out while the bank executives most responsible received bonuses—Olaf saw bitcoin as an economic system that could not be rigged. “This was the ultimate cyberpunk authoritarian thing,” he recalls. He plowed almost all of his life savings of $700 into bitcoin and urged his friends to do the same. In his final year at Vassar College in upstate New York, not long before Brian left Airbnb for Y Combinator and Katie Haun’s boss asked her to prosecute FNU LNU, Olaf selected bitcoin as the topic for his final thesis. His professor was bemused at first, then tried to discourage Olaf after discovering “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin,” an article that appeared in the November 2011 edition of Wired magazine.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Providers are engaged in rich and diverse work, gaining valuable independence and flexibility. Lyft's slogan is “Your Friend with a Car.” Airbnb and Feastly urge hosts and guests to share photos and communicate to build trust. Some things remain the same. Researchers have found that, accounting for other variables, Airbnb guests pay black hosts less than they do white ones.8 The sharing economy, in reality, relies on disintermediating existing businesses and minimizing regulatory costs. Amateur chauffeurs, chefs, and personal assistants now perform, at a lower cost, work once undertaken by full-time professionals. Airbnb, Lyft, and others do not always comply with regulations designed to ensure a minimum level of skill, standard of performance, safety and security, and insurance coverage.

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The origins have been traced to a speech given by Martin Niemoller, the Lutheran pastor and victim of Nazi persecution, on 6 January 1946 to the representatives of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt. 8 Cited in Jason Tanz, “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other,” Wired, 23 April 2014. www.wired.com/2014/04/trust-in-the-share-economy. 9 William Alden, “The Business Tycoons of Airbnb,” The New York Times Magazine, 30 November 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/magazine/the-business-tycoons-of-airbnb.html. 10 Kevin Roose, “Does Silicon Valley Have a Contract-Worker Problem?” New York Magazine, 18 September 2014. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/silicon-valleys-contract-worker-problem.html. 11 Harley Shaken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, quoted in Louis Uchitelle, “The Wage That Meant Middle Class,” New York Times, 20 April 2008. 12 The Future of Retirement (2015) – Global Report, HSBC Holdings PLC. 13 Andrew Haldane, “The $100 Billion Question,” speech at the Institute of Regulation & Risk, North Asia (IRRNA) in Hong Kong, 30 March 2010. www.bankofengland.co.uk/archive/Documents/historicpubs/news/2010/036.pdf. 14 Paul Brodsky, “Plastics,” 14 November 2011. www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/11/plastics/. 15 Martin Amis, “Martin Amis on God, Money, and What's Wrong with the GOP,” Newsweek, 10 September 2012. www.newsweek.com/martin-amis-god-money-and-whats-wrong-gop-64629. 16 Arnaud Marès, “Ask Not Whether Governments Will Default, but How,” Morgan Stanley, 26 August 2010. http://economics.uwo.ca/fubar_docs/july_dec10/morganstanleyreport_sept10.pdf. 17 Alan J.

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Google and blogs divert revenue from newspapers, publishing, and libraries. Digital advertising diverts revenue from newspaper, magazine, and TV advertising. Technological innovation increasingly relies on lowering costs, which is achieved by reducing the quality of the product as well using untrained individuals or personal assets. Airbnb allows people to rent out their own home for accommodation. Uber, a ride-sharing application, allows individuals to use their own cars to provide transport services. Wikipedia and other online media or entertainment services rely on unpaid labor. This kind of innovation also focuses on creating free platforms or services in order to build a sufficiently large user community from which stealth revenues can be extracted, either directly or by selling user data to allow targeted marketing, or worse.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

In the past, when travelers thought about where they would stay while visiting a distant city, the mental model that they called up was a hotel. The second important information component had to do with trust. Consumers assumed that if they stayed in a branded hotel, they would experience a certain level of quality. The Airbnb model has changed the rules and tools by substituting a different set of information equivalents for those assumptions. Now travelers think about staying in the homes of total strangers. And they trust a computer system—Airbnb—to find them one that is clean, safe, convenient, and fairly priced. The extent of the transformation that takes place as a result of information equivalence depends, first, on the amount of functionality that can move from one information equivalent structure to another.

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Hawkins, “Car2Go Thinks We’d Rather Share Luxury Mercedes-Benz Sedans Than Smart Cars,” The Verge, January 30, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/30/14437770/car2go-daimler-mercedes-benz-cla-gla-carsharing (accessed June 27, 2019). 50. “Millennials,” special advertising section, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/brand-connect/millennials/ (accessed June 27, 2019). 51. Ibid. 52. “10 Airbnb Competitors That You Should Know About,” Tripping, https://www.tripping.com/industry/rental-companies/9-airbnb-competitors-that-you-should-know-about. 53. “Find Your Next Workspace,” ShareDesk, https://www.sharedesk.net/ (accessed June 27, 2019). 54. Connie Loizos, “Uber Just Pissed Off Dozens of Longtime Employees; Now They’re Gunning for Management,” TechCrunch, June 8, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/08/uber-just-pissed-off-dozens-of-longtime-employees-now-theyre-gunning-for-management/ (accessed June 27, 2019); and Mansoor Iqbal, “Uber Revenue and Usage Statistics (2019),” Business of Apps, May 10, 2019, http://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/ (accessed June 27, 2019). 55.

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CHAPTER FIVE COMMERCIAL TRANSFORMATION Rewriting Business and the Economy INFORMATION, INTELLIGENCE, AND SPATIAL EQUIVALENCES are reshaping commerce and the economy at large. Tom Goodwin’s now-famous observation encapsulates just how thoroughly the rules are being rewritten: Uber, the world’s largest 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.1 The worlds of business and finance are changing rapidly: online retailing, the sharing economy, freemium business models, streaming media, crowd-sourcing, peer-to-peer lending, virtual currencies.

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required
by Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung
Published 8 Jul 2019

Canadians, meanwhile, can find the best options (like our favorite, the American Express Gold rewards card that comes with a 25,000-point sign-on bonus) at CanadianTravelHacking.com. AIRBNB Another trick we’ve learned to keep our costs down is using Airbnb. Between Airbnb and travel hacking, we saved around $18,000 a year. You get to experience living like a local, plus your own kitchen and access to a washing machine. Unlike staying at a hotel, where you’re stuck watching your waistline expand and your wallet shrink, Airbnb lets you feel at home. I’ve discovered all sorts of hidden gems (like the best place for a steak sandwich in Lisbon and the best dessert in Chiang Mai) by asking my Airbnb host for their recommendations. TRAVEL INSURANCE AND EXPAT INSURANCE “Massive heart attack,” “ICU,” “Might not make it.”

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COST OF TRAVELING THE WORLD Countries visited: 20 (the USA, England, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Greece, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia) Region Duration Monthly Cost (USD) Monthly Cost (CAD) North America 1 month $2,441 $3,174 UK 1 month $3,962 $5,150 Western Europe 1 month $3,515 $4,569 Eastern Europe 1 month $2,657 $3,454 Asia 2 months $3,243 + $2,376 $4,216 + $3,089 Southeast Asia 6 months $2,031 + $2,057 + $2,038 + $1,836 + $1,674 + $1,703 $2,640 + $2,675 + $2,649 + $2,387 + $2,176 + $2,214 Total 12 months $29,533 USD/year $38,393 CAD/year Adding in $875 CAD per person per year × 2 = $1,750 CAD for travel insurance, it ended up costing us $30,879 USD or $40,143 CAD per year. The lie we’ve been sold is that traveling is expensive. But by splitting the year between expensive regions (like the UK, Western Europe, and Japan) and inexpensive ones (like Southeast Asia), our daily costs averaged only $42 USD or $55 CAD per person per day. We stayed in Airbnbs and hotels, sometimes going out to eat, sometimes cooking. We even managed to sneak in splurges like fresh oysters and lobsters in Boston, a four-day scuba-diving certification course in Thailand ($250 USD per person, accommodations included), scuba diving in Cambodia ($80 USD per person for two dives), hiking in the Swiss Alps ($87 USD per person), and Kobe beef ($48 USD per person) in Japan!

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By alternating the time spent in higher-cost locations like Western Europe with time in lower-cost places like Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, it’s possible to “design” a travel budget. Useful techniques to keep travel costs down: Travel Hacking: Using credit card signups to accumulate points for flights. Airbnb: Much cheaper than hotels, plus they often come with a kitchen so you can cook your own food and live like a local rather than a tourist. Make sure you get travel insurance! — 17 — BUCKETS AND BACKUPS During our first year of retirement, Bryce and I learned two important lessons: One, traveling the world could cost less than living in a high-cost city.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

Thompson FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2011 Among the various other startups in our shared office space, many of which went on to far greater things than AdGrok, was Getaround. To use that X of Y formulation so beloved of startup self-promotion, this was Airbnb for your car. By placing a small electronic device in your car to permit controlled access, you could list your car on a user-facing site that permitted searching and filtering. The borrower paid an hourly rate, Getaround took a cut, and you got paid for owning an often idle asset, similar to a spare bedroom on Airbnb. In the midst of this Brazilian telenovela we called tech entrepreneurship, fellow startup traveler Matt Tillman and I were plotting a bit of fun.

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To paraphrase the very quotable Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do. Wall Street was merely the first inkling. The next place where this shift would be seen at whopping scale in terms of both money and technology (though I didn’t realize at the time) was in Internet advertising. And after that, it would hit transportation (Uber), hostelry (Airbnb), food delivery (Instacart), and so on. To take the theory further, computation would no longer fill some hard gap in a human workflow process, such as the calculators used by accountants. Humans would fill the hard gaps in a purely computer workflow process, like Uber’s drivers. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

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If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

Tomorrow I should easily be able to earn enough to live on, doing real work but without drawing a fixed salary. Instead, I could be an Uber driver, rent my house out through Airbnb, provide my work skills on community platforms. And why not think about becoming a teacher or lecturer via these same platforms?’ Pierre Calmard, CEO, iProspect12 That is one sanguine view of what is happening, presented by someone who is most unlikely to be an Uber driver or an Airbnb host any time soon. There is a more worrying perspective. The number of taskers is rising extraordinarily fast. The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has predicted that by 2025 200 million nominally unemployed or part-time employees will be making extra from doing tasks through online platforms.13 But MGI is too optimistic in implying that those earnings will merely supplement a main source of income.

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Disputes about standards are bound to arise whenever amateurs provide a service that hitherto was the exclusive preserve of those with qualifications or membership of an occupational community. Hotel and bed-and-breakfast organisations have attacked Airbnb, saying its ‘hosts’ have an unfair advantage because they do not need to comply with fire regulations or pay taxes on overnight stays. In New York, Airbnb has been accused of encouraging illegal lets and landlordism.24 Amateurism is a route for cheapening labour and increasing the rental income of the platforms. Taskers fit in the precariat. They lack income security, labour security and an occupational trajectory.

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In a seminal book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen argued that innovation was ‘disruptive’ if it had the potential to generate new products or services or to deliver them in radically new ways.3 He and colleagues later claimed that the provision of services through digital platforms did not meet two criteria for disruptive innovation – that the innovation must target the low end of an existing market and mainly draw in non-consumers of existing options.4 But digital platforms surely qualify as disruptive on both counts. Uber, for example, has expanded the market for taxi services by offering cheap rides, drawing in users previously put off by high prices and lack of flexibility of traditional taxi services. By late 2015 Uber had over 1.1 million drivers and was operating in 351 cities in sixty-four countries.5 Airbnb has created a casual rental market enabling people to let rooms in their homes on a short-term basis, as well as providing a platform for conventional bed-and-breakfast operators. In 2015, it had 1.5 million listings, ranging from spare beds to castles in 34,000 cities and over 190 countries, and had more rooms on its books than some of the world’s largest hotel chains.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb identified as platforms, as did Beyond Meat, the pea-protein burger maker (“plant-based-product platforms”); Peloton, the indoor exercise bike company (“the largest interactive fitness platform in the world”); and Casper, the mattress company (a “platform built for better sleep”). It was no longer good enough for companies to simply be what they were. Connecting WeWork to the SaaS trend was only the latest way Adam and other WeWork executives had tried to tie their company to the rising titans of Silicon Valley. WeWork needed office buildings like Uber needed cars and Airbnb needed apartments.

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“Until today, we were a boutique office space,” Adam said. “Starting tomorrow, we’re going to be the world’s first ‘physical social network.’” WeWork’s business didn’t seem to share much with the tech companies taking off in the Mission or Menlo Park. The empires of the 2010s—Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb—were being built on “platforms” with “network effects” that made them more and more valuable with each user that signed up; WeWork leased office space in half a dozen buildings to people who paid rent. But Miguel and Adam had been talking about the networking aspect of WeWork since the beginning, a decade after Miguel had missed the social revolution with English, baby!

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Let’s build the largest networking community on the planet.” The idea was to connect WeWork’s buildings and members so that belonging to the WeWork community would become as valuable as the space itself. “We happen to need buildings just like Uber happens to need cars,” Adam would say. “Just like Airbnb happens to need apartments.” The 2010s offered plenty of incentives for Adam to present WeWork as a social network. While he had no trouble finding wealthy friends in New York willing to invest a few million dollars into a steadily growing real estate firm, the global expansion he and Miguel had in mind would require the kind of investment capital flowing most freely to companies that claimed to use technology to disrupt staid industries.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl
Published 7 May 2018

No taxonomy of the platform economy today seems complete without men- tioning platforms such as airbnb, a California-based company offering room and house rentals across the globe (http://www.airbnb.co.uk, archived at https://perma.cc/TF8R-YUSJ). At first glance, it has much in common with the on-demand economy platforms we are interested in: both match consumers and services through sophisticated rating algorithms, and both offer fully auto- mated payment and feedback systems. They are also subject to similarly polar- ized debates about their impact on local markets, as well as engaged in high-profile disputes with regulators. airbnb will nonetheless be excluded from subsequent discussion.

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The authors graciously concede that ‘because the inter- ests of digital, third-party platforms are not always perfectly aligned with the broader interests of society, some governmental involvement or oversight is likely to remain useful’: ibid. 21. Ibid., 130–1. In their worked example of airbnb (a property rental business), they suggest: [delegating] regulatory responsibility relating to information asymmetry to plat- forms like Airbnb (whose interests are naturally aligned with the global aggregation of information and the mitigation of adverse selection and moral hazard), and let [local housing associations] play a key role in the regulation of local externalities, as the guest-noise and strangers-in-the-building externalities are typically local and primarily affect [the association’s] membership

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You have great stories.’56 Micro-entrepreneurship promises to unlock the value of idle or under- used assets and skills, enthuses Nick Grossman of gig-economy investor Union Square Ventures: ‘Someone on Sidecar doing the same commute they do on a daily basis and picking up a rider, it’s really free money for the driver and reduced cost for the rider.’57 Perhaps best of all, we are told that the gig economy offers precisely the sort of work environment today’s labour force wants: flexible work, on an informal basis, and the ability to work ‘any- where’ using digital technology have all ranked highly in recent global sur- veys conducted by major professional services firms.58 No wonder, then, that Matt Hancock, one of the UK’s former junior ministers for business, was so euphoric in his foreword to a government- commissioned review: The sharing economy is an exciting new area of the economy. Digital innov- ation is creating entirely new ways to do business. These new services are unlocking a new generation of microentrepreneurs—people who are making money from the assets and skills they already own, from renting out a spare room through Airbnb, through to working as a freelance designer through PeoplePerHour. The route to self-employment has never been easier.59 Rethinking Employment Regulation What does this mean for employment law? Once more, we see a range of proposals based on tales of entrepreneurship and innovation—from a complete * * * Rebranding Work 47 rejection of employment law to a watering down of existing laws through new, less protective, categories.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by Alexis Ohanian
Published 30 Sep 2013

A few years ago, most would have scoffed at the idea that a couple of Rhode Island School of Design graduates in an apartment with laptops would have more rooms available for rent than the Hilton corporation6 (not a Hilton or even the biggest single Hilton hotel—the entire Hilton Hotels empire). But that’s exactly what happened. The guys at Airbnb.com (air bed-and-breakfast; see what they did there?) found a brilliant, simple way to connect people who have space, from spare bedrooms to entire homes, with people looking to rent, like vacationers and business travelers, in an online marketplace. These days, their company is valued in the billions and highly profitable. I had the privilege of watching them pitch their idea at Y Combinator Demo Day, if not the foresight to invest in them when I had the chance. Airbnb is a perfect example of a company that technologically could’ve existed before social media connected the web—websites like CouchSurfing.org and even craigslist had been facilitating this for quite some time—but thrived when it did because social media had created a critical mass of people who were comfortable turning online relationships into real-world business transactions.

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Five years ago, I doubt you would’ve found many international hotel companies who were worried about startups disrupting their industry. They owned all those expensive, big, solid buildings, after all! It would take ludicrous amounts of money to build a hotel empire in a few years, but that’s exactly what Airbnb did—except they did it with pixels rather than bricks. It turned out that a vast empire of hotel rooms was in our homes the whole time. Airbnb is just one example of disruption enabled by an open Internet, but there are countless others happening as we speak. No one can predict just how these industries will be disrupted—only that it’s a matter of when, not if. That’s the nature of innovation.

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Keep a notepad handy—I prefer digital, but analog is fine, too—and write down whatever is upsetting you. There’s a good chance you’ll find a business in those notes. Remember, Adam’s awful experiences booking flights for the MIT debate team motivated him to start hipmunk because he figured there had to be a better way to search for flights online. Similarly, Airbnb got its start because the founders needed to pay their rent and realized there were lots of other people who would pay to rent the founders’ unused space. So many successful companies start out like this: the founders were having a problem, and they found a way to solve it. A company doesn’t have to start this way, but it’s the easiest place to start.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

The remarkable Apple supply chain that Tim Cook was responsible for developing is clearly a long-term source of value for Apple, allowing it to bring products to market extraordinarily quickly. A valuable asset of so-called sharing-economy businesses like Uber or AirBnB is typically their network of committed suppliers—Uber’s drivers or AirBnB’s hosts. This too is an asset of lasting value that both companies have invested heavily to develop (and which they invest to protect, for example, against legal actions requiring them to treat their suppliers as employees). There’s a more general point here as well.

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Because computers and networks of computers deal in information, they also help make other intangible investment easier or more effective. Consider the network of big sharing-economy companies like Uber or AirBnB. There is nothing about their business models that absolutely requires computers and the Internet. Before everyone had a smartphone, there were networked cab companies, some of which, like London’s ComCab or Radio Taxis, used independent drivers. Before AirBnB, there were house-share clubs with brochures and telephone booking systems. Both the house-share clubs and the taxi networks made investments of time and money to develop their networks of suppliers.

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But the process of “software eating the world,” in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s words, is not just about software: it involves other intangibles in abundance. Consider Apple’s designs and its unrivaled supply chain, which has helped it to bring elegant products to market quickly and in sufficient numbers to meet customer demand, or the networks of drivers and hosts that sharing-economy giants like Uber and AirBnB have developed, or Tesla’s manufacturing know-how. Computers and the Internet are important drivers of this change in investment, but the change is long running and predates not only the World Wide Web but even the Internet and the PC. The rise of intangible investment becomes clear if we look at data for the economy as a whole.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Wind and I got to know each other in Paris while splitting a stranger’s apartment that we found through Airbnb. It was 2014, and thanks to apps like that, such apps were on the rise in urban centers.12 The internet was making it possible again for people to share resources such as cars, homes, and time—bringing us together, for a price. Capitalism’s creative destruction may have ravaged our communities for centuries with salvos of individualism, competition, and mistrust, but now it was ready to sell the benefits of community back to us on our smartphones. Without owning any guestrooms of its own, Airbnb was by then more valuable than Hyatt; Zipcar, which rents cars by the hour, had been bought by the international car-rental company Avis Budget.

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McKinsey and Company estimates as many as half of all jobs are vulnerable to existing technologies.6 Rather than industrial production and distribution—now outsourced to other lands—the apps offer postindustrial matching algorithms. But networked connections can do more than endlessly disrupt us. Behind so many disruptive tech companies lies an innovation that started with collaboration. Before there was Airbnb, travelers stayed in each other’s homes for free with Couchsurfing. While Google and Facebook were disrupting the print advertising industry, an Egyptian Google employee used Facebook to help set off the popular uprising that brought down the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Car sharing, crowdfunding, social networks—these are things that people previously turned to co-ops to do.

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When the sharing evangelist and consultant Rachel Botsman showed slides of Arab Spring crowds, those scenes served as an analogy, not a recommended course of action. She described sharers as “insurgents” against old-fashioned hierarchical businesses, engaged in “revolution,” “democratizing,” and of course “disruption.” Disruption came up at OuiShare Fest a lot. Just as Airbnb disrupted the hotel industry, the sharing startups present were poised to undermine more industries in short order. One could sense a general din of cheerfulness, as the startup boosters and organic farmers alike expected an imminent and inevitable disintegration of the economic establishment and a triumphant future of sharing ready to take its place.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler
Published 11 Jun 2018

December 5, 2013. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/. 13   Friedman, Thomas. How to Monetize Your Closet. New York Times. December 21, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/friedman-how-to-monetize-your-closet.html; Geron, Tomio. Airbnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy. Forbes. February 11, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/01/23/airbnb-and-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-share-economy/#463a65b6790b. 14   Johnson, Justin Elof. Will You Leave Your Job to Join the Sharing Economy? VentureBeat. January 21, 2013. http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/21/will-you-leave-your-job-to-join-the-sharing-economy/. 15   Manjoo, Farhad.

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He hoped that the gig economy—specifically Leila’s vision for it—would play out in Dumas as it had been conceived in Silicon Valley, that it would serve as a conduit for opportunities that had otherwise left his small town, and others like it, behind. CHAPTER 4 UBER FOR X Travis Kalanick joined his first startup more than ten years before co-founding Uber, dropping out of the University of California, Los Angeles, to work on a peer-to-peer music- and video-sharing startup. Airbnb’s first founders met at the Rhode Island School of Design. Two of Upwork’s cofounders created the freelancing site after working together, but from separate countries, on a previous startup.1 Like most of the people who founded gig economy companies, these founders were experts in creating technology products, not in mobilizing and managing large service workforces.

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Though some hired subcontractors, like Managed by Q, and some hired independent contractors, like Uber, the misconception behind both strategies was similar: “We’d build this beautiful interface, and of course the cleaning just happens,” Saman remembered thinking. “Of course the stuff just gets done.” PART II SUNSHINE, RAINBOWS, AND UNICORNS CHAPTER 5 LIKE AN ATM IN YOUR POCKET The percentage of adults who earned some income through websites like Uber, Airbnb, and Mechanical Turk grew 47-fold between 2012 and 2015, expanding to include around 4% of adults in the United States.1 As the gig economy gained traction, Silicon Valley was sure that it would change the world. And it was equally sure, or at least seemed hell-bent on convincing itself, that the change would be wonderful.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

“Built to Last.” Logic Magazine, August 31, 2020. logicmag.io/care/built-to-last. Hicks, Mar. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Hill, Kashmir. “Airbnb Has a Dead People Problem: The Morbid Side of the Sharing Economy.” Splinter, February 11, 2015. splinternews.com/airbnb-has-a-dead-people-problem-the-morbid-side-of-th-1793845201. Hobart, Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Tamara Kneese. “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” Social Text 38, no. 1 (142) (2020): 1–16. doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067.

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To do this effectively, social networking websites rely on servers to collect and store vast amounts of data.45 Individuals’ profiles now follow them through life, sometimes even from conception, documented in ultrasound and pregnancy photos and shared with social networks before they are born. Social media can track individuals, as well as their kin and social networks, throughout their entire life cycles.46 As platforms like Facebook converge with other forms of social media—Instagram, Twitter, Airbnb, Tinder, and Pinterest—along with news sources and a vast number of commercial websites and institutions, the amount of data stored about an individual and their networks is immense. The affective value of communicative traces is of central importance, but the data are also extremely valuable to advertisers, companies, and government agencies long after a person dies, providing fodder for machine learning training sets.

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As systems age, break down, and decay, however, it is people who must keep them alive. Such objects are manufactured with the expectation of smartness, but there are plenty of not-so-smart objects that are now networked with digital platforms. The sharing economy integrates cars, apartments, and other everyday objects into automated systems. On Airbnb, for example, the listings of the dead continue to persist, as the company has no mechanism for sorting out which hosts have died. Automation makes it hard to tell the difference between the objects of the living and the dead. The journalist Kashmir Hill, writing for Splinter News, rightly imagines such a future: “You’ll unlock a stranger’s door with a code or smartphone app.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
Published 25 Apr 2023

On the porch, Tyler and David tensed slightly and mumbled something about relaxing and drinking beers. “How long are you guys staying here?” the man asked. They told him they had been renting the house from Airbnb and planned to leave the next day. “Why don’t you stay for an extra week?” he said. “I’ll pay for the Airbnb.” What is going on here? Tyler thought. These two strange men, standing in front of them chain-smoking cigarettes, were now proposing they cover the cost of the Airbnb so they could stay another week? The shoeless man looked at David. “What do you do?” he said. David was cautiously interested to see where this was going and told him he worked in recruiting.

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A year after the sale Alfred departed: Arrington, Michael, “Alfred Lin to Leave Zappos, Join Sequoia Capital,” TechCrunch, April 9, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/09/alfred-lin-leaves-zappos-joins-sequoia-capital/. he joined the board of Airbnb: TechCrunch, “Airbnb’s Brian Chesky on How He Met Board Member Alfred Lin,” September 27, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/video/airbnbs-brian-chesky-on-how-he-met-board-member-alfred-lin/. Cities “spur innovation”: Silver, Diana, “Up, Up, Up,” New York Times, February 11, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/Silver-t.html. would take over the old City Hall building: Schoenmann, Joe, “Zappos Views Las Vegas City Hall as Perfect Fit for New Headquarters,” Las Vegas Sun, November 29, 2010, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/nov/29/zapposcom-moving-green-valley-las-vegas-city-hall/.

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For all the hullabaloo about the successful leadership synergy at the top of Zappos between Tony, Fred, and Alfred Lin, it didn’t last long after Amazon bought the company. A year after the sale, Alfred departed and took a role at Sequoia alongside his mentor Michael Moritz, where he would end up steering investments into companies like DoorDash, Instacart, and Reddit. (In 2012, he joined the board of Airbnb.) With Alfred gone, there were rumblings that Tony and Fred were working on something massive. “They were actually very, very explicit about the fact that they had this secret project,” recalled Chris Peake, the Zappos employee who reported to Fred. Tony and Fred had been inspired by an economist named Edward Glaeser, whose book Triumph of the City unpacked how urban metropolises like Athens, London, Tokyo, and Singapore have historically fostered humans’ leaps forward.

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
by Laura Shin
Published 22 Feb 2022

A FEW DAYS later, Gavin, Vitalik, Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir, and another friend, Yanislav Malahov, showed up in Vienna at the ornately decorated, 198-year-old Vienna University of Technology for a Bitcoin conference, to which Vitalik wore the same purple-, blue-, and white-striped sweater he’d worn at the January Decentral opening.10 Gavin drank and was out late with Yanislav, while the younger Vitalik and Vlad stayed in the Airbnb on their computers. But during the day, Gavin and Vitalik discussed weightier issues. Both of them had always been in favor of Ethereum being a Crypto Mozilla, a nonprofit to support open-source development, and they finally discussed their misgivings about a for-profit model. According to Vitalik, in a discussion at their giraffe-figurine decorated Airbnb, although Gav would later say he didn’t remember it, Gavin expressed that if a for-profit rather than a nonprofit were to be stewarding the technology, he wasn’t willing to stay.

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Although years later Jeff would say the way Charles became CEO was “like someone stepping in, saying, ‘Hey, I’m the CEO of Apple right now,’” at the time Jeff was quite happy and grateful to CEO Charles, and Gavin felt vindicated that the others recognized that he and Jeff were important.5 Each founder would get the same endowment and vote, except Vitalik would get double the amount of ether as well as a second vote, essentially to break ties among the eight cofounders. THE CREW WORKING on Ethereum’s legal and administrative structure first stayed in an Airbnb at Meierskappel, a municipality across the lake from Zug. Mihai was a big proponent of holons, live-work spaces, to complement the decentralized Ethereum network. They worked, cooked, and filmed each other in the small space. Charles would be on the phone with a reporter. A twenty-three-year-old Dane named Mathias Grønnebæk, whose experience watching his grandfather lose millions in the financial crisis had sparked his path to Ethereum, would be coding the website.

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A twenty-three-year-old Dane named Mathias Grønnebæk, whose experience watching his grandfather lose millions in the financial crisis had sparked his path to Ethereum, would be coding the website. Another member of the tribe would be cooking. It felt like a kibbutz. Stephan Tual, who was focused on communications, would later call this early period his best Ethereum memory. When the Airbnb ended, Herbert Sterchi, their Swiss liaison to the Zug authorities, offered his Lucerne apartment. One IKEA trip later, at least eleven people crowded into his now-mattress-strewn two-bedroom flat. Roxana found what became Ethereum’s home, a modern, three-story, taupe-colored bulwark they nicknamed the Spaceship.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

McAdoo duly approached them and wowed them with his understanding of their business model, and the result was an investment in the real estate rental platform Airbnb, which ultimately generated a multibillion-dollar jackpot for Sequoia.[35] Told like this, the Airbnb story makes the venture business sound absurdly casual, with the payoff wildly disproportionate to skill. But the deeper truth is that McAdoo’s visit to the YC building was not at all casual. He was there because Sequoia had deliberately made itself the incubator’s primary ally, investing in multiple YC graduates and providing capital for YC’s own seed fund. McAdoo was able to wow the Airbnb founders because he had foreseen that the rental business was ripe for digital disruption, and he had spent time studying the ways in which incumbents could be challenged.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33 Later, the idea of tracking app store downloads was embraced by all Valley VCs, and the information was sold by a third-party provider. But at the time of the WhatsApp investment, Sequoia had an edge from its proprietary tracker. Goetz, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34 Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), 89. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35 Graham recalls of Airbnb, “They might not have raised money at all but for the coincidence that Greg McAdoo, our contact at Sequoia, was one of a handful of VCs who understood the vacation rental business, having spent much of the previous two years investigating it.”

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Using the capital in its first fund, a16z also invested alongside DST in the gaming company Zynga and staked $20 million on the mobile app Foursquare.[52] Its second fund, a war chest of $650 million, made a pair of $80 million bets on Facebook and Twitter; a $40 million bet on Groupon; and a pair of $30 million bets on the picture-sharing app Pinterest and the real estate rental platform Airbnb. For a venture partnership that had advertised itself as an early-stage startup doctor, committing more than a third of a fund’s capital to growth deals was off brand. But this surprising pivot was a testimony to the influence of one man. “We made a bet that this expansion-stage opportunity had arisen,” Andreessen said later.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

New Jersey, for instance, withdrew Tesla’s license for dealer-free car sales in 2014, forcing it to go through a franchise if it wanted to sell cars in the Garden State.19 Likewise Airbnb, the online platform for individuals to rent out their homes, has effectively been banned or repeatedly fined in cities like Santa Monica and Barcelona.20 Other city authorities, such as in Berlin and New York, impose regulations – old or new – that seriously constrain homeowners from renting out beds or their entire home on sites like Airbnb.21 All too often innovators need to err on the wrong side of regulation if they aim to contest markets. The time and money of regulation If regulatory resistance to innovation is strong in business sectors that are comparatively less regulated, such as car sales and online services, imagine then the effects of regulation in energy, pharmaceuticals, neuroscience, medical technology, and other sectors with more complicated regulations.

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12.OECD, Businesses’ Views on Red Tape. 13.Olson, The Logic of Collective Action. 14.Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 and All That. 15.This anecdote is from Diamandis and Kotler, Abundance. 16.Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail. 17.Downes, “Fewer, Faster, Smarter.” 18.Goodwin, “The History of Mobile Phones.” 19.Rogers and Ramsey, “Tesla to Stop Selling Electric Cars in New Jersey.” 20.Lepore, “How Santa Monica Will Enforce Its Airbnb Ban.” 21.Coldwell, “Airbnb’s Legal Troubles.” 22.Tabarrok, “Book Review: ‘Innovation Breakdown’.” 23.Gulfo, Innovation Breakdown. 24.Kay, “Miracles of Productivity Hidden in the Modern Home.” 25.Erixon, “EU Policies on Online Entrepreneurship.” 26.Tabarrok, “Book Review: ‘Innovation Breakdown’.” 27.CSDD, “Growing Protocol Design Complexity.” 28.Grabowski and Hansen, “Cost of Developing a New Drug.” 29.Herper, “The Truly Staggering Cost of Inventing New Drugs.” 30.Roy, “Stifling New Cures.” 31.CSDD, “Growing Protocol Design Complexity.” 32.Basu and Hassenplug, “Patient Access to Medical Devices.” 33.That figure is for 2010 when one of the authors was given a guided tour of the FedEx hub. 34.Button and Christensen, “Unleashing Innovation.” 35.Comin and Hobijn, “Technology Diffusion and Postwar Growth.” 36.Agarwal and Gort, “First-Mover Advantage.” 37.Jaffe and Trajtenberg, Patents, Citations and Innovations. 38.Mansfield, “How Rapidly Does New Industrial Technology Leak Out?”

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At http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/13/how-apple-prompted-this-countrys-downgrade.html. Coase, Ronald H., “The Nature of the Firm.” Economica, 4.16 (1937): 386–405. Coase, Ronald, and Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Coldwell, Will, “Airbnb’s Legal Troubles: What Are the Issues?” Guardian, July 8, 2014. At http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/jul/08/airbnb-legal-troubles-what-are-the-issues. Comin, Diego, and Bart Hobijn, “An Exploration of Technology Diffusion.” NBER Working Paper No. 12314. National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2006. Comin, Diego, and Bart Hobijn, “Technology Diffusion and Postwar Growth.”

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

So don’t rule out that possibility if a threesome or “more-some” intrigues you. And remember our advice about vesting curing many sins. A Trio Starts at Airbnb Two designers and an engineer walk into a bar . . . well, actually, the meeting took place elsewhere, but out of those early discussions about rethinking the entire hotel and couch-surfing experience came an idea to democratize it. With Driver Joe Gebbia and Crusader Brian Chesky on the guest and host experience and design side, and Explorer Nathan Blecharczyk handling engineering, Airbnb opened up a new world of private apartments and homes to visitors worldwide. “It’s pretty unusual, and I actually attribute a lot of our success to that combination,” Blecharczyk says.

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An interesting personal observation on the Driver coauthors in this regard: one of us (John) prefers coequal frameworks in his venture activity because he feels that maximizes alignment between the parties and forces compromise when necessary; while the other (Chris) tends to view them as exceptions to his usual approach, believing that in order to win in competitive markets, a single person must have the tiebreaker vote in tough decisions. 4. Michael Abbott, “Founder Stories: Airbnb’s Nate Blecharczyk on Being the Only Engineer for the First Year,” TechCrunch, June 19, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/19/founder-stories-airbnbs-nate-blecharczyk-on-being-the-only-engineer-for-the-first-year. 5. Special thanks to our University of California Berkeley faculty colleague, Dan Mulhern, for suggesting this approach to what he calls “paired leaders.” 6.

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That’s a decision that immediately puts the issue of Builder Personality front and center—for both of you. Just take a look at this partial list of cobuilders: Apple: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak Microsoft: Bill Gates and Paul Allen Ben & Jerry’s: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield Intel: Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce P & G: William Procter and James Gamble Airbnb: Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, and Joe Gebbia Google: Sergey Brin and Larry Page Rent the Runway: Jenn Hyman and Jenny Fleiss Warby Parker: Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Andrew Hunt, and Jeffrey Raider Pinterest: Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and Paul Sciarra Eventbrite: Julia Hartz and Kevin Hartz HP: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard These builder partnerships cut across industry, geographic, gender, and cultural lines.

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It.
by James Silver
Published 15 Nov 2018

Facebook Messenger chose monthly active usage as their North Star because reach is always a struggle for networks, so they figured the best way to get reach was to get monthly active usage, which I agree with. With [digital] games, I’d say daily active usage. ‘With marketplaces, it’s usually a liquidity metric. The example I’ll give is Airbnb, which is nights booked. So you have a supply side, and you have a demand side. When there’s a successful transaction in the form of night units for Airbnb, that’s the sign of the marketplace working. So anything you do that’s driving up nights booked [or equivalent] is what you want to do for a marketplace. ‘For Uber and Lyft, it’s rides booked. So they don’t say kilometres driven; they could, and then you could incentivise people to do longer rides, but the theory is that ride length is not very elastic, so using these ride-sharing services for more rides is the right reflection of the utility of those apps.’

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Ideally they are the roadmap the business is actually following. ‘I always say to founders that pitching strategy is a bit like an hourglass. At the wide point of the hourglass you have your big vision - if you’re Airbnb, for instance, being the biggest property provider in the world that owns no property. The narrow part of the hourglass represents the product and customer traction you need to make today, to place you on the trajectory towards that big vision and make you credible: with Airbnb that would be increasing numbers of hosts advertising their spare room in San Francisco, and people paying to rent them, through your platform. ‘Then, when you go out to fundraise again for Series A, you are actually saying: “I need, say, £5m for the next 18 months to take me on these next five steps towards my big goal, and you should believe me because I have evidence I can build product and get customers engaged.”

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Authenticity However, the thing about a brand story, Sohoni continues, is that in order to have staying power it needs to be authentic – it cannot be bolted on retrospectively at the scaling stage. ‘Hindsight is great for articulating the points of resonance for a story, but you need an authentic story of an Airbnb type or TransferWise type or indeed a Seedcamp type for it to play through across [the years].’ By the time companies reach their Series A, let alone B, something, she says, ‘has gone seriously right’. When you’re right at the beginning, part of the reason your startup may not be resonating is that you don’t have a story which elicits an emotional connection with your product or service.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

Enforcement can be lenient or strict. What matters is that we are intentional. Evolutionary Organizations play with these continuums in an increasingly nonbinary way. Burning Man blurs the lines between attendee and host, customer and volunteer, and in so doing creates a richer and more participatory experience. Airbnb does the same. A host in one city is often a guest in another. Wikipedia does the same, as do countless open-source projects and peer-to-peer platforms. The future of membership may end up looking like many ways to play, clearly defined and held simultaneously. As you may recall, in a complex system, the interactions matter more than the parts.

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In an unexpected twist, the buildings and real estate around the park, previously an eyesore, have now skyrocketed in value. The areas along the High Line are among the most desirable in the city. All because someone started with what was (almost) there. The history of human innovation is a story of happy accidents. Airbnb didn’t happen because of a vision to change travel and hospitality forever. It happened because a couple guys with an air mattress were short on rent. Their idea worked, so they did more of it. As leaders, we have been told we have to imagine a compelling future and drive everyone toward it. While this can gather people to our cause, it doesn’t do much to further it.

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And what about those organizations that need to go public to realize their vision? They face a situation so unappealing that today’s hottest startups are avoiding an initial public offering (IPO) for as long as they possibly can. The average number of companies who choose an IPO each year is one third what it was prior to 2000. Uber and Airbnb, valued at more than $60 billion and $30 billion respectively, are roughly a decade old and worth more than United Airlines. But they’re not listed yet. By comparison, when Amazon went public it had a market value of just $438 million. When companies don’t go public, only elite investors get to enjoy the climb.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

Having demonstrated rapid growth in the US, it can cost almost nothing to roll out apps across large new markets, increasing their user numbers for little more than some data-storage costs and a handful of new employees in each region. Without their own fast-scaling giant corporations, technological change means that British markets are left open for US businesses to exploit. Just four years after the first guest had been registered, Airbnb was already in 89 countries and a million nights had been booked on the platform. By 2022 there were 70,000 Airbnb locations in London alone and about $6 billion each year was being spent on UK accommodation through this San Francisco-based platform. Uber spent two years in development before the first customer used the app. Four years later it was operating in 100 cities – ‘a global brand focused on helping move you towards opportunity out in the world’, as the company immodestly claims.8 Its rival Lyft followed the same path but, by 2023, despite billions in annual revenue, neither taxi app had turned a significant profit.

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, published by the think tank the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) in 2010. 19 Antoine Gara and Ortenca Aliaj, ‘FIS sells majority stake in Worldpay to buyout group at $18.5bn valuation’, Financial Times (6 July 2023), https://www.ft.com/content/b133fa58-5ef2-4cc4-972b-8271f749779e. 20 Quoted in Wiggins and Borrelli, ‘How the private equity industry stole a march in European payments’. 21 ‘Alfred Kelly Jr net worth & insider trades’, Benzinga [website] (4 December 2023), https://www.benzinga.com/sec/insider-trades/v/ALFRED-KELLY%20JR; ‘Ajay Banga – net worth and insider trading’, GuruFocus [website], https://www.gurufocus.com/insider/3836/ajay-banga. 22 Charlotte Tobitt and Aisha Majid, ‘National press ABCs: FT stays steady while Evening Standard falls below 300,000 for first time since going free’, Press Gazette (15 November 2023), https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/most-popular-newspapers-uk-abc-monthly-circulation-figures-2/. 23 ‘UK ad spend grew 8.8% in 2022 to reach £34.8bn’, Advertising Association [website] (27 April 2023), https://adassoc.org.uk/our-work/uk-ad-spend-grew-8-8-in-2022-to-reach-34-8bn-inflationary-pressures-persist-with-minimal-growth-forecast-for-2023/. 24 ‘Nobody reads terms and conditions: it’s official’, Pinsent Masons [website] (19 April 2010), https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/nobody-reads-terms-and-conditions-its-official. 25 ‘It pays to read license agreements (7 years later)’, PC Matic [website] (12 June 2012), https://www.pcmatic.com/blog/it-pays-to-read-license-agreements-7-years-later/. 26 Gina Hall, ‘San Jose area has world’s third-highest GDP per capita, Brookings says’, The Business Journals [website] (23 January 2015), https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/01/23/san-jose-has-worlds-third-highest-gdp-per-capita.html. 27 ‘Investing in American dynamism (with Katherine Boyle)’ [transcript of podcast interview with embedded video], Acquired [website] (5 June 2022), https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/american-dynamism-with-katherine-boyle. 28 David Curry, ‘Etsy revenue and usage statistics (2023)’, Business of Apps [website] (8 November 2023), https://www.businessofapps.com/data/etsy-statistics/. 29 Krystal Hu, ‘ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base – analyst note’, Reuters [website] (2 February 2023), https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/. 30 For ‘privacy zuckering’, ‘roach motel’ and ‘confirmshaming’, see ‘Dark pattern’, Wikipedia [website], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern. For WinRed, see ‘How Trump steered supporters into unwitting donations’, New York Times (7 August 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html. 31 ‘The ultimate guide to Airbnb service fees (3%, 14%, 15%, 17%)’, Uplisting [website], https://www.uplisting.io/blog/guide-to-airbnb-service-fees. 32 Alex Baggott, ‘Every Apple App Store fee, explained: how much, for what, and when’, AppleInsider [website] (8 January 2023), https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/08/the-cost-of-doing-business-apples-app-store-fees-explained. 33 Simon Sinek, ‘How great leaders inspire action’ [video], TED [website] (September 2009), https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?

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It turns out that three Texas-based refiners, ExxonMobil, Valero and Phillips 66, process more than 60 per cent of the UK’s oil, making petrol, diesel, airline fuel, tarmac and feedstock for dozens of other markets.33 One example from ExxonMobil’s refinery at Fawley is the supply of raw materials for Dow Chemical Company (Michigan) to make antifreeze and agricultural fertiliser. When you scratch the surface of almost any UK industry you find US ownership – but you also find US enterprises creating the toll bridges which consumers have to cross to find suppliers: Airbnb for accommodation, eBay for second-hand goods, Etsy for handmade products, Tinder or Bumble for dating, and Amazon Marketplace for everything else. As a result, the British constantly have to pay royalties to access their home market. Raw numbers on the US Official numbers quantify this brutal story.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

If you wanted to build a nationwide chain of available hotel rooms you had to, well, build those actual hotel rooms. But that’s not what Airbnb did. Technically, Airbnb is a hosting platform, except that term doesn’t exactly reflect the scale of disruption the company has wrought. By providing a place to post available spare bedrooms, open garage apartments, even empty vacation homes, this site allows anyone to turn unused space into a bed-and-breakfast. By mid-2014, just six years into their existence, Airbnb had over 600,000 listings in 34,000 cities and 192 countries and had served over 11 million guests. Most recently the company was valued at $10 billion—making it worth more than Hyatt Hotels Corporation ($8.4 billion)—and all without building a single structure.24 Then there’s Uber, a different kind of hosting platform—one going head-to-head with the taxi and limousine industry.25 Download the Uber app and you can order a car, get information about the driver, watch the car’s approach on a map, and, with your credit card already stored online, pay instantly.

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In other words, by putting would-be passengers together with luxury vehicle owners, Uber cut out the middleman, dematerialized a boatload of infrastructure, and democratized a sizable segment of the transportation industry. And fast. Four years after launching their mobile, Uber is operational in thirty-five cities, and worth $18 billion. Quirky, Airbnb, and Uber are great examples of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the expanding scale of exponential impact. They have created billion-dollar companies in record time. They are the absolute inverse of everything we believed was true about scaling up a capital-intensive businesses. For most of the twentieth century, scaling up such businesses required massive investments and time.

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Couple that with the incredible value proposition of abundant, longer, and healthier lives—there is over $50 trillion locked up in the bank accounts of people over the age of sixty-five—and you understand the potential. And understanding this potential is critical if you’re going to succeed as an exponential entrepreneur. Consider that, twenty years ago, the idea that a computer algorithm could help companies with funny names (Uber, Airbnb, Quirky) dematerialize twentieth-century businesses would have seemed delusional. Fifteen years ago, if you wanted access to a supercomputer, you still had to buy one (not rent one by the minute on the cloud). Ten years ago, genetic engineering was big government, and big business and 3-D printing meant expensive plastic prototypes.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

One of the greatest examples of a nonscalable decision that made a huge impact from the get-go came from Joe Gebbia and his team at Airbnb. After seeing poor-quality photographs dominate the site’s marketplace for short-term rentals, they decided to hire professional photographers to capture high-quality images of each home. At the time, Airbnb was competing with Craigslist and was struggling to get the volume of transactions required to be a viable business. Rather than cut costs and further automate the listing of properties, the team decided to offer free professional photography for properties posted. As a result, properties on Airbnb looked far superior to those posted on Craigslist.

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Some call this “faking it till you make it,” but I think it’s just burgeoning a new path to solve a problem in hopes that it becomes the preferred path. Companies like Airbnb, Uber, and others have done just this. Their founders were outsiders but had a strong opinion or vision about what should change. They then stayed alive long enough to become experts and compete with better technology, a superior path to market, and a lower cost structure. Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, knew very little about the hospitality industry when he started the company. “I was so naive. On a scale from one to ten on how prepared I was . . .

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The Messy Middle details the unglamorous but essential lessons every founder needs to learn.” —JENNIFER HYMAN, cofounder and CEO, Rent The Runway “Starting a new venture is like jumping off a cliff and sewing a parachute on the way down. This book is the parachute.” —JOE GEBBIA, cofounder and chief product officer, Airbnb “Having been through the ups and downs of the messy middle many times, it’s critical to understand the challenges ahead. This insightful book empowers you to approach them head-on. Belsky’s powerful tool kit, based on hard-earned experiences, is an essential guide to building a compelling product, revolutionizing an organization, or growing your leadership abilities.”

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy
by Melanie Swan
Published 22 Jan 2014

Beyond these situations in which a public interest must transcend governmental power structures, other industry sectors and classes can be freed from skewed regulatory and licensing schemes subject to the hierarchical power structures and influence of strongly backed special interest groups on governments, enabling new disintermediated business models. Even though regulation spurred by the institutional lobby has effectively crippled consumer genome services,3 newer sharing economy models like Airbnb and Uber have been standing up strongly in legal attacks from incumbents.4 In addition to economic and political benefits, the coordination, record keeping, and irrevocability of transactions using blockchain technology are features that could be as fundamental for forward progress in society as the Magna Carta or the Rosetta Stone.

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Whereas Blockchain 1.0 is for the decentralization of money and payments, Blockchain 2.0 is for the decentralization of markets more generally, and contemplates the transfer of many other kinds of assets beyond currency using the blockchain, from the creation of a unit of value through every time it is transferred or divided. An approximate technological metaphor for Bitcoin is that it is analogous to the protocol stack of the Web. After the underlying Internet technology and infrastructure was in place, services could be built to run on top of it—Amazon, Netflix, and Airbnb—becoming increasingly sophisticated over time and always adding new ways to take advantage of the underlying technology. Blockchain 1.0 has been likened to the underlying TCP/IP transport layer of the Web, with the opportunity now available to build 2.0 protocols on top of it (as HTTP, SMTP, and FTP were in the Internet model).

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Now, PayPal has been incorporating Bitcoin slowly, as of September 2014 announcing partnerships with three major Bitcoin payment processors: BitPay, Coinbase, and GoCoin.37 Also in September 2014, Paypal’s Braintree unit (acquired in 2013), a mobile payments provider, is apparently working on a feature with which customers can pay for Airbnb rentals and Uber car rides with Bitcoin.38 In the same area of regulation-compliant Bitcoin complements to traditional financial services is the notion of a “Bitbank.” Bitcoin exchange Kraken has partnered with a bank to provide regulated financial services involving Bitcoin.39 There is a clear need for an analog to and innovation around traditional financial products and services for Bitcoin—for example, Bitcoin savings accounts and lending (perhaps through user-selected rules regarding fractional reserve levels).

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

In other words, the start-up must create a simultaneous double riot. The successful start-up Airbnb provides a mini case study of a double riot. Airbnb matches people willing to rent a house, room, or apartment with people looking for a place to stay for a short period of time. Airbnb needed to build two populations: renters and people letting out their apartments. People looking for a place to rent would visit the site only if the site had a sufficient number of places available for rent. Therefore, Airbnb needed to sign up people willing to list apartments. The first two launches of Airbnb failed. Listing an apartment on the site required effort—downloading pictures and including other information.

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Listing an apartment on the site required effort—downloading pictures and including other information. No one had an incentive to list until Airbnb had a large population of renters. Thus, Airbnb needed enough listings to create a riot among renters—that is, to get renters to come to the site. They also needed enough renters to create a riot among those who wanted to list rooms and apartments. Whether Airbnb would take off would depend on the thresholds for the two groups. The bigger problem was getting people to list, as that required more effort. Airbnb overcame this problem by going door-to-door and helping people list their apartments. Once that happened, the renting riot began and the listing riot followed.2 The business succeeded because the founders were able to bootstrap a sufficient number of initial renters so that a double riot ensued.

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Solving for H gives the result. 4 I thank Michael Ryall of the University of Toronto for this example. 5 The model’s findings are summarized in Meadows et al. 1972. 6 The suite of models are often referred to as the Club of Rome models, as the Club of Rome, a group founded by David Rockefeller in 1968, funded reports on the models and promoted the models’ findings. 7 By manipulating more variables with small ranges, he can drive the model’s prediction to nearly 30 billion. See Miller 1998. 8 On the first point, see Hecht 2008. On the second point, see MacKenzie 2012. 9 See Sterman 2006. 10 Glantz 2008. Chapter 19: Threshold Models with Feedbacks 1 See Granovetter 1978. 2 Airbnb’s founders paid the costs of going door-to-door by selling Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s cereal boxes during the 2008 presidential election. 3 See Jacobs 1989 for the revolving-door model. Empirical studies find that in jobs that require little formal education, bartending and gardening being examples, men leave (or choose not to enter) professions that include as little as 15% women (Pan 2015). 4 See Syverson 2007. 5 See Gammill and Marsh 1988 for a more detailed account. 6 See Easley et al. 2012.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

Peer-to-peer A new business model which is generating a lot of column inches for the idea of digital disruption is peer-to-peer commerce, the leading practitioners of which are AirBnB and Uber. Both were founded in San Francisco, of course – in 2008 and 2009 respectively. The level of investor enthusiasm for the peer-to-peer model is demonstrated by comparing AirBnB’s market cap of $20bn in March 2015 with Hyatt’s market cap of $8.4bn. Hyatt has over 500 hotels around the world and revenues of $4bn. AirBnB, with 13 members of staff, owns no hotels and its revenues in March 2015 were around $250m. Uber’s rise has been even more dramatic: its market cap reached $50bn in May 2015.

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Uber’s rise has been even more dramatic: its market cap reached $50bn in May 2015. This sort of growth is unsettling for competitors. Taxi drivers around the world protest that Uber is putting them out of business by competing unfairly, since (they claim) its drivers can flout safety regulations with impunity. Hoteliers have tried to have AirBnB banned from the cities where they operate, sometimes successfully. A sub-industry of authors and consultants has sprung up, offering to help businesses cope with this disruption. One of its leading figures is Peter Diamandis, who is also a co-founder of Silicon Valley’s Singularity University. Diamandis talks about the Six Ds of digital disruption, arguing that the insurgent companies are: Digitized, exploiting the ability to share information at the speed of light Deceptive, because their growth, being exponential, is hidden for some time and then seems to accelerate almost out of control (we will look at exponential growth in chapter 5) Disruptive, because they steal huge chunks of market share from incumbents Dematerialized, in that much of their value lies in the information they provide rather than anything physical, which means their distribution costs can be minimal or zero Demonetized, in that they can provide for nothing things which customers previously had to pay for dearly Democratized, in that they make products and services which were previously the preserve of the rich (like cellphones) available to the many.

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
by Jake Knapp , John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz
Published 8 Mar 2016

So they did another round of interviews, and another round of improvements. Revenue doubled again to $800, then $1,600, then $3,200 a week. That growth didn’t stop. That startup was Airbnb. Today, the online hospitality marketplace operates in more than 30,000 cities and 190 countries. They’ve served more than 35 million guests. It turns out it was an amazing idea, but to make it work, they had to do those interviews. “There’s this gap between the vision and the customer,” Joe says. “To make the two fit, you have to talk to people.” Airbnb’s interviews showed the founders how the product looked through their customers’ eyes, revealing problems the founders themselves couldn’t see.

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Airbnb’s interviews showed the founders how the product looked through their customers’ eyes, revealing problems the founders themselves couldn’t see. Listening to customers didn’t mean abandoning their vision. Instead, it gave them the knowledge they needed to combine with that vision, so they could close the gap and make a product that worked for real people. We can’t promise that your interviews will make you as successful as Airbnb, but we can promise that the process will be enlightening. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how to make sense of what you observe: taking notes, finding patterns, and drawing conclusions about next steps. INTERVIEWER TIPS With a Five-Act script, your interviews are sure to be effective.

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By the time they turned in their final assignment (a revised version of the game), they’d observed how the probability principles operated in real life. We’ve heard about sprints in all kinds of contexts. Legendary consulting firm McKinsey & Company began running sprints, as did advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The sprint process is used at government agencies and nonprofits, as well as at major tech firms, at companies like Airbnb and Facebook. We’ve heard sprint stories from Munich, Johannesburg, Warsaw, Budapest, São Paulo, Montreal, Amsterdam, Singapore, and even Wisconsin. It’s become clear that sprints are versatile, and that when teams follow the process, it’s transformative. We hope you’ve got the itch to go run your own first sprint—at work, in a volunteer organization, at school, or even to try a change in your personal life.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

Some leaders, including Bill Gates and New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio Richard Rubin, “The Robot Tax Debate Heats Up,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2020. A 2019 report by the World Economic Forum “Towards a Reskilling Revolution: Industry-Led Action for the Future of Work,” World Economic Forum, January 22, 2019. Airbnb…was forced to lay off 25 percent of its staff Erin Griffith, “Airbnb Was Like a Family. Until the Layoffs Started,” New York Times, July 17, 2020. Executives from Accenture Sarah Fielding, “Accenture and Verizon Lead Collaborative Effort to Help Furloughed or Laid-Off Workers Find a New Job,” Fortune, April 14, 2020. According to the historian David E.

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Freelancers for Full-time Machines also allow companies to substitute part-time, temporary, and contingent workers for full-time employees, by breaking jobs down into standardized tasks that can be performed by relative amateurs and allowing small numbers of managers to supervise large, flexible workforces. The typical examples of this phenomenon are gig economy companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, all of which have made it possible for people with cars and spare bedrooms to compete with professional drivers and hoteliers. But a better example may be what’s happened in my industry. Several decades ago, human journalists were employed at newspapers, magazines, and TV stations, and given the job of separating fact from fiction, deciding which stories were appropriate for an audience, and ranking the day’s news in order of importance.

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When babies are born, we want a human doctor to be present in case something goes wrong, even if a virtual obstetrician could perform that work 99 percent of the time. Scarce jobs also include jobs that require human accountability or emotional catharsis. When our health insurance company wrongfully denies a covered claim, or an Airbnb guest trashes our house, we don’t want to fill out a form on a web portal—we want to complain to a human, and get our issues resolved. The final kind of scarce work that is almost certainly safe from automation is work that requires extraordinary talent. World-class athletes, prize-winning chefs, and people with standout acting or singing abilities all fit into this category.

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse
by Mohamed A. El-Erian
Published 26 Jan 2016

It enhances “winner-take-all” tendencies and is inseparable from rapidly changing consumer behaviors that seek more self-directed lives. It is a phenomenon that has been visibly conducive for companies like Airbnb and Uber to enhance consumer access to services that for too long have been deemed too expensive and/or unpleasant. And they did so using a powerful combination of technology, mobility, and superior customer interfaces. Just think, Airbnb is now a major supplier of “hotel” rooms. Yet the company has not built a single building. Uber is expanding aggressively in cities around the world, capturing a growing share of the urban transportation system.

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They also speak to the impact of innovation. Today’s innovations threaten quite a few existing industries and activities with what I have called disruptions from other worlds.2 Going back to Airbnb and Uber as examples, both have disrupted and redefined their respective industries using approaches that had very little, if anything, to do previously with the areas they are disrupting so effectively and profoundly. Remember, Airbnb is yet to build a hotel. Nevertheless in six years, it has accumulated a million rooms for rent, compared to some 700,000 for the Hilton group over a much longer time period. The result is a set of radical new game plans that fundamentally shake the target industry’s rules and operating approach.

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Having observed how new structured products were used, I noted at that time that complex derivative products were acting as a “credit risk transfer technology” that was enabling in a big way the migration of risk “to a new set of investors inexperienced in this arena and posing exposure problems for the international financial system.”6 — This time around, the assessment of risk and return is accentuated by an intriguing new type of entrant into financial markets. Similar to what has happened in the accommodation space with Airbnb, the transport sector with Uber, fashion with Rent the Runway, and retail with Amazon—just to name a few—the financial service industry is seeing interest from disruptors from “another world.”7 These nontraditional players disrupt traditional industries through the smart application of technological innovations and insights from behavioral science.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

It was a beautiful and brilliant metaphor, pointing to the seemingly magical nature of these companies. The magic, though, isn’t something mystical and esoteric. When TechCrunch published a list of the most valuable unicorns in early 2017, the top five were all participatory innovations. Uber (founded 2009, value $62.5 billion), Didi Chuxing (founded 2012, value $50 billion), and Airbnb (founded 2008, value $31 billion) are participatory platforms. Ant Financial (founded 2010, value $60 billion) is a participatory tool, enabling users to participate safely in China’s burgeoning e-commerce markets. Xiaomi (founded 2010, value $45 billion) is a participatory brand, crowd-sourcing users to participate in the design process as a means to make smartphones available at as near the cost of production as possible.

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It’s a groovy little spot, roughly halfway between LA and the Southern Californian city of Indio, where the festival is held. The meet-up emerged out of an online discussion thread I joined about the festival. The experiment I am conducting is to see if I can do the whole trip using participatory tools on my iPhone. I found my accommodation using Airbnb. I booked my flight using a budget air travel app. I used Uber to get to the airport. I arranged a ride-share at the other end on the groups’ Facebook event page. I used Apple maps and WhatsApp to arrange a place to meet. In the half hour since we arrived at the café, I have posted three moody photos of palm trees to Instagram to prove to my friends what a groovy time I am having, responded to an important email from a client, and checked the weather.

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But the shape, feel, and dynamic of our economies, lives, and societies will depend on the rules and metrics we choose to set. The deadly serious game is the system that powers Apple’s iTunes and App Store. It is the organising model of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. It is the mechanism that creates the dynamic energy of Uber, Tindr, and Airbnb. It is the source of the explosive growth of participatory activities like yoga and road cycling. Connected 1. Together “We used to take belonging for granted. Cities used to be villages. Everyone knew each other, and everyone knew they had a place to call home. But after the mechanisation and Industrial Revolution of the last century, those feelings of trust and belonging were displaced by mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences.

Full Stack Web Development With Backbone.js
by Patrick Mulder
Published 18 Jun 2014

Since its first release in 2010, Backbone.js has built up a good reputation for improving the development of client-side web applications. There are a number of in‐ teresting projects and companies that use Backbone.js. For example, Walmart uses Backbone.js as the core library of its mobile shopping cart. Airbnb uses Backbone.js to let users and search engines browse available travel accomodations. DocumentCloud has built a document screening service with Backbone.js. There are many more exam‐ ples, and you can find an interesting overview in the Examples section of the Backbone.js documentation. Preface | ix Second, this book should help you climb the learning curve for getting things done on the client side.

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If it is important that search engines can crawl your application, rendering of templates should be done on the server to provide links for search engine optimization and a fast first page load. Backbone.js integrates well with so-called isomorphic JavaScript appli‐ cations, where parts of an application can run on both the client and server. Airbnb’s Rendr.js library shows how client- and server-side rendering can be combined for this use case with Browserify and CommonJS modules. In other cases, a Backbone.js application is just part of a larger server-side web appli‐ cation. Some server-side approaches, such as Browserify and Express with Stitch, sup‐ port bundling JavaScript files with the CommonJS module format.

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As the CommonJS format is the default server-side approach, you can have an option to run the same code on the server that runs in the browser, or vice versa. This can be interesting for certain kinds of applications, as we can share the same logic to render views or validate models on the server as in the browser. The Rendr library from Airbnb, for example, follows this approach. Also, because npm uses the CommonJS format by default, it can be nice to build quick prototypes and to experiment for learning purposes as we are doing here. We will discuss RequireJS in the second half of this book, when we are looking at static web pages, without backend integration.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

Chapter 1: X TO THE X 3 according to a letter: Kara Swisher and Johana Bhuiyan, “Uber CEO Kalanick Advised Employees on Sex Rules for a Company Celebration in 2013 ‘Miami Letter,’ ” Recode, June 8, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/6/8/15765514/2013-miami-letter-uber-ceo-kalanick-employees-sex-rules-company-celebration. 4 “fast-growing”, “pugnacious”, a “juggernaut”: Kara Swisher, “Man and Uber Man,” Vanity Fair, November 5, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/12/uber-travis-kalanick-controversy. 6 a noun coined in 2013: Aileen Lee, “Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups,” TechCrunch, October 31, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/. 6 under fire for emails: Sam Biddle, “ ‘Fuck Bitches Get Leid,’ the Sleazy Frat Emails of Snapchat’s CEO,” Valleywag, May 28, 2014, http://valleywag.gawker.com/fuck-bitches-get-leid-the-sleazy-frat-emails-of-snap-1582604137. 6 Dropbox and Airbnb: Jack Morse, “Bros Attempt to Kick Kids Off Mission Soccer Field,” Uptown Almanac, October 9, 2014, https://uptownalmanac.com/2014/10/bros-try-kick-kids-soccer-field. 11 “philosophy of work”: Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World (New York: Little Brown, 2017). 11 Fourteen core leadership principles: “Leadership Priciples,” Amazon, https://www.amazon.jobs/principles. 13 employee explained the term: Alyson Shontell, “A Leaked Internal Uber Presentation Shows What the Company Really Values in Its Employees,” Business Insider, November 19, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-employee-competencies-fierceness-and-super-pumpedness-2014-11.

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taken-by=sweenzor. 59 hailed UberCab’s model: Leena Rao, “UberCab Takes the Hassle Out of Booking a Car Service,” TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/05/ubercab-takes-the-hassle-out-of-booking-a-car-service/. 59 one TechCrunch article by Arrington said: Michael Arrington, “What If UberCab Pulls an Airbnb? Taxi Business Could (Finally) Get Some Disruption,” TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/what-if-ubercab-pulls-an-airbnb-taxi-business-could-finally-get-some-disruption/. Chapter 7: THE TALLEST MAN IN VENTURE CAPITAL 65 “It’s magic”: GigaOm, “Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital (full version),” YouTube video, 32:48, December 14, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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And since ride-hailing was such a new phenomenon, much of Portland’s existing rules didn’t address the practice—laws for Uber just hadn’t been written yet. Uber would have to wait. It wasn’t as if Novick and Hales were being inflexible. Hales had promised to overhaul transportation regulations upon entering office. Just a few weeks prior, Portland was one of the first cities in the country to draft rules that allowed Airbnb, the home-sharing startup, to operate legally within the city’s confines. And for more than a year, the hope was that such a forward-thinking city could do the same with ride-sharing. But Portland’s good intentions weren’t delivering on Kalanick’s time frame. Now, the two sides found themselves at an impasse.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

Other governments, including that of New Zealand, are in the process of devising taxation schemes that disincentivise short-term rentals. See Mallory Lochlear, ‘Amsterdam will limit Airbnb rentals to thirty days a year’, Engadget, 10 January 2018, https://www.engadget.com/2018-01-10-amsterdam-airbnb-rental-30-day-limit.html; ‘How London hosts can manage around Airbnb’s 90-day limit’, Happyguest, 2 June 2018, http://www.happyguest.co.uk/blog/how-london-hosts-can-manage-around-airbnbs-90-day-limit; Ian Lloyd Neubauer, ‘Countries that are cracking down on Airbnb’, New Daily, 30 August 2019, https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/travel/2019/08/30/countries-crack-down-airbnb/. 32 Joseph Stromberg, ‘Eric Klinenberg on Going Solo’, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2012, p.4, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/eric-klinenberg-on-going-solo-19299815/. 33 ‘All by myself’, NYU Furman Center, 16 September 2015, https://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/all-by-myself; ‘Cities with the largest percentage of single-person households in the United States in 2018’, Statista, September 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/242304/top-10-us-cities-by-percentage-of-one-person-households/. 34 US Census Data, 2010, available at https://census.gov; see also Chuck Bennett, ‘Poll: Half of Manhattan Residents live alone’, New York Post, 30 October 2009, https://nypost.com/2009/10/30/poll-half-of-manhattan-residents-live-alone/.

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Every time he goes out of town, Frank takes down the photo of his late father and locks it away in a cupboard along with his other valuables to ‘protect’ them from the Airbnb guest who will be sleeping in his bed a few hours later. This wasn’t what 32-year-old Frank envisaged when he moved to Manhattan a few years earlier, with hopes of a glittering career in graphic design. However, the rise of digitally delivered content and subsequent cuts to print media and advertising budgets led to drastic lay-offs in his field. So in 2018, somewhat reluctantly, he joined the gig economy, securing his jobs on Upwork or Fiverr, or sometimes through word of mouth. Having strangers stay in his home via Airbnb was the only way he could afford to take a holiday.

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Economic theory suggests that because rent controls reduce incentives to build new housing, they can end up exacerbating housing supply shortages and thereby lead to price increases.31 It may therefore be that other forms of intervention would produce better outcomes, such as the granting of longer leases, or even leases with an indefinite time period, so that tenants know they can build a long-term home in a neighbourhood – although even these would presumably also need some kind of associated rent stabilisation measures if they were to work. A number of cities have also introduced limits on the number of days a year that a property can be rented out on Airbnb or similar short-term rental platforms so as to disincentivise the conveyor belt of inhabitants they set in motion. Whichever of these is best, all are examples of a dawning recognition by governments and local authorities that housing is one area where market forces need to be mediated for our collective good.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

It is possible that an idea is not as risky as it seems, and by taking a first-principles approach you can come to a more correct risk assessment (see Chapter 1). Many investors actually passed on Airbnb because both sides of an Airbnb transaction seemed so risky that they thought there wouldn’t be a market for it. After all, an Airbnb transaction on one side calls for letting a stranger sleep in your home, and on the other side involves sleeping in a stranger’s home. Of course, the investors who passed were wrong; plenty of people were happy to bear those risks once Airbnb set up a marketplace to do so. The opposite can be true as well, in that people can substantially underestimate risks, such as in the 2007/2008 U.S. housing crisis, which led to a global financial crisis.

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As Thiel wrote in his 2014 book, Zero to One: Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works. Consider the Silicon Valley startups that have harnessed the spare capacity that is all around us but often ignored. Before Airbnb, travelers had little choice but to pay high prices for a hotel room, and property owners couldn’t easily and reliably rent out their unoccupied space. Airbnb saw untapped supply and unaddressed demand where others saw nothing at all. The same is true of private car services Lyft and Uber. Few people imagined that it was possible to build a billion-dollar business by simply connecting people who want to go places with people willing to drive them there.

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It is a recognition that making direct appeals to people’s hearts and minds through communication can effectively win them over. In relatively recent history, the U.S. has led hearts-and-minds campaigns that directly explain its perspective to the populations of foreign countries like Vietnam and Iraq. In a business context, the concept has been successful when upstarts like Airbnb have made direct appeals to citizens to contact their representatives and lobby against regulations that would negatively impact consumer (and business) interests. Establishing and communicating a shared vision, values, and cultural norms helps organizations win the hearts and minds of its members, and thus intrinsically motivates them to reach their full potential.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

Newcomer, E., ‘In video, Uber CEO argues with driver over falling fares', Bloomberg, 28 February 2017: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-28/in-video-uber- ceo-argues-with-driver-over-falling-fares Oltermann, P., ‘Berlin ban on Airbnb short-term rentals upheld by city court', the Guardian, 8 June 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/08/berlin-ban- airbnb-short-term-rentals-upheld-city-court ONS (Office for National Statistics), Public Service Productivity Estimates: Total Public Services, 2012 (2015): http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_394117.pdf Osborne, G., Mansion House speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 10 June 2015: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/mansion-house-2015-speech-by-the-chancellor-of-the-exchequer Ostrom, E., Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: University Press, 1990).

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Or consider the way that entrepreneurs in the dot.com and IT industry lobby for advantageous tax treatment by governments in the name of ‘wealth creation'. With ‘innovation' as the new force in modern capitalism, Silicon Valley's do-gooders have successfully projected themselves as the entrepreneurs and garage tinkerers who unleash the ‘creative destruction' from which the jobs of the future come. These new actors, from Google to Uber to Airbnb, are often described as the ‘wealth creators'. Yet this seductive story of value creation leads to questionable broader tax policies by policymakers: for example, the ‘patent box' policy that reduces tax on any products whose inputs are patented, supposedly to incentivize innovation by rewarding the generation of intellectual property.

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Phrases like the ‘new economy', ‘the innovation economy', ‘the information society' or ‘smart growth' encapsulate the idea that it is entrepreneurs, garage tinkerers and their patents that unleash the ‘creative destruction' from which the jobs of the future come. We are told to welcome the likes of Uber and Airbnb because they are the forces of renewal that sweep away the old incumbents, whether black cabs in London or ‘dinosaur' hotel chains like Hilton. The success of some of the companies has been extraordinary. Google's share of the global desktop search engine market is more than 80 per cent,1 while just five US companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM) own most of the world's data, with China's Baidu being the only foreign company coming close.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross
Published 7 May 2012

With more than 100,000 listings available in more than 16,000 cities and 186 countries, it’s a real business. It has booked over 5 million nights’ accommodation. In July 2011 Airbnb raised $112 million from venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst. But the value of Airbnb isn’t what it brings to investors. Rather it’s the cash it puts into the hands of homeowners. The company says the average booking generates $80. Five million times $80 per night is $400 million.8 Even taken together, companies like Zipcar, Chegg.com, Rent the Runway, and Airbnb won’t transform the U.S. economy. Many of today’s consumer inefficiencies are habits acquired over decades, and they won’t be broken easily.

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Data on Zipcar’s membership growth, membership, and business development was taken from press releases at the company’s media site: http://zipcar.mediaroom.com. 7. Data on student debt come from The Project on Student Debt, http://project onstudentdebt.org. 8. Data on Airbnb’s growth, size, and fundraising was taken from press release at the company’s media site: http://www.airbnb.com/home/press. Chapter 13. Supersize Nation: Scale, Scope, and Systems 1. Data on the number of Apple, Google, and Facebook employees come from the companies’ SEC filings. See also Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick, and Kenneth L. Kraemer, “Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple’s iPod,” http://pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2011/Innovation JobCreationiPod.pdf.

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At the height of the boom, people believed their home generated cash by serving as a source of home equity credit or by returning a profit when it was sold. Both of those dynamics have faded. But thanks to another postrecession business, efficient homeowners have come to realize that their home can still generate cash. Airbnb, founded in August 2008, is dedicated to the premise that lots of people are willing to earn money by renting out a room in their house and that lots of other people are willing to save money by crashing at a stranger’s place rather than a motel or hotel. As the company describes its mission, “We connect people who have space to spare with those who are looking for a place to stay.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020

Anthony estimated that, between the two of them, they had lent Ethereum about $800,000, though Joe said it was less than $500,000, without providing a more accurate estimate. The rest of the team also contributed as much as they could, working with no salary, depleting their savings, and using their credit cards to pay for daily expenses. They hopped from Airbnb to Airbnb in the small towns near Switzerland’s capital during February 2014. One of the places they stayed at the longest was a two-bedroom apartment in Meierskappel, thirty minutes by car south of Zurich. During the day, they piled around a small table by the kitchen, laptops covering almost every corner of it.

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Christoph was known for being very good at his job, obsessive and meticulous, so when he jumped into a new venture, people paid attention. “With Uber, Airbnb, and others leading the way, we have to ask ourselves, ‘Is this how we want to build the sharing economy?’ Monopolistic companies that take extraordinary fees and have full control of the market?” said one of Slock.it’s blog posts.1 Slock.it cofounders, including Jentzsch’s brother, wanted to make it possible for people to rent, sell, and share their property without having to use intermediaries. Instead of going to platforms like Uber and Airbnb to get matched up and pay, the whole process would be done through a lock placed on each item.

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With that in mind, Mihai started to build Egora, an online marketplace meant to be a decentralized eBay, where buyers and sellers wouldn’t have to rely on the platform itself. Instead, funds would be sent into an escrow account stored in a decentralized ledger. The money would be released only when the buyer and seller unlocked the account. After two years of working together for the magazine, Vitalik and Mihai finally met in person at an Airbnb in Barcelona. They weren’t there for too long when Amir Taaki, a prominent Bitcoin developer, convinced them to come join him in Calafou, an anarchist community near Barcelona. They decided to go both because it was cheap and because they hoped to meet interesting people with aligned values of minimal government and corporate control.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification
by Peter Moskowitz
Published 7 Mar 2017

Because of California’s unique ballot initiative system, San Francisco is the only one of the four cities profiled in this book where residents can relatively easily get a housing-related ballot initiative voted on in a citywide election. In 2015, one ballot initiative attempted to limit Airbnb rentals, and another tried to place a moratorium on development in the Mission. This is a great concept, but like nearly all elections in this country today, money wins: both ballot measures in San Francisco were defeated after multimillion-dollar ad campaigns by Airbnb and other corporations. As far as I know, there is no perfect or even relatively good system for local, democratic planning decisions in the United States, but that does not mean they are an impossibility.

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She doesn’t have the money to afford a down payment on one, especially now that real estate values are skyrocketing in her city. Over cigarettes and draft beers at a bar in the Irish Channel, just a few blocks from where Ashana Bigard lives, Leslie and her friends told me about everything wrong with New Orleans today—the movie industry coming in and taking up space and houses and jobs; Airbnb, which allows people to rent their houses for short periods of time and has been shown to cause rent inflation; the increased touristification and Disneyfication of every neighborhood near the French Quarter; and the lack of community that comes with all those things. “I’ve worked at this bar for ten years,” Leslie told me through a cloud of Marlboro Lights smoke.

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The tech industry here is for the most part greeted with open arms. People recognize the problem of gentrification, but this is a company town, and anything perceived as anti-tech gets blasted by well-funded industry groups, by the mayor and most of the city council, and usually by many of the city’s residents. A ballot measure that would have limited Airbnb rentals in an attempt to preserve housing for people who actually live in the city failed to garner enough votes in 2015. So did one that would have put a temporary moratorium on development in the Mission. A proposed 1.5 percent tax on tech companies that would have raised millions for affordable housing was killed even before it made it out of the Board of Supervisors’ finance committee.

Lonely Planet's 2016 Best in Travel
by Lonely Planet
Published 30 Sep 2015

Elqui Domos (elquidomos.cl) charges around US$155-190 for a double per night, and there are more geodesic options with Airbnb. 8 Boot Bed & Breakfast, Tasman, New Zealand Has a boot-shaped hotel not been on your to-do list? Amend that and step into a living fairy tale in the epically beautiful area of Tasman in New Zealand. Looking like something out of a children’s book, the boot sleeps two, with a cosy Hobbit-meets-Beatrix Potter-meets-twee feel. There’s a sofa and open fire downstairs, where you can kick back in the toe area. Is this the ultimate boot-ique hotel? The Boot is in the grounds of Jester House (jesterhouse.co.nz), and costs NZ$300 for two. It may also be booked through Airbnb. 9 Iglu-Dorf, Zermatt, Switzerland Building starts on Iglu-Dorf (‘igloo village’) every November.

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Cluj-Napoca was dubbed an art city of the future by Phaidon, and Brașov is attracting as many nightlife lovers as vampire hunters. Horses and carts still rattle through the countryside, but they’ll soon share the roads with Uber cabs, as the app-based transport network sets up a new office in Bucharest. Meanwhile Transylvanian Airbnb listings are slowly amassing, excellent news for fans of social accommodation. Beyond the towns, all eyes are on Transylvania’s real fang-toothed predators: wolves, lynx and the majority of Romania’s 6000-strong bear population. With the recent reintroduction of bison to the Carpathian Mountains, opportunities for wildlife watching are sure to become even richer.

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Things inside are dog-themed too, with dog-decorated cushions and dog-shaped biscuits. The owners specialise in ‘chainsaw art’, which isn’t as terrifying as it sounds – they produce wooden sculptures of various breeds, available in the shop on site. ‘Responsible pets, with well-behaved owners’ are permitted. Dog Bark Park is bookable via Airbnb or the owners’ website (dogbarkparkinn.com), and costs US$98 per night for two people. 2 Dino Snores at the Natural History Museum, London, UK London’s Natural History Museum offers the chance to stay the night with the museum’s famous bony dinosaurs. The children’s sleepover includes a torch-lit trail of the Dinosaurs gallery and a live science show, while the grown-up version includes a three-course dinner, science shows, live music, bars, edible insect-tasting, and all-night monster movie marathon.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

Since this is the new model of how to be powerful, it is natural that when you ask people what feels fair in paying for a benefit over a network, an ordinary person will imagine themselves to be in the new kind of seat of power, running the server—and from that perspective it feels right and proper not to have to pay for the risk side of the equation. Risk Never Really Goes Away Consider the startup Airbnb.com, which has grown very rapidly and is by all appearances the sort of quick candy investors love the most. It smells like one of those Silicon Valley stories that instantly attract gigantic fortunes. Ah, but there’s a catch. Airbnb’s business plan is to pretend risk does not exist. The idea is that many people travel, so while they are away there might be a spare bedroom going to waste. The full capacity of the world’s housing isn’t always used to maximum capacity! So, Airbnb applies the standard playbook to use the power of network technology to optimize the world.

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The efficiency of the Internet ought to be able to disrupt the hotel industry just like Napster et al. disrupted the recorded music business! The number of available beds in the Airbnb system can quickly outstrip the entire hotel industry, and at almost no cost. This is classic Silicon Valley thinking. And it works! To a point . . . After millions of happy engagements, some horror stories started to appear. A woman in San Francisco lent her home to Airbnb visitors who trashed it and stole everything from her, including information to steal her identity. One of the Airbnb founders wrote on the company blog that the good experiences of millions of transactions shouldn’t be discounted because of a few bad ones.

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I agree that people are mostly good, and yet, in a functioning economy, it is necessary that those millions of good transactions account for the effects of fools, creeps, and just plain randomness.* *This is a universal quality of Siren Servers. I selected Airbnb, but I could just as easily have selected any of the other sites in which people coordinate their affairs efficiently so that some faraway entrepreneur enjoys their money without sharing their risks. Skout, a social network for meeting people, turned out to be the medium for a scattering of rapes of underage users. See http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2011/07/plot-thickens-airbnb-renter-horror-story/179250/1, and http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/after-rapes-involving-children-skout-a-flirting-app-faces-crisis/.

Roads and Bridges
by Nadia Eghbal

Anyone, from Facebook to an amateur programmer, can use that code to build their own apps. And they do. If it sounds unbelievable that, as Marquess puts it, a ragtag group of amateurs could outcompete huge corporations with their money and resources, [9] consider how this work reflects the rise of peer-to-peer collaboration around the world. Unlikely startups like Uber or AirBnB exploded into major corporate powerhouses in just a few years, challenging longstanding industries like transportation and hospitality. Musicians make a name for themselves through YouTube or Soundcloud instead of big record labels. Creative people fund their ideas through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or Patreon.

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Npm raised nearly $11M in funding since 2014 from True Ventures and Bessemer Ventures, among others. Their business model focuses on paid features that support privacy and security. Meteor is a JavaScript framework that was first released in 2012. It was incubated by Y Combinator, a prestigious startup accelerator that also incubated companies like AirBnB and Dropbox. Meteor has received over $30M in funding to date from firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Matrix Partners.[53] Meteor’s business model focuses on an enterprise platform called Galaxy, released in October 2015, for operating and managing Meteor applications.[54] The venture funding approach is relatively new, and growing rapidly.

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Van Rossum claimed he was looking for a ‘hobby’ programming project that would keep me occupied during the week around Christmas.[59] The project took off, and Python is now considered to be one of the most popular programming languages today.[60] Van Rossum remains the principal author of Python (also known as a benevolent dictator for life, or BDFL, among developers) and is currently employed by Dropbox, whose software relies heavily on Python.[61] Python is partially managed by the Python Software Foundation, created in 2001, which has a number of corporate sponsors, including Intel, HP, and Google. RubyGems is a package manager that helps distribute programs and libraries associated with the Ruby programming language. It is a critical piece of infrastructure for any Ruby developer. Examples of websites that use Ruby are Hulu, AirBnB and Bloomberg.[62] RubyGems was created in 2003 and is managed by a community of developers. Some development work is supported by Ruby Together, a foundation that accepts donations from companies and individuals. Twisted, a Python library, was authored by a developer named Glyph Lefkowitz in 2002.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

Toth contacted Joelle Emerson, a former lawyer who had started a new business called Paradigm to help tech companies build their diversity and inclusion policies. I first met Emerson in March 2016, at the airy San Francisco headquarters of Airbnb, another company her team was advising. She speaks incredibly fast and with conviction. Right off the bat she said, “None of these companies are winning, and all of them are struggling” when it comes to the representation of women. By September 2017, Emerson was mildly more optimistic: “We’ve seen a handful of companies (like Pinterest, Intel, and Airbnb, for example) demonstrate progress in some areas, while stalling in others. Sustained progress takes time . . . That companies shouldn’t be congratulating themselves doesn’t mean there isn’t progress; it means we have a long way to go.”

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UNWANTED ADVANCES, 24/7 When I asked if anyone in the room wanted to share a “Susan Fowler” type of experience, Laura Holmes, senior product manager at Google, was the first to speak up. She hesitated as she started to tell the story, as if gathering courage, then continued in a steady tone. It was the summer of 2008, just as a new wave of tech companies, including Uber and Airbnb, was about to take off. Holmes, then a computer science student at Stanford, got an internship at a hot new photo-app start-up in San Francisco named Cooliris. One evening, she and her co-workers went out for drinks at the Ruby Skye nightclub. Around 2:00 a.m., Holmes informed one of the male engineers that she was about to go home.

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As such, they closed deals with investors and entrepreneurs, spoke at industry conferences, and had the greatest sway over internal hiring and operations. After it became clear that Google was going to be huge, Moritz and Doerr took different approaches to finding the unicorns of the next decade. Sequoia stayed small and lean, making early investments in some of tech’s biggest hits, such as YouTube, Airbnb, and WhatsApp. Most founders dream of getting a check signed by Sequoia and the contacts and bragging rights that come with it. Kleiner, on the other hand, changed its approach, scaling up in staff size and widening its investment focus to include new energy and clean tech—changes made largely at the behest of Doerr.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika
Published 12 May 2015

Expedia, which launched in 1996, grew to become the largest travel company in the world, reaching $4.8 billion in revenues in 2013.23 By aggregating prices, data, reviews, and payment options, the web-based start-up constituted an important new platform that changed the basis of competition in the industry. But Expedia and its peers now face disruption from a new type of business model represented by Airbnb, the peer-to-peer hospitality site. Airbnb’s millions of customers can research, reserve, pay for, and review lodging at hundreds of thousands of locations without needing to interact with Expedia’s platform. Technology giants such as Facebook and Google must also be aware of new entrants. Snapchat, a photo-messaging app that enables senders to set a time limit for how long receivers can view their “snaps” (pictures), was started in 2011.

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Just as online platforms like Amazon and eBay have connected purchasers of consumer goods with manufacturers of consumer goods, new platforms, apps, and websites are connecting purchasers of services to service providers—in entirely new and disruptive ways. Lyft, a rival to Uber, allows people to transform themselves into professional drivers at their own convenience using their own vehicles. Airbnb, the wildly popular service that matches travelers with people who have spare rooms for rent in their homes, has allowed tens of thousands of people to work part-time as very small-scale innkeepers and hoteliers—on top of an existing job, or instead of it. Startups like oDesk, TaskRabbit, and Elance have established online marketplaces for a range of services from software development to basic cleaning and running errands.

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The average company’s tenure on the S&P 500 fell to about eighteen years in 2012, down from sixty-one years five decades earlier.13 It’s no longer sufficient to regard large firms as potential competitors; start-ups with access to digital platforms can be born global, scale up in the blink of an eye, and disrupt long-standing rules of competition in markets ranging from taxi services to hotels and retail. Many of these micro-multinationals are upending competition by bringing about a new “sharing economy” in hospitality (Airbnb), transportation (Lyft), and even home Wi-Fi rentals (Spain’s Fon). Technology has leveled the playing field between large and small players and increased companies’ willingness to enter new markets and expand into new sectors. Microsoft took fifteen years to reach $1 billion in sales.14 Amazon reached that mark in fewer than five years.15 Netflix is no longer merely disrupting content distribution, but is also becoming a formidable force in original content production.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

The site, Airbedand-breakfast.com, allowed people to offer rooms in their homes to visitors; it grew out of an experience that Gebbia and Chesky had offering space in their apartment to attendees of a 2007 design conference in San Francisco, where affordable hotel rooms were scarce. The service they built, which was renamed Airbnb.com in 2009, quickly became popular. On New Year’s Eve of 2012, for example, over 140,000 people around the world stayed in places booked via Airbnb; this is 50 percent more than could be accommodated in all the hotels on the Las Vegas Strip.29 TaskRabbit also grew quickly; by January 2013 the company was reporting “month-over-month transactional growth in the double digits.”30 TaskRabbit allows people to offer their labor to the crowd while Airbnb lets them offer an asset. The peer economy now includes many examples of both types of company.

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Alyson Shontell, “Founder Q&A: Make a Boatload of Money Doing Your Neighbor’s Chores on TaskRabbit,” Business Insider, October 27, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/taskrabbit-interview-2011-10 (accessed August 12, 2013). 29. Tomio Geron, “Airbnb and the Unstoppable Rise of the Share Economy,” Forbes, January 23, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/01/23/airbnb-and-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-share-economy/ (accessed August 12, 2013). 30. Johnny B., “TaskRabbit Names Google Veteran Stacy Brown-Philpot as Chief Operating Officer,” TaskRabbit Blog, January 14, 2013, https://www.taskrabbit.com/blog/taskrabbit-news/taskrabbit-names-google-veteran-stacy-brown-philpot-as-chief-operating-officer/ (accessed August 12, 2013). 31.

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While we certainly acknowledge the need to ensure public safety, we hope that regulation in this new area will not be stifling and that the peer economy will continue to grow. We like the efficiency gains and price declines that crowdsourcing brings, but we also like the work that it brings. Participation in services like TaskRabbit and Airbnb gives people previously unavailable economic opportunities, and it also gives them something to do. It therefore has the potential to address all three of Voltaire’s “great evils,” and so should be encouraged by policy, regulation, incentives like the ETIC, and other available levers. The peer economy is still new and still small, both relative to GDP and in absolute terms.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

Even though these failures were tragic in my mind, the failures that really hurt are the failures to act. In the venture capital business, when I have made an investment in a company that failed, it was never that big a loss since we make so many investments. But when I missed investing in Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber and others, those were my true failures. Here are some other failures I have experienced in my career. The Activision Story and The Netflix Story I tend to jump to the answer. I take great leaps and make assumptions about the future that may or may not come true, but once I am convinced, I assume that everyone else will easily jump to the same conclusion.

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To keep it manageable, we kept class size to a total of 30 so the 10 students could easily be focused on. The students included a wide mix of exceptional talent including former Miss USA Erin Brady and her then husband Tony Capasso, Instagram star Ana Marte, social entrepreneur Sharon Winter, and medical marijuana delivery king David Kram. Lectures were given by the founders of Lyft, SolarCity, Airbnb, and several other household names. Among the speakers were Michelle Kwan, Jane Buckingham, and the Valley Girl herself, Jesse Draper. The students came up with a wide range of interesting companies to pitch. I agreed to invest in the top three in hopes that the show would help them get off the ground.

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It helps that the inventor is anonymous, so there is no individual to attack, and that the Bitcoin true believers are so dedicated to the success of the currency. Napster and StreamCast were attacked by the music industry, and although these companies died, the technology lives on in iTunes and Spotify. Uber has been attacked by the cab companies, Airbnb by the hotels, and Amazon by the book stores. The battle between innovation and the status quo continues. The status quo knows how to squelch innovation. The simple recipe the entrenched oligopolies use is as follows: First, ignore it and hope it will go away. Next, align with other oligopolistic players to gang up against the upstart and manipulate the press to spread fear into the minds of the startup's customers.

Big Capital: Who Is London For?
by Anna Minton
Published 31 May 2017

There is even unhappiness at the very highest echelons of the market: the wife of Bank of England governor Mark Carney sparked opprobrium when she tweeted that she couldn’t find anywhere affordable to live in London, despite his £5,000 a week housing allowance. The phenomenal growth of Airbnb is another factor putting pressure on rents as it removes properties from the rental market while keeping prices high. Airbnb is becoming the focus of housing activists across Europe and in the US, particularly in cities which attract large numbers of tourists, such as New York, Barcelona, Berlin – and London. In Barcelona and Berlin the city government has banned renting out whole properties through Airbnb, and at the time of writing the company was embroiled in a battle in New York over the same issue.

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But while regulation is being introduced, it is a notoriously hard business to regulate and raises contentious issues in a city such as Barcelona where it has become an important source of income for people on modest salaries. The success of the model fits perfectly into Thomas Piketty’s thesis that income from rent now far exceeds economic growth, let alone wages. As such, it is likely to remain a key feature of the contemporary property market. The bedroom tax presents a mirror image of Airbnb. In a society where the ideal of public housing has collapsed, a financial penalty is imposed on people in social housing with a spare room, while those who are lucky enough to own a house with one find themselves with an additional source of revenue. Another feature of the new economy in private renting is property guardianship, where developers offer lower rents to people prepared to live in properties due to be redeveloped.

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In Berlin thirty-three districts have been designated ‘urban conservation areas’ where expensive redevelopments are banned, and in 2016, the city government successfully used an obscure legal tool known as a ‘pre-emptive right of purchase’ to prevent the sale of an apartment block in trendy Kreuzberg to an offshore company. As well as taking on Airbnb the city government is looking at a number of tax measures to cool foreign investment; it is considering imposing a tax on second homes which remain empty and it is monitoring closely the impact of Vancouver’s new 15 per cent tax on foreign investors buying properties.14 London, on the other hand, has one of the most generous tax regimes in the world for foreign investors.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

‘Indirect’ refers to the fact that many digital markets are matching suppliers to consumers, so if for example, you want to hire an AirBnB apartment, the more people supplying the AirBnB apartments the better it is for you. And if you are a supplier who wants to rent out your apartment, the more consumers on the platform the better it is for you. Digital platforms of this kind are also known as two-sided or multisided markets (Evans and Schmalensee 2016a). These indirect network effects are also mutually reinforcing and encouraging of scale. All ‘sides’ of the platform can—at least potentially—benefit the more users there are on the platform. There are many examples, from familiar consumer-facing ones like AirBnB, Amazon Marketplace, eBay, OpenTable, or Uber to business-to-business ones in industries such as chemicals or steel.

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These features are the opposite of mass production, many items that were more or less the same coming off an assembly line. In the digital economy we have massive economies of scale too, but combined with increasing variety and personalisation. For instance, through digital matching platforms like Airbnb, OpenTable, Uber, or Amazon Marketplace, people are able to satisfy highly specific individual needs or preferences. In some cases, no money is exchanged, not only in the case of Al Roth’s famous kidney exchange described earlier, but also now the numerous, non-profit sharing economy platforms exchanging unwanted goods or sharing equipment, or dogs.

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These tech companies are bigger than any earlier generation of corporate titans. A handful of them dominate our lives, the big American digital companies known collectively as GAFAM in much of the world, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent in China. Other digital companies do not match the titans in scale but are dominant in their activities, platforms such as Airbnb and Booking, Uber, or Deliveroo. As consumers and in business, much of our social, cultural, political, and economic activity every day relies on their services, from online shopping to social media to search to cloud computing. There has been an extraordinary rewiring of life, much of the change occurring since the launch of smartphones and 3G and beyond mobile networks just over a decade ago (Cellan-Jones 2021).

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

Microsoft controls 17 percent of the cloud-storage market, continues to be a major software provider for business and institutions, and recently joined Apple and Amazon in hitting a $1 trillion valuation. Ninety percent of the US wireless market is controlled by four telecom companies, of which the biggest two, AT&T and Verizon, together control more than 60 percent of the market.12 Meanwhile, companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter have created widely used apps that are disrupting existing markets and creating new ones. Other countries have their own titans. China has Alibaba, started by Jack Ma in 1999 in his Hangzhou apartment. Today Alibaba is among the world’s ten biggest companies by market capitalization and can count a sprawling online marketplace, digital video, music, sports, an online payments system (called Ant Financial), and artificial intelligence research in its portfolio.

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Facebook also buys data from data brokers such as Acxiom and Epsilon, which it combines with its own data to create an even fuller picture of you.42 Anytime you use your Facebook login to log in to another site, that company also gains access to your personal data: you’ve given access to your microphone, camera, photos, and contact list to Airbnb, Spotify, Amazon, Uber, Twitter, Pinterest, and all the other random apps smartphone users access. Researchers at Eurecom in France tested thousands of free Android apps in the Google Play store and found that many applications connected with hundreds of distinct URLs—including ad-related and suspicious sites—within just a few minutes of opening them.43 All this data, drawn from what virtually everyone does while connected to the internet—increasingly collected through a machine that we carry everywhere with us—accumulates to an unimaginable degree.

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Observers lamented the long-term loss of vision—instead of flying cars we got derivatives.10 Capitalist vision wasn’t dead however; it had simply moved to the other side of the country. In an about-face from the ideological imperatives of the 1990s and early 2000s, new companies such as Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon seemed blithely unconcerned with profits. They told stories about moon shots, abundance, and living on Mars, and in the midst of the Great Pessimism we were enraptured. NYU marketing professor, Scott Galloway, says of the iPhone: it “was a bright light in the darkness that signaled hope and optimism.”11 It had suddenly become acceptable to think big again.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the handheld cellphone: Britannica, “Martin Cooper,” britannica.com/​biography/​Martin-Cooper. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Airbnb, which was valued: “How Airbnb Was Built: It Started as Air Beds on the Floor for a Conference,” NZ Herald, Oct. 9, 2020, nzherald.co.nz/​business/​how-airbnb-was-built-it-started-as-air-beds-on-the-floor-for-a-conference/​MRDCZ3E6VBGNU4CVSTJ5PXJOTE/; Knowledge at Wharton, “The Inside Story Behind the Unlikely Rise of Airbnb,” Knowledge at Wharton, Apr. 26, 2017, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/​podcast/​knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/​the-inside-story-behind-the-unlikely-rise-of-airbnb/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the new mRNA technology”: Zeynep Tufekci, “3 Ways the Pandemic Has Made the World Better,” The Atlantic, Mar. 18, 2021, theatlantic.com/​health/​archive/​2021/​03/​three-ways-pandemic-has-bettered-world/​618320/.

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The 1970s, with its crippling “stagflation” (a combination of rapidly rising prices and slowing growth), was the decade that saw the introduction of three essentials of contemporary life: the personal computer, the handheld cellphone (the 1973 prototype weighed two and a half pounds and offered about thirty minutes of talk time), and the wheeled suitcase. The years surrounding the financial meltdown of 2008 would similarly prove to be a boom time for start-ups—especially ones that employed digital technology to help people navigate the challenges of a precarious economy and an increasingly complex world. Airbnb, which was valued at more than $67 billion in 2023, was launched in 2008 by cash-strapped roommates who decided to rent out air mattresses on their living room floor to people who couldn’t find or afford a hotel room. The encrypted messaging application WhatsApp was created the following year, as was the ride-hailing service Uber.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

When Stephan Tual, the founder of Slock.it: Paul Vigna, “Chiefless Company Rakes in More Than $100 Million,” The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chiefless-company-rakes-in-more-than-100-million-1463399393. in November 2016, when a site called Golem: Roger Aitken, “Fintech Golem’s ‘Airbnb’ For Computing Crowdsale Scores $8.6M in Minutes,” Forbes, November 12, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogeraitken/2016/11/12/fintech-golems-airbnb-for-computing-crowdsale-scores-8-6m-in-minutes/#324579c73583. An initial high-water mark came: Alyssa Hertig, “ICO Insanity? $300 Million Gnosis Valuation Sparks Market Reaction,” CoinDesk, April 25, 2017, https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-ico-irrationality-300-million-gnosis-valuation-sparks-market-concerns/.

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That failure was clear in the subsequent Internet 2.0 phase, which unlocked the power of social networks but also allowed first-mover companies to turn network effects into entrenched monopoly power. These included social media giants like Facebook and Twitter and e-marketplace success stories of the “sharing economy” such as Uber and Airbnb. Blockchain technologies, as well as other ideas contained in this Internet 3.0 phase, aim to do away with these intermediaries altogether, letting people forge their own bonds of trust to build social networks and business arrangements on their own terms. The promise lies not just in disrupting the behemoths of the Internet, however.

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This positive feedback loop in turn inspired other Ethereum-based developers to come up with their own new token-based Dapps and go to market with an ICO, which further spurred demand for ether and accelerated the carousel of surging prices. The sense that something extraordinary had been unleashed was cemented in November 2016, when a site called Golem, which offered a platform for trading idle computer power (it billed itself as the “Airbnb for computers”), raised $8.6 million in half an hour. After that, money seemed to open up for anyone with a white paper and a token to sell. An initial high-water mark came in April 2017 when Gnosis, whose platform allows users to create prediction markets for betting on just about anything, sold 5 percent of the tokens created by the company to raise $12.5 million in twelve minutes.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
Published 13 Feb 2018

Users had grown from 3 million in the fall to 10 million in the spring, while photos shared per day shot up from 50 million in December 2012 to 150 million in April 2013 and again to 200 million in June 2013. Most social networks track users by daily actives—that is, how many people visit the website or use the app on a given day. Other businesses with less frequency of use—like Amazon or Airbnb—focus more on monthly active users. In Snapchat’s case, teenagers were so addicted to the app—opening it and sending and receiving snaps dozens of times per day—that the company started focusing on hourly active users. Poke’s failure had provided convincing proof that Snapchat had built an app that was defensible—a bigger company couldn’t just copy it and wipe them out, which made it extremely attractive to venture capitalists.

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He hotly pursued other executives, trying to land former White House press secretary Jay Carney, who ultimately joined Amazon. Snapchat cheekily tried to poach San Francisco startup employees by adding Snapchat geofilters to their offices. At Uber’s headquarters, a geofilter read, “THIS PLACE DRIVING YOU MAD?” along with Ghostface Chillah sadly driving a cab. At Airbnb’s office, the ghost lay scared in bed, underneath the caption “NOT SLEEPING WELL?” At Twitter, the shtick was a ghost with a halo and angel wings to the tune, “FLY HIGHER!” And finally, at Pinterest, a ghost lay next to falling bowling pins, asking, “FEELING PINNED DOWN?” All of the filters featured an address for Snapchat’s jobs page.

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The geofilter for Venice, where Snapchat’s headquarters is located, was one of the earliest created. Soon after introducing geofilters, Snapchat designed one of its mascot, Ghostface Chillah, pointing and laughing at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. Snapchat would later post specific geofilters at Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest’s locations, urging their employees to come work at Snapchat. In December 2015, a shooter killed fourteen people and injured seventeen more in San Bernadino, California. As the tragedy unfolded, Snapchat created a live story, bringing viewers photos and videos from the scene as well as narrative developments and statements from authorities.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

Community solidarity is intangible, hard to measure, but its loss is a real cost nonetheless. In this tragedy of the commons, individual homeowners rationally choose to profit by listing on Airbnb, but collectively we all lose connection to our sense of place, to what makes us feel truly at home. In response, some communities—like Santa Monica, California—are starting to prohibit short-term rentals, effectively banning Airbnb. By restricting willing sellers and buyers, the city is trying to prevent already high house prices from escalating further and to keep community spirit intact. But that choice also helps Santa Monica remain wealthy and white, excluding those who are neither but want a brief sojourn by the beach.

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In 1889, Native lands in Oklahoma were opened for pioneer settlement through “land runs” that began with a pistol shot on the state line. (Sooner was the derogatory term for those who jumped the gun.) Today well-funded start-ups are aiming to mine the moon and harpoon asteroids for water, platinum, and gold—all in tension with internationally recognized ownership rules. This is also the origin story of Uber, Airbnb, YouTube, and many other Internet businesses that raced ahead of the law to create and then capture markets. Ambiguity about ownership favors the bold, the heedless, the outlaws—those who race ahead first. But not always. The law looks not only to who is making the claim but also to what they are doing with it.

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Knowing this, you may ask yourself, How do I use ownership design to get others to behave as I want? Don’t assume old-fashioned first-in-time will advance your interests best. As a parent or teacher, do you reward the kid who speaks up first, or who lines up first, or do you choose to reward some other behavior? As an Airbnb host, should you rent to the first asker, limit yourself to highly ranked guests, or do your own due diligence? First-in-time has many advantages—it’s easy to manage and appeals to our intuitive notions of fairness and equality. There’s a reason it has been around since biblical times. But it’s a crude tool, vulnerable to being captured and transformed.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
by Klaus Schwab
Published 11 Jan 2016

Simply put, major technological innovations are on the brink of fuelling momentous change throughout the world – inevitably so. The scale and scope of change explain why disruption and innovation feel so acute today. The speed of innovation in terms of both its development and diffusion is faster than ever. Today’s disruptors – Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba and the like – now household names - were relatively unknown just a few years ago. The ubiquitous iPhone was first launched in 2007. Yet there were as many as 2 billion smart phones at the end of 2015. In 2010 Google announced its first fully autonomous car. Such vehicles could soon become a widespread reality on the road.

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The on-demand economy raises the fundamental question: What is worth owning – the platform or the underlying asset? As media strategist Tom Goodwin wrote in a TechCrunch article in March 2015: “Uber, the world’s largest 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.”9 Digital platforms have dramatically reduced the transaction and friction costs incurred when individuals or organizations share the use of an asset or provide a service. Each transaction can now be divided into very fine increments, with economic gains for all parties involved.

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As Arun Sundararajan, professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University (NYU), put it in a New York Times column by journalist Farhad Manjoo: “We may end up with a future in which a fraction of the workforce will do a portfolio of things to generate an income – you could be an Uber driver, an Instacart shopper, an Airbnb host and a Taskrabbit”.27 The advantages for companies and particularly fast-growing start-ups in the digital economy are clear. As human cloud platforms classify workers as self-employed, they are – for the moment – free of the requirement to pay minimum wages, employer taxes and social benefits.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

The same is true of business. Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works. Consider the Silicon Valley startups that have harnessed the spare capacity that is all around us but often ignored. Before Airbnb, travelers had little choice but to pay high prices for a hotel room, and property owners couldn’t easily and reliably rent out their unoccupied space. Airbnb saw untapped supply and unaddressed demand where others saw nothing at all. The same is true of private car services Lyft and Uber. Few people imagined that it was possible to build a billion-dollar business by simply connecting people who want to go places with people willing to drive them there.

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Grossman and David Gahr/Getty Images 14.5: Jim Morrison, Elektra Records and CBS via Getty Images 14.5: Kurt Cobain, Frank Micelotta/Stringer/Getty Images 14.5: Amy Winehouse, flickr user teakwood, used under CC BY-SA 14.6: Howard Hughes, Bettmann/CORBIS 14.6: magazine cover, TIME, a division of Time Inc. 14.7: Bill Gates, Doug Wilson/CORBIS 14.7: magazine cover, Newsweek 14.8: Steve Jobs, 1984, Norman Seeff 14.8: Steve Jobs, 2004, Contour by Getty Images Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abound Solar Accenture advertising, 3.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 Afghanistan Airbnb airline industry Allen, Paul Amazon, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 12.1 Amundsen, Roald Andreessen, Horowitz Andreessen, Marc Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) antitrust Apollo Program Apple, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 14.1 branding of monopoly profits of Aristotle Army Corps of Engineers AT&T Aztecs Baby Boomers Bacon, Francis Bangladesh Barnes & Noble Beijing Bell Labs Berlin Wall Better Place Bezos, Jeff, 5.1, 6.1 big data Bill of Rights, U.S.

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The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future. Blake Masters was a student at Stanford Law School in 2012 when his detailed notes on Peter’s class “Computer Science 183: Startup” became an internet sensation.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Published 5 Oct 2015

Sites like Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Tumblr, GitHub, and Behance have all helped startups build traction. Airbnb saw much of its early growth come through Craigslist. Customers who used Craigslist found that Airbnb was a much simpler and safer solution. With this knowledge, the company’s engineers developed a “Post to Craigslist” feature that would allow you to list your bed on Craigslist. Though this feature eventually was shut down, it drove tens of thousands of Craigslist users back to Airbnb to book a room. PayPal, the leading online payments platform, used a similar strategy when it targeted eBay users as its first customers.

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MailChimp, Weebly, UserVoice, and Desk.com all add branding to free customers’ emails and Web sites by default, which can be removed by becoming a paying user. Products can also incentivize their customers to move through their viral loops and tell others about the product. Dropbox gives you more space if you get friends to sign up. Airbnb, Uber, PayPal, and Gilt give you account credits for referring the product to friends. Companies like reddit and YouTube have grown virally by using embedded buttons and widgets. On each video page, YouTube provides the code snippet necessary to embed a video on any Web site. You’ve probably also noticed such buttons for Facebook and Twitter on many Web pages: each button encourages sharing, which exposes the product to more and more people.

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A/B testing, 29, 33–34 email marketing, 116, 117 search engine marketing, 70–71 viral marketing, 123–24, 127, 128 activation rates, 111–12 Adaptly, 4, 76–77 Adbeat, 75, 76 Adblade, 75 Adblock Plus, 169 Adknowledge, 165 AdMob, 169 ad quality scores, 71, 73 AdRoll, 72 Advertising.com, 75 AdWords, 28, 65, 67–72, 165–66 Affiliate.com, 162, 164 affiliate networks, 162, 164–65, 166 affiliate programs, 6, 159–66, 212 strategy, 160–62 tactics, 162–65 targets, 166 aggregators, 161, 210 Airbnb, 171 Airbrake, 78 Alexa, 76, 96, 130 Amazon, 159, 160, 163, 171 analytics tools, 32–33, 95–96 Andreessen, Marc, 8–9 Andreessen Horowitz, 8 Android, 167, 172–73 angel investing, xii AngelList, 1, 15 Apple, 89, 120, 138 App Store, 6, 168–69, 171–74 application program interfaces (APIs), 144–45 Appointment Reminder, 4, 96–97 app stores, 167–70, 171–74 AppSumo, 42, 45 Archives.com, 4, 66–68 Asana, 115 attendees, at trade shows, 177, 179 Atwood, Jeff, 7, 199–201 audience prospectus (ad kits), 82–83 automated emails, 111–12, 116–17 automated long-tail content, 98 Baptiste, Jason, 51–52 Barsh, Steve, 150–51, 192 biases, 20, 38–40, 41 billboards, 59, 82–83, 87–88 BillGuard, 113 Bing Ads, 68, 210 Bingo Card Creator, 96–97, 132 Bitly, 170–71 black-hat tactics, 99, 101 Blendtec, 59, 62 blockages, 156 blogs.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

To hide my shock, I quickly say goodbye, head towards the wrong Underground line and stop to take a deep breath once he is out of sight. The next day, I get an idea of what redpilling looks like. Generation Identity is very 2010s. When they hold a secret strategy meeting, they rent an Airbnb in south London. To be precise, in Brixton, one of London’s most multicultural areas, known for its riots against police racism in the 1980s. I am the last person to arrive at the Airbnb on Sunday morning. The Austrian leader of Generation Identity, Martin Sellner, stands outside next to his new girlfriend, the prominent American alt-right YouTuber Brittany Pettibone. To my relief, Martin has left his glasses in the taxi.

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Available at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction. 3Paige Leskin, ‘The AI tech behind scare real celebrity “deepfakes” is being used to create completely fictitious faces, cats, and Airbnb listings’, Business Insider, 21 February 2019. Available at https://www.businessinsider.de/deepfake-tech-create-fictitious-faces-cats-airbnb-listings-2019-2?r=US&IR=T. 4Lizzie Plaugic, ‘Watch a man manipulate George Bush’s face in real time’, Verge, 21 March 2016. Available at https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/21/11275462/facial-transfer-donald-trump-george-bush-video. 5Hern, ‘New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators’. 6Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Mineola; New York: Dover Publications, unabridged edn, 1997). 7Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 8Ibid., p. 164. 9David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: Hurst, 2017). 10Hamza Shaban, ‘Google for the first time outspent every other company to influence Washington in 2017’, Washington Post, 23 January 2018.

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I was in the channels where the alt-right planned the lethal Charlottesville rally, ISIS plotted cyberattacks on American infrastructure, German trolls coordinated online attacks on politicians and Italian neo-fascists carried out information operations to influence the 2018 election. From participating in a secret strategy meeting hosted by white nationalists in an Airbnb in south London to joining a militant neo-Nazi rock festival on the German–Polish border and receiving hacking instructions from ISIS jihadists, my time inside these movements not only taught me about extremists’ strategies and tactics, it also exposed me to their human dimensions as well as to my own vulnerabilities.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

They can refuse to hire them, rent them an apartment, or provide services to them. When a recent landlord found out about Darling’s adult film work, she refused to renew Darling’s lease, leaving her scrambling for a new place to live. A couple years back, Airbnb, the house rental site, banned Darling from its platform during a time when it appeared to be purging anyone who worked in the sex industry. Darling said she had never even had sex in an Airbnb. But this is the world facial recognition will usher in even more rapidly, one in which people are prejudged based on choices they’ve made in the past, not their behavior in the present. * * * — DAVID SAID HE had no interest in outing the women or causing any problems for them.

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Ton-That couch surfed for at least three months because he didn’t have the credit history needed to rent an apartment, but the San Francisco Bay area, with its eclectic collection of entrepreneurs, musicians, and artists, was otherwise a good fit for him. He loved being in the heart of the tech world, meeting either startup founders or those who worked for them. He became friends with early employees at Twitter, Square, Airbnb, and Uber. “You see a lot of this stuff coming out, and it just gives you a lot of energy,” he said. America’s diversity was novel to him. “There wasn’t African American culture or Mexican culture in Australia,” he said. “I had never heard of a burrito before.” And he was shocked, at first, by San Francisco’s openly gay and gender-bending culture.

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He showed up at parties in a big white fur coat and his MAGA hat, and casually dropped extreme views into conversations: Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, he said, had been an opportunity to launder money; race and intelligence are linked (“look at the Ashkenazi Jews”); “There are too many foreign-born people in the U.S.,” he would say, according to friends who found those opinions confounding for many reasons, one of which being that he himself was an immigrant. One of Ton-That’s best friends from San Francisco stopped talking to him. “We couldn’t find common ground. It had never happened to me before that I had ended a friendship that close,” said Gustaf Alströmer, who was a product lead at Airbnb at the time. He said that Ton-That had not been a partisan person when he lived in the Bay Area. According to Alströmer, Ton-That’s political interests had been more theoretical, about the fairest way to do voting or the best economic system for society. “He talked about racism in Australia and his father being an immigrant.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Uber’s direct counterparts on the capital side are platforms such as Turo, which enable private car owners to rent out their vehicles – but not their labour. The archetypal capital platform, of course, is Airbnb, through which ‘guests’ search for and book homes for short-term rent listed by ‘hosts’. The ‘sharing economy’ label often given to the capital platform subsector is, needless to say, a misnomer, at least when applied to Airbnb and its ilk: if the Airbnb ‘host’ is ‘sharing’ her asset with her ‘guest’, it is only because she is being paid to do so. The third category is similar to the second, except that what are being sold – and it is generally sale rather than letting in this case – are not capital assets, but commodities.

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Rights owners can generate rents either by exploiting the IP themselves (for example, a drug company manufacturing and selling one of its own patented medications) or by licensing it to a third party (as with copyright-protected proprietary software). Intellectual property is a significant feature of the burgeoning digital-platform business – the world of Airbnb, Facebook, Uber, and so on. Chapter 4 examines such platforms, placing them in the context of platform capitalism more generally. While the technology they use and their scale of operation may be new in the networked age, the core ‘service’ – intermediation and market-making via the provision of a ‘space’ of some kind in which interaction between participants can occur – clearly is not.

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The answer typically takes one of four generic forms (see Table 4.1). Table 4.1 Platform rentiers by type Category of Platform rentier Examples of rentiers active in the UK Labour platforms •Deliveroo (food delivery) •TaskRabbit (household services) •Uber (private car transportation) •Upwork (professional freelancing) Capital platforms •Airbnb (short-term rental accommodation) •Turo (rental of private vehicles) Commodity platforms •ebay (online marketplace) •Intu Properties (shopping centres) •London Stock Exchange Group (financial exchanges) •Flutter Entertainment (peer-to-peer betting) Attention platforms •Facebook (social media) •Google (search engine) •Moneysupermarket.com (price comparison) •Rightmove (real estate portal) Source: Author First, there are platforms through which what is bought and sold is primarily human labour-power.

Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World
by Jeffrey Tucker
Published 7 Jan 2015

If you need a ride in a major city, you can pull up the smartphone app for Uber or Lyft and have a car arrive in minutes. It’s amazing to users because they get their first taste of what consumer service in taxis really feels like. It’s luxury at a reasonable price. If your sink is leaking, you can click TaskRabbit. If you need a place to stay, you can count on Airbnb. In Manhattan, you can depend on WunWun to deliver just about anything to your door, from toothpaste to a new desktop computer. If you have a skill and need a job, or need to hire someone, you can go to oDesk or Elance and post a job you can do or a job you need done. If you grow food or make great local dishes, you can post at a place like credibles.co and find a prepaid customer base.

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All my conversations with Uber drivers seem to confirm this hunch. The taxi monopolies might have provided such efficient services, but without competition, the motivation for progress evaporates. Similarly, we might expect the hotel industry, which is forced to pay high taxes and to comply with vast regulations, to grumble about room-sharing services such as Airbnb, which bear no 11 such costs. Individuals with an extra room in their house or apartment can charge less, often far less, than established players in the industry. So too might bankers be annoyed by peer-to-peer lending services. Central banks are agitated by the rise of bitcoin. This reaction is pure economic interest at work against innovations that threaten their competitive advantage of the status quo.

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“Uber is part of a new wave of corporations that make up what’s called the ‘sharing economy,’” writes Avi Asher-Schapiro in the strangely titled article “Against Sharing.” “The premise is seductive in its simplicity: people have skills, and customers want services. Silicon Valley plays matchmaker, churning out apps that pair workers with work. Now, anyone can rent out an apartment with Airbnb, become a cabbie through Uber, or clean houses using Homejoy.” So far, so good. But then the writer dives deep into the ideological thicket: “under the guise of innovation and progress, companies are stripping away worker protections, pushing down wages, and flouting government regulations.” Hold on there.

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy
by Lawrence Ingrassia
Published 28 Jan 2020

The men’s clothing company Bonobos was about five years old, and Warby Parker, the eyeglass start-up, had launched in 2010. But there wasn’t much else. Starting in January 2012, Pham contacted about seventy venture capital firms, and he and Dubin went to San Francisco a dozen times, often booking Airbnb rooms rather than staying in hotels, to save money. One problem they encountered: When Silicon Valley venture capital firms thought of disruption, they thought of companies like Facebook and Google, Twitter and YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. They rarely thought of physical products such as clothing or eyeglasses or razors.

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The retailers didn’t need nearly as many goods as they once did, because shoppers were staying home and buying online, usually from other retailers. A year later, many of the shelves had been replenished—not with goods for Kmart and Sears stores but with the products of more than a dozen e-commerce companies. This inventory had been brought to the warehouse by what might be best described as the Airbnb of the warehousing world, the brainchild of Karl Siebrecht. Siebrecht was at a cocktail party in Seattle when he bumped into a friend of a friend who had launched a barware business that sold stir sticks, shot glasses, coasters, and the like. Things were going okay, the man said, but he lamented having to pay for warehouse space he often didn’t need.

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The warehouse would earn money by filling some of its empty racks, and consumer product companies could get as much, or as little, space as they needed, for as long as they needed it and where they needed it, without the expense of having to sign a long-term lease. Plus, the concept could be easily explained to customers. Like Airbnb, which pairs up travelers with people seeking to rent rooms in their homes, Siebrecht’s company would collect a fee for making it easy for people on both sides of the transaction to find each other. For e-commerce entrepreneurs, there would be another advantage. If Siebrecht could build a big enough network of warehouses, a start-up could afford two, three, or even more warehouse locations, strategically placed around the country, thus speeding delivery and making them more competitive with Amazon, with its network of warehouses nationwide.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

A ‘smart contract’, for instance, is a piece of blockchain software that executes itself automatically under pre-agreed circumstances— like a purchase agreement which automatically transfers the ownership title of a car to a customer once all loan payments have been made.27 There are early ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’ (DAOs) that seek to solve problems of collective action without a centralized power structure.28 Imagine services like Uber or Airbnb, but without any formal organization at the centre pulling the strings.29 The developers of the Ethereum blockchain, among ­others, have said they want to use DAOs to replace the state altogether. Blockchain still presents serious challenges of scale, governance, and even security, which are yet to be overcome.30 Yet for a youthful technology it is already delivering some interesting results.

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Software engineers like those at loomio.org are trying to create ideal deliberation platforms using code.The Taiwanese vTaiwan platform has enabled consensus to be reached on several matters of public policy, including online alcohol sales policy, ridesharing regulations, and laws concerning the sharing economy and Airbnb.21 Digital fact-checking and troll-spotting are rising in prominence22 and the process of automating this work has begun, albeit imperfectly.23 These endeavours are important. The survival of deliberation in the digital lifeworld will depend in large part on whether they succeed. What’s clear is that a marketplace of ideas, attractive though the idea sounds, may not be what’s best.

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because so many users have asked it in the past. It raises a mirror to our own prejudices. Take a different set of examples that are likely to grow in importance as time goes on: the ‘reputation systems’ that help to determine people’s access to social goods like housing or jobs on the basis of how other people have rated them. Airbnb and Uber, leading lights of the ‘sharing economy’, rely on reputation systems of this kind. There are also ways of rating professors, hotels, tenants, restaurants, books, TV shows, songs, and just about anything else OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 290 FUTURE POLITICS capable of quantification.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

This isn’t wealth creation; it is wealth extraction. Just as it is when Uber takes a slice of the money for a cab ride, or when Airbnb gets you to monetise your own bed. Maybe you make some money by renting out your bed. But maybe your friend is fired from the hotel because it loses business. Or wages are kept low because hotel-room rates must be kept low, because of competition from Airbnb. At the same time it gets harder to rent an affordable place to live. And those who live close by regularly let Airbnb ‘homes’. Do we love it? No, we hate it. The ‘sharing’ economy (sharing is not a financial transaction – do words mean nothing?)

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That’s what Big Tech has to recognise. The usual definition of Big Tech is a reference to the top 5 tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft. In reality, Big Tech is about global reach, global control, and a business model that seeks global power without local responsibility. Uber and Airbnb are just the same. If that’s the model business favours, then the only option is legislation. This won’t strangle innovation, as the tech-bullies claim. (Bullies love to play the victim.) Legislation will put a choke on innovation strangling us. An example: Facebook wants to partner with Ray-Ban to produce facial-recognition eyewear.

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We cannot accept a situation where decisions that have a wide-ranging impact on our democracy are being made by computer programs without any human supervision. That was Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, in January 2021, calling for international laws, not company policy, to decide the limits of Big Tech. * * * As Airbnb prepares its IPO, ask yourself, what are they really selling? They are selling your bed. You will make a few quid. They will make billions. * * * Amazon. Next time you click to buy, pause for a moment at the non-unionised labour. The low wages. The battery-chicken warehouse conditions of the workers: overlit and noisy with no privacy.

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime
by Bradley Hope
Published 1 Nov 2022

One of Adrian’s quirks over the years was a nearly singular obsession with staying in Marriott hotels and affiliates during his travels—with so many nights, he became such a high-level member of its benefits program that he could check out late and as much as guarantee a room on short notice at any of the chain’s hotels in the world. The Airbnb, located just an eight-minute drive north, was the de facto safe house where So Yun-suk, his wife, and his child would be sequestered before being transported out of the country. Located in a purely residential area with a quiet alleyway behind, it was nondescript, private, and large. The house had three floors, a garage, and a garden. Speaking to the assembled men in the Airbnb, Adrian explained a key component of the mission, one that Ahn had never heard before in the group’s previous actions.

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Substance abuse, marital breakdown, depression—these were common symptoms. To rescue someone without those consequences would be a momentous achievement. * * * — As soon as Ahn arrived in Madrid just after 8:00 a.m., it became clear that something different was brewing. Another group member picked him up from the airport and brought him to an Airbnb where the others were gathering. He had a quick shower while a fellow member cooked breakfast. Then Adrian strode in to explain the plans. “This is our biggest operation yet,” he began, going on to describe how by that evening they would be responsible for a North Korean family who had asked for their help.

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That served two purposes: making them harder to identify as individuals later and signaling they were a different kind of Korean. North Korean men invariably stick to short and tidy haircuts. Long hair and beards are forbidden. Sam Ryu flew in on the thirteenth, booking three double rooms at the Eurostars Zarzuela Park, a quiet business hotel in a garden-like setting, until February 25. He also rented the nearby Airbnb where they were meeting. The hotel, located in Madrid’s northwest outskirts, was the perfect base of operation for a small team who would be nearby with cars at the ready. Adrian, being the most publicly recognizable person inside Cheollima, whose travel was far more likely to arouse the suspicions of intelligence services, was staying completely separate from the rest of the group at the Hotel Carlton to help protect the identities of the more anonymous members of the group.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

For a critique of the limitations of the report, see “Universal Basic Services Won’t Fix Our Economy” by Grace Blakeley for New Socialist, published February 8, 2018 at https://newsocialist.org.uk/universal-basic-services-wont-fix-our-economy/. 7 To read the case for scooters as a public service, see “Privately Owned Scooter Companies Don’t Have a Future” by Paris Marx for Jacobin, published July 29, 2019, at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/07/e-scooters-bird-lime-uber-venture-capital. 8 See https://common-wealth.co.uk/bdc.html. 9 See, for instance, “The Unspeakable Cost of Parenthood” by Katherine Zoepf for the New York Times, published August 27, 2019, at https://parenting.nytimes.com/work-money/parents-money-stress. For some unknown reason, the Airbnb public policy team decided this story reflected well on Airbnb (rather than being a horrific indictment of the current housing landscape) and paid to promote the article through their @AirbnbCitizen account at https://twitter.com/AirbnbCitizen/status/1172272152449626114. 10 See “Ex-Google and Uber Engineer Anthony Levandowski Charged with Trade Secret Theft” by Andrew J.

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At least we all got through. The next immediate task was to find a place to live. The accelerator office was in Midtown Manhattan, and we wanted to live close by, but Manhattan was not exactly cheap, nor was it easy for outsiders to find months-long lodging on short notice. We booked an apartment in Murray Hill via Airbnb, sight unseen, and when we arrived we determined that this so-called two-bedroom apartment had originally been a one-bedroom, with the extra bedroom created by walling off a portion of the living room. The remainder of the living room was consequently devoid of natural light and contained a worn mid-century couch, a flimsy coffee table, and an ageing wooden chair.

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One of the partners caught the whole thing on video, and the next day he sent the link around the office. With Demo Day over, it was time to get to everything we had put aside. Priority number one: move to a better apartment. The skylight mould in our current place was starting to block out the sun, and even I conceded that the place was intolerable. We found an Airbnb much farther away but quieter, more spacious, and with no discernible mould. The office wasn’t heated on the weekends, and after a long day of work the autumn chill lingered in the bones. One Sunday, finding ourselves alone in the office, we purloined a toaster oven from the communal kitchen and holed up in a conference room.

Hawaii Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Though the area is protected somewhat by Lahilahi Point to the south, be cautious if you have kids – the beach’s sandy bottom has a quick and steep drop-off. 2Activities Makaha Valley Riding StablesHORSEBACK RIDING ( GOOGLE MAP ; %808-779-8904; http://makahastables.com; 84-1042 Maunaolu St; rides from $50)S Saddle up at this historic ranch for a sunset trail ride with a BBQ dinner and s'mores by the firepit, or an afternoon horseback ramble through the valley as you learn about Hawaiian culture, including traditional games and crafts. Advance reservations required. 4Sleeping Makaha has the majority of the vacation rentals available on the Waiʻanae Coast; check out VRBO (www.vrbo.com), Home Away (www.homeaway.com), Airbnb (www.airbnb.com) and others. Beachside condos are the most popular (one bedrooms run from $100 to $200, two bedrooms from $250 to $350). You should be wary of house rentals as they could be in sketchier neighborhoods. Three-night minimums are usually required. The four beachfront condo complexes are Makaha Shores, Makaha Cabanas, Makaha Surfside and Hawaiian Princess.

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VACATION RENTALS Condos tend to be cheaper than hotels for longer stays, and offer more independence for DIY types and families. Condo vacation rentals are handled directly by owners or property management agencies. Check listings for condos and vacation rentals on the following websites: Affordable Paradise (%808-261-1693; www.affordable-paradise.com) Airbnb (www.airbnb.com) HomeAway (www.homeaway.com) Kona Hawaii Vacation Rentals (%808-329-3333, 800-244-4752; www.konahawaii.com) Kona Rentals (%800-799-5662; www.konarentals.com) Knutson & Associates (%808-329-6311, 800-800-6202; www.konahawaiirentals.com) Luxury Retreats Hawaii (%877-993-0100; www.fabulous-homes.com) SunQuest Vacations (%from Canada 800-367-5168, from USA 808-329-6438; www.sunquest-hawaii.com) Vacation Rentals by Owner (www.vrbo.com) 5Eating You don't have to spend a lot to eat ʻono kine grinds (good food), but you'll usually have to venture further afield than Aliʻi Dr, where most waterfront restaurants are disappointing and overpriced.

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Volcano Village Artists HuiARTS (www.volcanovillageartistshui.com)SF Tour pottery, fiber work, wood sculpture, ceramics, woodblock prints, glass blowing and photography studios over a three-day weekend in late November. 4Sleeping Tranquil B&Bs and vacation-rental cottages grow around Volcano like mushrooms. Most require a two-night minimum stay, or else add a one-night surcharge or cleaning fee. For more listings, check Vacation Rentals by Owner (www.vrbo.com), HomeAway (www.homeaway.com), AirBnB (www.airbnb.com) and local rental agent Volcano Gallery (%808-987-0920; www.volcanogallery.com). Holo Holo InHOSTEL ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %808-967-8025, 808-967-7950; www.volcanohostel.com; 19-4036 Kalani Honua Rd; dm $24, r with shared/private bath $60/75; iW) Don't be put off by this hostel's exterior.

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments
by Michael Batnick
Published 21 May 2018

Sacca couldn't see Snap's potential and passed.14 Now, Snapchat functions like a full social media or messaging app, and it has a huge user base, especially among Generation Z. Snap went public in 2017 at a $24 billion valuation.15 Ouch. When Simmons asked, “Is that your biggest misfire?” Sacca responded, “I misfire all the time. I told the Airbnb guys what they're doing is unsafe and somebody was gonna get raped and murdered in a shared house.”16 Airbnb is currently worth more than $30 billion.17 Sacca is able to speak openly and candidly about his misses because he's had so many winners. He understands that swinging and missing, or in these cases watching the pitch and not swinging is part of the game.

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Interview with Tim Ferriss. 14. Chris Sacca, interview with Bill Simmons, “Episode 95: Billionaire Investor Chris Sacca,” The Bill Simmons Podcast, April 28, 2016. 15. Portia Crowe, “Snap Is Going Public at a $24 Billion Valuation,” Business Insider, March 1, 2017. 16. Interview with Bill Simmons. 17. Lauren Thomas, “Airbnb Just Closed a $1 Billion Round and Became Profitable in 2016,” CNBC.com, March 9, 2017. 18. SEI, “Behavioral Finance: Loss and Regret Aversion,” September 2014. CHAPTER 16 Michael Batnick Looking in the Mirror You will do a great disservice to yourselves, to your clients, and to your businesses, if you view behavioral finance mainly as a window onto the world.

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In his spare time he enjoys reading and spending time with his wife Robyn, son Koby, and dog Bianca. Index 13D registration, 90 101 Years on Wall Street (Brown), 50 Abbot Labs, 91 ABX Index, 134 Ackman, Bill, 3, 85, 88 CNN interview, 92 confidence, 88–89 persistence, 89 Adams, Evelyn, 131 Airbnb, 151 Alcoa, trading, 157 Alfond, Harold, 81 Amazon, 139–140 earnings, 7 Animal spirits, 126 “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias” (Kahneman/Knetsch/Thaler), 75 AOL/Time Warner, merger, 49 Apple earnings, certainty (example), 120 shareholder wealth, 109 Arthur Lipper, tracking, 70 Art of Contrary Thinking, The, (Neill), 67 Assets under management (AUM), reduction, 61 Automatic, Sacca investment, 149 Bacon, Louis, 103 Balanced fund, transformation, 50 Bank of England, currency defense, 103 Bank of Taiwan, investments, 40 Baruch, Bernard, 7 Batnick, Michael, 155 Behavior gap, 99 Bell, Alexander Graham, 29 Benchmarks, 77 Benjamin Graham Joint Account, 7 Berkowitz, David, 88 Berkshire Hathaway Buffett control, 76 drawdowns, 143 market cap, 79 recovery, 114 shares, decline, 142 stock, Buffett purchase, 76 value loss, 57 Bernstein, Peter, 121, 164 Bernstein, William, 37 Betting on Zero (Silvan), 94 Betty Crocker, comparison, 91 Black Monday, 102 Black‐Scholes option pricing model, 39–40 Blood money, 91 Blue Chip Stamps, 141–142 Bogle, Jack, 45, 159 firing (Wellington Management), 51 impact, 47 performance, problems, 51 Boston Security Analysis Society, Samuelson remarks, 51 Brokerage house, offer, 20 Brokers, long‐term relationship, 61 Brooks, John, 68 Brown, John Dennis, 50 Brown, Josh, 162–163 Bucket shops closure, 18 usage, 16 Buffalo Evening News (purchase), 142 Buffett, Warren, 4, 10, 73, 140 annual forecasts, 77 circle of competence, 80 comparison, 100 gross returns, 76 investment philosophy, 76–77 limited partnership, closure, 111 Oracle of Omaha, 76, 78 Pearson, contrast, 114 Bull market, margin for error, 67 Cabot, Walter, 50 Capital, usage, 17 Carr, Fred, 69 Cayne, James, 40 Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (Griffin), 81 Charmin, comparison, 91 Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam, 158–159 Chasing the Last Laugh (Zacks), 27 Chesapeake & Atlantic, 20–21 Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, 16 Chicago Herald (problems), 30 Church and Dwight, value, 91 Churchill, Winston, 91 Circle of competence (Buffett), 80 Cisco, gains, 57 Citron Research, 113–114 Clemens, Samuel.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web
by Paul Adams
Published 1 Nov 2011

Using existing connections is a powerful way to build new connections. It highlights the shortest paths between people, which can be useful for sharing information to more relevant groups, or connecting with new people. Airbnb is a service that allows people to rent out their homes to strangers. As these people don’t know each other, which makes it hard to know who to trust, Airbnb used Facebook connections to make it possible to see whether you are connected to the other people through friends of friends. It’s now easy to ask the mutual friend about whether we’re likely to get on well with the host, or whether we’re likely to like their place

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• The readers of my blog, thinkoutsidein.com, whose commentary always gives me new perspectives and helps me shape many early thoughts. New groups Thanks to you, for reading. I hope we’ll chat together face to face in a future group. Index A adoption thresholds 74–75, 76, 81 advertising historical increase in 132 new forms of 135, 142 reach approach to 133 targeted 80, 138, 139 See also marketing Airbnb service 46 Allen, Christopher 48 American Eagle Outfitters 41 American Express 120 anchoring 126 Apple products 122 Ariely, Dan 98, 128, 131, 144 associates 52 B Bahrami, Bahador 92 Barabási, Albert-László 31, 48 basic friendship pattern 55 behavior changing 123–124, 149 consistency of 118–119 consumer 12, 104, 106, 148 influence of 86–87, 109, 148 social proof and 86–87 technology and 9–10 understanding 150 beliefs 120, 149 Berger, Jonah 19, 27, 28 Bernoff, Josh 28, 69, 99 biases confirmation bias 127 environmental cues and 125–126 habits related to 123–124 influenced by others 118–119 perception of value and 120–122 BMW ads 19, 26 Bok, Derek 27 boyd, danah 32, 48 brain conscious 103, 107–109 decision making and 103–104, 107, 109–110, 148 memory and 111–113 nonconscious 103–104, 107–111, 148 patterns detected by 105, 110 brands, conversations about 20–21 broad friendship pattern 58 Broadbent, Stefana 14, 68 Brooks, David 48 C Call of Duty games 2, 3 cascades of ideas 73, 80, 81 choices, number of 120–121, 122 Christakis, Nicholas 48, 68, 94, 97 Cialdini, Robert 98 classic sales funnel 104, 106, 113 Cohen, Jonathan 128 comforters 53 communal laughter 16 comparison 126 confidants 53 confirmation bias 127 Connected (Christakis and Fowler) 48, 68, 97 connections degrees of separation between 43–45 independent groups and network 39 influence not correlated with 73 marketing campaigns for making 18 social network patterns of 33–35, 47 surfacing of common 45 conscious brain 103, 107–109 decision making by 103, 110 processing capacity of 107, 108 consumer behavior 12, 104, 106, 148 contacts, useful 52 conversations brands mentioned in 20–21 feelings shared in 19 information communicated in 24–26 reasons for having 16–17 topics of 18–22 who we engage in 23–26 credibility 139–142 Crossing the Chasm (Moore) 79, 83 cues, environmental 20, 21 culture, influence of 87–88 customer testimonials 137 Cyworld network 80 D De Vries, Marieke 128 decision making bias and 118–119, 125–126 comparison used in 126 getting help with 90 groups used for 92 nonconscious brain and 103–104, 107, 109–110, 148 presentation and 125–126 Dijksterhuis, Ap 114, 115 Dove ad campaign 46, 49 Dunbar, Robin 10, 18, 27, 34, 48 E early adoption 78–79 Eastern cultures 88 Emergence (Johnson) 114 emotional brain.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

When her job description said to start at 8:00 a.m., she got to the restaurant at 5:30 a.m. every day.9 This ethos is what we mean when we talk about hustle, and your ability to do it well can comprise a competitive advantage. Entrepreneurs, forever operating with constraints, are the kings and queens of hustle, and the best examples of hustle in action. Be Resourceful: If You Don’t Have a Bed to Sleep On, Make Your Own It was January 2008. Airbnb founders Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, and Nathan Blecharczyk had a problem: they were broke. They started “Air Bed and Breakfast” thinking that anyone with an air mattress, extra couch, or bed should be able to make money renting out that space on a temporary basis. It wasn’t a bad idea. For example, during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Barack Obama spoke at a packed NFL stadium with eighty thousand seats in a city with a total of twenty-seven thousand quickly-sold-out hotel rooms.

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For example, during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Barack Obama spoke at a packed NFL stadium with eighty thousand seats in a city with a total of twenty-seven thousand quickly-sold-out hotel rooms. Thousands of Democratic supporters were scrambling to find a place to stay. Using Airbnb.com, Denver residents absorbed the excess demand by renting out their couches or beds to visitors. Unfortunately, while the website’s usage spiked during the occasional big event or conference, it never gained enough day-to-day traction to make a profitable business. To close the gap between revenue and expenses, the founders maxed out four credit cards and blew through all of their savings.

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It’s hard to capture the essence of resourcefulness, but most of us know it when we see it. When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was looking for a wife, he told friends who were setting him up on dates that he wanted a woman who was resourceful. But they didn’t get it. So he told them, “I want a woman who could help me get out of a Third World prison!” That did the trick.10 The Airbnb guys, if they had to, could probably break out of a Third World prison. Be Resilient: When the Naysayers Are Loud, Turn Up the Music Tim Westergren might be the most resilient man in Silicon Valley. He was inspired to start Internet radio business Pandora back in 1999 after hearing that Geffen Music dropped singer Aimee Mann from their label because she didn’t have enough paying fans.

Stuffocation
by James Wallman
Published 6 Dec 2013

The success of Zipcar, for instance, reflects the space and cost that comes with keeping a car in a city, and the fact that, if you live in a city, you just do not need a car so much anymore. With Spotify, why own a CD or even a download, when you can listen to it whenever you want? Airbnb goes one better. As well as giving people the chance to borrow other people’s goods, it also lets them share a good they already own: their own home. Beyond the obvious financial reward, there is also a participatory, social good that comes with Airbnb. It provides the people who let their rooms and their homes, and the people who stay there, with real connections. As a result, they tend to feel part of the new, innovative sharing economy, they feel more connected to other people, and they have more stories to share.

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Joseph Pine II and James H Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience Economy”, Harvard Business Review, July 1998. More on TOMS shoes: www.toms.com. More on the Common Threads Initiative between eBay and Patagonia: www.patagonia.com/us/common-threads. Watch Puma’s Clever Little Shopper disappear on YouTube. Stay with Airbnb: www.airbnb.com. Rent a car from Zipcar: www.zipcar.com . Get your music from Spotify: www.spotify.com. “London, one of the world’s most visited cities” Source: Deborah L. Jacobs, “The 20 Most Popular Cities In The World To Visit In 2012”, Forbes, 20 June 2012. In the 2013 rankings, Bangkok pipped London to the number one spot.

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To solve that, Puma created a bag that, rather than add to the clutter in your home when you stash it away, or the guilt you feel when you throw it out, would simply disappear. Put the brand’s Clever Little Shopper bag in hot water for three minutes and it harmlessly dissolves, so you can pour it safely down the plug. The social accommodation brand Airbnb, the car-sharing service Zipcar and music-streaming site Spotify are all examples of what is variously known, from slightly different angles, as the new trend for dis-ownership, the sharing economy and collaborative consumption. Now, thanks to these trends and the technologies that make them possible, you can enjoy the experience of a room, a house, a car, a CD, a handbag, a lawnmower, a musical instrument or even a dog – without all the hassle that comes with owning them.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

Inequality is, by definition, just one more problem our lovable entrepreneurs have set out to solve, and in the eyes of some, they have succeeded. Marc Andreessen, the famous venture capitalist, has described the vacation rental platform Airbnb as a solution for income inequality. Chris Lehane, a former assistant to Bill Clinton and Al Gore who now does public affairs for Airbnb, has said the same. Objecting to proposed regulation of the company, Lehane has said that cities “understand that in a time of economic inequality, this is a question of whose side are you on: do you want to be on the side of the middle class, or do you want to be opposed to the middle class?”

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Uber is the most obvious example: much of its value comes not from the efficiencies in taxi-hailing that it has engineered but rather from the way it allows the company to circumvent state and local taxi rules having to do with safety and sometimes insurance. The circumvention strategy is everywhere in inno-land once you start looking for it. Airbnb allows consumers and providers to get around various safety and zoning rules with which conventional hotels must comply.15 Amazon allows customers in many places to avoid paying sales taxes. The circumvention strategy isn’t restricted to software innovations, either. One of the great attractions of credit default swaps—a big financial innovation of the last decade—is that they were completely unregulated.

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Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (Knopf, 2013), p. 36. 10. Interview with Maria Bartiromo, December 3, 2009. 11. Andreessen: Alessandra Stanley, “The Tech Gods Giveth,” New York Times, November 1, 2015. Lehane: Conor Dougherty and Mike Isaac, “Airbnb and Uber Mobilize Vast User Base to Sway Policy,” New York Times, November 5, 2015. 12. “Uber and the American Worker,” a speech Plouffe delivered at “the DC tech incubator 1776,” dated November 3, 2015, and available on the Uber website. http://newsroom.uber.com/2015/11/1776. 13. Schmidt can be seen making these statements in a YouTube recording of his SXSW talk, which also featured his coauthor, Jared Cohen, and the interviewer Steven Levy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

In fact, you might believe that just buying software was how this transformation would work. Or that the software would just eat the world on its own in some kind of Terminator-like hellscape. Nobody wrote the instruction manual for this transformation. But in fact companies succeed at digital transformation not just by using software but by building software. Startups like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and Spotify have become household names because they’re really good at building software. They know how to write software that changes how we live our lives. Now incumbents in every other industry are learning to do the same. Nearly every industry is transforming because of software. Digital transformation initiatives take top priority at all kinds of companies.

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These digital native companies focused their early energy on creating great customer experiences, and they used their software-building expertise to their advantage. The new playing field was digital, and they brought an A-game. Uber and Lyft, without owning a single taxi, in less than five years used software to completely overhaul how people get around cities. Airbnb challenged the global hotel industry without owning the real estate. One of my favorite examples is Casper, the mattress company. Casper makes mattresses and distributes them directly to consumers via their website. I was always intrigued with how Casper could be considered a tech company, raising substantial money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists and fetching tech-like valuations in the process.

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Decision makers need to stay up to speed with the Cambrian explosion of new microservice providers that are racing into the market. Each microservice is continually and rapidly changing and improving. “Tech companies are constantly debating” which microservices to build and which to buy, says Ashton Kutcher. He has invested in dozens of startups and chalked up some big wins, most notably Airbnb, Spotify, and Uber. “I think what you don’t build is as important as what you build. The only things companies should build themselves are the things that are core to their business. A lot of times people end up building things where there’s already a product you could buy or license for a relatively low cost.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

“Work” is more likely to behave like a marketplace in the cloud than behind a desk at a traditional corporation. While a central skill set or career anchor will be entirely probable, most will be entrepreneurs, and many will have their side gigs. For instance, Uber, Lyft and Sidecar are platforms that give people a way to leverage their cars and time to make money. TaskRabbit is a market for odd jobs. Airbnb lets you rent out any extra rooms in your home. Etsy is a market for the handmade knick-knacks or 3D print designs that you make at home. DesignCrowd, 99designs and CrowdSPRING all offer freelance design resources that bid logos and other designs for your dollars. Before long, technology will allow instant marketing of your skill set, the auctioning of gigs and expertise, and the ability to be paid for your work in near real time or as deliverables are finished.

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Cash today accounts for just 34 per cent of the total value of consumer spending globally.11 While non-cash payments are highest in the developed world, as mobile payments and mobile bank accounts emerge, the use of physical currency will enter a steeper decline. Most commodities traded on global markets like oil, gold, diamonds, titanium and so forth are priced in US dollars because it is easier to measure relative market performance. However, the more significant shift is in the fact that whether I’m on Amazon, Alibaba or Airbnb, I can pretty much buy anything from anywhere in the world today, in real time. This is putting incredible strain on market mechanisms that assume you’ll be transacting in one currency, and you have to be a local resident to purchase goods locally. How does sales tax work? What about exchange rate mechanisms?

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It also means that as an entrepreneur bank account the next obvious move is to design day-to-day banking into Uber’s app instead of standing alone as a typical bank account or mobile banking app. For the millions of permalancers or gigging economy workers, it’s highly likely that the first time a freelancer opens a bank account will be directly in response to a new gig or job offer—if that employer (like Uber or Airbnb) offers you a bank account as part of the sign-up process, why would you stop signing up for Uber, drive to a branch and sign a piece of paper? Uber is also offering car leases to its drivers,2 allowing drivers with no vehicle to sign up and get car financing backed by demand from Uber. This is what the new banking experience looks like for small business entrepreneurs.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

Advertising informed us of products. We traded our attention for information, industry observer Gord Hotchkiss has written on MediaPost, an online marketing publication. Today we are glutted with information and have “too little attention to allocate to it. . . . This has allowed participatory information marketplaces such as Uber, Airbnb, and Google to flourish. In these markets, where information flows freely, advertising that attempts to influence feels awkward, forced and disingenuous. Rather than building trust, advertising erodes it.” Evidence of advertising fatigue is found in ad blockers and in Nielsen data that says half of those who watch TV shows they have recorded on their DVR devices skip past the ads.

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Obstacles remain, particularly for smaller companies, because programmatic buying rewards scale, but for agencies the trends are ominous. Even more worrisome, clients are also doing more creative work in-house. Unilever outsourced Unilever Studio to a company to perform tasks once outsourced to agencies. Airbnb CMO Jonathan Mildenhall, who left a top marketing job at Coca-Cola to join this digital upstart in 2014, says half his marketing department “are creative. They’re writers and art directors and photographers and videographers.” A major reason, he says, is that agencies don’t move fast enough. A client performing more of its own creative work was a practice he followed when he was at Coca-Cola, and it’s practiced at companies like Apple.

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.”* Google has merged all the data it collects from its 3.5 billion daily searches and from YouTube and other services, and it introduced a Google About Me page, offering advertisers your date of birth, phone number, where you work, mailing address, education level, where you’ve traveled, your nickname, photo, and e-mail address.* Airbnb then-CMO Jonathan Mildenhall says of the many millions of people who rent homes, “We know everything about our hosts. Likewise with our guests,” though it’s a bit less specific for the latter. As for Amazon, since it is the world’s largest store and knows what individuals have actually purchased, its data is unrivaled.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

As more and more heavyweight VCs bid up the value of start-ups, others have to follow. It’s up or out. The result has been not only a new bubble in IPO markets, but the undercutting of a host of public companies that actually do have to worry about profits. Two classic examples are Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry and Airbnb’s of hotels. This may be good for some of the VCs who can use the inflated values of the unicorns on their books to raise more money and charge more management fees. But I can’t see how it is good for economic value overall. Meanwhile, that capital, generated by valuations that are based as much on narrative as fact, is used less for R&D or as an investment in growth than to pay nosebleed salaries.

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And, by the same token, Facebook could deny anyone access to those massive amounts of user data (which is the only reason other businesses are interested in being on Facebook in the first place), for any reason. As the 250 pages of emails and documents released by British lawmakers revealed, companies who were not considered competitive with Facebook, including Airbnb, Lyft, and Netflix, got preferred access to data, as did the Royal Bank of Canada and a number of other nontech businesses. But those companies that Facebook viewed as competition, like Vine (a Twitter-owned video app), were denied or even shut out of the company’s network altogether. Indeed, after Twitter released Vine in 2013, Facebook shut off Twitter’s access to Facebook friends data at Zuckerberg’s behest.1 Meanwhile, the emails revealed that Zuckerberg discussed charging app developers for access to Facebook user data, while also forcing them to share their own user data with Facebook’s network; email debates show that the company even considered restricting developer access to certain kinds of data unless the developers bought advertising on Facebook.

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Google and Facebook don’t need to build more factories, invest in more raw materials, or staff more assembly lines in order to capture market share, which is why they have the ability to grow much faster than corporate giants of the past. In today’s economy, the losers tend to own more things—tangible assets such as factories and equipment—whereas the winners are concerned with leveraging intangible ones. The network effect is at the center of this shift. Whether it’s made up of Twitter users, Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts, or Instagram influencers, the network is worth far more than the value of any single node within it. The key point is that users beget users, which allows the players who can grab the most market share quickly to dominate entire industries seemingly overnight. This is not unique to Google, as we’ve seen.

The Crux
by Richard Rumelt
Published 27 Apr 2022

A Web-based platform works to serve both buyers and sellers, becoming a marketplace. Whereas Facebook could first build the user base, a platform like Airbnb is of little use to customers unless there are renters and little use to renters unless there are customers. For the platform strategist, edge arises from having network effects on both sides, a moderate “lock-in” of both buyers and sellers. The early crux issue is deciding which side to build first, later adding the other side. The decision depends on the specifics of the situation and the ingenuity of the owners. Airbnb attacked this crux by first building a listing of apartments. The company raided Craigslist for listings as well as newspaper listings and other online vacation and for-rent notices.

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No one would ordinarily think this would be a very profitable business. After all, there are already plenty of small firms that lease office space, a business that has been around for thirty years. But WeWork wanted to lease a lot of space in a lot of cities and then make that space available on a Web app, sort of like Airbnb. And it was signing new leases fast, showing rapid growth in the space available. Despite the fact that this business plan wouldn’t pass muster in an undergraduate make-up-a-plan competition, it got funded by Japanese investment house SoftBank. The initial investment in WeWork was $4.4 billion, implying a valuation of $18–$20 billion.

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They subsidized these early listings by paying for professional photography of the apartments. This not only encouraged property owners to list, but also made their listing appear comparable to good hotels rather than the bare-bones Craigslist format. Over time, as renters began to use the platform, Airbnb no longer had to pay for photography—property owners hired their own to keep up with the look of other listings. Uber is a platform connecting drivers and their cars with people wanting a ride. At Uber its ride-sharing prices are low enough to pull business away from taxicabs and black cars. There is controversy over what it pays drivers.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

Those startups included Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, and innumerable other “sharing economy” and “gig economy” businesses which have no workers and own no property but instead use APIs to outsource all front-line functions that require a human. The deliberate conversion of employees into contractors has allowed these companies to externalise labour costs to the rest of society, giving them an edge over every competitor. Amazon now accounts for a staggering 40 percent of all US online commerce; Uber handles half of all taxi rides in New York City; and as of 2020, in my own city of Edinburgh, there are almost as many Airbnb listings as there are hotel rooms.103 The traditional Chicago School belief is that this concentration of entire industries into just a few companies is an inevitable result of technology and economies of scale, and that if it benefits the customer, all is well.

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“Working as a Call Center Supervisor,” Dialpad Help Center, Dialpad, accessed November 26, 2021, https://help.dialpad.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005100283-Working-as-a-Call-Center-Supervisor. 41. Ken Armstrong, Justin Elliott, and Ariana Tobin, “Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You,” ProPublica, October 2, 2020, www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service-reps-for-disney-and-airbnb-who-have-to-pay-to-talk-to-you. 42. Kevin Roose, “A Machine May Not Take Your Job, but One Could Become Your Boss,” New York Times, June 23, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/artificial-intelligence-ai-workplace.html; “Cogito,” Crunchbase, accessed November 26, 2021, www.crunchbase.com/organization/cogito-corp. 43.

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A century ago, workers at Taylor’s factories learned about their performance by means of a piece of paper stuffed in their pigeonholes the following day. At many call centres, you’re constantly informed of your performance, usually through a timer on your computer and a pep talk from a supervisor listening in on an occasional call.40 An investigation by ProPublica found Arise Virtual Solutions, a company that counts Airbnb, Comcast, Disney, Walgreens, and Barnes & Noble among its clients, has managers score some of its agents’ calls to the sixth decimal point against a forty-item checklist, including the following: Adhered to internal staff procedures (7.1429 points) Tone and responses were courteous, confident, professional, positive (3.75 points) Apologized when appropriate (3.75 points) Kept control of the call (2.857143 points) Asked if there was anything else (2.857143 points) Addressed the caller by name (1 point) Used empathetic statement (2 points) Attempted to de-escalate the caller (3 points) Delayed greeting (–25 points) Confrontational (–100 points)41 Arise’s managers can’t listen to every single call, though.

The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles
by Astronaut Ron Garan and Muhammad Yunus
Published 2 Feb 2015

This is the old tried-and-true model of creating trust, institutional trust, which requires a great deal of infrastructure and overhead, takes a long time to develop, is very inflexible, and is not very open to innovation. Airbnb is an application similar to Uber, used to locate a room or home to rent. Today, random people are going into random people’s houses, spending the night, and comfortably trusting each other. Technology provides built in checks and balances that allow this trust to form. And as with accepting a ride through Uber, the trust between those two parties isn’t long-term; it has to last only for as long as one is staying in the other’s home. Airbnb and Uber have become successful because both have 154â•…  Co n c l u sio n mechanisms to form trust without elaborate processes or contracts.

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Wikipedia, for instance, was built on the premise that people enjoy interacting within a community, which in the case of Wikipedia, is a global village documenting human knowledge. As is the case with hackathons, very few people work to add knowledge and keep Wikipedia updated out of a sense of charity. Instead, they do it because it’s interesting, fun, and community oriented. And like Uber and Airbnb, Wikipedia employs a model that engages the trust of the community to help keep postings accurate and up to date. There also is a community-based trust model that deals with geographic data, to help keep platforms like Google Maps up to date in the face of changing street names or geography. Many parts of the developing world lack accurately recorded information on which to base maps, because survey data is incomplete.

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Thanks to all those who are helping to spread the message of the orbital perspective. Thanks also to my mother and father, who started and supported me on this journey on and off Spaceship Earth. Last but not least, I want to thank Carmel, Ronnie, Joseph, and Jake. Index Abbey, George, 13–14, 16 “Act as if.” See “Fake it till you make it” attitude Africa, 131 Airbnb, 153–154 Anderson, Michael, 20 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, 13–14, 31, 42 Atlantis. See Space Shuttle Atlantis Bangladesh, 52 Barratt, Mike, 39 background, 23–25 ISS and, 41–43 Russia, Russians, and, 24–27, 30, 31, 36, 37, 41 Beck, Beth, xiii Big picture perspective Chilean mine rescue and, 100–102 orbital perspective and, 133, 136, 167 worm’s eye view and, 80, 81, 112–113, 119–121, 167 Biosphère Environmental Museum, 163 Bolden, Charlie, 40, 98–99 Borisenko, Andrei, photo Botvinko, Alexander, 44 Brezhnev, Leonid, 13 Brown, David, 20 Brugh, Willow, 141–143, 160, 164 Budarin, Nikolai, 19 Burbank, Dan, photo Bureaucratic inertia, 119–121 Bush, George H.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Published 9 Oct 2017

Nancy Lee, “Focusing on Diversity,” The Keyword (blog), June 30, 2016, https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/focusing-on-diversity30. 7. Apple, “Inclusion & Diversity,” accessed October 15, 2016, http://www.apple.com/diversity. 8. Google, “Diversity,” accessed October 2016, https://www.google.com/diversity. 9. Airbnb, “Employee Diversity & Belonging: 2016 Assessment,” October 25, 2016, http://blog.airbnb.com/employee-diversity-belonging-2016-assesment. 10. Williams, “Facebook Diversity Update.” 11. Kaya Thomas, “The Diverse Talent Pool Exists. Facebook Just Isn’t Hiring Us,” Fusion, July 15, 2016, http://fusion.net/story/325940/the-diverse-talent-pool-exists. 12.

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I’m not meaning to pick on Apple here; in fact, they were actually one of the first companies to release diversity data, and their numbers look better than many others. For example, at Google, technical employees were 81 percent male in 2016.8 Just 1 percent were black, and 3 percent were Hispanic. In leadership roles across all departments, 76 percent were male. Two percent were black, and 1 percent were Hispanic. Over at Airbnb, 10 percent of staff came from “underrepresented groups” in 2016 (which means neither white nor Asian, the two groups that are well represented in tech companies)—but in technical roles, that number was only 5 percent.9 I could go on, but I don’t think you need more stat soup to understand this story.

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You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. Note: Italic page numbers refer to illustrations. Abler, Erin, 32–33 Acxiom data brokers, 104 advertising and collection of gender information, 65–66 Facebook’s selections for users, 10 and filtering, 65 and proxy data, 110–112 and Reddit, 162 and value of user data, 96 Airbnb, 20 Alciné, Jacky, 129–130, 132–133, 135, 137–138 alcohol use, 17–18 algorithms biases in, 144–145, 176 and clean design aesthetic, 143 and COMPAS, 120–121, 125–129, 145 and debiasing word-embedding systems, 140 described, 121–123 and edge cases, 137 and Facebook’s use of proxy data, 112 and Friends Day Facebook feature, 84 and Google, 123, 136, 144 and neural networks, 131–133 and News Feed Facebook feature, 168 and social media trends, 10 and training data, 145–146, 171 and Trending Facebook feature, 149, 166–167, 169 and Yelp, 123–125 Allen, Paul, 182 AltaVista, 2 alt-right movement, 153, 164 Apple and emoji suggestions, 80 iPhone location settings, 105–108 and Siri’s female voice, 36 and Siri’s responses to crises, 6–7, 7 and Siri’s teasing humor, 88–89 smartwatches from, 13 and use of personas, 27 and workforce diversity, 19–20 artificial intelligence and failure to understand crises, 6–7 and loss of jobs, 192 Siri as, 88–89 word-embedding systems, 139–140 Automattic, 183 “average” users, 38–44, 47 Barron, Jesse, 114–115 Batman, Miranda, 57 Bawcombe, Libby, 40–42 Beyoncé, 55 bias.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Once this powerful positive feedback loop is in place, it becomes nearly impossible to convince either the buyer or the seller to leave and join a new platform. This kind of business actually becomes stronger as it grows and displays accelerating fundamental momentum. Look at Airbnb’s strong two-sided network as an example of a business model that greatly benefits from positive feedback loops (figure 22.1). FIGURE 22.1 The strong network effect enjoyed by Airbnb. Source: “Airbnb TWOS: Network Effects,” SlideShare, March 7, 2016, https://www.slideshare.net/a16z/network-effects-59206938/34-AirbnbT_W_O_S_I. Low-Cost Advantages Low-cost advantages stem from various sources, including process, scale, niche, and interrelatedness.

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These costs tend to be associated with critical products (such as Oracle’s SAP software) that are so tightly integrated with the customer’s business processes that it would be too disruptive and costly to switch vendors, or with products that have high benefit-to-cost ratios (such as Moody’s). Network Effects The network effect advantage comes from providing a product or service that increases in value as the number of users expands, as with Airbnb, Visa, Uber, or the National Stock Exchange of India. This functions as a strong moat as long as pricing power is not abused and the user experience does not degrade. Creating a two-sided network such as an auction or marketplace business requires both buyers and sellers, and each group is going to show up only if they believe the other side will be present as well.

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As Rothschild puts it, all of modern industrial life has unfolded in the last ninety seconds of humanity’s existence. We are new to change, and change is new to us.1 Uber, the world’s largest 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 “We are living in an ever-changing world” is both a cliché and an understatement. Regulations change all the time, new technologies emerge, unique business models evolve, and disruptive innovations take shape across all walks of life.

DK Eyewitness Top 10 Azores
by Dk Eyewitness
Published 22 Dec 2022

DIRECTORY PASSPORTS AND VISAS Australian Embassy Avenida da Liberdade 200, 2nd Floor, Lisbon, Portugal (213) 101 500 British Consulate General Rua de São Bernardo 33, Lisbon, Portugal (213) 924 000 Canadian Embassy Avenida da Liberdade 198–200, 3rd Floor, Lisbon, Portugal (213) 164 600 Ministry of Foreign Affairs vistos.mne.gov.pt United States Consulate General Avenida Príncipe do Mónaco 6, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel (296) 308 330 GOVERNMENT ADVICE Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade dfat.gov.au smartraveller.gov.au Câmara Municipal de Lisboa visitar.lisboa.pt UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice US Department of State travel.state.gov CUSTOMS INFORMATION Visa HQ visahq.com/portugal INSURANCE EHIC ec.europa.eu GHIC ghic.org.uk HEALTH Centro de Saúde de Santa Cruz das Flores Largo 25 de Abril, Santa Cruz das Flores, Flores (292) 590 270 PERSONAL SECURITY Tourist Police Rua da Alfândega, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel (296) 205 500 Safe Space Alliance safespacealliance.com TRAVELLERS WITH SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS Accessible Portugal accessibleportugal.com Cresaçor azoresforall.com Disabled Holidays disabledholidays.com European Network for Accessible Tourism accessibletourism.org MONEY Nova Câmbios João Paulo II Airport, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel • Open 7am–9pm Mon–Fri, 7am–2pm & 3–5pm Sat & Sun (296) 306 770 MOBILE PHONES AND WI-FI Frequency Check frequencycheck.com MAIL CTT Correios de Portugal ctt.pt VISITOR INFORMATION Azores Trails trails.visitazores.com Epicure and Culture epicureandculture.com Parques Naturais parquesnaturais.azores.gov.pt Percursos do Artesanato dos Açores artesanato.azores.gov.pt Sentir e Interpretar o Ambiente dos Açores siaram.azores.gov.pt Spot Azores spotazores.com Tourist Helpline (296) 284 569 Visit Azores visitazores.com TRIPS AND TOURS Archipelago Choice archipelagochoice.com Biosphere Expeditions biosphereexpeditions.org Melo Agência de Viagens melotravel.com Nature Trek naturetrek.co.uk Portugal Walks portugalwalks.com Responsible Travel responsibletravel.com Sunvil sunvil.co.uk Tour Azores tourazores.com ACCOMMODATION Airbnb airbnb.com Azores Pousadas de Juventude pousadasjuvacores.com Casas Açorianas casasacorianas.com COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic proved that situations can change suddenly. Always check before visiting attractions and hospitality venues for up-to-date hours and booking requirements.

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Many historic hotels – converted forts, manor houses and convent buildings – offer upscale accommodation. The majority fall within the mid-range, four-star category. Numerous B&Bs and traditionally styled guesthouses are listed on the Casas Açorianas website. Budget travellers can opt for one- and two-star hotels known as a pensão or residencial. Another idea is to check into a hostel or book on Airbnb. There are five youth hostels operated by Azores Pousadas de Juventude. All islands have official campsites; the Visit Azores website lists most. DIRECTORY PASSPORTS AND VISAS Australian Embassy Avenida da Liberdade 200, 2nd Floor, Lisbon, Portugal (213) 101 500 British Consulate General Rua de São Bernardo 33, Lisbon, Portugal (213) 924 000 Canadian Embassy Avenida da Liberdade 198–200, 3rd Floor, Lisbon, Portugal (213) 164 600 Ministry of Foreign Affairs vistos.mne.gov.pt United States Consulate General Avenida Príncipe do Mónaco 6, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel (296) 308 330 GOVERNMENT ADVICE Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade dfat.gov.au smartraveller.gov.au Câmara Municipal de Lisboa visitar.lisboa.pt UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice US Department of State travel.state.gov CUSTOMS INFORMATION Visa HQ visahq.com/portugal INSURANCE EHIC ec.europa.eu GHIC ghic.org.uk HEALTH Centro de Saúde de Santa Cruz das Flores Largo 25 de Abril, Santa Cruz das Flores, Flores (292) 590 270 PERSONAL SECURITY Tourist Police Rua da Alfândega, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel (296) 205 500 Safe Space Alliance safespacealliance.com TRAVELLERS WITH SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS Accessible Portugal accessibleportugal.com Cresaçor azoresforall.com Disabled Holidays disabledholidays.com European Network for Accessible Tourism accessibletourism.org MONEY Nova Câmbios João Paulo II Airport, Ponta Delgada, São Miguel • Open 7am–9pm Mon–Fri, 7am–2pm & 3–5pm Sat & Sun (296) 306 770 MOBILE PHONES AND WI-FI Frequency Check frequencycheck.com MAIL CTT Correios de Portugal ctt.pt VISITOR INFORMATION Azores Trails trails.visitazores.com Epicure and Culture epicureandculture.com Parques Naturais parquesnaturais.azores.gov.pt Percursos do Artesanato dos Açores artesanato.azores.gov.pt Sentir e Interpretar o Ambiente dos Açores siaram.azores.gov.pt Spot Azores spotazores.com Tourist Helpline (296) 284 569 Visit Azores visitazores.com TRIPS AND TOURS Archipelago Choice archipelagochoice.com Biosphere Expeditions biosphereexpeditions.org Melo Agência de Viagens melotravel.com Nature Trek naturetrek.co.uk Portugal Walks portugalwalks.com Responsible Travel responsibletravel.com Sunvil sunvil.co.uk Tour Azores tourazores.com ACCOMMODATION Airbnb airbnb.com Azores Pousadas de Juventude pousadasjuvacores.com Casas Açorianas casasacorianas.com COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic proved that situations can change suddenly.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

In the past few years, the incubators and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley have turned their attention to new areas ready for algorithmic reinvention that are more distant from the traditional technology sector. The triumph of gamification, ubiquitous computing, and remote sensing (in other words, the quantification of everything) has led to a slew of new businesses that add an algorithmic layer over previously stable cultural spaces. Companies like TaskRabbit, Uber, and Airbnb are adapting algorithmic logic to find new efficiencies in lodging, transportation, and personal services, inserting a computational layer of abstraction between consumers and their traditional pathways to services like taxis, hotels, and personal assistants. These companies take the ethos of games like FarmVille and impose their “almost-magic circle” on what was previously considered to be serious business.

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All of these markets were, of course, already technological, but they were largely inaccessible to direct algorithmic management until the advent of smartphones and ubiquitous sensors enabling the close monitoring of human and financial resources. In terms of labor and surplus value, what the algorithms of Uber, Airbnb, and their cohort capitalize on is the slack infrastructure of modern consumption: empty cars, unused bedrooms, and under-employed people. According to UCLA urban planning researcher Donald Shoup, the average car is parked 95 percent of the time; why not exploit that latent resource?34 Viewed more broadly, the interface layer is a colonization of the quiet backwaters of contemporary capitalism—the remobilization of goods and spaces after they have already been consumed or deployed.

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This is the central labor question at the implementation fault line between algorithmic gamification and the marketplace: who is motivating these changes, and what exactly are we “sharing” in the sharing economy? On the most obvious level, this new economy is about more efficient access to privately owned or atomized goods and services. The rhetoric of companies like Yerdle and Airbnb leans on the mobilization of material resources: cars, apartments, and household objects that are sitting around unused. Share your personal goods to monetize that slack and reduce the overhead of ownership, turning an empty vehicle or room into a profit center and a community resource. At a deeper level, what the interface entrepreneurs are asking is for us to share (and monetize) our time: the founders of Lyft are motivated not just by profit but by the loneliness of the average commuter stuck in his car.36 These companies encourage us to dedicate our hours to others, often in appeals that blend the allure of wages for labor with something more socially complex.

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 15 Oct 2018

Perhaps another part of me just wanted to be with thousands of other people who were also devastated about Trump. Whatever the case may be, once I decided to go, I was all in. Not wearing pussy hats all in, because those were goofy-looking as hell. I was all in in other ways. I booked my train ticket to Washington, DC, and shared an Airbnb with a friend. I encouraged others to speak up on sosh meeds; Ilana and I hosted a comedy show at the march and raised as much money as possible and donated all of it to the ACLU, in addition to my own private donation; I armed myself with as much knowledge as possible about what we could potentially be up against with a number 45 administration; I used my podcast Sooo Many White Guys as a way of having tough conversations with folks I didn’t agree with on a plethora of issues, not just politics; as well as getting educated by the likes of political satirist Bassem Youssef and blerd* superhero Melissa Harris-Perry, who helped me see America and the rest of the world clearer.

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In fact, if temperature could be personified in ignorance, it’d be the singer Meat Loaf when he competed on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2011 and assumed actor and fellow contestant Gary Busey had stolen his paint supplies, so Meat cursed Gary out with the same passion Malcolm X had when delivering his “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us” speech. It was that hot. How hot was it? It was so hot that I get why the devil leaves hell to take an Airbnb vacation to the polar ice caps and melts them because he’s mad at living in such a hot-ass home. You get the point. It was hot. Moving on. One day, after a wardrobe fitting, I was sweating like Patrick Ewing during his heyday on the Knicks and I was hanging out with Alex, the director. I mentioned I was hungry and jonesing for water.

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I don’t play sports recreationally, nor do adventure-seeking things such as rock climbing, skateboarding, or jumping—lol—but when I was on a recent girls’ trip to Palm Springs, I had to take one for the team when someone suggested ATV’ing. When I think of Palm Springs, I think of unwinding in a cute AF house that I found on Airbnb, drinking tequila, and seeing old-ass white people with their Jamaican or Haitian caretakers at the grocery store. But I decided to go ATV’ing because the only thing I’m more scared of than hurting myself is FOMO. I said, “Yaaas,” and went with the gang to the ATV site. The place looked like the set of Fear Factor without the budget and possible accreditation.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

With the ascendancy of Amazon, Apple, and other online emporia early in the twenty-first century, much of the Internet was occupied with transactions, and the industry retreated to the “cloud.” Abandoning the distributed Internet architecture, the leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs replaced it with centralized and segmented subscription systems, such as Paypal, Amazon, Apple’s iTunes, Facebook, and Google cloud. Uber, Airbnb, and other sequestered “unicorns” followed. These so-called “walled gardens” might have sufficed if they could have actually been walled off from the rest of the Internet. At Apple, Steve Jobs originally attempted to accomplish such a separation by barring third-party software applications (or “apps”).

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Whereas money in the Google era is fodder for a five-trillion-dollar-a-day currency exchange—that’s seventy-five times the amount of the world’s trade in goods and services—you will command unmediated money that measures value rather than manipulates it. Whereas the Google world is layered with middlemen and trusted third parties, you will deal directly with others around the globe with scant fees or delays. Emerging is a peer-to-peer swarm of new forms of direct transactions beyond national borders and new forms of Uber and Airbnb beyond corporate gouges. Whereas the Google world confines you to one place and time and life, the new world will open up new dimensions and options of new life and experience where the only judge is the sovereign you. Does the promise that human dignity will once again take its place on the Internet and that human beings will be masters of the cryptocosm sound too good to be true?

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Microsoft acquired an elegant modular browser and made Netscape’s inventors compete with themselves. The IPO dearth continued for more than a decade. For nine months in 2016, there were no US IPOs at all. Instead, venture capitalists kept hundreds of “unicorns”—private companies valued at more than a billion dollars—in their corrals. Led by Uber and Airbnb, nearly all of them had private market caps higher than Netscape’s in its IPO. Most were less interested in going public than merging with a mammoth like Google/Alphabet or Facebook. Unlike the appreciation of earlier Internet companies such as Microsoft and Netscape, the appreciation of unicorns would not chiefly benefit the public.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

But developers fund their campaigns. It’s just this constant squeeze. It’s a global crisis. In Austin and Seattle—tech companies are growing there and a housing crisis along with it. Berlin and Barcelona and London and all these places are trying to deal with deregulated housing markets because of “home sharing” companies like Airbnb. The Bay Area’s history of resistance is helpful, but it seems the minute the movement gets in the way of capital, then it gets blocked or coopted. And it’s hard to sustain the movement we need, when people are being displaced from their families, their networks. The support we need to do the long-haul work is being torn apart.

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I told him, “Well, Picasso used to paint and make $15 million within five minutes. Why can’t I? What separates me and you from him?” The guy got frustrated and asked, “Can you please just drop me here?” We get that more and more now. I was here when Uber was at the beginning, when Travis Kalanick was at his beginning, or Brian Chesky from Airbnb, or Jack Dorsey was trying to make Square, and the beginning of Elon Musk doing Tesla.§ I have driven many of them. From my own experience, when you meet them, you don’t see anything inspiring on them. You don’t see that genius in them. These are normal people with regular IQs, maybe they’re sneakier than others.

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You should be able to go to a venture capitalist and say, “I’m really smart. Here’s the math. You can check my homework. This will work.” That doesn’t get funded. No matter how much you hope it does. Venture now funds you to expand your sales team. It doesn’t fund you to do anything that’s revolutionary anymore. Everyone wants to fund the Ubers and the Airbnbs, which really are not at all technological. They are leveraging government investments in technology to do economic and social disruption. That will all be lost in the narrative of history, because Silicon Valley wants to have this libertarian idea that the government doesn’t know how to spend money to do research, which couldn’t be more contrary to the evidence.

The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul
by Isabel Kershner
Published 16 May 2023

For an additional charge, Inbal, the hostess, would provide a wholesome breakfast. A heated indoor swimming pool encased in a quaint stone building could be booked in advance for the guests’ private use. The mountain villa’s Airbnb listing was vague on location: The Bikta B’Kerem, or “Cottage in a Vineyard,” was described as being in “Shilo, Jerusalem District, Israel.” Arrival by taxi or private car was recommended. A click on the Airbnb map erroneously placed the pastoral retreat in Shiloh, Illinois. In fact, as a couple of guest reviews quickly revealed, the luxury cabin was situated in Esh Kodesh, a settler outpost on a rugged hilltop deep in the occupied West Bank that was illegally built, even by Israeli standards.

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Three months later, however, Israel’s Supreme Court struck down the 2017 Regularization Law, on the grounds that its purpose was to legalize “unlawful acts perpetrated by one specific population,” meaning the Jewish settlers, “while harming the rights of another,” the Palestinians. Airbnb, meanwhile, came under mounting pressure from Palestinian officials, anti-settlement advocates, and human rights groups for advertising holiday chalets in the occupied territories and the illegal outposts, until it announced in 2018 that it would remove its West Bank settlement listings. Legal challenges in the United States accused the online rental company of discrimination and forced it to reverse its decision. Airbnb pledged to donate to charity any profits it made from West Bank rentals. Years of efforts by the international, pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement were hardly felt on the ground, as the settlers remained focused on building

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Grainy Palestinian cellphone footage sometimes captured images of armed settler men descending the mountainsides with unkempt beards, flowing sidelocks, and large skullcaps, their faces wrapped in T-shirts. Clashes with farmers in the fields around Esh Kodesh, between the Palestinian villages of Qaryut, Jalud, and Qusra, had occasionally turned deadly amid mutual recriminations about the uprooting of olive trees and vandalization of crops. Yet Inbal Zeev, the Airbnb host, and her neighbors sold an alternative reality of a mostly tranquil, bucolic idyll in which the Palestinian villages, in plain view on the opposite slopes, hardly figured. Brushing off the outpost’s image of violence, she and other residents pointed to one incident a few years back when Esh Kodesh residents were suspected of torching six cars in Qusra.

The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things
by Daniel Kellmereit and Daniel Obodovski
Published 19 Sep 2013

My car has an exact avatar in the cloud, and that is what I’m doing to my home. The idea is that I can lock and unlock my car remotely for my son, who is visiting and wants to drive the car. I can turn the engine on and off. I’m not that far away from essentially turning my car into the equivalent of Airbnb for cars. At Airbnb I can rent a room in someone’s house if I want. The idea is to do the same with the car, especially if it is just sitting there and just costing money. People should be able to log in and borrow somebody’s car, just pay twenty bucks and be done. They should be able to make it happen just using their cell phone.”

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The second thing is the need for a paradigm shift in how people view their cars. For some, their car is a very personal thing, their fashion statement or status symbol, and not just a utility that can be shared with anybody else. The third area would be security; the idea that someone can hack into their car would scare most people away. Sanjay Sarma used Airbnb.com as an example of how things that were almost unthinkable before can become big business and how what used to be a niche market went mainstream. Considering that a connected car, a CloudCar, can always be tracked with GPS, it’s unlikely that it’s going to be hijacked, or at least it can be quickly recovered if it is.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

At the time, the fallout from the dot-com crash was still being felt—how could a struggling online retailer justify starting a computer services company? Despite the risks, Bezos gave the go-ahead to build a cloud service. It worked so well that eventually Amazon started to offer these same software tools to other businesses. Today, AWS is Amazon’s most profitable business line—a service that counts among its thousands of customers Netflix, Airbnb, and the CIA. It was a huge long-term gamble that has paid off handsomely. In mid-2019, the investment research firm Cowen estimated that AWS alone was worth north of $500 billion, more than half the total stock market capitalization of Amazon itself. The bold, long-term bets that Bezos made over the years didn’t always pay off.

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As difficult as it was for her, pulling the plug on Amazon.com was easy compared with escaping the company’s iron-fisted digital grip. She set up a private network and instructed it to avoid any site that had anything to do with AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing system that acts as the backbone for a large swath of the Internet. She soon found that she could no longer access Netflix, HBO Go, Airbnb, and her Slack account at work, crucial for communicating with her colleagues. In all, her private network blocked more than 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon. She concluded that: “Ultimately . . . we found Amazon was too huge to conquer.” Amazon’s ubiquity is no accident. Everything the company does is part of an effort to build a giant ecosystem that follows us everywhere, whether it’s the home, the car, the office, or strolling down the street with our smartphones.

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To prevent theft or vandalism, customers have apps on their phones that let them see the delivery person enter and drop off the bags of groceries in real time or on tape delay. At first, consumers will balk at letting strangers into their homes when they’re not there, but many will get used to it in the same way that homeowners have gotten used to giving strangers access to their apartments through Airbnb. So far, Walmart has had no complaints, although the day will come when an unfriendly rottweiler takes a dislike to an unsuspecting delivery person. Lore believes that direct deliveries to the refrigerator will save costs. No longer will the company have to pack milk and ice cream in insulated boxes, and the arrangement gives Walmart much more flexibility on the timing of deliveries.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

When, in 2018, the company finally responded to public pressure by raising minimum wage for its warehouse workers to $15, it made these changes at the expense of those very workers, taking their holiday bonus incentives and potential stock grants away. The model of business success in the millennial era is that of dismantling social structures to suck up cash from whatever corners of life can still be exploited. Uber and Airbnb have been similarly “disruptive.” Where Amazon ignored state sales taxes, Uber ignored local transportation regulations, and Airbnb ignored city laws against unregulated hotels. With Uber and Airbnb, the aesthetic of rapid innovation—and, crucially, the sense of relief these cheap experiences provide to consumers who are experiencing an entirely related squeeze—obscures the fact that these companies’ biggest breakthroughs have been successfully monetizing the unyielding stresses of late capitalism, shifting the need to compete from the company itself to the unprotected individual, and normalizing a paradigm in which workers and consumers bear the company’s rightful responsibility and risk.

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With Uber and Airbnb, the aesthetic of rapid innovation—and, crucially, the sense of relief these cheap experiences provide to consumers who are experiencing an entirely related squeeze—obscures the fact that these companies’ biggest breakthroughs have been successfully monetizing the unyielding stresses of late capitalism, shifting the need to compete from the company itself to the unprotected individual, and normalizing a paradigm in which workers and consumers bear the company’s rightful responsibility and risk. Airbnb didn’t tell its New York City users that they were breaking the law by renting their apartments. Uber, like Amazon, has been artificially holding down prices to take over the market, at which point the prices will almost certainly go up. Driver pay, in the meantime, has been declining sharply. “We are living in an era of robber barons,” said John Wolpert, in Brad Stone’s The Upstarts.

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Liar’s Poker. W.W. Norton, 1989. ———. The Big Short. W.W. Norton, 2010. McClelland, Mac. “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.” Mother Jones, March–April 2012. Pressler, Jessica. “Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It.” New York, May 28, 2018. Stone, Brad. The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World. Little, Brown, 2017. We Come from Old Virginia Coronel, Sheila, Steve Coll, and Derek Kravitz. “Rolling Stone’s Investigation: ‘A Failure That Was Avoidable.’ ” Columbia Journalism Review, April 5, 2015. Dorr, Lisa Lindquist.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World
by Craig Kielburger , Holly Branson , Marc Kielburger , Sir Richard Branson and Sheryl Sandberg
Published 7 Mar 2018

Accessed June 19, 2017. http://www.edelman .com/insights/intellectual-property/2015-edelman-trust-barometer/trust-and-innovation-edelman-trust-barometer/executive-summary. 11. Thomas, Lauren. “Airbnb Just Closed a $1 Billion Round and Became Profitable in 2016.” CNBC.com. March 9, 2017. Accessed June 19, 2017. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/09/airbnb-closes-1-billion-round-31-billion-valuation-profitable.html. 12. Ting, Deanna. “Airbnb's Latest Investment Values It as Much as Hilton and Hyatt Combined.” Skift.com. September 23, 2016. Accessed June 19, 2017. https://skift.com/2016/09/23/airbnbs-latest-investment-values-it-as-much-as-hilton-and-hyatt-combined/. 13. “Best Use of Social/Digital Media: 2015.”

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We trust in a group of peers with shared interests as much as—or more than—we trust in big companies. Today, most travelers wouldn't dare book a hotel without checking online reviews. In fact, millions are choosing to stay in someone's vacant apartment based on referrals from people they've never met. As recently as five years ago, this notion would have been absurd, but Airbnb, the online apartment-swap tool that charges service fees for every booking, is reportedly valued at $30 billion,11 more than most of the big hotel chains.12 Stranger danger aside, putting our faith into an aggregate of users makes complete sense. Sharing our lives digitally, including purchases, means consumers can look to other consumers for feedback, not just to the brand.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

Reputation Reputation is a form of stored value users can literally take to the bank. On online marketplaces such as eBay, TaskRabbit, Yelp, and Airbnb, people with negative scores are treated very differently from those with good reputations. It can often be the deciding factor in what price a seller gets for an item on eBay, who is selected for a TaskRabbit job, which restaurants appear at the top of Yelp search results, and the price of a room rental on Airbnb. On eBay both buyers and sellers take their reputations very seriously. The e-commerce giant surfaces user-generated quality scores for every buyer and seller, and awards its most active users with badges to symbolize their trustworthiness.

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What first began as a nascent behavior at one campus became a global phenomenon catering to the fundamental human need for connection to others. As discussed in the first chapter, many habit-forming technologies begin as vitamins—nice-to-have products that, over time, become must-have painkillers by relieving an itch or pain. It is revealing that so many breakthrough technologies and companies, from airplanes to Airbnb, were at first dismissed by critics as toys or niche markets. Looking for nascent behaviors among early adopters can often uncover valuable new business opportunities. Enabling Technologies Mike Maples Jr., a Silicon Valley “super angel” investor, likens technology to big-wave surfing. In 2012 Maples blogged, “In my experience, every decade or so, we see a major new tech wave.

Choose Yourself!
by James Altucher
Published 14 Sep 2013

And people are embracing it: Uber gave more car rides in San Francisco in October, 2014 then all cab rides combined. Times three. AirBnB is another example. This website allows people with extra rooms in their home to post the availability online for people looking in that particular place at that particular time. These extra rooms essentially become hotel rooms for people looking for accommodations (except they’re usually a lot cheaper). AirBnB has more rooms available in New York than all the hotels combined. Uber and AirBnB are hard to invest in right now because they are private. But figuring out how to piggyback on, or use, their model—which is becoming widely known as “the sharing economy”—will provide ways for people to make money.

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It also has the feature that it’s about one hundred feet from the local river so it’s probably easier for me to take a beautiful walk in nature than just about anyone. I value convenient travel. I don’t try to save. I fly business class whenever I travel. First class is a scam (not much difference between the two other than the prices). I try to stay in AirBnBs instead of hotels, because why pay the same price for a room that I can pay for a five-bedroom brownstone? I use Uber for a car service so I don’t have to wait in the cold for a cab. I use Zipcar instead of rental car agencies because Zipcars (or Cars2Go) are everywhere and require zero paperwork.

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
by David Kadavy
Published 5 Sep 2011

The program tends to fund small teams of hackers who have used their skills and hacker attitude to build cool products that solve problems: UserVoice (www.uservoice.com) democratizes customer support; Reddit (www.reddit.com) democratizes news; Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) provides an easy, automatic backup solution; and AirBNB (www.airbnb.com) turns extra bedrooms into places for travelers to stay. Hackers are the scribes of the modern world. They build products and businesses that not only communicate, but that users interact with and use to communicate with each other. Armed with a laptop, an idea, and a few hours to code, a hacker can build something that reaches millions.

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By using this sloppy, community-driven site, people are giving a middle finger to all those polished corporate newspapers that took their money for so many years. Sometimes Visual Design Is Your Advantage But, of course, craigslist is an exceptional case, and its market share is being eroded by a variety of services that specifically target various categories within craigslist. Services such as AirBNB (www.airbnb.com), TaskRabbit (www.taskrabbit.com), and oDesk (www.odesk.com) all provide solutions that are more tailored to the needs of their specific vertical markets and incorporate much more attractive visual design. There is no better example of a company that enjoys a heavier advantage thanks to its design than Apple.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

At skyscanner.com you type in JFK and San Jose Cabo airports, put in dates for next weekend, and select “Direct flights only.” Within minutes you’ve entered your credit card details and booked the cheapest option available. Next stop is Airbnb to find accommodation. After some searching you hit upon a reasonably priced beachfront condo with what looks like a spectacular view of the ocean. You also go into your own Airbnb account so that anyone looking will know that your Brooklyn apartment is free to rent next weekend. Finally, you arrange some online insurance just in case anything goes wrong. On the day of the trip itself you go to the airline’s website, enter your passport details, select an aisle seat, check yourself in, and print out your boarding pass.

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This means you may be contributing to growth in ways that only the National Security Agency truly understands. Something else was going on that night in New York. You were participating in what has become known rather glibly as the sharing economy. Before Airbnb, if you were out of town, you would normally have left your apartment vacant. Post Airbnb, you can effectively exchange your apartment for one in Baja California by finding a third person to rent it on the online marketplace. Congratulations, you are helping to sweat the world’s physical assets. You have turned what would have been an empty apartment into a hotel.

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
by Paul Jarvis
Published 1 Jan 2019

They prioritize attracting customers, not determining the type of customers they want or the experience they want to give people once they become customers. She has found that growth as a one-dimensional metric for success is useless in the absence of real reasons for it or ways to support customers once they’re acquired. Most companies don’t even need that kind of excessive growth to be profitable. Companies like Airbnb have to start with a huge inventory—Airbnb needed to amass places to stay before it could make a dent in the market—but most companies don’t require so large a market share to start. When Kate worked for Magazines.com, her role was to assume the overall strategy for acquiring customers. Previously, the strategy had been to grow right away to gain more customers, the thinking being that simply adding more customers would lead to more revenue.

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In treating trust as a primary factor in running your business, you’ll amass an army of loyal fans—and not just a huge customer base of people who bought from you and then forgot about you. The truth is, you don’t need Super Bowl ads. Instead, as a company of one, you can be more effective by writing guest articles for websites and blogs, creating incentive programs for existing clients, or appearing in podcasts that cover your industry. Alex Beauchamp, former head of content at Airbnb, said that she never wants any content she works on to “go viral.” She doesn’t want to ever be on the hook for making that happen. Moreover, going viral is often what happens with a business that, not understanding who its intended audience is, tries to appeal to pretty much everyone. If you want a piece of content for your business to generate a billion views, you probably don’t understand the purpose of that content or whom it was really created for.

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Index A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z 3M, 8, 112 99U, 88, 179 1984 (Orwell), 102–3 A A/B tests, 130 Abel, Jessica, 140–41 accounting, 209–10 Adams, Henry, 56 adaptability, 12–13, 18–19, 86 Adaptiv Learning Systems, 11 Airbnb, 61, 159–60 airline industry, 102, 150, 151 Amazon, 149–50, 157–58, 177 Ambassador Software, 153–54 American Egg Board, 101 amplification, 102 Andrews, Leah, 33 Anheuser-Busch, 181 apologizing, 117–18, 119 Apple, 103, 177, 192 Arnett, Jeffrey, 85–86 Arthur & Henry, 128 asynchronish, 132 attention, vs. credibility, 184 attention economy, 96–99 audience.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

get matched along multiple dimensions: “Ride-Sharing with BlaBlaCar’s New MariaDB Databases,” ComparetheCloud.net, February 19, 2016, https://www.comparethecloud.net/articles/ride-sharing-with-blablacars-new-mariadb-databases; “About Us,” BlaBlaCar.com, accessed January 27, 2017, https://www.blablacar.com/about-us. 4 million people book rides: Arun Sundararajan, “Uber and Airbnb Could Reverse America’s Decades-Long Slide into Mass Cynicism,” Quartz, June 9, 2016, https://qz.com/700859/uber-and-airbnb-will-save-us-from-our-decades-long-slide-into-mass-cynicism. Madi Solomon, an expert in such data: Madi Solomon, “Transformational Metadata and the Future of Content Management: An Interview with Madi Solomon of Pearson PLC,” Journal of Digital Asset Management 5, no. 1, 27–37, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/dam.2008.48; quote from conversation with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger.

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But the richer the information, the more difficult it is to process it—to weigh each dimension based on our preferences and select the optimal transaction partner. Translating an avalanche of information into decisions is hard. Who hasn’t gotten overwhelmed by too many filters and options when searching for airline flights on online platforms, such as Expedia, or for a place to stay on Airbnb? Even if all offers are plainly visible to us, identifying the best one is often difficult. The challenge is information overload, including having too many options to filter and select, and thus to identify the optimal match. Fortunately, here, too, technology can help. In conventional markets focused mostly on price, matching preferences of a buyer and a seller is relatively trivial.

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open the window to new insights: Avi Loeb, “Good Data Are Not Enough,” Nature, November 2, 2016, http://www.nature.com/news/good-data-are-not-enough-1.20906. INDEX abundance of capital, 142–143, 194 of resources, 220–221 accounting, 90 development of, 91–95 reform of, 172–173 Air France Flight 447, 157–159, 170–171 Airbnb, 70 airline industry, 112 Akerlof, George, 40 Alation, 70 Alexa, 79, 164 Alexandria library, 21 algorithms, 5, 8–9, 71–77, 81, 82, 84, 136, 210 development process for, 71–72 fintechs and, 153 firms and, 128 lack of diversity in, 12 open, call for, 167 opportunities provided by, 74–75 Alibaba, 2, 75, 163, 196, 215 Allende, Salvador, 176, 177 Altman, Sam, 189 Amazon, 9, 30, 52, 68, 69, 74, 75, 76–77, 79, 87–89, 96, 102, 107 annual revenues of, 87 data-rich market structure and, 130 feedback effects and, 164 as a firm, 88–89, 106 low job satisfaction in, 88–89 market concentration in, 161 market model of, 87–88 network effects and, 164 research & development in, 196 scale effects and, 164 American Express, 127 American Research and Development Corporation, 216 Andreesen, Marc, 189 Angkor Wat, 21 animal skins (as currency), 48 antitrust measures, 12, 165 Apollo spacecraft, 22, 159 Apple, 55, 75, 79, 121–122, 169, 196, 215 Apple Music, 74 Apple Pay, 135–136, 146 Arendt, Hannah, 223 Armstrong, Neil, 22 artificial intelligence.

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms
by Hannah Fry
Published 17 Sep 2018

For more on this, see James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 4. 22. Netflix Technology Blog, https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/netflix-recommendations-beyond-the-5-stars-part-2-d9b96aa399f5. 23. Shih-ho Cheng, ‘Unboxing the random forest classifier: the threshold distributions’, Airbnb Engineering and Data Science, https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/unboxing-the-random-forest-classifier-the-threshold-distributions-22ea2bb58ea6. 24. Jon Kleinberg, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig and Sendhil Mullainathan, Human Decisions and Machine Predictions, NBER Working Paper no. 23180 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, Feb. 2017), http://www.nber.org/papers/w23180.

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(The term ‘machine learning’ first came up in the ‘Power’ chapter, and we’ll meet many more algorithms under this particular canopy later, but for now it’s worth noting how grand that description makes it sound, when the algorithm is essentially the flowcharts you used to draw at school, wrapped up in a bit of mathematical manipulation.) Random forests have proved themselves to be incredibly useful in a whole host of real-world applications. They’re used by Netflix to help predict what you’d like to watch based on past preferences;22 by Airbnb to detect fraudulent accounts;23 and in healthcare for disease diagnosis (more on that in the following chapter). When used to assess offenders, they can claim two huge advantages over their human counterparts. First, the algorithm will always give exactly the same answer when presented with the same set of circumstances.

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‘ambiguous images 211n13’ 23andMe 108–9 profit 109 promises of anonymity 109 sale of data 109 volume of customers 110 52Metro 177 abnormalities 84, 87, 95 acute kidney injuries 104 Acxiom 31 Adele 193 advertising 33 online adverts 33–5 exploitative potential 35 inferences 35 personality traits and 40–1 political 39–43 targeted 41 AF447 (flight) 131–3, 137 Afigbo, Chukwuemeka 2 AI (artificial intelligence) 16–19 algorithms 58, 86 omnipotence 13 threat of 12 see also DeepMind AI Music 192 Air France 131–3 Airbnb, random forests 59 Airbus A330 132–3 algebra 8 algorithmic art 194 algorithmic regulating body 70 algorithms aversion 23 Alhambra 156 Alton Towers 20–1 ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) 118–19 Alzheimer’s disease 90–1, 92 Amazon 178 recommendation engine 9 ambiguous images 211n13 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 17 Ancestry.com 110 anchoring effect 73 Anthropometric Laboratory 107–8 antibiotics 111 AOL accounts 2 Apple 47 Face ID system 165–6 arithmetic 8 art 175–95 algorithms 184, 188–9 similarity 187 books 178 films 180–4 popularity 183–4 judging the aesthetic value of 184 machines and 194 meaning of 194 measuring beauty 184–5 music 176–80 piano experiment 188–90 popularity 177, 178, 179 quality 179, 180 quantifying 184–8 social proof 177–8, 179 artifacts, power of 1-2 artificial intelligence (AI) see AI (artificial intelligence) association algorithms 9 asthma 101–2 identifying warning signs 102 preventable deaths 102 Audi slow-moving traffic 136 traffic jam pilot 136 authority of algorithms 16, 198, 199, 201 misuse of 200 automation aircraft 131–3 hidden dangers 133–4 ironies of 133–7 reduction in human ability 134, 137 see also driverless cars Autonomous Emergency Braking system 139 autonomy 129, 130 full 127, 130, 134, 138 autopilot systems A330 132 driverless cars 134 pilot training 134 sloppy 137 Tesla 134, 135, 138 bail comparing algorithms to human judges 59–61 contrasting predictions 60 success of algorithms 60–1 high-risk scores 70 Bainbridge, Lisanne 133–4, 135, 138 balance 112 Banksy 147, 185 Baril, David 171–2 Barstow 113 Bartlett, Jamie 44 Barwell, Clive 145–7 Bayes’ theorem 121–4, 225n30 driverless cars 124 red ball experiment 123–4 simultaneous hypotheses 122–3 Bayes, Thomas 123–4 Bayesian inference 99 beauty 184–5 Beck, Andy 82, 95 Bell, Joshua 185–6 Berk, Richard 61–2, 64 bias of judges 70–1, 75 in machines 65–71 societal and cultural 71 biometric measurements 108 blind faith 14–16, 18 Bonin, Pierre-Cédric ‘company baby‘ 131–3 books 178 boost effect 151, 152 Bratton, Bill 148–50, 152 breast cancer aggressive screening 94 detecting abnormalities 84, 87, 95 diagnoses 82–4 mammogram screenings 94, 96 over-diagnosis and over-treatment 94–5 research on corpses 92–3 ‘in situ’ cancer cells 93 screening algorithms for 87 tumours, unwittingly ­carrying 93 bridges (route to Jones Beach) racist 1 unusual features 1 Brixton fighting 49 looting and violence 49–50 Brooks, Christopher Drew 64, 77 Brown, Joshua 135 browser history see internet browsing ­history buffer zone 144 Burgess, Ernest W. 55–6 burglary 150–1 the boost 151, 152 connections with earthquakes 152 the flag 150–1, 152 Caixin Media 45 calculations 8 calculus 8 Caldicott, Dame Fiona 223n48 Cambridge Analytica 39 advertising 42 fake news 42 personality profiles 41–2 techniques 41–2 whistleblowers 42 CAMELYON16 competition 88, 89 cameras 119–20 cancer benign 94 detection 88–9 and the immune system 93 malignant 94 ‘in situ’ 93, 94 uncertainty of tumours 93–4 see also breast cancer cancer diagnoses study 79–80 Car and Driver magazine 130–1 Carnegie 117 Carnegie Mellon University 115 cars 113–40 driverless see driverless cars see also DARPA (US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) categories of algorithms association 9 classification 9 filtering 9–10 prioritization 8 Centaur Chess 202 Charts of the Future 148–50 chauffeur mode 139 chess 5-7 Chicago Police Department 158 China 168 citizen scoring system 45–6 breaking trust 46 punishments 46 Sesame Credit 45–6, 168 smallpox inoculation 81 citizen scoring system 45–6 Citroen DS19 116, 116–17 Citymapper 23 classification algorithms 9 Clinical vs Statistical Prediction (Meehl) 21–2 Clinton Foundation 42 Clubcard (Tesco) 26 Cohen’s Kappa 215n12 cold cases 172 Cold War 18 Colgan, Steyve 155 Commodore 64 ix COMPAS algorithm 63, 64 ProPublica analysis accuracy of scores 65 false positives 66 mistakes 65–8 racial groups 65–6 secrecy of 69 CompStat 149 computational statistics 12 computer code 8 computer intelligence 13 see also AI (artificial intelligence) computer science 8 computing power 5 considered thought 72 cookies 34 Cope, David 189, 190–1, 193 cops on the dots 155–6 Corelogic 31 counter-intuition 122 creativity, human 192–3 Creemers, Rogier 46 creepy line 28, 30, 39 crime 141–73 algorithmic regulation 173 boost effect 151, 152 burglary 150–1 cops on the dots 155–6 geographical patterns 142–3 gun 158 hotspots 148, 149, 150–1, 155 HunchLab algorithm 157–8 New York City subway 147–50 predictability of 144 PredPol algorithm 152–7, 158 proximity of offenders’ homes 144 recognizable patterns 143–4 retail 170 Strategic Subject List 158 target hardening 154–5 see also facial recognition crime data 143–4 Crimewatch programme 142 criminals buffer zone 144 distance decay 144 knowledge of local geographic area 144 serial offenders 144, 145 customers data profiles 32 inferred data 32–4 insurance data 30–1 shopping habits 28, 29, 31 supermarket data 26–8 superstore data 28–31 cyclists 129 Daimler 115, 130 DARPA (US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) driverless cars 113–16 investment in 113 Grand Challenge (2004) 113–14, 117 course 114 diversity of vehicles 114 GPS coordinates 114 problems 114–15 top-scoring vehicle 115 vehicles’ failure to finish 115 Grand Challenge (2005) 115 targeting of military vehicles 113–14 data 25–47 exchange of 25, 26, 44–5 dangers of 45 healthcare 105 insurance 30–1 internet browsing history 36–7, 36–8 internet giants 36 manipulation and 39–44 medical records 102–7 benefits of algorithms 106 DeepMind 104–5 disconnected 102–3 misuse of data 106 privacy 105–7 patterns in 79–81, 108 personal 108 regulation of America 46–7 Europe 46–7 global trend 47 sale of 36–7 Sesame Credit 45–6, 168 shopping habits 28, 29, 31 supermarkets and 26–8 superstores and 28–31 data brokers 31–9 benefits provided by 32 Cambridge Analytica 39–42 data profiles 32 inferred data 32–4, 35 murky practices of 47 online adverts 33–5 rich and detailed datasets 103 Sesame Credit 45–6 unregulated 36 in America 36 dating algorithms 9 Davies, Toby 156, 157 decision trees 56–8 Deep Blue 5-7, 8 deep learning 86 DeepMind access to full medical ­histories 104–5 consent ignored 105 outrage 104 contract with Royal Free NHS Trust 104 dementia 90–2 Dewes, Andreas 36–7 Dhami, Mandeep 75, 76 diabetic retinopathy 96 Diaconis, Pesri 124 diagnostic machines 98–101, 110–11 differential diagnosis 99 discrimination 71 disease Alzheimer’s disease 90–1, 92 diabetic retinopathy 96 diagnosing 59, 99, 100 disease (continued) hereditary causes 108 Hippocrates’s understanding of 80 Huntington’s disease 110 motor neurone disease 100 pre-modern medicine 80 see also breast cancer distance decay 144 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) 106, 109 testing 164–5 doctors 81 unique skills of 81–2 Dodds, Peter 176–7 doppelgängers 161–3, 164, 169 Douglas, Neil 162–3 driver-assistance technology 131 driverless cars 113–40 advantages 137 algorithms and 117 Bayes’ red ball analogy 123–4 ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) 118–19 autonomy 129, 130 full 127, 130, 134, 138 Bayes’ theorem 121–4 breaking the rules of the road 128 bullying by people 129 cameras and 117–18 conditions for 129 cyclists and 129 dealing with people 128–9 difficulties of building 117–18, 127–8 early technology 116–17 framing of technology 138 inevitability of errors 140 measurement 119, 120 neural networks 117–18 potential issues 116 pre-decided go-zones 130 sci-fi era 116 simulations 136–7 speed and direction 117 support for drivers 139 trolley problem 125–6 Uber 135 Waymo 129–30 driverless technology 131 Dubois, Captain 133, 137 Duggan, Mark 49 Dunn, Edwina 26 early warning systems 18 earthquakes 151–2 eBureau 31 Eckert, Svea 36–7 empathy 81–2 ensembles 58 Eppink, Richard 17, 18 Epstein, Robert 14–15 equations 8 Equivant (formerly Northpointe) 69, 217n38 errors in algorithms 18–19, 61–2, 76, 159–60, 197–9, 200–201 false negatives 62, 87, 88 false positives 62, 66, 87, 88 Eureka Prometheus Project 117 expectant mothers 28–9 expectations 7 Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) 189–91, 193 Face ID (Apple) 165–6 Facebook 2, 9, 36, 40 filtering 10 Likes 39–40 news feeds experiment 42–3 personality scores 39 privacy issues 25 severing ties with data brokers 47 FaceFirst 170, 171 FaceNet (Google) 167, 169 facial recognition accuracy 171 falling 168 increasing 169 algorithms 160–3, 165, 201–2 2D images 166–7 3D model of face 165–6 Face ID (Apple) 165–6 FaceFirst 170 FaceNet (Google) 167, 169 measurements 163 MegaFace 168–9 statistical approach 166–7 Tencent YouTu Lab 169 in China 168 cold cases 172 David Baril incident 171–2 differences from DNA testing 164–5 doppelgängers 161–3, 164, 169 gambling addicts 169–70 identical looks 162–3, 164, 165 misidentification 168 neural networks 166–7 NYPD statistics 172 passport officers 161, 164 police databases of facial images 168 resemblance 164, 165 shoplifters 170 pros and cons of techno­logy 170–1 software 160 trade-off 171–3 Youssef Zaghba incident 172 fairness 66–8, 201 tweaking 70 fake news 42 false negatives 62, 87, 88 false positives 62, 66, 87, 88 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 168 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 36 Federal Trade Commission 47 feedback loops 156–7 films 180–4 algorithms for 183 edits 182–3 IMDb website 181–2 investment in 180 John Carter (film) 180 novelty and 182 popularity 183–4 predicting success 180–1 Rotten Tomatoes website 181 study 181–2 keywords 181–2 filtering algorithms 9–10 Financial Times 116 fingerprinting 145, 171 Firebird II 116 Firefox 47 Foothill 156 Ford 115, 130 forecasts, decision trees 57–8 free technology 44 Fuchs, Thomas 101 Galton, Francis 107–8 gambling addicts 169–70 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) 46 General Motors 116 genetic algorithms 191–2 genetic testing 108, 110 genome, human 108, 110 geographical patterns 142–3 geoprofiling 147 algorithm 144 Germany facial recognition ­algorithms 161 linking of healthcare ­records 103 Goldman, William 181, 184 Google 14–15, 36 creepy line 28, 30, 39 data security record 105 FaceNet algorithm 167, 169 high-paying executive jobs 35 see also DeepMind Google Brain 96 Google Chrome plugins 36–7 Google Images 69 Google Maps 120 Google Search 8 Google Translate 38 GPS 3, 13–14, 114 potential errors 120 guardian mode 139 Guerry, André-Michel 143–4 gun crime 158 Hamm, John 99 Hammond, Philip 115 Harkness, Timandra 105–6 Harvard researchers experiment (2013) 88–9 healthcare common goal 111–12 exhibition (1884) 107 linking of medical records 102–3 sparse and disconnected dataset 103 healthcare data 105 Hinton, Geoffrey 86 Hippocrates 80 Hofstadter, Douglas 189–90, 194 home cooks 30–1 homosexuality 22 hotspots, crime 148, 149, 150–1, 155 Hugo, Christoph von 124–5 human characteristics, study of 107 human genome 108, 110 human intuition 71–4, 77, 122 humans and algorithms opposite skills to 139 prediction 22, 59–61, 62–5 struggle between 20–4 understanding the ­human mind 6 domination by machines 5-6 vs machines 59–61, 62–4 power of veto 19 PredPol (PREDictive ­POLicing) 153–4 strengths of 139 weaknesses of 139 Humby, Clive 26, 27, 28 Hume, David 184–5 HunchLab 157–8 Huntington’s disease 110 IBM 97–8 see also Deep Blue Ibrahim, Rahinah 197–8 Idaho Department of Health and Welfare budget tool 16 arbitrary numbers 16–17 bugs and errors 17 Excel spreadsheet 17 legally unconstitutional 17 naive trust 17–18 random results 17 cuts to Medicaid assistance 16–17 Medicaid team 17 secrecy of software 17 Illinois prisons 55, 56 image recognition 11, 84–7, 211n13 inferred data 32–4, 35 personality traits 40 Innocence Project 164 Instagram 36 insurance 30–1 genetic tests for Huntington’s disease 110 life insurance stipulations 109 unavailability for obese patients 106 intelligence tracking prevention 47 internet browsing history 36–8 anonymous 36, 37 de-anonymizing 37–8 personal identifiers 37–8 sale of 36–7 Internet Movie Database (IMDb) 181–2 intuition see human intuition jay-walking 129 Jemaah Islam 198 Jemaah Islamiyah 198 Jennings, Ken 97–8 Jeopardy!

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble
Published 8 Jan 2018

With all of the aberrations and challenges that tech companies face in charges of data discrimination, the possibility of hiring recent graduates and advanced-degree holders in Black studies, ethnic studies, American Indian studies, gender and women’s studies, and Asian American studies with deep knowledge of history and critical theory could be a massive boon to working through the kinds of complex challenges facing society, if this is indeed the goal of the technocracy. From claims of Twitter’s racist trolling that drives people from its platform34 to charges that Airbnb’s owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes35 to racial profiling at Apple stores in Australia36 and Snapchat’s racist filters,37 there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to the critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges of engineering nationwide.

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Lederer (Ed.), Take Back The Night: Women on Pornography, 105–114. New York: William Morrow. Gillis, S. (2004). Neither Cyborg nor Goddess: The (Im)possibilities of Cyberfeminism. In S. Gillis, G. Howie, and R. Munford (Eds.), Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, 185–196. London: Palgrave. Glusac, E. (2016, June 21). As Airbnb Grows, So Do Claims of Discrimination. New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com. Golash-Boza, T. (2016). A Critical and Comprehensive Sociological Theory of Race and Racism. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2(2), 129–141. doi:2332649216632242. Gold, D. (2011, November 10). The Man Who Makes Money Publishing Your Nude Pics.

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See also commercial interests; search engine optimization advertising companies, 5, 50, 123; bias, 89, 105–6, 116; profit motive, 36, 124; role in search results, 24, 38, 40–41, 56. See also Google Search affirmative action, 12, 174 African-American community, hair salon, 173–74 African sexuality, 94–95 Airbnb rental discrimination, 163 algorithmic oppression, 1–2, 4, 10, 80, 84, 173 algorithms: big data bias, 29, 31, 36; conceptualizations, 24; democratic practices online debunked, 49; discriminatory effect, 6, 13, 28, 85, 173, 175–76; perception of neutrality, 37, 44, 56, 171; “racist algorithms,” 9; reflection of programmers, 1, 26.

Virtual Competition
by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke
Published 30 Nov 2016

For example, you could compete against hotels and hostels through the accommodations app Airbnb or Booking.com. These online platforms facilitate entering the accommodation market in hosting guests at our own residences. In the same vein, it is a lot easier for drivers to enter the taxi market through a ride-sharing app, such as Uber, Lyft, or Didi Chuxing, than to acquire a taxi medallion or a cab. Online platforms can facilitate a competitive market by mitigating the seller’s actual (or perceived) risk and costs of entering. The risks of renting my place to a stranger may appear daunting. So platforms like Airbnb pro- The Promise of a Better Competitive Environment 7 vide information and ratings of potential guests and a “Host Guarantee” that reimburses eligible hosts for damages up to $1,000,000.20 In a similar vein, Uber provides its drivers with a passenger rating, which is an average rating of those provided by all of a passenger’s previous drivers, which is not immediately available to the passenger.

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Parts Geek, LLC, 494 F App’x 743, 745 (U.S. Court of Appeals [9th Circuit], 2012) (affirming summary judgment on antitrust counterclaims when Parts Geek failed inter alia to offer evidence such that a jury could reasonably find significant entry barriers in that market). Airbnb, Inc., The $1,000,000 Host Guarantee, https://www.airbnb.com /guarantee. Rob Price, “The Incredibly Simple Way to Find Your ‘Secret’ Uber Passenger Rating,” Business Insider UK, February 11, 2015, http://uk.businessinsider .com/uber-passenger-rating-how-to-customer-stars-how-do-i-2015-2. For instance, a PCW dedicated to hotel accommodations would represent numerous hotels, and is more likely to achieve a higher conversion rate than a single supplier—that is, converting more clicks on advertisements into business.

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After watching an entire season of Downton Abbey on Amazon Prime, you could, without leaving your home—whether in Oxford, Mississippi, or Oxford, U.K.—aspire to the British aristocracy, buying your Barbour hunting jacket and Hunter boots from a U.K. merchant, your Range Rover from a dealership several hundred miles away, your Rhodesian Ridgeback from a California kennel, your summer rental in the Lake District from a family through Airbnb, and Wordsworth’s poems and a sketchpad from Amazon.com. You could find eager sellers on eBay, Fiverr.com, or one of the many tradesmen’s advice websites, and join a host of communities, chat rooms, and information websites. Indeed, you could even find your future spouse online to accompany you to your English manor, where you could post photos on Facebook to celebrate your elevated social status.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

As I lay down, I set the screen on my wrist for 6 a.m. For eight hours I stop screening. 5 ACCESSING A reporter for TechCrunch recently observed, “Uber, the world’s largest 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.” Indeed, digital media exhibits a similar absence. Netflix, the world’s largest video hub, allows me to watch a movie without owning it. Spotify, the largest music streaming company, lets me listen to whatever music I want without owning any of it.

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You sign up and your computer will operate the latest best versions as long as you pay the monthly subscription. This new model entails reorientation by customers comfortable owning something forever. TV, phones, and software as service are just the beginning. In the last few years we’ve gotten hotels as service (Airbnb), tools as service (TechShop), clothes as service (Stitch Fix, Bombfell), and toys as service (Nerd Block, Sparkbox). Just ahead are several hundred new startups trying to figure how to do food as service (FaS). Each has its own approach to giving you a subscription to food, instead of purchases.

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The wealthiest and most disruptive organizations today are almost all multisided platforms—Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. All these giants employ third-party vendors to increase the value of their platform. All employ APIs extensively that facilitate and encourage others to play with it. Uber, Alibaba, Airbnb, PayPal, Square, WeChat, Android are the newer wildly successful multiside markets, run by a firm, that enable robust ecosystems of derivative yet interdependent products and services. Ecosystems are governed by coevolution, which is a type of biological codependence, a mixture of competition and cooperation.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

Earned It,” December 29, 2011, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.foodrepublic.com/2011/12/ 29/eddie-huang-got-tv-show-earned-it; Allison Benz, “A Day in the Life of a Chef,” Radio Blog, July 3, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://theradioblog.marthastewart.com/ 2012/07/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-chef.html; Evan Huang, interviews with the author, spring 2012. 203 One incubator that nurtures: Y Combinator Site, http://ycombinator.com/, accessed September 5, 2012. 203 Architect Charles Gwathmey: http://www.trianglemodernisthouses.com/gwathmey.htm, accessed September 5, 2012. 204 There are also manufacturing platforms: Bob Brunner, discussions in author’s class at Parsons; Tim Brown, discussions in author’s class at Parsons. 204 NY Creative Interns: Emily Miethner spoke at my class and I interviewed her in the spring of 2012; http://www.hercampus.com/career/ how-she-got-there-emily-miethner-founderpresident-ny-creative-interns. 204 Past events have included: http://nycreativeinterns.com/, accessed September 5, 2012; http://wearenytech.com/ 294-emily-miethner-founder-president-of-ny-creative-interns-community-manager-at-recordsetter-com, accessed September 5, 2012. 205 YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley: interview between Hurley and Bill Moggridge that I attended and participated in, 2011. 207 Brian Chesky, cofounder: Steven Loeb, “Airbnb Buys Up UK Rival, Crashpadder, Ahead of Olympics,” VatorNews, March 20, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://vator.tv/news/ 2012-03-20-airbnb-buys-up-uk-rival-crashpadder-ahead-of-olympics; Robin Wauters, “Airbnb Buys German Clone Accoleo, Opens First European Office in Hamburg,” TechCrunch, June 1, 2011, accessed October 22, 2012, http://techcrunch.com/2011/ 06/01/airbnb-buys-german-clone-accoleo-opens-first-european-office-in-hamburg/. 207 And eBay has grown: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-941964.html. 207 Even Apple has begun: http://www.cultofmac.com/129150/ this-norwegian-man-made-millions-selling-siri-to-steve-jobs/. 208 On January 28, 2010: http://www.economist.com/node/15393377, accessed September 8, 2012. 209 Prophet of Profits: I came up with this term in talking about the Economist cover with Ben Lee. 209 Charisma, secularized from: accessed September 5, 2012, http://oed.com/view/Entry/ 30721?

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Pivoting by linking to a bigger platform—YouTube’s sale to Google, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger’s sale of Instagram to Facebook—is perhaps the strategy we’ve become most familiar with in the era of start-ups. Of course, the strategy works the other way too—rather than selling to a larger platform, some entrepreneurs scale by expanding their original platform. Brian Chesky, cofounder of Airbnb, bought smaller platforms similar to his company’s model—Crashpadder and Accoleo, both in Europe. This has been Larry Ellison’s strategy at Oracle as well. And eBay has grown by buying PayPal and other smaller companies. Even Apple has begun to do this by buying the company that made Siri. Of course, you can still pivot and decide not to scale, at least not much.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

The innovative investor should expect to see similar concepts coming to market over the years with their own cryptotokens and should know that not all DAOs or dApps with cryptotokens are similarly shaky. For example, a fully functional decentralized insurance company, Airbnb, or Uber all hold great promise, and developer teams are working on similar use cases. One can think of an Airbnb or Uber as a middleman, connecting the consumer and provider of a service, and then taking a 20 to 30 percent fee for doing so. While many merchants understandably complain about credit card fees of 2 to 3 percent, the “platform fees” of Airbnb, Uber, and similar platform services are borderline egregious. Many of the cryptotoken systems that are imitating such platforms plan to take a fee that is an order of magnitude less, using underlying blockchain architectures to facilitate the decentralized transfer of value and services.

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It allows a global transaction to be settled in an hour as opposed to a couple of days. It operates in a peer-to-peer manner, the same movement that has driven Uber, Airbnb, and LendingClub to be multibillion-dollar companies in their own realms. Bitcoin lets anyone be their own bank, putting control in the hands of a grassroots movement and empowering the globally unbanked. However, Bitcoin has done something arguably more impressive than Uber, Airbnb, and LendingClub. Those companies decentralized services that were easily understandable and had precedent for being peer-to-peer. Everyone has had a friend drive them to the airport, or stayed with a relative in another country, or borrowed money from their parents.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

M., & Palfrey, J. G. (2010). Working towards a deeper understanding of digital safety for children and young people in developing nations. Berkman Center Research Publication, (2010-7), 10-36. 23andMe and Airbnb have partnered: Valle, G. D. (2019, May 22). Airbnb is partnering with 23andMe to send people on “heritage” vacations. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2019/5/22/18635829/airbnb-23andme-heritage-vacations-partnership GlaxoSmithKline acquired: Brodwin, E. (2018, July 25). DNA-testing company 23andMe has signed a $300 million deal with a drug giant. Here’s how to delete your data if that freaks you out.

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A rash of unintended consequences surrounds DNA data, such as that collected by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com — a market that is exploding in popularity as genetic testing technology advances and curious customers want to know more about their lineage or health risks. Like all digital technologies, genetic testing services such as these have higher- and lower-level functions, including selling data they collect on their customers to third parties. For example, 23andMe and Airbnb have partnered to offer customers “heritage vacations” based on their genetic results.64 Large pharmaceutical companies could use genetic data to target users who have specific genetic markers with tailored advertisements for their drugs. That’s no doubt why, in 2018, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline acquired a $300 million stake in 23andMe.65 Another obvious potential third-party client is law enforcement agencies, which can use genetic information to locate perpetrators of crimes (however those may be defined).

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You make the world a better place, and I love you all dearly. Index Abdulaziz, Omar, 138, 141, 142–145, 156–157 Abdul Razzak, Bahr, 251–252 Abubakar, Atiku, 120 advertising, 47–48, 64–67, 76, 79, 130–131 Africa, 82. See also specific countries The Age of Missing Information (McKibben), 262 Airbnb, 71 Akamai Technologies, 41 Akpinar, Ezgi, 109 Albanese, Anthony, 89 Albertsons Companies, 170 Alibaba, 69, 241 Almog-Assouline, Aharon (“Michel Lambert”), 252–254 Alphonso Inc., 76 al-Qahtani, Saud, 139–143 Amazon, 48, 52, 78, 305–306. See also Bezos, Jeff and the environment, 239–240, 241–242 security/privacy issues, 56, 77, 175, 184–185 American Civil Liberties Union (aclu), 185, 189, 191, 322 American Coal Association, 233 American Psychiatric Association, 106 Amkor Technology, 227 Amnesty International, 142, 223 Ancestry.com, 71 Anderson, Ross, 290 Antisocial Media (Vaidhyanathan), 112, 256 antisurveillance, 298–300, 306, 315.

Backbone.js Cookbook
by Vadim Mirgorod
Published 25 Aug 2013

Moreover, they are using the same code base in their mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms. ff WordPress.com: This is a SaaS version of Wordpress and uses Backbone.js models, collections, and views in its notification system, and is integrating Backbone.js into the Stats tab and into other features throughout the home page. ff Airbnb: This is a community marketplace for users to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world. Its development team has used Backbone in many latest products. Recently, they rebuilt a mobile website with Backbone.js and Node.js tied together with a library named Rendr. You can visit the following links to get acquainted with other usage examples of Backbone.js: http://backbonejs.org/#examples Backbone.js was started by Jeremy Ashkenas from DocumentCloud in 2010 and is now being used and improved by lots of developers all over the world using Git, the distributed version control system.

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We can still see some models are kept in the memory, but it happens because they are used by ControlsView. 257 Special Techniques See also ff The JavaScript Garbage Collector is described at the following location: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/09/17/53038. aspx ff Memory leaks' patterns in JavaScript are described at the following location: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-memleak/ 258 Index Symbols B $and operator 81 $equal operator 80 $exists operator 80 $has operator 80 $in operator 80 $ne operator 80 $nin operator 80 $nor operator 81 $not operator 81 $or operator 81 _.template() method 143 Backbone application basic views, defining 15 extending, with plugins 27 memory leak, avoiding 250 model, defining 21 model instance, creating 21 parameters, parsing in URL 26 Preview Invoice page 16 router, defining 15 starting 23 structure, creating from scratch 18 typical workflow 14 typical workflow diagrammatic representation 14 URL routing, implementing 24, 25 view, defining 22 view, rendering 23 views, spilting into subviews 17 wireframes, creating 15 writing 20-22 Backbone.Chosen extension 83 Backbone.Collection object 66 Backbone dependencies downloading 19 Backbone.Events managing 116 Backbone.HasMany 87 Backbone.history 25 Backbone.js about 6, 28 code, contributing 28 collections 65 documentation, working on 28 downloading 18 A acceptance validator 50 add event 119 add() method 69 advanced mapping deeply nested attributes, mapping 85 function, using 86 performing 85 Advanced REST client installing 181 advanced validation built-in validators 50 using, in model 49 Airbnb 6 append() method 126 Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) technique 236 asyncTest() function 222 at() method using 67 attrs parameter 35 events, managing 116 improvements 28 issue queue, working on 28 usage examples 6 used, for building RESTful frontend 190 Zepto, using with 98 Backbone.js documentation reference link 28 Backbone.js extension creating, with Grunt 211-215 tests, writing with QUnit 216-220 Backbone.LayoutManager about 163 downloading 163 used, for assembling layouts 163 Backbone.LayoutManager object 167 Backbone localStorage adapter downloading 206 Backbone.Memento extension downloading 42 Backbone model.

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See REST require.config() function 243 required validator 50 Require.js file downloading 238 requirejs() function 239, 242 reset event 119 reset() method 71 resource URI 180 REST 180 REST API architecting 180 RESTful backend prototyping, with MongoLab 181 RESTful frontend building, with Backbone 190-201 RESTful service mocking up, with jQuery Mockjax 220-222 restore() method 42 R.js 244 route event 119 params parameter 139 route parameter 139 router parameter 139 route:[name] event 119 router events handling 138, 139 S save() method 36, 187 schema definition URL 152 search engines used, for ensuring compatibility 245-247 Seoserver about 245 source repository 250 setElement() method 97, 100-102 set() method 33 setTemplates() method 161 setup() function 216, 219 shift() method 72 showDialog() method 228 Social Mobile Application 236 some() method 76 sort event 119 sort() method 73 specific HTML event listening to, Backbone.stickit used 133 stack about 72 collection, working as 72 standard operators, No SQL operators $equal 80 $exists 80 $has 80 $in 80 $ne 80 $nin 80 about 79 using 79, 80 start() function 25, 222 stickit() method 131 store() method 42 strictEqual() 218 subviews view, splitting into 103-106 switchPane() method 195, 196 sync event 119 sync() method 188 T teardown() method 216, 221 template loader implementing 145, 146 templates splitting, into partials 144 using, in view 142, 143 265 test() function 218 tests, for Backbone extension writing, QUnit used 216-218 throws() 218 toJSON() method 39, 90, 189, 220 triggered event handling 120 triggerEvent() method 46 trigger() method 116 U undelegateEvents() 137 undelegateEvents() method 110 unset() method 33 unshift() method 72 url() method 185 URL routing implementing, in Backbone application 24, 25 usage examples, Backbone.js Airbnb 6 Foursquare 6 Groupon Now! 6 LinkedIn mobile 6 reference link 6 WordPress.com 6 V validate() method 35 validation adding, to form 153, 154 validation errors handling 36 value() method 78 266 view about 93 collection, rendering in 101, 102 creating, steps 94 DOM events, handling 106-110 model, rendering in 99, 100 removing 97 rendering 95 splitting, into subviews 103-106 switching, Backbone.Router used 110-113 templates, using 142, 143 view element dealing with 97, 98 modifying, dynamically 97 view element updates overriding, Backbone.stickit used 132 W where() method 74 WordPress.com 6 workflow.js extension downloading 45 workflow, model creating 45, 46 Z Zepto about 93, 98 using, with Backbone 98 Thank you for buying Backbone.js Cookbook About Packt Publishing Packt, pronounced 'packed', published its first book "Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management" in April 2004 and subsequently continued to specialize in publishing highly focused books on specific technologies and solutions.

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry
by John Warrillow
Published 5 Feb 2015

One of Amazon’s latest ventures is a subscription that offers to help other companies grow their subscription businesses. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers companies access to servers, software, and technology support on a subscription basis. Many of the world’s largest subscription companies, including Adobe, Citrix, Netflix, and Sage, use AWS, along with many of the highest-profile start-ups, like Airbnb, Pinterest, Dropbox, and Spotify. Amazon is pioneering the subscription model in virtually every area of its business, but the subscription model is nothing new. In fact, it’s been around for quite a while. A (Very) Short History of the Subscription Model The history of the subscription business model dates back to the 1500s, when European map publishers would invite their customers to subscribe to future editions of their maps, which were evolving as new lands were discovered, conquered, and claimed.

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They prefer to stay nimble and rent a home rather than own one; listen to a song on Spotify rather than buy it from iTunes; or subscribe to Oysterbooks .com or Scribd rather than buy from a Barnes & Noble store. The Access Generation is behind the explosion of the new “sharing” economy. Sharing stuff has been around since stuff itself, but technology allows sharing to scale: websites like Airbnb match buyer and seller; your GPS-enabled iPhone allows you to find the closest Zipcar; Facebook and LinkedIn enable you to vet anyone you’re thinking of doing business with; and sites like PayPal allow you to safely pay for what you’re renting. Light-Switch Reliability When you walk into a room and turn on the light, you don’t hold your breath hoping the room will illuminate.

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Index The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable. Absolute Software, 116 access generation, 18–19, 22 accountants, 169 Acton, Brian, 2, 113 ADT, 116 Airbnb, 19 airplanes, 175 all-you-can-eat library model, 57–63 Amazon, 11–15, 84, 87, 89, 90 AmazonFresh, 14 Diapers.com acquired by, 15, 84–86 Mom, 85 Prime, 11–13, 14, 37, 84, 188 Subscribe & Save, 14–15, 25, 84 Web Services, 15 Ancestry.com, 30–31, 58–59, 135–36, 159, 163–64 Anderson, Chris, 16, 21 Any.do, 100 Apple, 22, 100 iPhone, 1, 19 iTunes, 57–58, 154 Joint Venture, 22–23, 79 One to One, 22, 23 Reseller network, 23 art education, 59–60 New Masters Academy, 59–62, 155, 166 Art Snacks, 187–88 Auger, Frank, 180–81 Avis Budget Group, 111 banking, 100, 177–78, 186–87 Bank of America, 126 BarkBox, 19, 92, 95, 165, 187 Barna, Haley, 39 Basecamp, 144, 145–46 Beauchamp, Katia, 39 Berkshire Hathaway, 118 Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), 140–41 Bezos, Jeff, 14, 86, 145 Bharara, Vinit, 84–85 BirchBox, 38–39, 88, 172 Blackburn, Jeff, 85 Blacksocks, 83, 84, 88, 151 Blake, Kathy, 49–52, 197 Blake, Suzanne, 50–52, 197 Blockbuster, 59 Bloodhound Technologies, 147 Bloomberg Businessweek, 58, 85 Blue Dolphin, 179–80 Brand, Stewart, 47–48 brand, unique, 87, 89, 90 Branson, Richard, 67 Broughman, Brian, 147 Buffet, Warren, 118 Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You (Warrillow), 3 Burkhart, Bryan, 33, 197 burning platform strategy, 166–67 business-to-business (B2B) companies, 55, 69, 158 Buterin, Dmitry, 29, 184–85, 190 cancellations, see churn rate Capital Factory, 142, 173 Carsanaro, Joseph A., 147 car sharing, 109 Zipcar, 19, 109–11, 113, 153 car theft, 116 Case, Steve, 69 cash, 138, 139–43 cash sources, 143–51 charging up front, 148–51 outside money, 146–48 robbing Peter to pay Paul, 143–46 CA Technologies, 141–42 CBS MarketWatch, 88 Centore, Anthony, 76–77 charging up front, 148–51, 184–85 Chase, Robin, 109, 113 chocolate, 93–94 Standard Cocoa, 22, 93–94, 165 churn rate, 130–31, 142–43, 172–74 Ancestry.com and, 136 and charging up front, 184–85 communication and, 185–87 Constant Contact and, 137 evergreen subscriptions and, 193–94 happiness bombs and, 187–88 Hassle Free Home Services and, 173 HubSpot and, 133–34, 180 logo churn and, 191–93 lowering, 174–94 Mosquito Squad and, 138 net churn and, 189–91 90-day onboarding clock and, 176–82 rogue jet concept and, 175–76 Salesforce.com and, 176 and targeting larger businesses, 188–89 wow timetable and, 182–84 Cisco, 117 Coca-Cola, 89 Cohen, Jason, 177 Cohen, Ted, 58 cohorts, 182 Colony, George F., 150–51 communication, 185–87 Conscious Box, 35–36, 86, 95–96, 164 Constant Contact, 18, 136–37, 183–84 consumables model, 81–90 Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, 11 ContractorSelling.com, 35, 49 cost of goods sold (COGS), 132 counseling, 75–77 Cratejoy, 86, 96–97 Crisara, Joe, 35 cross-selling, 191–93 Cue, 100 customer acquisition cost (CAC), 128–30, 138, 139, 143, 146, 151, 189 Ancestry.com and, 136 cash up front and, 148–51 Constant Contact and, 137 HubSpot and, 133–34, 149–50 Mosquito Squad and, 138 payback period and, 140–43 Crystal Cruises, 50 DanceStudioOwner.com, 49–52, 197 Dance Teachers’ Club of Boston, 49 Danielson, Antje, 109, 113 data, 20–21, 22, 96–97 Daugherty, Gordon, 141–42, 173 demand, 33–34 De Nayer, Pierre, 158 Desk.com, 77 destination clubs, 68–70 Diapers.com, 15, 84–86 discounted cash flow, 28 distribution channels, 20 DocuSign, 140 Dollar Shave Club, 81–83, 84, 87–89, 157, 175–76, 192–93 Dorco, 88–89 Dream of Italy, 48–49 Driesman, Debbie, 101 Dropbox, 100 Dubin, Michael, 81–83, 87 e-commerce: consumables model, 81–90 surprise box model, 91–98 Economist Intelligence Unit, 25 Elaguizy, Amir, 86–87, 96 elevator business, 40–41 Entitle, 59 entrepreneurs, 129 eReatah, 59 evergreen subscriptions, 193–94 Everything Store, The: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Stone), 85 Exclusive Resorts, 68–69 Facebook, 2, 19, 108, 146n New Masters Academy and, 61, 62 Family Circle, 179 Financial Times, 17, 48 first mover advantage, 146n float, 118–19 flower stores, 32–33, 34, 158–59, 195–96 H.Bloom, 33, 34, 39, 158–59, 197 Foot Cardigan, 165 For Entrepreneurs, 129 Forrester Research, 150–51, 192 Founders Investment Banking, 29–30 freemium model, 161–62, 164 free trials, 161–64 FreshBooks.com, 27, 144–48, 162–63, 164, 189 Fried, Jason, 144, 145–46 Fried, Jesse, 147 front-of-the-line model, 73–79 GameFly, 59, 155 Gartner and Forrester Research, 5, 24 Gates, Bill, 67 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), 127 Genius Network, 66–67, 155 Gerety, Suzanne Blake, 50–52, 197 Ghirardelli, 93 gifts: happiness bombs, 187–88 subscriptions as, 164–66 Gladwell, Malcolm, 71 Godiva, 93 Goodies Co., 20–21, 35 Goodman, Gail, 136, 183–84 Google, 55, 92 Apps, 24 Grano Speaker Series, 70–71, 159 Gray, Andrew, 168–70 Griffith, Scott, 109–10, 111, 113 Griffiths, Rudyard, 70 GrooveBook, 156–57 Hackers Conference, 47 Handler, Brad, 69 Handler, Brent, 69 Hansson, David Heinemeier, 144 happiness bombs, 187–88 Harland Clarke, 178 Hassle Free Home Services, 101–3, 173, 181, 194 H.Bloom, 33, 34, 39, 158–59, 197 Hearst, William Randolph, 16 Herbal Magic Weight Loss & Nutrition Centers, 24–25 Holland, Anne, 52–54 home ownership, 18 Hassle Free Home Services and, 101–3, 173, 181, 194 security businesses and, 4, 31, 116 Honda, 117 HubSpot.com, 131–36, 149–50, 180–81 Hunt, Sean, 37 Hunt, Stuart, 37 Hyssen, Alex, 24–25 Hyssen, James, 24–25 IBM, 126 inertia, 175, 180–81 information, 47–48 Infusionsoft, 176 Inspirato, 69–70 insurance companies, 117–19 International Air Transport Association, 175 Internet, 16, 137 reliability of, 19 Internet-based messaging services, 2 WhatsApp, 1–2, 108–9, 113, 157 iPhone, 1, 19 Islam, Frank, 101 iTunes, 57–58, 154 JackedPack, 91 Jacobo, Joshua, 59–62, 155 J.

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small
by Steve Sammartino
Published 25 Jun 2014

The truth is they serve the same need: a directory of life solutions. And by the time the Yellow Pages reconfigured its output it was far too late. Airbnb. The hotel industry would never have taken into account the calculations of peer-to-peer accommodation as part of its market. It doesn’t even own any real estate! It’s unimaginable to believe that executives at the Hilton chain or the Starwood group of hotels would have considered Airbnb a threat, and certainly not a threat in the section of the market they define as high-end, luxury or business appropriate. Yet Airbnb has both unexpected luxury and growing numbers of business travellers as its audience.

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No Maps for These Territories (2000) Film presented by William Gibson. Something Ventured (2011) Film about venture capitalists. INDEX 3D printing access and accessibility see also barriers; communication; digital; social media — factors of production — knowledge adoption rates advertising see also marketing; mass media; promotion; television Airbnb Alibaba Amazon antifragility Apple artisanal production creativity audience see also crowd — connecting with — vs target Away from Keyboard (AFK) banking see also crowdfunding; currencies barriers Beck (musician) big as a disadvantage bioengineering biomimicry biotechnology bitcoins blogs borrowed interest brand business strategies change see disruption and disruptive change Cluetrain Manifesto co-creation coffee culture Cold War collaboration collaborative consumption collective sentience commerce, future see also retail and retailers communication see also advertising; promotion; social media; social relationships — channels — tools community vs target competition and competitors component retail computers see also connecting and connection; internet; networks; smartphones; social media; software; technology era; 3D printing; web connecting and connection see also social media; social relationships — home/world — machines — people — things consumerism consumption silos content, delivery of coopetition corporations see also industrial era; retail and retailers; technology era costs see also finance; price co-working space creativity crowd, contribution by the crowdfunding cryptocurrencies culture — hacking — startup currencies see also banking deflation demographics device convergence digital see also computers; internet; music; smartphone; retail and retailers, online; social media; social relationships; technology; web; work — cohorts — era — footprint — revolution — skills — strategy — tools — world disruption and disruptive change DNA as an operating system drones Dunbar's number e-commerce see retail and retailers, online economic development, changing education employment, lifetime see also labour; work ephermalization Facebook see also social media finance, peer to peer see also banking; crowdfunding; currencies Ford, Henry 4Ps Foursquare fragmentation — of cities — industrial — Lego car example gadgets see also computers; smartphone; tools games and gaming behaviour gamification geo-location glass cockpit Global Financial Crisis (GFC) globalisation Google hacking hourglass strategy IFTTT (If this then that) industrialists (capital class) industry, redefining industrial era see also consumerism; marketing; retail and retailers — hacking — life in influencers information-based work infrastructure — changing — declining importance of — legacy innovation intention interest-based groups see also niches interest graphs internet see also access and accessibility; connecting and connection; social media; social relationships; web Internet.org In Real Life (IRL) isolation iTunes see also music Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act (USA) keyboards knowledge economy lab vs factory labour see also work — low-cost language layering legacy — industries — infrastructure — media Lego car project life — in boxes — in gaming future — hack living standards see also life location see place, work making see also artisanal production; retail and retailers; 3D printing malleable marketplace manufacturing see also artisanal production; industrial era; making; product; 3D printing; tools — desktop marketing see also advertising; consumerism; 4Ps; mass media; promotion; retail and retailers — demographics, use in — industrial era — language — mass — metrics — new — post-industrial — predictive — research — target — traditional mass media ; see also advertising; marketing; media; promotion; television — after materialism media see also communication; legacy; mass media; newspapers; niches; television — consumption — hacking — platform vs content — subscription Metcalfe's law MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Moore's law music Napster Netflix netizens networks see also connecting and connection; media; social media; social relationships newspapers see also media niches nodes nondustrial company Oaida, Raul oDesk office, end of the omniconnection era open source parasocial interaction payment systems Pebble phones, number of mobile see also smartphones photography Pinterest piracy place — of work platforms pop culture power-generating technologies price see also costs privacy see also social media; social relationships product — unfinished production see also industrial era; product; 3D printing — mass projecteer Project October Sky promotion see also advertising; marketing; mass media; media quantified self Racovitsa, Vasilii remote controls RepRap 3D printer retail cold spot retail and retailers — changing — digital — direct — hacking — mass — online — price — small — strategies — traditional rewards robots Sans nation state economy scientific management search engines self-hacking self-publishing self-storage sensors sharing see also social media; social relationships smartphones smartwatch social graphs social media (digitally enhanced conversation) see also Facebook; social relationships; Twitter; YouTube social relationships see also social graphs; social media — digital software speed subcultures Super Awesome Micro Project see Lego car project Super Bowl mentality target tastemakers technology see also computers; digital; open source; social media; smartphones; social relationships; software; 3D printing; work — deflation — era — free — revolution — speed — stack teenagers, marketing to television Tesla Motors thingernet thinking and technology times tools see also artisanal production; communication; computers; digital; making; smartphones; social media; 3D printing — changing — old trust Twitter Uber unlearning usability gap user experience volumetric mindset wages — growth — low — minimum web see also connecting and connection; digital; internet; retail and retailers, online; social media; social relationships — three phases of — tools Wikipedia work — digital era — industrial era — location of — options words see language Yahoo YouTube Learn more with practical advice from our experts WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018

The digital party is a ‘platform party’ because it mimics the logic of companies such as Facebook and Amazon of integrating the data-driven logic of social networks in its very decision-making structure; an organisation that promises to use digital technology to deliver a new grassroots democracy, more open to civil society and the active intervention of ordinary citizens. It is ‘data hungry’ because, like internet corporations, it constantly seeks to expand its database, the list, or ‘stack’, of contacts that it controls. The digital party is also a start-up party, reminiscent of ‘unicorn companies’ such as Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb, sharing their ability to grow very rapidly. The Five Star Movement, in less than a decade from its birth, has managed to become the largest party in Italy, and is currently heading the national government, while many other formations have had a similarly explosive growth trajectory. Like social networks, it is a party that feeds on the ‘engagement’ which its supporters and sympathisers provide.

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Richard Florida, for example, highlights that during the Long Depression that started in 1873 there was a peak in patents, and the same may be said about the stagflation of the 1970s that led to the development of industrial robots.98 Furthermore, we know from Joseph Schumpeter that capitalism is characterised by a tendency towards creative destruction,99 in which incumbents in various industries are constantly threatened by the rise of new products and services, and we most clearly see this phenomenon in the so-called ‘disruption’100 posed by new companies, such as Airbnb, Amazon, Uber and Deliveroo, to existing companies. The rise of digital behemoths such as the FAANGs – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google – has created enormous economic unfairness. These companies have acquired monopoly status in the markets they have themselves largely created, with negative consequences for employment and consumers who need to eventually pay monopoly prices.101 Furthermore, these companies have heavily engaged in tax avoidance tactics by moving their fiscal address to countries with low levels of taxation (e.g.

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Platforms lie at the core of various social media and apps, enabling users to accomplish a diverse set of goals: socialising with friends and acquaintances (Facebook); publishing one’s thoughts or news (Twitter); finding sentimental and sexual partners (Match.com, Tinder); ordering a ride (Uber) or a meal (Deliveroo) and booking accommodations (Airbnb). What we see in these companies is a new business model that differs from Fordist and post-Fordist models in a number of ways. First and most glaringly, platform companies are data businesses that collect massive amounts of personal data produced through our everyday interactions, by writing a post, uploading a picture or in the form of meta-data (e.g. our location data), traces that we leave without even realising it.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

Amazon’s positions in ecommerce and cloud computing were growing, but it was not yet seen as such an existential threat to brick-and-mortar retail. Apple was reinventing itself with the iPhone, but it was far from being one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. Yet, as they expanded, other companies made use of smartphone access, new digital tools, and the excitement around the tech economy to make their own splash. Airbnb was founded in 2008, Uber in 2009, and WeWork in 2010. They were part of a business trend that further extended the reach of the tech industry into the physical world. These companies operated under the assumption that taking the mindset of tech into a traditional industry would not only modernize and transform it but would generate previously unrealizable returns.

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Rather, they take away the human elements that are perceived as friction and hollow out our social existence. The City of Algorithmic Control Through the 2010s, there was a concerted push for us to conduct more of our lives through our smartphones. People took rides through Uber instead of taxis or transit. They booked vacation rentals through Airbnb instead of hotel chains. They found people to walk their dogs, clean their homes, fix their pipes, and fulfill other needs through a new cluster of gig services, then found new ways to consume through subscription services and ecommerce sites with free shipping. Digital services are preferable to their traditional counterparts, even when they are worse for the task—and that has consequences.

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Even as Paris was taking these actions to make the city a better place to live, housing prices were soaring and the city center was increasingly becoming a zone for tourists, especially after the council failed to effectively stop the conversion of housing units into short-term rentals on platforms like Airbnb. This had the effect of pushing more poor and working-class residents out of the city, even as the construction of public housing accelerated under Delanoë and Hidalgo and is expected to reach 25 percent of all units by 2025. Critics have suggested the fifteen-minute city could have the effect of further fueling gentrification and providing benefits only to the wealthy.

Together
by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.
Published 5 Mar 2020

Paolo Parigi11 has been studying the effects of online reputations on personal relationships, and his findings are as complex as they are surprising. His subjects are users of networking services such as Airbnb and Uber, and his premise is that online reputations, which users build through services’ apps, function as a form of social introduction. In the peer-to-peer marketplace, before you and your Uber driver or Airbnb host ever meet, you have a wealth of preliminary information about each other, which is distilled into a rating. This, in effect, crowdsources your trust in each other. One real benefit of this ratings system, Parigi said in a 2018 interview,12 is that it overrides superficial biases and increases the diversity of interactions in our daily lives.

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“What we found was that if you were interacting with someone who was different from you, but had a good reputation, using [the] Airbnb style of reputation (ratings and reviews), you were more likely to trust that person.” However, the trust that forms as a result of these interactions is highly limited. One reason for this is that the reputations we build online are conditional. Uber passengers feel comfortable trusting drivers to get them safely where they need to go, but not to housesit for them. Airbnb hosts trust their guests to be responsible with their belongings, but not to tend their elderly parents. App ratings produce what Parigi calls “thin” reputations, as opposed to reputations developed through direct personal familiarity over time.

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They would treat one another with genuine compassion and kindness, as they’d like to be treated themselves. They’d lead with deeply held thoughts and feelings, instead of surface appearances. In other words, they’d relate to one another from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. As an experiment, Serena rented an Airbnb off campus and invited a group of Penn students who were all strangers to come together for an evening of personal conversation and storytelling. She called it a Space Gathering. “I actually just approached people on the sidewalk and asked if they’d be interested in spending a few hours with a group of other students getting to know each other and having intentional conversations.”

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
by Sarah Frier
Published 13 Apr 2020

On his instrument, he’s taped a large piece of paper with the name of his social media account, alongside the logo of the only app that matters here: Instagram. With the rise of Instagram, Beco do Batman has become one of São Paulo’s top tourist destinations. Via the vacation rental site Airbnb, various vendors charge about $40 per person to provide two hours of “personal paparazzi” in the alley, taking high-quality pictures of people to post on Instagram; the service is a type that’s become one of Airbnb’s most popular for its travelers in cities around the world. For amateur photographers, the only cost is the stress of perfection. One woman corrals two small children sparring over a bottle of Coca-Cola so that her sister can stand in line to pose in front of green-and-blue peacock feathers.

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He absorbed everything he could about the technology industry, resolving to use his trend-spotting skills in a more lucrative way. He worked with Guy Oseary, Madonna’s manager, to sort through all the opportunities, and ended up giving money to dozens of companies—not just in social media—including Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and Instagram competitor Path. “Whenever there was a new type of experience for consumers, there would be like three companies doing the same thing,” he remembers. There were several versions of Instagram, Pinterest, and Uber. “Who would get traction first? And then the network effect would take all.”

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ABC News, 211 Above Category cycling, 185 abuse, abuse content, 41, 97, 261 Academy Awards, 152 Systrom at, 191–92, 204 Accenture, 260 Acton, Brian, 125, 256, 258 Adams, William (will.i.am), 128 Adidas, xix Adobe Lightroom, 240, 243 Adobe Photoshop, 21, 23, 244 advertising, 59, 176, 256 false, 244; see also fake news FB’s business of, 75, 77, 89, 91–92, 94, 96, 105, 118–19, 125, 149–50, 163, 217, 224, 277 IG’s business of, 104, 118–21, 124, 151, 155, 163–65, 174, 175–76, 184, 225, 241, 277 mobile, 74–75 television, 215 see also brand advertising advertising agencies, 89 FB’s relationship with, 120–21, 124 Ahrendts, Angela, 147 @aidanalexander, 171 AiGrow, 246 Airbnb, xvi, 45 Alba, Jessica, 130, 250 Alexander, Aidan, 171 algorithms: FB’s use of, 91, 103, 128, 162, 163, 208, 209, 210–12, 215, 221, 224, 259 IG’s early lack of, 34, 143 IG’s use of, 81, 170, 174, 197–98, 218, 229, 230–32, 233, 251, 271 IG users’ mistrust of, 197 YouTube’s use of, 233–34 @alittlepieceofinsane, 161 Allen, Nick, 117 Allen & Company, 49 Amanpour, Christiane, 127 Amaro photo filter, 23 Amazon, 22, 28, 139, 242 Communications Decency Act and, 41 Whole Foods acquired by, 64 Zappos acquired by, 105 Amazon Web Services, 26, 79–80 American Medical Association, 244 American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 244 analytics, 90, 102, 226 IG’s use of, 100, 178, 183, 226 IG users’ access to, 275–76 Anchor Psychology, 172 Anderson, Steve, 34 early IG investment of, 11, 15 on IG board, 37, 56, 63–64 Anderson Cooper 360, 142 Andreessen, Marc, 11 Andreessen Horowitz: early investment in IG by, 11, 15, 33 investment in PicPlz by, 33–34, 36, 77 Android, 19, 33, 110, 203 IG app for, 50, 51 angel investments, 16, 17, 24, 36 anonymity, user, 41, 80 on Formspring, 40 on IG, 41, 80, 163, 173, 218, 219, 260, 261 troubling content and, 40, 163, 218–19, 260; see also bullying antitrust laws, 75, 268 Antonow, Eric, 165 AOL, 116 Apple, 10, 21, 56, 65, 147, 167, 234 Apple app store, 26, 28, 38, 115 Apple IDs, 42 apps: filter, see filter apps, photo location-based, 15 see also mobile apps; specific apps Argentina, 12 Arthur D.

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business
by Mikkel Svane and Carlye Adler
Published 13 Nov 2014

And then came the less obvious part—we had to decide where exactly to set up shop. As usual, there was a difference of opinion. I flew out to San Francisco, toured a few office spaces, and selected what I thought to be a solid choice, 410 Townsend Street, in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood, which was home to so many software companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, salesforce.com, Twitter, and many more. The four-story building I found was a true SoMa building. It looked like it was previously an industrial warehouse or something and consisted of lots of brick and wooden beams. Later we found out it had previously been home to a Buddhist center! It 115 Svane c07.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 9:41 P.M.

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“It’s a fantastic thing when things are going like this. You are a very ungrateful person if you don’t feel good and happy.” Alex’s attitude was right. We gained some battle scars from dealing with the sudden Twitter success. But the experience later came in handy for us when massively fast-growing companies like Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox, and Groupon became Zendesk customers. Hiring: American Style As we grew, the product was making greater demands on the hardware. It was hard to keep it up. Luckily, our move West attracted some of the people who previously worked with us and knew exactly what we needed—like Mick, a great engineer who had worked in Copenhagen as a contractor three days a week.

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Page 197 Index A acquiring customers, 47–53 AdWords, 49–50 Aghassipour, Alexander, 1 and Charles River Ventures (CRV), 83–86 as chief product officer, 26 epilogue, 179–180 financial struggles, 36–37 and the inception of Zendesk, 21–23 loft office, 31–33 moving to San Francisco, 123–124 and the price increase, 146 Airbnb, 124 Amazon.com, 24–25 angel investors, 65–67 anxiety, curbing, 78–79 Araneum, 21 Arrington, Michael, 45, 68, 130 asking friends for money, 64–65 B Barney agreements, 151 Basecamp. See 37signals Benchmark, 106, 109 Benioff, Marc, 27 Bezos, Jeff, 24–25 Black, Alan, 159, 169 boring ideas, 23–25 Box, 24, 168 Buddha Machine, 51 C Calacanis, Jason, 43, 44, 45 Caput, 13–15 CBA.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

On weeks when I’m not in San Francisco I’m either in New York, where ReadWrite’s parent company is based, or in some other city, making sales calls, trying to get tech companies to buy ads from us. It’s not a lot of fun, but I’m making a paycheck and keeping my eyes open for something better. ReadWrite’s offices are on Townsend Street, in the South of Market neighborhood, where all of the hot tech start-ups are located—Twitter, Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb. While the rest of the country is still licking its wounds from the worst recession in nearly a century, things here are buzzing. Start-ups are everywhere, and they’re all raising money. For a few years after the stock market crash in 2008, it was impossible for companies to pull off initial public offerings of stock.

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The two co-founders of Secret, a mobile app maker, raised a $25 million round of funding, put $6 million into their pockets, then nine months later shut down the company. “It’s like a bank heist,” one of their pissed-off investors said. (The investor later walked back that comment, saying it was a “poor choice of words.”) Start-ups seem to believe it is okay for them to bend rules. Some, like Uber and Airbnb, have built their businesses by defying regulations. Then again, if laws are stupid, why follow them? In the World According to Start-ups, when tech companies cut corners it is for the greater good. These start-up founders are not like Gordon Gekko or Bernie Madoff, driven by greed and avarice; they are Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., engaging in civil disobedience.

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Sure, things got out of hand in the first dotcom bubble, and we had a crash, and now we were on the upswing again, but that didn’t mean another crash was coming. The crash of 2000 was an “isolated event,” Andreessen said, and the economy was heading into a “sustained boom,” almost the same phrase Doerr would use in Bloomberg a month later. Andreessen Horowitz has invested in some of the Valley’s most highly valued companies, including Pinterest, Airbnb, and Box, and enlists its publicity machine (both its own internal operation and its friends in the tech press) to further its interests. In the spring of 2014, when “software as a service” (SaaS) stocks went into a slump, and when Box was still hoping to go public but had started to look wobbly, Andreessen’s content factory sprang into action.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee
Published 14 Sep 2018

But headquarters’ resistance to forking made each new feature an uphill battle, one that slowed us up and wore us down. Tired of fighting with their own company, many employees left out of frustration. WHY SILICON VALLEY GIANTS FAIL IN CHINA As a succession of American juggernauts—eBay, Google, Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Amazon—tried and failed to win the Chinese market, Western analysts were quick to chalk up their failures to Chinese government controls. They assumed that the only reason Chinese companies survived was due to government protectionism that hobbled their American opponents. In my years of experience working for those American companies and now investing in their Chinese competitors, I’ve found Silicon Valley’s approach to China to be a far more important reason for their failure.

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Most customers had long forgotten that Meituan began as a group-buying site. They knew it for what it had become: a sprawling consumer empire covering noodles, movie tickets, and hotel bookings. Today, Meituan Dianping is valued at $30 billion, making it the fourth most valuable startup in the world, ahead of Airbnb and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. ENTREPRENEURS, ELECTRICITY, AND OIL Wang’s story is about more than just the copycat who made good. His transformation charts the evolution of China’s technology ecosystem, and that ecosystem’s greatest asset: its tenacious entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs are beating Silicon Valley juggernauts at their own game and have learned how to survive in the single most competitive startup environment in the world.

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Other examples of O2O companies in China going heavy abound. After driving Uber out of the Chinese ride-hailing market, Didi has begun buying up gas stations and auto repair shops to service its fleet, making great margins because of its understanding of its drivers and their trust in the Didi brand. While Airbnb largely remains a lightweight platform for listing your home, the company’s Chinese rival, Tujia, manages a large chunk of rental properties itself. For Chinese hosts, Tujia offers to take care of much of the grunt work: cleaning the apartment after each visit, stocking it with supplies, and installing smart locks.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
by Jeff Goodell
Published 23 Oct 2017

The night I attended the talk at the museum by Oka Doner (who, as I mentioned, had made her own calculation and decided to sell her place in Miami Beach), my Uber driver turned out to be keenly aware of the risks of sea-level rise. Kamel had emigrated to Florida from Turkey a decade ago. Now he owned several condos in Miami—“I rent them out on Airbnb,” he told me. When I asked him about sea-level rise, he didn’t dispute that it was happening—in fact, he mentioned reading a magazine article that said the city had until 2025 before it got really bad. “So I have another seven or eight years before I have to sell,” he said. “As long as people keep coming, I can make money on Airbnb.” A few nights later, I had dinner with a wealthy retired businessman who owned a spacious condo on the seventeenth floor of a building in one of the most flood-prone neighborhoods of Miami Beach.

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As Da Mosto and I walked around the piazza, she told me that the cruise ships and sea-level rise are the two most powerful threats that Venice faces right now. The cruise ships have transformed the Venice economy into a singular engine that services tourists: every shop sells necklaces of fake Murano glass jewelry and Venetian carnival masks; every restaurant offers the same pasta with meatballs; every apartment is now an Airbnb. This has not only eroded the city’s tax base and pushed out traditional jobs, it has turned the city into something nearly indistinguishable from a Disney version of itself. It also distracts from the larger threat of sea-level rise. As Da Mosto pointed out, the flooding is getting worse and worse.

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Billion-Dollar Sandbar: A Biography of Miami Beach (New York: Dutton, 1970), 123. 25. September 18, 1926: Fisher, The Pacesetter, 300–304. 26. fifteen-foot tsunami: Grunwald, The Swamp, 192. 27. “Miami Beach has based its economy…”: Jerry Iannelli. “Miami Beach Plans to Use Alarming Ads to Scare Away Airbnb-Style Renters.” Miami New Times, September 8, 2016. 28. “the poor people who suffered…”: Grunwald, The Swamp, 180. 29. “Sure, some lives were lost…”: Ibid., 188. Chapter 3 1. entire surface of the ice sheet: “An Intense Greenland Melt Season: 2012 in Review.” Nsidc.org, February 5, 2013. Accessed February 12, 2017. http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/2013/02/greenland-melting-2012 in review/ 2.

Drama Queen: One Autistic Woman and a Life of Unhelpful Labels
by Sara Gibbs
Published 23 Jun 2021

As people lurched all around me with flyers, shouting about their shows and begging for an audience, I started to feel like I was suffocating. Kat took my bag, moving me swiftly through the crowds like a bodyguard, while I cowered and shook, unable to explain to myself why running this particular gauntlet was so hard. By the time I’d done my shopping and settled in at the Airbnb I’d rented, I couldn’t contemplate going back out there. I called Kat and apologised; I just felt too sick to go and see her show that night. ‘Oh . . .’ she responded, disappointed. ‘That’s OK.’ But it didn’t feel OK. Nor did it feel OK the next day when a group of us went to see several shows in one day and I sat in tearful silence at the bar while everyone else had a lovely time, wondering what on earth was wrong with me.

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I was going to go out to bars, spend days at Disney, take Kat shopping. I was going to prove to myself and everyone else that I wasn’t miserable, anxious and broken, that Kat hadn’t made a terrible mistake by associating with me. The trip got off to a great start. As we stumbled out of the airport, I found the nearest bin and threw up. By the time we arrived at our Airbnb I could barely speak or move. Usually, when I am too tired to function, I ask John for help. He has never minded, but I have always felt self-conscious about how much help I actually need. In the constant company of friends I had no way to communicate to John in my easy, normal way what I needed, and so I tried to do so in whispers and looks, which just came off as passive aggressive to everyone around us.

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Stoned out of my mind, I convinced everyone to come to a grotty karaoke bar in a strip mall, where, upon seeing a stranger had booked a solo karaoke session and finding this inexplicably hilarious, I descended into fits of unstoppable giggles, while my friends looked on in stony silence. On the last day, after we had left the Airbnb, I felt so unwell all I could do was lie in the car while everyone else got out for ice cream, frozen bananas, coffees and to enjoy their last day in paradise. The flight home was a gruelling nightmare. I upgraded my seat, partly to give myself a small chance at sleep, but mainly to spare Kat the ordeal of having to sit near me.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time
by George Berkowski
Published 3 Sep 2014

Chapter 25: International Growth 1 Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber Technologies, speaking at Fortune’s 2013 Brainstorm Tech Conference, video published on 23 July 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGbuitwkZiM. 2 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, ‘Resistance Is Futile’, article for Inc. magazine, July/August 2013 issue, www.inc.com/magazine/201307/christine-lagorio/uber-the-car-service-explosive-growth.html. 3 Eric Schneiderman, ‘Airbnb Hit with Subpoena from NY Attorney General’, blog post on WSJ.com, 7 October 2013, blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2013/10/07/airbnb-hit-with-subpoena-from-n-y-attorney-general/. 4 Dan Primack, ‘More details on Uber’s Massive Funding Round’, article on CNN.com, 23 August 2013, finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/08/23/more-details-on-ubers-massive-funding-round/. 5 Catherine Shu, ‘Square Starts Mobile Payments in Japan, Its First Country Outside of North America, In Partnership With Visa’s Ally’, article on TechCrunch.com, 23 May 2013, TechCrunch.com/2013/05/23/square-starts-mobile-payments-in-japan-its-first-country-outside-of-north-america-in-partnership-with-visas-ally/. 6 Information taken from squareup.com/jp. 7 Jeff Blagdon, ‘Square Arrives in Japan, Its First Market Outside North America’, article on TheVerge.com, 23 May 2013, www.theverge.com/2013/5/23/4358294/jack-dorsey-square-tokyo-japan. 8 Grace Huang and Takashi Amano, ‘Apple Won 76% of Japan October Smartphone Sales, Kantar Says’, article on Bloomberg.com, 29 November 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-28/apple-won-76-of-japan-smartphone-sales-in-october-kantar-says.html. 9 Hugo Barra interview with LeWeb in Paris, video published on 11 December 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?

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Personally, I think you get back what you put in, and having access to their network of alumni and their inside knowledge is a precious resource. Let’s have a look the three top programmes. Y Combinator is probably the best seed accelerator. It was started in March 2005 and has funded more than 500 companies – including Dropbox, Airbnb and Stripe. It provides seed money, advice and connections during two three-month programmes each year. In exchange, it takes an average of about 6 per cent of the company’s equity. It receives about 1,000 applications for each class – and accepts about 38 – so it has a 4 per cent acceptance rate.1 Techstars is another US outfit that is jockeying for that number-one startup accelerator crown.

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This last point is particularly important. As it expands, Uber has run up against regulatory and legal issues. Governments – around the world and in the US – are very concerned at the pace of change and their ability to control it. Numerous startups are succeeding at causing governments similar problems. Airbnb and its new-fangled approach to monetising your spare room or apartment drew ire from the New York Attorney General, who said the people renting their properties are breaking the law.3 With a fresh injection of cash – a quarter of a billion dollars in August 20134 – Uber is now very well positioned to escalate its operations, move even faster and fight legal battles.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky
Published 31 Mar 2017

Uber expanded globally almost from its beginning, far earlier than would have been possible in an era when packaged software and clunky computers were the norm. It is a leader of the so-called gig economy, cleverly marrying its technology with other people’s assets (their cars) as well as their labor, paying them independent-contractor fees but not costlier employee benefits. Such “platform” companies became all the rage as Uber rose to prominence. Airbnb didn’t need to own homes to make a profit renting them. Thumbtack and TaskRabbit are just two companies that matched people looking for project-based work with customers—without having to make any hires themselves. By late 2016 Uber stood at a crossroads. It had raised $17 billion from private investors, reaching a valuation of $69 billion, an unheard-of level for a still-fledgling private company.

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“He was looking for something more than investing,” says Anderson. “So we had a conversation around his running it. The numbers were exploding.” Though years later he’d downplay it, Kalanick was tempted by Formspring. Julie Supan, a marketing consultant who worked simultaneously with Formspring and another brand-new start-up, Airbnb, recalls Kalanick as more forceful than the average adviser. “He was dictatorial,” she says. “He would walk into a room and he would stay standing as you sat. But he also was incredibly smart.” Coaching and advising allowed Kalanick to evaluate multiple companies simultaneously. Even as he was getting more deeply involved with Formspring, whose founders wanted him to be its CEO, he was hanging out with a friend from the start-up circuit named Garrett Camp.

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“I didn’t realize it at the time,” he says, that “it’s sort of the physical-world equivalent of where I came from. But your mind just finds these things.” Moreover, disrupting the transportation business wasn’t the only concept on his mind that winter. “I had this one idea, that was basically a more buttoned-up corporate version of Airbnb. It was like long-term leases in all these places that had the same consistency everywhere but you had a home experience when you traveled. It was called Pad Pass.” Kalanick’s Twitter feed reveals other ideas he was noodling on while discussing limos with Camp. In December 2008, he broadcast that he was advising a company in the medical transcription business.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

The business of sharing has become investment-worthy and is even sparking new venture capital funds, like New York-based Collaborative Fund. And new services such as Airbnb, an online service that allows property owners to post rental listings for as short as one night, are creating whole new markets where once there were none. In 2013, ‘hosts’ on its platform booked five million nights in cities and suburbs across the world and in myriad types of real estate, ranging from tree houses to penthouses. The success of Airbnb has made not only the economic case for sharing resources, but the case for finding new models of ownership that reduce our consumption and increase the meaningful experiences in our lives.

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In 50 years, would a company even resemble the typical business of today? The clues could be found in studying organizations like the Taproot Foundation and other pioneers working on the front lines of the new economy, and in trying to understand how Purpose Economy organizations like Etsy, Interface, and Airbnb differ from their predecessors of even a decade earlier. As I began to study the pioneers of the Purpose Economy, it became clear that marketing, human resources, and strategic planning were giving way to new methods of organizing and working, and that in order to thrive, organizations would need to rethink the ways they were operating in this new economy.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Hockey stick user growth leads to hockey stick stock growth. Then, with the increased capital at their disposal, tech companies build “war chests” with which to lobby for policy changes in the real world. Uber and Doordash spend millions lobbying to be allowed to hire drivers as low-cost independent contractors rather than employees entitled to benefits. Airbnb uses its war chest to fund “independent, host-led local organizations that serve as a forum to connect and gather passionate hosts”—so that they can fight against regulatory pressure from local governments and city councils. By 2017, facing antitrust accusations, Google was outspending every other company lobbying lawmakers in Washington—only to be outspent by Facebook , facing similar charges in 2020.

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.… Some parts of our human family, it appears, can be readily sacrificed for the sake of others considered worthy of a carefree existence.” This misconception that there was nothing out there to begin with grants “developers” the freedom to destroy existing cultures, economies, ecosystems, and neighborhoods. Uber, Airbnb, and even Google see low-income residents and their neighborhoods the way John Locke saw the landscape and natives of America: as undeveloped, virgin territories for exploitation. It’s no wonder their highly paid young developers use the same language when describing their search for apartments as “pioneering” new neighborhoods on the outskirts of what is normally considered “safe” for white professionals.

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Chapter 2: Mergers and Acquisitions   25   Tech companies actively sought : Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (New York: HarperOne, 1994).   25   “new communalists” : Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).   26   Operation Sundevil : Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992).   26   “Governments of the Industrial World” : John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1996, https:// www .eff .org /cyberspace -independence.   26   fungus and bacteria : Qi Hui Sam, Matthew Wook Chang, and Louis Yi Ann Chai, “The Fungal Mycobiome and Its Interaction with Gut Bacteria in the Host,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences , February 4, 2017, https:// www .ncbi .nlm .nih .gov /pmc /articles /PMC5343866 /.   28   extolled the virtues of the deal : Saul Hansell, “America Online Agrees to Buy Time Warner for $165 Billion; Media Deal is Richest Merger,” New York Times , January 11, 2000, https:// www .nytimes .com /2000 /01 /11 /business /media -megadeal -overview -america -online -agrees -buy -time -warner -for -165 -billion .html.   28   the piece I wrote placed in the Guardian : Douglas Rushkoff, “Why Time Is Up for Warner,” Guardian , January 20, 2000, https:// www .theguardian .com /technology /2000 /jan /20 /onlinesupplement10.   29   People blamed : Seth Stevenson, “The Believer,” New York Magazine , July 6, 2007, https:// nymag .com /news /features /34454 /.   30   hired investment bank Salomon Smith Barney : Tim Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” New York Times , January 10, 2010, https:// www .nytimes .com /2010 /01 /11 /business /media /11merger .html.   31   probably borrowed : Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020).   32   stocks quadruple : Lisa Pham, “This Company Added the Word ‘Blockchain’ to Its Name and Saw Its Shares Surge 394%,” Bloomberg , October 27, 2017, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2017 -10 -27 /what -s -in -a -name -u -k -stock -surges -394 -on -blockchain -rebrand.   33   “independent, host-led local organizations” : Dave Lee, “Airbnb Using ‘Independent’ Host Groups to Lobby Policymakers,” Financial Times , March 21, 2021, https:// www .ft .com /content /1afb3173 -444a -47fa -99ec -554779dde236.   33   Google was outspending : Shaban Hamza, “Google for the First Time Outspent Every Other Company to Influence Washington in 2017,” Washington Post , January 23, 2018, https:// www .washingtonpost .com /news /the -switch /wp /2018 /01 /23 /google -outspent -every -other -company -on -federal -lobbying -in -2017 /.   33   outspent by Facebook : Lauren Feiner, “Facebook Spent More on Lobbying than Any Other Big Tech Company in 2020,” CNBC , January 22, 2021, https:// www .cnbc .com /2021 /01 /22 /facebook -spent -more -on -lobbying -than -any -other -big -tech -company -in -2020 .html.   33   Numerous studies : Martin Gilens and Benjamin I.

Lonely Planet Barcelona
by Isabella Noble and Regis St Louis
Published 15 Nov 2022

The top-end category starts at €250 for a double, and can easily rise to €500 (and beyond for suites). Apartment & Room Rentals A cosier (and often more cost-effective) alternative to hotels is a short-term apartment rental. Many firms organise short lets across town and, of course, Airbnb is a big player – though Airbnb and other apartment rental agencies have been accused of fuelling Barcelona’s overtourism problem and hiking prices for locals. Typical prices start at around €80 to €100 for two people per night, while for four people you might be looking at an average of €160 a night – but rates soar for more upscale apartments.

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For much more on Getting Around. Sleeping Barcelona’s wonderful accommodation scene caters to all budgets, from sparkling contemporary hostels and family-owned guesthouses to boutique beauties, historical hotels and self-catering apartments. Book well ahead at any time. Useful Websites Booking.com and, controversially, Airbnb are of course popular accommodation-booking portals. Other options: AAparteasy (www.aparteasy.com) ARent the Sun (www.rentthesun.com) ABarcelona On Line (www.barcelona-on-line.com) AFriendly Rentals (www.friendlyrentals.com) AMH Apartments (www.mhapartments.com) AApartment Barcelona (www.apartmentbarcelona.com) AIdealista (www.idealista.com) ALonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com/spain/barcelona/hotels) For much more on Sleeping.

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Gold-painted beams, white walls and a changing display of local artwork combine in a soothing space where youngish patrons often tap away on laptops. APARTMENTS & OVERTOURISM While private apartments might seem a convenient and cost-effective accommodation choice, it’s important to know that Airbnb and other apartment-rental agencies have been accused of contributing to Barcelona’s overtourism problem and driving up prices (not to mention noise levels) for local residents. The Barri Gòtic, El Raval, La Barceloneta and El Born have been particularly affected. Barcelona’s authorities stopped issuing new licences in 2014 and since 2016 have been firmly closing down unlicensed properties.

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce
by Natalie Berg and Miya Knights
Published 28 Jan 2019

Available from: https://www.groupe-casino.fr/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/06/2018-06-22-The-Casino-Group-and-LOreal-France-unveil-le-drugstore-parisien.pdf [Last accessed 1/7/2018]. 26 Parker, Ceri (2016) 8 predictions for the world in 2030, World Economic Forum, 12 November. Available from: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/8-predictions-for-the-world-in-2030/ [Last accessed 1/7/2018]. 27 Taylor, Colleen (2011) Airbnb CEO: The future is about access, not ownership, Gigaom, 10 November. Available from https://gigaom.com/2011/11/10/airbnb-roadmap-2011/ [Last accessed 12/9/2018]. 28 Westfield (2017) Press release: Westfield launches style trial pop-up – rent this season’s looks, November. Available from: https://uk.westfield.com/content/dam/westfield-corp/uk/Style-Trial-Press-Release.pdf [Last accessed 1/7/2018] 29 Balch, Oliver (2016) Is the Library of Things an answer to our peak stuff problem?

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The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2030 products will become services and the notion of shopping will become a ‘distant memory’.26 ‘We have an ownership society now, but we’re moving toward an access society, where you’re not defined by the things you own but by the experiences you have.’ Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky27 How is this impacting retail? Sites like Rent the Runway and Bag, Borrow or Steal give shoppers today access to luxury items without having to fork out $2,500 for an Anya Hindmarch bag. In the UK, Westfield launched the first ever standalone rental retail pop-up Style Trial in 2017.

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56–61 retail fulfilment: winning the customer over the final mile 220–21 retail strategy: why Amazon is not your average retailer 24–28 store of the future: digital automation 183–85 store of the future: shifting from transactional to experiential 203–06 technology and frictionless retail 144–46 Whole Foods Market – a brave new era 119–20 Cheeseman, K (Amazon communication spokesperson) 222 Cheshire Sir I (Debenhams Chairman) 56 Chesky, B (Airbnb co-founder and CEO) 201 China (and) 2, 14, 46, 150 see also Liu, R Alibaba’s Hema chain 191 Amazon China: ocean freight services 231 Auchan China’s Minute and BingoBox stores 181 China Smart Logistic Network (Cainiao) launched by Alibaba (2003) 234 F5 Future concept store with mobile payment and robotic fulfilment 181 KFC: first smile to pay payment system 183 online shoppers 43–44 online to offline grocery concepts 111 self-driving Wheelys MobyMart 181 Yihaodian online grocery store (JD.com) 175 Clarke, P (Ocado CTO, 2016) 97 Clarkson, I (ex-Amazon executive, 2018) 100 click & collect 208–09 see also lockers Collasse, R (president of Chanel Japan) 189 conclusion: peak Amazon?

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
by Conor Dougherty
Published 18 Feb 2020

It has become a popular narrative, at least in a certain kind of high-cost city, to say that the reason housing has become so expensive is that working-class neighborhoods are being gentrified, foreign investors are parking money in U.S. condominiums, houses and apartments are being commodified by hedge funds, and companies like Airbnb are turning rental buildings into hotels. These things are all happening, and they’ve been exacerbated by years of federal disinvestment in affordable housing, a tax code that subsidizes wealthy homeowners at the expense of poor renters, and a building industry that hasn’t had any meaningful innovation in decades.

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But balance wasn’t a trait San Francisco had much use for, so to a good amount of the city he would always be the developer shill. In 2015, when Wiener started running for the senate, San Francisco politics started escalating into total war. The November ballot had been a de facto referendum on the tech industry, with measures to raise money for affordable housing and to regulate Airbnb rentals. The most contentious idea was called Proposition I, which was being pushed by Wiener’s old friend David Campos. That was an initiative to impose an eighteen-month moratorium on all new market-rate housing in the Mission District, which would have shut down essentially all new development in one of the city’s most popular and transit-rich neighborhoods.

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On one side was the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that had the country’s largest concentration of single-room occupancy hotels and was the site of open-air heroin use and blocks of people with tattered clothes and shredded shoes sleeping on sidewalks smeared with human shit and orange needle caps. On the other side was South of Market, which had towering glass condos and the headquarters of Salesforce and Airbnb. It took about ten minutes to walk between those scenes. Eight weeks after delivering a boy named Anton Kazimir, Sonja emerged from her $3,000-a-month one-bedroom in a black dress and plaid wool coat pushing a stroller on her way to her official campaign kickoff. Nearby, a very strung-out man who appeared to have slept in the alley was completing a battle with a kiddie vacuum cleaner that he’d found on a doorstep and smashed on the ground until the orbs of colored plastic were rolling across the asphalt.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

This is a major shift in the nature of their business as suddenly they are taking on the costs and responsibilities of an immense amount of fixed capital. We can see the shift by looking at a now famous quote from 2015: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. Airbnb, the largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.8 I am less convinced that Uber will ever be banned from London and think that this threat is more of a negotiating tactic than anything else, but it does show the regulators are cracking down on this sort of business model. 6 Kosoff (2017). 7 Levine and Somerville (2016). 8 Goodwin (2015). 5 14 Two Myths About the Future of the Economy 137 Today, the reality is vastly different for all of these companies, and we’d need to rewrite the quote for 2018: Uber is buying 24,000 cars, Facebook is spending $1 billion on original TV content, Alibaba is spending $2.6 billion on physical retail, and Airbnb is opening branded apartment buildings.

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Airbnb, the largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.8 I am less convinced that Uber will ever be banned from London and think that this threat is more of a negotiating tactic than anything else, but it does show the regulators are cracking down on this sort of business model. 6 Kosoff (2017). 7 Levine and Somerville (2016). 8 Goodwin (2015). 5 14 Two Myths About the Future of the Economy 137 Today, the reality is vastly different for all of these companies, and we’d need to rewrite the quote for 2018: Uber is buying 24,000 cars, Facebook is spending $1 billion on original TV content, Alibaba is spending $2.6 billion on physical retail, and Airbnb is opening branded apartment buildings. These companies realise that the standard Uber business model does not work, and they are now moving into a much more traditional business approach. So the first myth—that Uber is the future of the economy, either as a business model or as an employment practice—is nothing more than misplaced hype

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Innovation, Employment and Skills in Advanced and Developing Countries: A Survey of Economic Literature. Journal of Economic Issues, XLVIII(1), 123–154. Index1 A Abramovitz, Moses, 193 Accelerative thrust, 159 Accountancy (automation of ), 84, 114 Acemoglu, Daron, 194 Action, 2, 58, 74, 128 Agrarian societies/agrarian revolution, 27, 28 Agriculture, 3, 11, 39, 41, 44, 45, 47 Airbnb, 136, 137 Algorithms accountability, 140, 148 accuracy, 148 bias, 148 ethics of, 6 1 feedback loops, 146, 148 gaming, 148 prediction, 139, 146, 147 Alibaba, 136, 137 Alienation, 57, 58, 61 AlphaGo, 90, 112 Amazon Alexa, 140 Web Services, 134, 140 Anthropomorphisation, 110 Apple, 73, 137, 138 Applebaum, Herbert, 74 Architecture, 43 Arendt, Hannah, 74 Arkwright, Richard, 29 Art, 61, 76, 107, 115–117, 119, 120, 170, 197 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism
by Kyle Chayka
Published 21 Jan 2020

The design draws attention to scale and emptiness, the volume more than the meaning of the architecture. The building’s religious legacy is only hinted at, as if an amusing joke. Its interior has been covered with the same deceptively simple design that can be found in coffee shops, co-working spaces, retail boutiques, and rooms on Airbnb. In order to succeed, all of these types of places need to make multiple groups of people feel comfortable at the same time. Minimalism is a perfect fit because it allows for just enough character to make a space interesting but not too much. The rest gets smoothed over into blankness. The hotel is a zone of commerce instead of organic community, a place where customers trade the price of a cappuccino or a perfectly formed croissant for access to a luxurious, high-design space for an hour or two.

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Kickstarted by Judd, the town is now a hipster oasis. It features in lifestyle photo shoots and literary novels alike. Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel30 10:04 evoked Marfa as the locus of artist residencies, late-night parties, and accidental ketamine ingestion. While researching there I stayed at an inn that was operated entirely on Airbnb. It was a series of small apartments filled with plasticky faux-mid-century furniture ringed around a gravel courtyard with trees shedding pink petals onto the sidewalk. The inn had opened not so long ago, and I suspected I was the only occupant until late in my trip when some neighbors arrived and other windows lit up at night.

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The fourteen-hour flight from New York was its own form of blankness, like a dream of nothing. I woke up and the clock read the same as when I left, but a day had gone by. I passed through the Narita airport in a daze and took an express train into the center of Tokyo that delivered me to a station only a ten-minute walk from the Airbnb I had booked in Shinjuku. The total frictionlessness of the journey, a species of Rem Koolhaas’s ambience, made me feel like I had only taken an extremely long subway ride and was still somehow in Brooklyn, but different: the buildings taller, the streets quieter. The feeling of displacement, or maybe it was the conspicuous lack thereof, was compounded by the fact that I didn’t have to interact with anyone to get into the apartment.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

The question to be taken more seriously, now that numbers are being constantly generated behind our backs and beyond our knowledge, is where the crisis of statistics leaves representative democracy. On the one hand, it is worth recognising the capacity of long-standing political institutions to fight back. Just as ‘sharing economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have recently been thwarted by legal rulings (Uber being compelled to recognise drivers as employees, Airbnb being banned altogether by some municipal authorities), privacy and human rights law represents a potential obstacle to the extension of data analytics. What is less clear is how the benefits of digital analytics might ever be offered to the public, in the way that many statistical data sets are.

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Once suspicions are cast on others – be they public officials, teachers or other members of our community – no amount of data will be sufficient to alleviate them. The platform economy drives this into everyday life. Reputation and recommendations systems were originally unveiled with the promise of establishing trust between strangers, for instance on eBay. But Airbnb is now increasingly plagued by the phenomenon of sellers installing secret cameras around their homes, to seek additional proof of a buyer’s honesty. The authority of language is downgraded in the process. Throughout its history, liberalism has relied on public institutions and procedures to bolster the credibility of public speech.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber
by Susan Fowler
Published 18 Feb 2020

I tried to remember it, happy to have an option that seemed better than Philadelphia’s unpredictable (and sometimes scary) yellow cabs, but I had completely forgotten its name until that night in San Francisco, at the end of my first day as a professional software engineer. I took my very first solo UberX ride that night, heading across the Bay Bridge to my Airbnb in Oakland, where I was temporarily staying until I could find an apartment. * * * — I enjoyed living in the Bay Area and had fun taking BART to the city every morning to work. The weather was lovely, and it seemed as though there were so many interesting people everywhere doing so many interesting things.

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I loved opening up the fridge and seeing rows of fresh fruits and vegetables, loved being able to try things that I’d never been able to justify buying before: the little plastic bins of precut fresh fruits, the expensive orange juice, the cage-free eggs, the antibiotic- and hormone-free meat. Even on my decent salary, I still couldn’t afford an apartment anywhere in the Bay Area. In what turned out to be a stroke of very good luck, I moved into another Airbnb in the East Bay: a bedroom in a big orange pumpkin of a house owned by Liz and Bob, a free-spirited, wonderful couple who took me in and made me feel like part of their family. Liz was a math teacher and dancer who, like me, loved books and art and music and science and mathematics. Bob had a lot of corporate experience, and was always there when I needed advice about work and life.

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Bob had a lot of corporate experience, and was always there when I needed advice about work and life. The house soon felt like home: whenever I had some free time, I played my violin in the living room, cuddled with their two fluffy cats, or sat down for dinner with Liz, Bob, and whoever was renting the other spare bedroom. What began as an Airbnb became my permanent Berkeley home, where I lived until I moved in with my fiancé almost two years later. During my time at Penn, I’d read something by the sociologist C. Wright Mills in which he had written, “The aim of the college, for the individual student, is to eliminate the need in his life for the college; the task is to help him become a self-educating man.”

Lonely Planet Pocket Reykjavík & Southwest Iceland
by Lonely Planet

Reykjavík Domestic Airport AIn central Reykjavík, just 2km south of Tjörnin. Sightseeing services, domestic flights and those to/from Greenland and the Faroe Islands fly here. AThere’s a taxi rank at the airport. ABus 15 stops near the Air Iceland Connect terminal and goes on to the Hlemmur bus stop. Useful Accommodation Websites Airbnb (www.airbnb.com) Private rooms, apartments and houses. Booking.com Popular and thorough, especially in the countryside. CouchSurfing (www.couchsurfing.com) Network of travellers hosting travellers. Hey Iceland (www.heyiceland.is) Experienced Icelandic travel agency. Lonely Planet (lonelyplanet.com/iceland/hotels) Recommendations and bookings.

Poland - Culture Smart!
by Allen, Gregory;Lipska, Magdalena;Culture Smart!;
Published 15 Jun 2023

More of a dormitory than a home, it is being offered as an option for first-time buyers. While individuals struggle to get a foot on the property ladder, investors are buying up apartments to profit on the high rental, making the market increasingly competitive. Other developers turn their apartments into short-term rentals such as on Airbnb, a market that is still largely unregulated in Poland. RENTING AN APARTMENT Apartments are typically rented directly from the individual owner. The best way to go about this, especially for a foreigner, is through a real-estate agency. Ask a friend if they can recommend a good one, but even if you don’t have a recommendation you’ll find estate agents to be generally honest and trustworthy.

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Typical student hostels can be found in the large cities, but there are not that many elsewhere in the country. As a result, they tend to be overcrowded and there are often no free places available. Curfews may be strictly enforced, so beware! Finally, private or shared accommodation can be organized through Internet sites. Providers such as AirBnB, Booking.com, and Couchsurfing are popular and reliable in Poland. As with anywhere else, however, proceed with caution and be sure to check reviews. HEALTH As in other European countries, basic health care and hospitalization are covered by a national health-care system. Non-emergency treatment often involves lengthy waiting times, however, so many Poles (those who can afford it) opt for private health care to deal with routine aches and pains.

Bit Rot
by Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016

Uber’s not alone in this sort of engineered fear environment. Remember the Craigslist killer? Gosh—someone didn’t buy an ad in a newspaper, and for their stupidity they paid with their life. In Canada a while ago, the press revelled in the fate of an Edmonton couple who rented out their house on Airbnb and came back only to find it trashed to the tune of C$100,000. Airbnb now has the largest hotel footprint in the world. Uber has image problems, but they’re on the correct historical track. Craigslist, Lyft et al—the shareconomy? The freeconomy? It’s going to happen. And the moment these firms start paying more in taxes is the moment they officially suffocate to death the old economy.

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I think it’s the fact that they look at the mechanics of voting and compare it to the universe they inhabit, and they collectively say, You have to be kidding: every four years I go into a plywood booth and use a graphite-based stylus to “fill in a box” beside my choice for who’s best for the job? What century are we in? How is this still even happening? And they have a point. Voting methods feel archaic, like taking everyone’s computers and devices away and telling them they have to instead use envelopes and stamps to communicate with each other. In the era of Airbnb, Netflix and Skype, we have a political selection ritual straight out of the nineteenth century. Millennials must view terms such as hanging chads (Bush election, November 2000) and recounts (almost every election) and wonder how so many useless voting methods still manage to exist. Why don’t we just vote online?

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Would everyone sit around all day, nursing a single cup of coffee while discussing Marianne Faithfull’s vocal tracks in Broken English? Would everyone go out and riot? But riot for what? More money? There is no more money. More respect? You’ve got respect…You just don’t have any more money. Do you put your entire country up on eBay? Do you Airbnb every single residence in the country? Emigrate to England or Denmark, where they still have a Middle-Class Classic™? The global middle class, just like Alaskan glaciers, is melting away at an extraordinary rate, and we very much need to rebrand the successor of the middle-class society as utopian—or at least suck the dread out of it and strip it of horror vacui.

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments
by Andrew Henderson
Published 8 Apr 2018

Fortunately for them, there is more than one way to live as an expat, and many of those ways do not require that you be a perpetual traveler. There is no “right way” to live as a Nomad Capitalist. Just as you do not have to follow the herd to any particular city, you do not have to live by someone else’s definition of what it means to be a Nomad or adhere to any stereotypes. You do not have to stay in Airbnbs, work out of co-working spaces, or flock to the latest co-living space where entrepreneurs live together. You can, but you do not have to. Joining this lifestyle does not mean you have to live the way others do, it means not caring what anyone else thinks and doing what works best for you. No matter how much, how little, how often, or how active your desire for travel is, you can fit right in and make it work for you.

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I started in Vietnam and continued to Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, and finally the Philippines. Then, the first half of 2014 was spent in Eastern Europe, beginning in the Baltics and working my way down to the Balkans at a slightly faster pace. To increase the flexibility of your travel plans, you can reserve your hotel or Airbnb one week at a time and then choose to extend it or not. In most places there is never a shortage of hotels, which means you can choose how long you stay in each place based on your needs or interests. This is why, for me, being a perpetual traveler is the ultimate freedom. There is no set approach to being a perpetual traveler and there are many variations to this particular strategy.

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When I rented my home in Malaysia, I not only avoided a terrible investment property, but I got to keep $644,900 in my pocket because I was renting and not buying. The reason to buy your own home is so you can control what you do there. It is not an investment, it is emotion. Emotion is worth something because being happy and comfortable in your home has value. In fact, I rarely stay in Airbnbs or other vacation rentals because most people are not as OCD about home organization and that makes me less productive than in a sparkling clean hotel room. Productivity from comfort equals money, but labeling an emotional real estate purchase as a pure ‘investment’ is not accurate. You are investing for a certain lifestyle, not necessarily for profit.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
by Tom Eisenmann
Published 29 Mar 2021

The first is ignoring features or performance attributes for which your prospective solution falls short. It’s easy to fall prey to wishful thinking—for example, “this feature really doesn’t matter”—especially when pitching investors. The second trap: contending that you actually don’t have any competitors because your product is the first of its kind. Sometimes, radically new concepts—like Airbnb—truly inaugurate a new product category. But such category-defining inventions are rare, and most investors will view “we have no rivals” with skepticism. Somehow, humans have been trying to solve the problem that you’ll address, and it’s crucial to understand what customers like and don’t like about those supposedly inferior solutions.

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Compounding the cash drain was the cost of breakneck expansion into Europe, where Fab had been quickly cloned by several startups, including Bamarang, launched in January 2012 by the infamous Samwer brothers. The Samwers’ Rocket Internet incubator copied successful U.S. ventures—including Pinterest, Airbnb, eBay, and Groupon—and then demanded that the U.S. company acquire the clone to avoid trench warfare. Goldberg was furious and refused to roll over, writing on his blog, “Let me put Bamarang and other copycats on notice. Ripping someone off is not going to work in this space. Knockoffs are just bad design.

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Goldberg recalled that the Samwers “had cloned us, almost literally pixel by pixel. We figured that since our designers were all over the world, we were credible entrants overseas, and we shouldn’t cede Europe.” He added that the move abroad had strong support from Fab’s board: “We had investors who’d also invested in Airbnb, and they were asking, ‘Who’s going to stop this? Will anyone challenge this aggressor?’ ” To jump-start its move into Europe, in 2012 Fab acquired three overseas flash sales startups, committed $12 million for a ten-year warehouse lease, and staffed a European headquarters in Berlin with 150 employees.

Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet , Carolyn Bain and Alexis Averbuck
Published 31 Mar 2015

The tourist office can usually help if you arrive without a booking (Ikr500 reservation fee), but your options will be limited, especially in summer. Most accommodation is open year-round (winter weekends are especially busy with skiers). The website of the tourist office lists most options in the area. Another great source is AirBnB (www.airbnb.com), detailing private rooms, cottages, apartments and houses for rent, with strong coverage in Akureyri. As ever, check websites for up-to-date prices and low-season rates – and shop around for discounted rates. Prices listed here are for the summer peak (current at the time of writing).

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Large campsites that also offer huts or cottages may be open year-round. The free accommodation directory Áning (available from tourist information centres) lists many of Iceland’s campsites, but is not exhaustive. SLEEPING WITH THE LOCALS Two recommended websites can help you find a bed with a local host: Airbnb (www.airbnb.com) Has private rooms, cottages, apartments and houses for rent throughout Iceland, with a large concentration in the capital. Couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.com) Access a great network of travellers hosting travellers. Emergency Huts There are bright-orange survival huts on high mountain passes and along remote coastlines (usually marked on country maps in some way).

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zFestivals & Events Reykjavikers celebrate a host of festivals with gleeful enthusiasm. SHORT-TERM RENTALS Reykjavík's sky-high summertime accommodation prices have led enterprising locals in the capital’s prized neighbourhoods to rent their apartments (or rooms) to short-stay visitors. Prices often beat commercial rates, though of course there's no maid, concierge etc. Try Airbnb and Couchsurfing and aim for Reykjavík 101 to be centrally located. 4Sleeping Reykjavík has loads of accommodation choices, with hostels, midrange gistiheimili (guesthouses) and simple business-class hotels galore, but top-end boutique hotels and apartments seem to be opening daily. June through August accommodation books out entirely; reservations are essential.

The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World
by Anu Bradford
Published 14 Sep 2020

Times (Apr. 6, 2018), https://www.ft.com/content/88a8682a-3996-11e8-8b98-2f31af407cc8 (on file with author). 94.Hard Questions Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Newsroom (Apr. 4, 2018), https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/hard-questions-protecting-peoples-information/ [https://perma.cc/NEP5-9748]. 95.Updates to Terms, Airbnb, https://www.airbnb.com/home/terms-of-service-event?euid=76ed6f04-5530-5d81-7aaa-ce7e07e16be9 [https://perma.cc/X9BJ-WRYN]. 96.Privacy Policy, Uber (May 25, 2018), https://privacy.uber.com/policy [https://perma.cc/43JZ-MP4N]. 97.PricewaterhouseCoopers, GDPR Preparedness Pulse Survey (2016), https://www.pwc.com/us/en/increasing-it-effectiveness/publications/assets/pwc-gdpr-series-pulse-survey.pdf [https://perma.cc/2BZB-FGWK]. 98.See Preparing for a New Era in Privacy Regulation, Microsoft (Apr. 16, 2018), https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/04/16/preparing-for-a-new-era-in-privacy-regulation-with-the-microsoft-cloud/ [https://perma.cc/7XMV-G3U6]; Brendon Lynch, Get GDPR Compliant with the Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft on the Issues (2017), https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/02/15/get-gdpr-compliant-with-the-microsoft-cloud/ [https://perma.cc/Y2Z5-F6WS]; Rich Sauer, Earning Your Trust with Contractual Commitments to the General Data Protection Regulation, Microsoft on the Issues (2017), https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/04/17/earning-trust-contractual-commitments-general-data-protection-regulation/ [https://perma.cc/UEQ8-SBCS]. 99.Ugo Pagallo, The Impact of Domestic Robots on Privacy and Data Protection, and the Troubles with Legal Regulation by Design, Data Protection on the Move 403 (2016). 100.Opinion 2/2017 on Data Processing at Work WP 249, Article 29 Working Party (June 8, 2017), https://iapp.org/resources/article/wp29-opinion-on-data-processing-at-work/ [https://perma.cc/A5CT-MQ9X]. 101.Number of Employers Using Social Media to Screen Candidates at All-Time High, Finds Latest CareerBuilder Study, CareerBuilder (June 15, 2017), http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-06-15-Number-of-Employers-Using-Social-Media-to-Screen-Candidates-at-All-Time-High-Finds-Latest-CareerBuilder-Study [https://perma.cc/7BRH-R4DB]. 102.Daniel Michaels, Hot U.S.

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However, while the GDPR conveys extensive regulatory capacity in principle, a different question is whether the DPAs across the member states will have the resources to deploy this capacity in practice. They would need both substantial technical expertise and monetary resources to take on powerful multinationals whose resources vastly outweigh the modest budgets of the DPAs. For example, the Irish DPA is responsible for enforcing GDPR against digital companies such as Airbnb, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft, as these companies have their European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.79 At the same time, the annual budget of the Irish DPA is approximately $9 million—which is equivalent to the revenue that the digital companies based in Dublin generate roughly every 10 minutes.80 Thus, the strength of the Brussels Effect may ultimately hinge on whether the member state governments will vest their DPAs with adequate resources to ensure the existence of the required regulatory capacity.

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The GDPR also led Facebook to assemble “the largest cross functional team” in its history to prepare for its compliance with new EU rules.93 Facebook has clarified that while its user content language or the format for settings and controls may vary across jurisdictions, “we’ll make all controls and settings the same everywhere, not just in Europe.”94 Google similarly updated its privacy policy in anticipation of the GDPR, sending its users a notice saying that “We’re making these updates as new data protection regulations come into effect in the European Union, and we’re taking the opportunity to make improvements for Google users around the world.” Airbnb also announced that its revised, GDPR-consistent privacy policy came into effect for all its existing users on May 25, 2018—the day the GDPR entered into force.95 Uber similarly follows a single privacy policy worldwide, including its riders and drivers in all jurisdictions.96 Other companies are similarly undertaking considerable investments to ensure compliance with GDPR.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

When engineers inside corporations and governments wanted to run their computing experiments via AWS, they often quietly routed around their organizations’ stringent procurement processes. Like many other technology revolutions, cloud computing was first the provenance of geeks, and then spread outward. The first companies to embrace AWS became its beta testers and evangelists. Silicon Valley startups like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, and the photo-sharing site SmugMug ran their operations on AWS and could quickly order up more servers as their businesses grew at unprecedented rates. It was one of the greatest enablers of the post-recession technology boom—arguably more important than even the iPhone, though outsiders understood very little about it.

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In midtown Manhattan, where Amazon decided to introduce the Houdini portion of Prime Now, employees set about stocking popular merchandise like Beats headphones, coffee grinders, toilet paper, and bottles of seltzer water in a fifty-thousand-square-foot warehouse inside an office tower across the street from the Empire State Building. For the first few weeks of December, they scattered around Midtown, placing test orders in the initial service area. Landry, who practically moved to an Airbnb in Brooklyn with her partner and their two-year-old son, ordered a pair of Havaiana flip-flops while she was getting a pedicure; they arrived before it was done. After abandoning a marketing plan to promote the launch by wrapping the entire Empire State Building in gift paper, Amazon introduced Prime Now on December 18, 2014.

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“Day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death,” he had said earlier that year on stage at an all-hands meeting. “And that is why it is always Day one.” S-team members appeared to cast blame on Stephenson, who would leave the company a year later to become the CFO of Airbnb. “The tone of it was ‘how did you miss it?’ ” said another executive privy to the discussions. “But we had been missing it together for this whole time.” The retail OP1 set the tone for other contentious meetings that month. Bezos issued a similar mandate to Russ Grandinetti, senior vice president of the international consumer group, whose division’s finances looked even bleaker without advertising.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Tammy Kim, “The Gig Economy Is Coming for Your Job,” New York Times, January 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/sunday/gig-economy-unemployment-automation.html, accessed September 8, 2021; Aarian Marshall, “With $200 Million, Uber and Lyft Write Their Own Labor Law,” Wired, April 11, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/200-million-uber-lyft-write-own-labor-law/, accessed September 8, 2021. For the origins of Uber and Airbnb specifically, see Brad Stone, The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley (London: Corgi, 2018); Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How to Disrupt an Industry, Make Billions of Dollars . . . and Plenty of Enemies (London: Virgin Books, 2018); Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). 23.The classic historical work on casual labor markets is Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (1971; London: Verso, 2013).

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Cars sat undriven for many hours every day, generating neither utility nor income. Primary homes or apartments were not underutilized in the same way; but second homes and apartments were. Why not find ways to make these assets income-generating centers for oneself and one’s family? The founders of start-ups Airbnb (2008) and Uber (2009) were asking precisely these questions and answering them by persuading armies of homeowners and car owners to monetize their assets through the ingeniously designed computer programs that these new corporations had developed. Rather quickly, legions of cars-for-hire and apartments for short-term rentals inundated and convulsed urban transportation and rental housing industries, with the promise of lower rates for riders and lessees, on the one hand, and robust new sources of income for drivers and lessors, on the other.22 There was a downside to this new gig economy, of course.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abrams, Stacey, 285–86 Acheson, Dean, 36 Adbusters, 251–52 Affordable Care Act (ACA), 227, 237–38, 241, 242 Afghanistan war, 189 Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1974), 113 Airbnb, 238 Al Qaeda, 191–205 al-Sadr, Moqtada, 203 Alexander, Michelle, 236–37 Amazon, 279 American capitalism, 20, 31, 42–43, 139 American democracy, 1, 7, 282–83, 287–88, 289 American industry, 27–28 American International Group (AIG), 219–20, 226–27 American manufacturers, 29, 62 The American Political Tradition (Hofstadter), 95–96 American Prospect, 278–79 American Rescue Plan, 283 American Revolution, 30, 79–80 American system of regulation (Herbert Hoover), 85 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), 67–68, 166–67 American Whigs, 78 Andropov, Yuri, 142–43 Anglican theory of liberty, 97–98 AOL, 172 apartheid, 92–93, 236 Apple, 279 Arab Israeli War (fourth), 60. see also Yom Kippur War Arendt, Hannah, 35–36 Aron, Raymond, 86–87 asylum seekers, 273–74 Atari Democrats, 135, 137, 155 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 100–1 atomic bomb, 37, 42–43, 99–100 Aufderheide, Patricia, 167–68 Auletta, Ken, 131–32 authoritarianism, 2–3, 145–46, 188, 270, 277–78, 289 automobile industry, 62, 226–27 automobile workers strikes (1936–37, 1946), 24–25 Baathist Party, 193–94, 198–99 Bear Stearns, 218–19, 240–41 Becker, Gary, 90–91 Bentham, Jeremy, 92 Bentsen, Lloyd, 157–58 Bernanke, Ben, 219, 220–21 Bernstein, Jared, 284 Bezos, Jeff, 160 Biden, Joe, 281–93 Bigelow, Katherine, 219–20 Bill of Rights, 75–76 bin Laden, Osama, 191, 193 black economic suffering, 234–37 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 230, 263–64, 286 black voters, 20–21, 27, 261–62, 264–65 Blair, Tony, 176–78 Bloomberg, Michael, 253 Boer Wars, 80 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 78 Bork, Robert, 124, 125 Boushey, Heather, 284 Bradley, Bill, 137 Brand, Stewart, 8–9, 103–4, 160 Bremer, Paul, 198–200, 217 Brezhnev, Leonard, 142–43 Brin, Sergey, 207 Brown, John, 81–82 Brown, Michael, 262–63 Brown, Wendy, 91–92 Brown v.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center, June 2010), 4, https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs40/40395/40395p.pdf. 44. “Agents Seize $7 Million in Heroin in East Palo Alto,” Palo Alto Online, July 21, 2009, https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2009/07/21/agents-seize-7-million-in-heroin-in-east-palo-alto. 45. “Seed Round—Airbnb,” Crunchbase, April 1, 2009, https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/airbnb-seed—ba7b61b6. 46. Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Nathaniel Morris, and Benjamin T. Smith, “The U.S. Fentanyl Boom and the Mexican Opium Crisis,” Building Resilient Communities in Mexico: Civic Responses to Crime and Violence (Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and University of San Diego Justice in Mexico Program, 2019), 8–9. 47.

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It also notes the presence of a new blue-colored methamphetamine from Mexico following the same path around the Bay. On Sacramento Street, police seized 70 pounds of black tar from a Sac Street associate named Adam Alfonso Herrera in 2009.44 At a $7 million estimated street value, the contents of Herrera’s Lincoln were worth more than twice as much as the local start-up Airbnb, which had recently completed its seed financing round at a $3 million post-money valuation.45 How did Sac Street go from a spot on the ground to an international operation that was smuggling multimillion-dollar loads of heroin in less than ten years? EPA could do rapid growth, too. The trends in illegal drug use support the idea of supply-driven rather than demand-driven markets, the same framework we’ve been using since the advent of wheat fields and railroad tracks.

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Still, investors pumped novel magnitudes of value through these platforms, allowing them to pursue money-losing strategies indefinitely and hold out for monopoly positions. Since the start-ups were little more than fantasies before their first six- or seven-figure infusions, early investors in the top crabs got extraordinary hauls. VCs couldn’t afford not to take chances on hare-brained schemes. “Airbnb for X” and “Uber for Y” pitches proliferated. What is the lesson there? Whatever it was, capitalists took it. Speed Bumps Despite how they appear to us now, at first it was hard to understand the rise of the scraper advertising and crab platforms politically. The world’s turbulent 1990s left political narratives scrambled, and capital’s orthogonal attack on labor caught the United States by surprise.

Immortality, Inc.
by Chip Walter
Published 7 Jan 2020

Those centers were expensive and burdened by foreign regulatory issues. The way the board saw it, scaling them was not sustainable. Nor would Human Longevity seek any longer to aggressively gather a million integrated genomes—certainly not by 2020. HLI’s new strategy was to disintermediate traditional medicine in the way that Airbnb and Uber had disrupted the hospitality and transportation industries. The current Health Nucleus center in San Diego would remain. But instead of the costly rollout of its own facilities worldwide, HLI began planning partnerships with a variety of institutions: physicians interested in longevity medicine, hospitals and clinics that wanted to prevent or slow the diseases of aging.

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HLI’s partners would gather participating patients’ blood tests, gather their omes, and provide imaging to HLI while the Health Nucleus service—now called Core Reports—would provide an online interface, as well as available experts to explain what all the data revealed. The key to the new approach was the software platform and database analyses that HLI proposed to deliver without the cost of brick-and-mortar HNX centers spread around the globe. This model was similar to the back-end software platform and front-end interface that Airbnb uses to make it so easy for its partners to service millions of overnight guests around the world. Except in this case, the same sort of artificial intelligence that had the seer-like potential to reveal a customer’s future health would now power HLI’s platform. Karow called this “democratizing precision health analytics,” which was another way of saying that HLI could still create a better medical mousetrap while simultaneously generating income and enlarging its all-important genomic database.

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The main thing was to build on past successes and focus on what Karow called a workable “commercial strategy.” Still, by early 2019, the new HLI had yet to nail down even one Health Nucleus business partner. But Karow insisted the company’s finances were solid and partnerships would soon materialize. After all, who would have thought, when Airbnb was launched in 2008, it would be booking a million rooms a night within five years? Given Venter’s past, you could almost have predicted the events that unfolded at Human Longevity, Inc. The man attracted drama like mass attracts gravity. He was the hare, not the tortoise. Do the experiment! But HLI’s pockets weren’t as deep as Calico’s, and even Silicon Valley investors have their limits.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
by Scott D. Anthony and Mark W. Johnson
Published 27 Mar 2017

In 2013, Dave Ulmer drew on his experience at several large companies to detail The Innovator’s Extinction. His cover blurb? “How natural selection and best intentions will drive your company into the grave.” Another voice is that of Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, a leading incubator that helped spur Dropbox, Airbnb, and hundreds of other companies. Graham perhaps summed up the zeitgeist best when he said, “Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.” Coauthor Scott Anthony believed all this when he packed up his family and moved them to Singapore in 2010.

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Professional Services After founding Netscape and Opsware, in 2009 Marc Andreessen cofounded a venture capital firm with entrepreneur Ben Horowitz (who was also part of the founding team at Opsware) called Andreessen Horowitz. In a few years the firm became one of the most influential in Silicon Valley, investing in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Jawbone, Oculus VR, and many more. In a piece in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, Andreessen summarized one of his key investment theses with a phrase that rings true to entrepreneurs and executives of companies under disruptive assault: “Software is eating the world.” The first paragraph of a widely shared article in 2015 on TechCrunch summed up the powerful pull of software-based platforms: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles.

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The first paragraph of a widely shared article in 2015 on TechCrunch summed up the powerful pull of software-based platforms: “Uber, the world’s largest 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.” Historically, providers of high-end professional services, such as lawyers, investment advisors, and, yes, management consultants, seemed impervious to disruption. Yet four trends promise to have a significant impact on professional services.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

Number of Employees at Major Companies: Present Day versus Past Years Company: Amazon Number of Employees in 2017: 341,400 Company: Walmart Number of Employees (Year): 1,600,000 (2017) Company: Apple Number of Employees in 2017: 80,000 Company: GM Number of Employees (Year): 660,977 (1964) Company: Google Number of Employees in 2017: 57,100 Company: AT&T Number of Employees (Year): 758,611 (1964) Company: Microsoft Number of Employees in 2017: 114,000 Company: IBM Number of Employees (Year): 434,246 (2012) Company: Facebook Number of Employees in 2017: 20,658 Company: GE Number of Employees (Year): 262,056 (1964) Company: Snap Number of Employees in 2017: 1,859 Company: Kodak Number of Employees (Year): 145,000 (1989) Company: Airbnb Number of Employees in 2017: 3,100 Company: Hilton Hotels Number of Employees (Year): 169,000 (2016) The companies of the future simply don’t need as many people as the companies of earlier eras, and more of their employees have specialized skills. If one looks at the numbers they clearly show an economy that is having a harder time creating new jobs at previous levels.

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You see lots of people wearing sweatpants and sweatshirts with the names of where they went to school: Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Middlebury. In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, they don’t advertise where they went to school but the prices are just as exorbitant. Very normal-looking houses go for $2 million plus in Palo Alto and Atherton. The corporate headquarters of Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Apple are insider tourist attractions. For the average tech worker, you wake up and drive from a leafy suburb to a grounded spaceship and stay there to eat the subsidized gourmet dinner. Or maybe you bike to your downtown office or take the dark-windowed company bus from San Francisco and tap out emails with headphones on.

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We did this nominally so that the banks would lend money to businesses, who would then create jobs and shore up the economy. In practice, most of the money went to the balance sheets of the banks and to inflate asset bubbles all over the country, primarily in assets like real estate in Manhattan and Silicon Valley and the stock prices of private companies like Uber and Airbnb. Many human beings did get rich from the money printing bonanza, but they were people among the best situated, not the least. We did this because we believed in institutions far more than we believe in our people. With the Freedom Dividend, money would be put in the hands of our citizens in a time of unprecedented economic dislocation.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World
by Dambisa Moyo
Published 3 May 2021

Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/01/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers/. Gallup. “Tobacco and Smoking.” https://news.gallup.com/poll/1717/tobacco-smoking.aspx. Generation Investment Management. “Generation Philosophy.” www.generationim.com/generation-philosophy/. Gerdeman, Dina. “The Airbnb Effect: Cheaper Rooms for Travelers, Less Revenue for Hotels.” Forbes, February 27, 2018. www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2018/02/27/the-airbnb-effect-cheaper-rooms-for-travelers-less-revenue-for-hotels/#18d69094d672. Gertz, Geoffrey. “5 Things to Know About USMCA, the New NAFTA.” Brookings Institution, October 2, 2018. www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/10/02/5-things-to-know-about-usmca-the-new-nafta/.

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Research in Motion, the owner of BlackBerry, was acquired by a consortium of financial investors who have kept the company as a private entity trading under the BlackBerry name—albeit greatly reduced in size. From a peak of $19.9 billion in sales in 2011, BlackBerry fell to $932 million in 2018. The proliferation of the iPhone transformed the landscape for Nokia and BlackBerry, just as Airbnb has taken traditional hotels to task and Lyft and Uber have disrupted the transportation and car industries. It is impossible to know what actually transpires in the boardrooms of failing businesses, but later analyses often point toward slow reactions to changes in consumer trends and the competitive landscape, leaving a company to operate under flawed assumptions.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

In a society like ours, characterized by extreme concentrations of wealth and income, the market allocates social power in proportion to money—thus producing a society of “one dollar, one vote.” Consider the example of companies like the car-sharing service Uber, the errand-outsourcing website TaskRabbit, and the short-term rental market AirBnB. All represent themselves as part of the “sharing economy,” in which individuals make small exchanges of goods and services under conditions of fundamental equality. The idea is that I might rent out my apartment when I’m on vacation, and hire you to drive me somewhere when you have the spare time, and that we all therefore end up with a bit more convenience and a bit more money.

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In that case, nobody has enough wealth and power to exploit anyone else, which would make this a good example of what the sociologist Erik Olin Wright calls “capitalism between consenting adults” who have equal power in the marketplace.20 As they exist now, these companies really just demonstrate how unequal and nonconsensual our current system is. They are unequal in two different ways. There is inequality between the buyers and sellers of services in these systems: people employed through TaskRabbit can do little to challenge abusive or unreasonable demands for fear of being fired. Many AirBnB properties are run by companies that are essentially unlicensed hotel chains, not by individuals trying to let a spare room for a few days. And the companies themselves, backed by major venture capitalists, have power over buyers and sellers because they control the platforms on which the exchange occurs and can change the rules at will to maximize their profits.

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed
by Laurie Kilmartin
Published 13 Feb 2018

I took a stone from the rock garden. (That’s the kind of garden that people have in a drought state). It’s now the lead stone in my own rock garden. And I hope my son steals it after I die. LEAVE SOMETHING. Drop one final deuce in the toilet and don't flush. You won’t soon be forgotten. DEMAND FIRST DIBS ON AIRBNB. If the new people are going to Airbnb during the holidays, you should get first dibs on staying there. Include it as part of your contingency kickback. Make your RE tell their RE, “My client acknowledges the leak in the roof. She’ll take $5,000 off the final price if she can sleep under that roof at Thanksgiving.” YOUR LAST-MINUTE PANIC ATTACK: The day the sale takes place, you may want to cancel.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar
Published 8 May 2023

Curbs almost entirely cleared of cars in residential neighborhoods just a block from the jammed commercial district. Nowhere for gardeners and cleaners to park. The neighbors around South Congress, a local storefront landlord named Susan Holgren told me conspiratorially, were claiming the curb for themselves because they had turned their garages into Airbnbs—seizing public parking because they’d decided to put their own legally owned space to more lucrative use. Their attitude, she said, was, “ ‘If we give you back the parking, what are you going to give us?’ They speak with forked tongues. And the city council, they’re like those little dogs in the shop window, just nodding their heads.”

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He graduated from college into the Great Recession, took an entry-level banking job, got laid off, and moved in with his parents outside of Chicago. There, Mark tooled around with a familiar start-up formula: find a successful new company, and apply its model to a field that hasn’t yet been disrupted. Uber of X, Amazon of Y. Mark wanted to start the Airbnb of parking. Initially, as a kid from the suburbs accustomed to stress-cruising snowy streets before a Bulls game and going home with a parking ticket, Mark assumed there was not enough parking in Chicago. His company would bring all this new parking to market and alleviate traffic and congestion.

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Ten years later, with tens of thousands of spots in his portfolio, he had experienced an epiphany. “It’s not that there’s not enough parking,” he said. “It’s that there’s too much, and you don’t realize where it is.” Mark started the company at a place where overwhelming demand from outsiders was already drawing locals into a black market. If his software was to be Airbnb, this place was his Dubrovnik, teeming with pent-up demand. The place was Wrigley Field, the Cubs’ beloved bandbox ballpark on Chicago’s North Side. What makes Wrigley special is not really its small size, irregular dimensions, or ivy-crawled brick outfield wall, but that it is nestled snugly inside a neighborhood.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

The very word “disrupt” once applied to an angry kid in class, or maybe a broader political struggle; now it is more likely citing the overturning of a long-successful business model by a digital interloper, a purely peaceful activity. And we’re not even aware that by most measures, in spite of a few highly visible examples, such as Uber and AirBnb, disruption in the world of business is down too. Contrary to common impressions, America is creating start-ups at lower rates each decade, and a smaller percentage of those start-ups is rising to prominence, as we see in more detail in chapter 4. We’re not even managing peaceful disruptions, much less violent ones, at our earlier rates.

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According to one of the standard measures of firm entry rates, only one American metropolitan area has seen an increase in corporate dynamism over the last few decades, and that is McAllen, Texas, probably a statistical blip rather than any proof of extreme Texas potency.2 If it feels to you like start-ups are on a rising pace, this is probably because many of today’s most impressive new ventures are highly visible consumer-oriented companies, such as Uber and Airbnb, and also they receive a lot of media hype. You tap on your smartphone, and all of a sudden a vehicle appears at your door, ready to do your bidding. That’s pretty cool, and it gives consumers a feeling of extraordinary power. But those impressions distract our attention from a more general slowdown in economic activity, including in the arena of start-ups.

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The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. academia. See higher education affluence Affordable Care Act. See also health care Airbnb Allen, Woody Amazon.com Andreessen, Marc antidepressants anti-establishment insurgence assortative mating. See also matching attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) Attica prison riots Austen, Jane authenticity automation Babcock, Kendrick Charles Baltimore riots bank bailouts Bausum, Amm behavioral economics Bell, Daniel big data Birmingham Children’s March Black Lives Matter Black Panthers book sellers Bowling, Julia Brexit Brin, Sergei building restrictions business morale Canada capital services car culture Carter, Jimmy change and the Complacent Class and crime decelerating and dynamic society and education and gay culture and global affairs and government and higher education and innovation job switching and matching and mobility and politics and race relations resistance to and segregation and social protest chaos.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

“In 2010, Apple sold 39.9 million. By 2014 there were 169.2 million” comes from Statista polling, as well as “two hundred million new Apple phones, including the billion and a half iPhones already in someone’s possession.” The founders of both Airbnb and Uber were in Washington, D.C., for Obama’s inauguration, according to Walter Isaacson in The New York Times (“How Uber and Airbnb Became Poster Children for the Disruption Economy,” June 19, 2017). I wrote about the transition from flip phones to iPhones earlier in a piece for Medium (“iPhone Dreams,” April 24, 2014). For more on the topic of sharing and context collapse, see the “Twitter is public” debate on Gawker and elsewhere circa 2013.

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But from the stage at Macworld, on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs announced the future betimes. The iPhone’s first decade nearly parallels Barack Obama’s years in the White House. Elected in 2008, Obama left office in January of 2017, ten years after Jobs’s presentation. Barack Obama was the first president to have a Twitter account and the first to use Instagram. The founders of both Airbnb and Uber were in Washington, D.C., for Obama’s inauguration (crashing in very different accommodations—friends’ couches and an upscale hotel room, respectively), and independently, they have talked about the experience as a eureka moment—the spark that crystalized into an idea for a company. The corresponding timelines of Obama and the iPhone are abundant pasturage for future historians, but let’s not forget that meanwhile there was the Great Recession.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

Many jobs in financial and legal analysis, even medical diagnosis, are soon going the way of travel agents’ and stenographers’ jobs, which have been usurped by travel booking websites and digital transcription software.22 The other consequence of industrial automation was its effect on labour relations, and a weakening of unions’ and workers’ bargaining power as factory jobs disappeared.23 This is a feature of the new services automation, too. One of the most dramatic consequences of the internet has been the creation of platforms that allow work to be organised in a fundamentally more fragmented way. We all know Uber, eBay, and Airbnb, which connect buyers and providers of transport, goods, and lodging in one-off, fragmented interactions, thereby eliminating the need for businesses such as taxi firms, shops, and hotels. The actual taxis, goods delivery, and rooms still have to be where the customers physically find themselves.

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It is present in small places where all the jobs within a particular line of work are with the same employer,2 but also where big corporations dominate a market and make things hard for new entrepreneurs. It is manifested in the harnessing of private data for manipulative purposes, and in the new digital platforms in sectors ranging across retail (Amazon), transport (Uber), hospitality (Airbnb), and many others, where they dominate business flows and can therefore make or break smaller players. Market power can of course harm anyone, not just the groups we think of as the left behind. But the left behind are always the most vulnerable to rigged markets, and emerging forms of market concentration threaten to create new groups of left behind as technology continues to transform our economies.

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The redistribution is identical in the two systems, but a UBI will be accounted for as involving much larger transfers and tax revenues than a NIT. It would make little sense to say that the former would mean a “bigger state” than the latter. INDEX Note: Page numbers in italic type refer to figures. Adbusters (magazine), 148 age, voter behaviour linked to, 41–42 Airbnb, 69, 113 Alaska, 119–20, 203 Alternative for Germany, 15, 41, 45, 192 Amazon, 113, 129, 180–81, 197, 267n16 Amazonian rain forest, 223 American Finance Association, 155 antiglobalisation, 21, 72, 222 antisystem proponents, 6–7, 10, 18, 62–63, 192 Asian tiger economies, 6 austerity measures, 43, 45–46, 134, 137, 144–45 Austria, 38 authoritarianism, 7, 14, 26, 42, 49 automation.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

“I will not be a slave working for chump change. I would rather be dead.” Silicon Valley promotes the gig economy as an innovative new industry that is creating jobs for millions of people. But the jobs being created are mostly bad ones. Meanwhile, gig-economy companies threaten established industries. Airbnb steals business from hotels. Uber and Lyft have hurt business at car-rental companies like Hertz and Avis, and have utterly decimated the taxi and livery business. Pundits like to talk about “creative destruction” as if it were an abstract concept, but the sight of a driver parked in front of City Hall with his head blown off served as a reminder that all this change and so-called progress is coming at a very high cost to actual human beings.

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The gig economy is the second way in which Silicon Valley has helped drive down wages. Instead of hiring employees, companies use the Internet to assemble a workforce of contract employees. The shift to gig work was helped along by the Great Recession, which put 8.7 million people out of work between 2007 and 2010—just as companies like Uber and Airbnb were being formed. The problem is that the jobs people lost had provided them with health insurance and some kind of retirement plan. Gig work pays almost nothing and provides no benefits. Apps like Uber might feel like magic for consumers, but the gig economy is not so magical for the people trying to make a living in it.

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Tesla, Spotify, Dropbox, Box, Snap, Square, Workday, Cloudera, Okta, Blue Apron, Roku, MongoDB, Redfin, Yext, Forescout, Docusign, Smartsheet—they’re all publicly traded, and they all lose money, and in some cases a lot of it, sometimes for years and years, long after they go public. Other unicorns like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, WeWork, Vice Media, Magic Leap, Bloom Energy, and Postmates remain privately held, but reportedly don’t turn a profit. As I write this, a tech start-up called Domo is attempting to offer shares to the public even though the company lost $360 million over the past two years, on sales of just $183 million, meaning Domo loses two dollars for every dollar it took in.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
by James Bridle
Published 18 Jun 2018

This cognitive dissonance between the expected functions of a traditional lock and those offered by such a ‘smart’ product can be explained by its real target. It became evident that the locks are a preferred device for those running Airbnb apartments when another manufacturer’s software update bricked hundreds of the devices, leaving their guests out in the cold.38 In the same way that Uber alienates its drivers and customers, and Amazon degrades its workers, Airbnb can be held responsible for the reduction of homes to hotels, and the corresponding rent rises in major cities around the world. It should be no surprise when infrastructures designed to support their business models fail us as individuals.

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Index Locators in bold italic represent images/pictures A AAIB (Air Accidents Investigations Branch), 188–9 ABC Trial, 189 Aberdeen Proving Ground, 28–9 acceleration, 132 AdSense, 218 Advanced Chess, 159–60 Aeroflot, 65 Aero Lease UK, 190–1 AI (artificial intelligence), 139 Air Accidents Investigations Branch (AAIB), 188–9 Airbnb, 127 Air France, 71 air loom, 208, 209, 209 al-Assad, Bashar, 55, 124 Aldrich, Richard, 189–90 algorithms about, 108, 126 reaction speed of, 123 YouTube, 217–8, 229, 232 AlphaGo software, 149, 156–8 Al-Qaeda, 212 Alterman, Boris, 158, 159 ‘Alterman Wall,’ 158 Amash-Conyers Amendment, 178 Amazon, 39, 113–8, 115, 125–7 American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, 64 American Meteorological Society, 26 ‘A National Infrastructure for the 21st century’ report, 59 Anderson, Chris ‘End of Theory,’ 83–4, 146 anthropocene, 203 antiquisation programme, 234 approximation, conflating with simulation, 34–5 Arimaa, 158–9 Arkin, Alan, 188 ‘the ark,’ 52–3 Army Balloon Factory, 188–9 artificial intelligence (AI), 139 AshleyMadison.com (website), 237–8 Asimov, Isaac Three Laws of Robotics, 157 Assange, Julian ‘Conspiracy as Governance,’ 183 Assistant software, 152 Associated Press, 124 ‘As We May Think’ (Bush), 23–4 Aubrey, Crispin, 189 Aurora (Robinson), 128 AutoAwesome software, 152 Automated Insights, 123–4 automated journalism, 123–4 automated trading programs, 124 automation bias, 40, 42–3, 95 aviation, 35–6 B BABYFUN TV, 225 Ballistic Research Laboratory, 28–9 Bank of England, 123 Banks, Iain M., 149–50 Barclays, 109 basic research/brute force bias, 95 Bel Geddes, Norman, 30–1 Bell, Alexander Graham, 19–20 Benjamin, Walter, 144, 156 The Task of the Translator, 147, 155–6 Berners-Lee, Conway, 78 Berners-Lee, Tim, 78–9, 81 Berry, John, 189 ‘better than the Beatles’ problem, 94 Bevan Aneurin, 111 In Place of Fear, 110 big bang, 106 big data, 84 Bilderberg Group, 241 Binney, William, 176, 180, 181 Birther movement, 206 Bitcoin, 63 ‘Black Chamber,’ 249 blast furnace, 77–8 BND, 174 Borges, Jorge Luis, 79–80 Bounce Patrol, 223 branded content, 220 Brin, Sergey, 139 Broomberg, Adam, 143 Bush, George W., 176 Bush, Vannevar ‘As We May Think,’ 23–4 Bush Differential Analyser, 27 on hypertext, 79 Bush Differential Analyser, 27 Byron “Darkness,” 201–2 C Cadwalladr, Carole, 236 calculating machines, 27 calculation p-hacking, 89–91 raw computing, 82–3 replicability, 88–9 translation algorithms, 84 Cambridge Analytica, 236 Campbell, Duncan, 189 ‘Can We Survive Technology?’

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

Predictably, there were a couple of ideas for apps that would help millennials meet each other. (Every hackathon includes an idea for making an app that replicates the experience of online social networking in real life.) A few people on the bus had some variation of, “It’s like ____ for _____,” as in: “My idea is to build an app that’s like AirBnB for boats,” which was a pitch by a second red-haired woman named Jen. This seemed profoundly unrealistic to build in three days on a bus, but I’ve always wanted to learn to sail, so I imagined it might be fun to hang out with buspreneurs who were into boats. I made a note to work on her app if I couldn’t form a team around my own idea.

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Eddie was a developer evangelist at a tech company called SendGrid, which means his job was to go around the country attending hackathons, throwing pizza parties, and handing out t-shirts to developers to convince them to use SendGrid. SendGrid is the technology that many tech companies, including Uber and AirBnB, use to send out autogenerated emails like receipts and marketing messages. Eddie was worried that he had brought too many t-shirts. Our bus had only twenty-eight people. Three giant boxes of shirts, which reached four feet high when stacked, were in the belly of the bus. Eddie decided he had more important things to worry about, like getting our pizza-calculator app to work before the hackathon qualifiers in Nashville, so he put on his blue headphones and turned back to his laptop.

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Edited by Fran Lewitter. PLOS Computational Biology 13, no. 3 (March 30, 2017): e1005399. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005399. Index Abacus, 75 Ability beliefs, 83 Academy at Palumbo, 56–57 Ackerman, Arlene, 58–59 Activism, cyberspace, 82–83 Adair, Bill, 45 AI Now Institute, 194–195 AirBnB, 168 Albrecht, Steve, 159 Alda, Alan, 70 Alexa, 38–39, 72 Alexander, Michelle, 159 Algorithmic accountability reporting, 7, 43–44, 65–66 Algorithms bias in, 44, 150, 155–157, 195 defined, 7, 94 elevator, 157 function of, 43–44 risk, 44, 155–156 tic-tac-toe, 34 Alphabet, 96 AlphaGo, 33–37 Amazon, 115, 158 Analytical engine, 76 Anarcho-capitalism, 83 Anderson, C.

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Nov 2023

After another series of texts—Parag had been dutiful but brief in his messages, wanting to know more about Elon’s plans before extending himself too far—had led to the group scheduling a dinner between Parag, Bret, and Elon just days before this revelation about Elon’s stake in Twitter, on March 31. The occasion had been one of the oddest meetings, and venues for a meeting, that Parag had ever attended. Elon would later describe the private residence outside of San Jose, close enough to all of them to be considered neutral ground—which Bret had found via Airbnb—as “post-apocalyptic.” The residence had been surrounded by abandoned trucks and farm equipment, and there had been actual donkeys wandering about, braying when anyone got too close. At random intervals, helicopters could be heard flying overhead, circling the valley around them. But the meeting had been more promising than the setting.

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Elon believed that a global town hall, a place for a truly free exchange of ideas, was like a rocket booster, and necessary for that forward motion; conversely, an assault on free speech and the sharing of ideas acted as an air brake, slowing progress, threatening to reverse whatever achievements had brought humanity to the starting gate. To Stargate. Elon was determined to keep that from happening. His quiet accumulation of shares in Twitter had been a first step in trying to right what had gone wrong with the platform. But his dinner with Twitter’s upper management at the donkey-infested Airbnb outside of San Jose had been more of a shuffle backward. He had nothing yet against Parag and Bret, both of whom had seemed grounded and smart, yet he’d come out of the session less than confident that talking about Twitter’s issues would lead to any real change. Upper management seemed good at conversation, less so at action.

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“Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (pays 3$/month) should get an authentication checkmark, and no ads,” he’d tweeted. “The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive.” He wasn’t simply trolling with the tweet; he believed that separating Twitter from advertisers was indeed a free speech issue. During the dinner at the Airbnb, Parag had offhandedly explained that Twitter’s sometimes heavy-handed moderation was often in support of advertising. Since advertisers didn’t want their ads running next to controversial content, the greater the restrictions, the higher the ad revenue. If this was the case, as long as Twitter relied on advertising dollars to survive, how could speech on the platform ever truly be free?

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

Steve Jobs narrated version,” The Crazy Ones, http://www.thecrazyones.it/spot-en.html. 7 Lev Grossman, “Person of the Year 2010: Mark Zuckerberg,” Time, December 15, 2010, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.html. 8 Forbes Staff, “America’s Best Entrepreneurs: Forbes’ Annual Ranking of the Best Small Companies in America,” Forbes, October 17, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbespr/2012/10/17/americas-best-entrepreneurs-forbes-annual-ranking-of-the-best-small-companies-in-america/?sh=7c5a86af9857. 9 Harrison Weber, “Airbnb officially closes its $475 million megaround,” VentureBeat, August 1, 2014, https://venturebeat.com/2014/08/01/airbnb-officially-closes-its-475-million-mega-round/. 10 Josh Ong, “Uber announces UberPool, a carpooling experiment with 40% lower prices than UberX,” The Next Web News, August 6, 2014, https://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/08/06/uber-announces-uberpool-carpooling-experiment-40-lower-prices-uberx/. 11 Ananya Bhattacharya, “Fitbit is now worth $4.1 billion after IPO,” CNN Money, June 25, 2015, https://money.cnn.com/2015/06/17/investing/fitbit-ipo/index.html. 12 Quentin Hardy, “Palantir, a Silicon Valley Start-Up, Raises Another $880 Million,” New York Times Business, Innovation, Technology, Society, December 23, 2015, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/palantir-a-silicon-valley-start-up-raises-another-880-million/. 13 Katie Benner, “The ‘Unicorn’ Club, Now Admitting New Members,” New York Times, August 23, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/technology/the-unicorn-club-now-admitting-new-members.html. 14 Maeve Duggan, “Mobile Messaging and Social Media 2015,” Pew Research Center, August 19, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/08/19/mobile-messaging-and-social-media-2015/. 15 Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (New York: Random House, 2014). 16 Veronica Toney, “Complete guest list for the state dinner in honor of Chinese President Xi Jinping,” Washington Post, September 25, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2015/09/25/complete-guest-list-for-the-state-dinner-in-honor-of-chinese-president-xi-jinping/. 17 Robinson Meyer, “The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America,” The Atlantic, July 9, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/. 18 David Dayen, “The Android Administration,” The Intercept, April 22, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/; Brody Mullins, “Google Makes Most of Close Ties to White House,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-makes-most-of-close-ties-to-white-house-1427242076. 19 Andrew Orlowski, “Revealed: The revolving door between Google and the US govt—in pictures,” The Register, April 29, 2016, https://www.theregister.com/2016/04/29/google_transparency_project/; “Our Offices,” Google, https://about.google/intl/en_us/locations/?

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Engineers living off ramen noodles and Soylent became millionaires in a matter of months. In 2010, Time magazine named Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year.7 A couple of years later, the cover of Forbes featured Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey under the headline “America’s Best Entrepreneurs.”8 When I arrived in the Bay in the summer of 2014, Airbnb, which had started six years earlier as an air mattress in its founders’ San Francisco living room, had recently closed a $475 million funding round.9 Uber had just launched Uber Pool.10 Within a year, Fitbit had IPOed.11 Palantir, the data analytics company, was valued at $20 billion.12 The term “unicorn” had originally been coined to describe the rarity of billion-dollar start-ups; by mid-2015, there were over 130 unicorns.13 By the middle of the decade, 62 percent of adult Americans were on Zuckerberg’s Facebook.14 Sleek Apple Watches started appearing on the wrists of the well connected, and Amazon Echos began dotting living rooms around the United States.

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It reminded me of my upbringing and my family’s history, my paternal grandparents springing back to a joyful life through years of toil after surviving the horrors and humiliations of the Holocaust and my maternal grandfather risking his life to fight in the French Resistance. Keith had his fingerprints on some of the most prominent companies in the Valley—including PayPal, Square, YouTube, Airbnb, Lyft, and LinkedIn20—and growing closer to him meant becoming more firmly embedded in that culture. I came to know some of tech’s most original thinkers. Often controversial, always unconventional, Keith and his circles confirmed for me that the Bay was indeed home to the ideals that had called out to me growing up in Europe.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Ditto with Airbnb and others that have more variable than fixed costs compared to incumbents (e.g., Hilton). What’s the Rush? Can You “Retire” and Come Back? I’m in startups for the long game. In some capacity, I plan to be doing this 20 years from now. Here’s the reality: If you’re spending your own money, or otherwise not banking on management fees, you can wait for the perfect pitches, even if it takes years. It might not be the “best” approach, but it’s more than enough. To get rich beyond your wildest dreams, it isn’t remotely necessary to bet on a Facebook or Airbnb every year.

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Don’t Overestimate the People on Pedestals “Get inside the heads of the people who made things in the past and what they were actually like, and then realize that they’re not that different from you. At the time they got started, they were kind of just like you . . . so there’s nothing stopping any of the rest of us from doing the same thing.” TF: Both Marc and Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, have read and recommend Neal Gabler’s biography of Walt Disney. Marc also mentioned a Steve Jobs quote in our conversation, which is printed in full below. It was recorded in a 1995 interview conducted by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, while Jobs was still at NeXT: “Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

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Could bitching and moaning on paper for 5 minutes each morning change your life? As crazy as it seems, I believe the answer is yes. * * * Reid Hoffman Reid Hoffman (LI/TW: @reidhoffman, reidhoffman.org) is often referred to as “The Oracle of Silicon Valley” by tech insiders, who look at his company-building and investing track record (Facebook, Airbnb, Flickr, etc.) with awe. Reid is co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, which has more than 300 million users and was sold to Microsoft for $26.2 billion in cash. He was previously executive vice president at PayPal, which was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion. He has a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

David Johnston is a senior board member at the Mastercoin Foundation, the body that coordinates the funding for the Mastercoin project, which offers a special software platform for developers to design special decentralized applications that can run on top of the bitcoin blockchain. He says blockchain technology “will supercharge the sharing economy,” that emerging trend in which apartment owners use Airbnb.com to rent out quasi hotel rooms and car owners sign up as self-employed taxidrivers for smartphone-based Uber and Lyft. The idea is that if we can decentralize the economy and foster multiple forms of peer-to-peer exchanges, people will figure out profitable ways to turn much of what they own or control into a marketable service.

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This new system is called several things: the sharing economy, the mesh economy, the collaborative economy. Got some extra computing power sitting on your desktop? Share it with those who need it. Got a car sitting idle in your driveway? Share that. Got a big idea? Share it online and raise the money online to fund it. Business symbols of this era so far include the personal-apartment rental site Airbnb, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, the peer-to-peer lending network Lending Club, and the taxi services controlled by individual car owners Uber and Lyft. In some respects these new business models are extensions of a process that began far earlier with the advent of the Internet. While no self-respecting bitcoiner would ever describe Google or Facebook as decentralized institutions, not with their corporate-controlled servers and vast databases of customers’ personal information, these giant Internet firms of our day got there by encouraging peer-to-peer and middleman-free activities.

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Unlike a blockchain model, the lending is done in a centralized way in which the investor must trust the company itself, but the middleman-less mechanism has some of the same effects as projects touted by cryptocurrency advocates. Other big companies are also looking to figure out an adaptive response to the onset of new crowd- and sharing-based business models such as those employed by Uber, Airbnb, and Lyft. Silicon Valley–based Crowd Companies, which advises old-world companies on how to survive in this new economy, boasts an impressive list of clients, among them Visa, Home Depot, Hyatt, General Electric, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and FedEx. All are trying to figure out how to adapt their businesses to a centerless economy.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
by Nancy Jo Sales
Published 17 May 2021

It was during this parade that I realized I’d struck gold with my new cameraman. He ran up and down the street, his big arms hoisting the camera, shooting everything from the sleepy-eyed mayor of Louisville rolling by in a convertible to the little girls scrambling in the street for candy. Then, when we went back to the Airbnb, he set up the computer on the desk and showed me the footage without me even having to ask him. And it looked like a real movie. I told him what I liked about what he’d shot and what other types of things I was looking for, and he listened and treated me like I was the director—which, of course, I was.

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My new brother Daniel and I were having fun, bopping around. I was letting loose when I felt a hand come and grab my butt—just some random guy in the crowd. He grinned at me in a way that made me think of Roger the boob-grabber, as he danced away. It rankled me, and I wanted to go. Daniel asked me to drive us back to the Airbnb, since he was feeling a bit tipsy after hefting the camera all day in the hot sun. I felt completely sober, though truth be told I’d had six or eight drinks that day, but spread out over many hours and with lots of bottles of water in between, so I felt okay. When I started to drive, I was fiddling with the controls, trying to figure out how to turn on the headlights, and it caused me to drift into another lane.

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And suddenly, he was every guy who didn’t take my side, every guy who had ever let me down, every guy who had ever doubted me—every guy who had called me crazy. My voice went down to a growl and I chewed him out very quietly. “Daniel,” I said, “we are a team, and if we’re gonna be a team, you have to support me.” After a few minutes of this, Daniel said he was quitting, going back home the next day. I can’t say I really blame him. We got back to the Airbnb and he went in his room. What I thought was going to be this great, brother-sister working relationship had already turned into a bad marriage, and now we were getting divorced. I didn’t have a cameraman anymore. I felt like a failure. Then it occurred to me: “Hey, am I maybe going through menopause here?

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Yishan Wong, Reddit’s chief during Gamergate, had come up at PayPal, whose alums guided much of the social media era. One of PayPal’s first executives, Reid Hoffman, used his windfall to found LinkedIn and invest early in Facebook. He introduced Zuckerberg to Thiel, who became Facebook’s first board member. Thiel, further parlaying his PayPal success, started a fund that launched major investments in Airbnb, Lyft, and Spotify. Throughout, like many leading investors, he imposed his ideals on the companies he oversaw. In the 1990s, he co-authored a book, The Diversity Myth, calling the purposeful inclusion of women or minorities a scam that stifled free intellectual pursuit. “Max Levchin, my co-founder at PayPal, says that startups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible,” Thiel wrote.

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Another was Google, whose young founders Doerr personally instructed in the gospel of Grove. Wojcicki sat in. But as the Valley expanded its reach, this culture of optimization at all costs took on second-order effects. Uber optimizing for the quickest rideshare pickups engineered labor protections out of the global taxi market. Airbnb optimizing for short-term rental income made long-term housing scarcer and more expensive. The social networks, by optimizing for how many users it could draw in and how long it could keep them there, may have had the greatest impact of all. “It was a great way to build a startup,” Chaslot said. “You focus on one metric, and everybody’s on board [for] this one metric.

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This sense of divine mission drove the angel investors of Generation PayPal who selected the startups and founders to remake the world around their vision. They called it disrupting incumbents. Uber and Lyft would not just offer a new way to hail taxis, they would abolish and replace the old one. Airbnb would disrupt short-term housing. All three were PayPal alumni investees. Many others pursued the same violent displacement. Amazon and physical retail, Napster and music. Only a few, like Thiel, seriously suggested doing to global governance what Uber had done to ridesharing. But once the social media platforms stumbled into that role, it must have felt like just a continuation of their rightful place.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

Older workers might recall a time when factory work was still good work, easy to find, even for those without much education. Or they might remember a time when offices were jammed with clerical staff hammering at their typewriters and shuffling piles of paper around. But the pace of change is such that even the youngest members of the labour force can remember a different world. Services such as Uber and Airbnb, virtually unknown at the beginning of this decade, are fundamentally transforming industries that employ millions of people. Products such as Slack, a chat service designed to make it easier for colleagues to collaborate, are altering communication within workplaces, and clever bots that can email your contacts or order you lunch participate in the conversation just like human colleagues.

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Labour-market woes are growing because humanity is choosing, decisively, in favour of the fruits of the digital age. We choose all the time: when we hail a car using Uber, when we buy a cheap smartphone assembled on the other side of the world, when we stop paying for cable television because we can stream everything we want to watch, when we rate plumbers on Yelp, when we book a holiday villa on Airbnb. As technology improves, we will find ourselves lured into more fundamental changes. Going carless, or skipping a high-priced university in favour of online courses, will cease to be sacrifices forced on people by a lack of resources and will become the easier, more liberating decisions. We plunge into the unknown future because the technologies that transport us there offer us the promise of something better.

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Index The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. Acemoglu, Daron ageing populations agency, concept of Airbnb Amazon American Medical Association (AMA) anarchism Andreessen, Marc Anglo-Saxon economies Apple the iPhone the iPod artisanal goods and services Atkinson, Anthony Atlanta, Georgia austerity policies automation in car plants fully autonomous trucks of ‘green jobs’ during industrial revolution installation work as resistant to low-pay as check on of menial/routine work self-driving cars and technological deskilling automobiles assembly-line techniques automated car plants and dematerialization early days of car industry fully autonomous trucks self-driving cars baseball Baumol, William Belgium Bernanke, Ben Bezos, Jeff black plague (late Middle Ages) Boston, Massachusetts Brazil BRIC era Bridgewater Associates Britain deindustrialization education in extensions of franchise in financial crisis (2008) Great Exhibition (London 1851) housing wealth in and industrial revolution Labour Party in liberalization in political fractionalization in real wages in social capital in surpassed by US as leading nation wage subsidies in Brontë, Charlotte Brynjolfsson, Erik bubbles, asset-price Buffalo Bill (William Cody) BuzzFeed Cairncross, Frances, The Death of Distance (1997) capital ‘deepening’ infrastructure investment investment in developing world career, concept of cars see automobiles Catalan nationalism Central African Republic central banks Chait, Jonathan Charlotte chemistry, industrial Chicago meat packers in nineteenth-century expansion of World’s Columbia Exposition (1893) China Deng Xiaoping’s reforms economic slow-down in era of rapid growth foreign-exchange reserves ‘green jobs’ in illiberal institutions in inequality in iPod assembly in technological transformation in wage levels in Chorus (content-management system) Christensen, Clayton Cisco cities artisanal goods and services building-supply restrictions growth of and housing costs and industrial revolution and information membership battles in rich/skilled and social capital clerical work climate change Clinton, Hillary Coase, Ronald Columbia University, School of Mines communications technology communism communities of affinity computing app-based companies capability thresholds cloud services cycles of experimentation desktop market disk-drive industry ‘enterprise software’ products exponential progress narrative as general purpose technology hardware and software infrastructure history of ‘Moore’s Law’ and productivity switches transistors vacuum tubes see also digital revolution; software construction industry regulations on Corbyn, Jeremy Corliss steam engine corporate power Cowen, Tyler craft producers Craigslist creative destruction the Crystal Palace, London Dalio, Ray Dallas, Texas debt deindustrialization demand, chronically weak dematerialization Detroit developing economies and capital investment and digital revolution era of rapid growth and industrialization pockets of wealth in and ‘reshoring’ phenomenon and sharp slowdown and social capital see also emerging economies digital revolution and agency and company cultures and developing economies and distance distribution of benefits of dotcom tech boom emergence of and global imbalances and highly skilled few and industrial institutions and information flows investment in social capital niche markets pace of change and paradox of potential productivity and output and secular stagnation start-ups and technological deskilling techno-optimism techno-pessimism as tectonic economic transformation and trading patterns web journalism see also automation; computing; globalization discrimination and exclusion ‘disruption’, phenomenon of distribution of wealth see inequality; redistribution; wealth and income distribution dotcom boom eBay economics, classical The Economist education in emerging economies during industrial revolution racial segregation in USA and scarcity see also university education electricity Ellison, Glenn Ellison, Sara Fisher emerging economies deindustrialization economic growth in education in foreign-exchange reserves growth in global supply chains highly skilled workers in see also developing economies employment and basic income policy cheap labour as boost to and dot.com boom in Europe and financial crisis (2008) ‘green jobs’ low-pay sector minimum wage impact niche markets in public sector ‘reshoring’ phenomenon as rising globally and social contexts and social membership as source of personal identity and structural change trilemma in USA see also labour; wages Engels, Friedrich environmental issues Etsy euro- zone Europe extreme populist politics liberalized economies political fractionalization in European Union Facebook face-recognition technology factors of production land see also capital; labour ‘Factory Asia’ factory work assembly-line techniques during industrial revolution family fascism Federal Reserve financial crisis (2008) financial markets cross-border capital flows in developing economies Finland firms and companies Coase’s work on core competencies culture of dark matter (intangible capital) and dematerialization and ‘disruption’ ‘firm-specific’ knowledge and information flows internal incentive structures pay of top executives shifting boundaries of social capital of and social wealth start-ups Ford, Martin, Rise of the Robots (2015) Ford Motor Company fracking France franchise, electoral Friedman, Milton Fukuyama, Francis Gates, Bill gender discrimination general purpose technologies enormous benefits from exponential progress and skilled labour supporting infrastructure and time lags see also digital revolution Germany ‘gig economy’ Glaeser, Ed global economy growth in supply chains imbalances lack of international cooperation savings glut and social consensus globalization hyperglobalization and secular stagnation and separatist movements Goldman Sachs Google Gordon, Robert Gothenburg, Sweden Great Depression Great Depression (1930s) Great Exhibition, London (1851) Great Recession Great Stagnation Greece ‘green jobs’ growth, economic battle over spoils of boom (1994-2005) and classical economists as consistent in rich countries decline of ‘labour share’ dotcom boom emerging economies gains not flowing to workers and industrial revolution Kaldor’s ‘stylized facts of’ and Keynes during liberal era pie metaphor in post-war period and quality of institutions and rich/elite cities rich-poor nation gap and skilled labour guilds Hansen, Alvin Hayes, Chris, The Twilight of the Elites healthcare and medicine hedge funds and private equity firms Holmes, Oliver Wendell Hong Kong housing in Bay-Area NIMBY campaigns against soaring prices pre-2008 crisis zoning and regulations Houston, Texas Huffington Post human capital Hungary IBM identity, personal immigration and ethno-nationalist separatism and labour markets in Nordic countries and social capital income distribution see inequality; redistribution; wealth and income distribution India Indonesia industrial revolution automation during and economic growth and growth of cities need for better-educated workers and productivity ‘second revolution’ and social change and wages and World’s Fairs inequality and education levels between firms and housing wealth during industrial revolution during liberal era between nations pay of top executives rise of in emerging economies and secular stagnation in Sweden wild contingency of wealth see also rich people; wealth and income distribution inflation in 1970s hyperinflation information technology see computing Intel interest rates International Space Station (ISS) iRobot ISIS Italy Jacksonville, Florida Jacquard, Joseph Marie Japan journalism Kaldor, Nicholas Keynes, John Maynard Kurzweil.

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity
by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott
Published 1 Jun 2016

Corporations will engage interested individuals and teams with prizes, partner with them for a specific project, or buy them – much as Uber bought the robotics team from Carnegie Mellon. Similar to the gig economy, the sharing economy as a commercial entity provides the promise of a flexible source of income. Through renting out spare room capacity with Airbnb, the most high-profile example, individuals can generate useful income. As well as providing a source of income, we expect these ecosystems will also help people better blend work, leisure and home. As people work more flexibly in small and focused teams where they feel passionate about what they are doing, so the barriers between work and leisure become eroded.

…

So during these periods, financing is always going to be tricky. That is why developments in the technologies of the sharing economy are so interesting.19 The sharing economy is a great way of enabling people to remain asset-light or to bring income in to finance their asset accumulation. Sharing platforms such as Airbnb, Simplest, Lyft or even Dogvacay are all examples of an emerging economy where people share capacity of assets that they may have purchased or created. So not only is it possible to put off making big financial decisions, it is also possible to reduce the exposure to these financial decisions. Buying a house or a car is expensive, as it involves purchasing a capital stock and making a financial commitment.

…

As our discussion about leisure and the working week showed, governments will need to allow for a significant range of lifestyle and work-style choices, and simple characterizations of full-time and part-time will make little sense. This is already apparent in what has been called the ‘sharing economy’. The growth of sharing businesses, such as Uber and Airbnb, has already brought to the fore complex questions such as ‘What is an employee?’ and ‘Who is responsible for benefits such as healthcare and pensions?’ In the past, trade unions have spoken for the collective rights of their members. The profiles of these unions are only just emerging in the sharing economy and we can expect more battles as the rights of these flexible workers are contested in the courts.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America
by Alissa Quart
Published 25 Jun 2018

This belief was also held by Koopman, whose mother was a nurse and whose father was a truck driver. He was the first person in his family to attend graduate school. But as we talked, he recounted a litany of formerly middle-class parents like himself who now drove for Uber or rented their homes on Airbnb while living in single rooms of their Bay Area apartments or houses, due to the cost of living in the area. Koopman worked extra and unlikely jobs to keep paying the bills, which included towing drunken strip club patrons out of the dance area and carrying in his arms a stripper who had overdosed to an ambulance.

…

As employees, they would be entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay, benefits, and basic employee protections—which would strike at the very engine of the Uber business model, costing the company billions of dollars. As independent contractors, they receive none of these benefits. Uber is fueled in part by those trying to make ends meet in an overall economy that devalues their work. The sharing economy helps deny its participants basic worker rights or, in the case of Airbnb, creates more scarcity in the rental market by turning apartments into illegal hotels, in a cruel cycle. Many drivers, along with leading labor advocates, disagree with the company’s classification of its drivers as independent contractors and have begun challenging the company in court. Uber has been fending off nearly a dozen lawsuits alleging that it has misclassified its drivers, including a sprawling class-action suit filed on behalf of drivers in California and Massachusetts.

…

Since he and his wife were expecting their first child, however, he had come up with another way to make a little extra—he and Nicole had just rented their house to the golf caddies for the Women’s Open. In other words, he had moved from one extra gig, Uber, on top of what should have been a full-time job, to another, renting his property on Airbnb—all in a determined effort to simply stay afloat in the threatening shadows of Silicon Valley wealth. 7 The Second Act Industry Or the Midlife Do-Over Myth In a Boston classroom in autumn, rows of students were dressed up in the corporate equivalent of their Sunday best, a patchwork of different epochs of business wear: flats and beige hose, a mustard-yellow dress suit with embroidery, white dress shirts, and reading glasses.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies
by Barry Meier
Published 17 May 2021

The apartment was on the building’s third floor but Moore could see from the bathroom window that the rooftop of the neighboring building was not far below. He imagined himself jumping onto it and then shimmying down to the street, where he would steal a moped and make a Jason Bourne–style escape. He called the apartment’s Airbnb host but no one picked up so he left a message on the answering machine. For the next two hours, he frantically deleted documents on his laptop related to Kusto or sent them to encrypted email accounts he had created. When the Airbnb host finally returned his call, Moore’s Jason Bourne moment became more like one from Mr. Bean. His visitor, he was told, had been the apartment’s maid. He hadn’t seen her through the door’s keyhole because she was too short to reach it and she had been too shy to respond to him when he had called out.

…

Bigazzi seemed mollified by the explanation but offered Moore some advice. It was fine for him to pretend he was an activist but his act had limits. “I don’t want to hear you are speaking about the industry’s corruption because then you are putting your head above the parapet,” Moore said Bigazzi told him. That evening, Moore heard a knock at the door of the Airbnb apartment in Hanoi where he was staying. He had given its address to his companion but no one else, not even Bigazzi. When Moore peered out through the door’s peephole, the hallway looked empty. When he asked who was there, no one responded. He panicked and suspected that a goon dispatched by the asbestos industry was lurking outside, waiting to beat him or worse.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

The number of English people owning a second home abroad doubled in the decade after 1997, reaching a quarter of a million in 2007; that of Norwegians quadrupled between 2002 and 2008.77 Of course, champions of the sharing economy might respond that, nonetheless, online services such as airbnb provide shared, alternative lodging that makes more efficient use of existing resources, meaning that fewer hotels are required. On New Year’s Eve in 2014, more than half a million people on this planet stayed on sofas and in flats rented via airbnb. Studies have certainly shown a correlation between the spread of airbnb lodgings on offer and a fall in hotel bookings, especially among cheaper hotels. In January 2015, hotel revenue in New York City was 19 per cent lower than in the previous year, the result, partly, of lots of snow and a weak euro, but partly also of more private rooms readily available on the site.

…

More and cheaper private accommodation may have encouraged airbnb customers to take more city holidays and mini-breaks, a kind of touristic rebound effect. And, finally, their temporary hosts gained additional income. Sharing only reduces resources if hosts throw open their homes to strangers and stay put, or temporarily move in with friends around the corner. But many hosts rent out their entire apartment and combine letting with going on holiday themselves. Reduction and displacement of resources and demand in some cases is matched, perhaps even outdone, by growth in others. Indeed, airbnb itself has responded to its critics by emphasizing that they are bringing more business and cash to city centres and their shops and restaurants.78 We must, moreover, not forget that people have always passed on goods.

…

See United Nations, Economic Commission for Europe, Economic and Social Council, ECE/CES/GE.20/2015: ‘Vacation Home Ownership in a Globalized World’, and see the UNECE’s http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/groups/wggna/GuideByChapters/Chapter_12.pdf. 78. A study of Austin, with data from 2008 to 2014, estimated that each 10% increase in airbnb supply resulted in a 0.35% decrease in monthly hotel-room revenue; for this and further references: see Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio & John W. Byers. ‘The Rise of the Sharing Economy: Estimating the Impact of Airbnb on the Hotel Industry’ (Boston, 2014). 79. Sean O’Connell, The Car and British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester, 1998), 34–6. 80. Alison Clarke, ‘Mother Swapping: The Trafficking of Nearly-new Children’s Wear’, in: Commercial Cultures: Economics, Practices, Spaces, eds.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Traditional manufacturing businesses, for instance, buy raw materials, make products, and sell those to customers. Platform companies on the other hand take different groups of customers that they help bring together. The more vacationers search on AirBnB, the greater the incentive for landlords to put properties on the site. The more properties there are on AirBnB, the less likely people will search on other rental sites. What would the value of Uber be if you were the only person on it? Zero. You need a buyer and a seller. With two people, the value would not be much. With 100, it gets interesting. With a million people, it is hard to compete with Uber.

…

Prices may not rise, but almost all the gain is captured by Walmart and the middlemen, while the amount paid to farmers has steadily declined.32 Fewer Startups and Jobs America is supposed to be a land of economic dynamism filled with disruptive companies, but the reality is very different. Everyone knows the inspiring stories of companies starting in garages in Silicon Valley from Hewlett Packard to Google. The popular press focuses on the big success stories we all know: Dropbox, AirBnB, Tinder, Nest, Fitbit, and so on. However, the overall numbers tell a different story. Recent research shows that the rate of new business formation in the United States has slowed dramatically since the late 1970s. The decline affects almost all sectors of the US economy, even high technology, which has such a powerful impact on all of our lives.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Renting carries with it the risk that you will be evicted if you miss a number of rental payments or cannot afford your rent after it has been increased by the landlord. People “self-assess” valuations in difficult circumstances whenever they buy insurance and are required, even if only implicitly, to decide how much money they would need if their house or car is destroyed. The sharing economy—exemplified by Zipcar, Uber, and Airbnb—is helping to accustom us to temporary “possessing” rather than “owning,” and simultaneously consuming and selling (and hence setting a price on) the same product. However, a COST would change life radically, which is why it should be tested in limited public and commercial markets before being applied more broadly.

…

In the coming years, experiments with QV will offer a proving ground for the practical utility of QV. RATING AND SOCIAL AGGREGATION Rating and social aggregation systems fuel today’s digital economy. Reputation systems are the crucial trust mechanisms that allow “sharing economy” services like Airbnb, VRBO, Uber, and Lyft to win consumer acceptance and give providers the confidence to adopt the system.46 They play a core role in the popular search services offered by Amazon, Google, Apple’s app store, and Yelp. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests these systems are badly broken. As noted above, almost all reviews cluster toward five stars, and a few at one star, making the resulting feedback biased and what statisticians call “noisy,” that is, not very accurate.47 Other online platforms, such as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram, gather limited information because they only allow “likes,” and other limited forms of response, rather than allowing participants to exhibit exceptional enthusiasm, or distaste, for particular content.

…

See, for example, Modiface’s eye-tracking–based advertising analytic system described at http://www.mobilemarketer.com/news/modiface-eye-tracking-app-increases-smashbox-conversions-by-27/447825/. INDEX Italic page numbers indicate figures and tables abortion, 27, 112–13, 116 Acemoglu, Daron, 240, 316n4 activism, 3, 124, 140, 176–77, 188, 193, 211, 232 Adachi, Kentaro, 80–81, 105–8 Africa, 136, 138 African Americans, 24, 89, 209–10 Airbnb, 70, 117 airlines, 171, 183, 189–91, 194 Akerlof, George, 66–67 algorithms, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93, 307n7 Allen, Robert C., 240 Amazon, 112, 230–31, 234, 239, 248, 288, 290–91 American Constitution, 86–87 American Federation of Musicians, 210 American Tobacco Company, 174 America OnLine (AOL), 210 Anderson, Chris, 212 antitrust: Clayton Act and, 176–77, 197, 311n25; landlords and, 201–2; monopolies and, 23, 48, 174–77, 180, 184–86, 191, 197–203, 242, 255, 262, 286; resale price maintenance and, 200–201; social media and, 202 Apple, 117, 239, 289 Arginoussai Islands, 83 aristocracy, 16–17, 22–23, 36–38, 84–85, 87, 90, 135–36 Aristotle, 172 Arrow, Kenneth, 92, 303n17 Articles of Confederation, 88 artificial intelligence (AI), 202, 257, 287; Alexa and, 248; algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; automated video editing and, 208; Cortana and, 219; data capacities and, 236; Deep Blue and, 213; democratization of, 219; diminishing returns and, 229–30; facial recognition and, 208, 216–19; factories for thinking machines and, 213–20; Google Assistant and, 219; human-produced data for, 208–9; marginal value and, 224–28, 247; Microsoft and, 219; neural networks and, 214–19; payment systems for, 224–30; recommendation systems and, 289–90; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; Siri and, 219, 248; technofeudalism and, 230–33; techno-optimists and, 254–55, 316n2; techno-pessimists and, 254–55, 316n2; worker replacement and, 223 Athens, 55, 83–84, 131 Atwood, Margaret, 18–19 auctions, xv–xxi, 49–51, 70–71, 97, 99, 147–49, 156–57, 300n34 au pair program, 154–55, 161 Australia, 10, 12, 13, 159, 162 Austrian school, 2 Autor, David, 240 Azar, José, 185, 189, 310n24 Bahrain, 158 banking industry, 182–84, 183, 190 Bank of America, 183, 184 Becker, Gary, 147 Beckford, William, 95 behavioral finance, 180–81 Bénabou, Roland, 236–37 Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 35, 95–96, 98, 132 Berle, Adolf, 177–78, 183, 193–94 Berlin Wall, 1, 140 Berners-Lee, Tim, 210 big data, 213, 226, 293 Bing, xxi BlackRock, 171, 181–84, 183, 187, 191 Brazil, xiii–xvii, 105, 135 Brin, Sergey, 211 broadcast spectrum, xxi, 50–51, 71 Bush, George W., 78 Cabral, Luís, 202 Cadappster app, 31 Caesar, Julius, 84 Canada, 10, 13, 159, 182 capitalism, xvi; basic structure of, 24–25; competition and, 17 (see also competition); corporate planning and, 39–40; cultural consequences of, 270, 273; Engels on, 239–40; freedom and, 34–39; George on, 36–37; growth and, 3 (see also growth, economic); industrial revolution, 36, 255; inequality and, 3 (see also inequality); labor and, 136–37, 143, 159, 165, 211, 224, 231, 239–40, 316n4; laissez-faire, 45; liberalism and, 3, 17, 22–27; markets and, 278, 288, 304n36; Marx on, 239–40; monopolies and, 22–23, 34–39, 44, 46–49, 132, 136, 173, 177, 179, 199, 258, 262; monopsony and, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255; ownership and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; property and, 34–36, 39, 45–49, 75, 78–79; Radical Markets and, 169, 180–85, 203, 273; regulations and, 262; Schumpeter on, 47; shareholders and, 118, 170, 178–84, 189, 193–95; technology and, 34, 203, 316n4; wealth and, 45, 75, 78–79, 136, 143, 239, 273 Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman), xiii Capitalism for the People, A (Luigi), 203 Capra, Frank, 17 Carroll, Lewis, 176 central planning: computers and, 277–85, 288–93; consumers and, 19; democracy and, 89; governance and, 19–20, 39–42, 46–48, 62, 89, 277–85, 288–90, 293; healthcare and, 290–91; liberalism and, 19–20; markets and, 277–85, 288–93; property and, 39–42, 46–48, 62; recommendation systems and, 289–90; socialism and, 39–42, 47, 277, 281 Chetty, Raj, 11 Chiang Kai-shek, 46 China, 15, 46, 56, 133–34, 138 Christensen, Clayton, 202 Chrysler, 193 Citigroup, 183, 184, 191 Clarke, Edward, 99, 102, 105 Clayton Act, 176–77, 197, 311n25 Clemens, Michael, 162 Coase, Ronald, 40, 48–51, 299n26 Cold War, xix, 25, 288 collective bargaining, 240–41 collective decisions: democracy and, 97–105, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; manipulation of, 99; markets for, 97–105; public goods and, 98; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; Vickrey and, 99, 102, 105 colonialism, 8, 131 Coming of the Third Reich, The (Evans), 93 common ownership self-assessed tax (COST): broader application of, 273–76; cybersquatters and, 72; education and, 258–59; efficiency and, 256, 261; equality and, 258; globalization and, 269–70; growth and, 73, 256; human capital and, 258–61; immigrants and, 261, 269, 273; inequality and, 256–59; international trade and, 270; investment and, 258–59, 270; legal issues and, 275; markets and, 286; methodology of, 63–66; monopolies and, 256–61, 270, 300n43; objections to, 300n43; optimality and, 61, 73, 75–79, 317n18; personal possessions and, 301n47, 317n18; political effects of, 261–64; predatory outsiders and, 300n43; prices and, 62–63, 67–77, 256, 258, 263, 275, 300n43, 317n18; property and, 31, 61–79, 271–74, 300n43, 301n47; public goods and, 256; public leases and, 69–72; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 123–25, 194, 261–63, 273, 275, 286; Radical Markets and, 79, 123–26, 257–58, 271–72, 286; taxes and, 61–69, 73–76, 258–61, 275, 317n18; technology and, 71–72, 257–59; true market economy and, 72–75; voting and, 263; wealth and, 256–57, 261–64, 269–70, 275, 286 communism, 19–20, 46–47, 93–94, 125, 278 competition: antitrust policies and, 23, 48, 174–77, 180, 184–86, 191, 197–203, 242, 255, 262, 286; auctions and, xv–xix, 49–51, 70–71, 97, 99, 147–49, 156–57; bargaining and, 240–41, 299n26; democracy and, 109, 119–20; by design, 49–55; elitism and, 25–28; equilibrium and, 305n40; eternal vigilance and, 204; horizontal concentration and, 175; imperfect, 304n36; indexing and, 185–91, 302n63; innovation and, 202–3; investment and, 196–97; labor and, 145, 158, 162–63, 220, 234, 236, 239, 243, 245, 256, 266; laissez-faire and, 253; liberalism and, 6, 17, 20–28; lobbyists and, 262; monopolies and, 174; monopsony and, 190, 199–201, 223, 234, 238–41, 255; ownership and, 20–21, 41, 49–55, 79; perfect, 6, 25–28, 109; prices and, 20–22, 25, 173, 175, 180, 185–90, 193, 200–201, 204, 244; property and, 41, 49–55, 79; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 304n36; regulations and, 262; resale price maintenance and, 200–201; restoring, 191–92; Section 7 and, 196–97, 311n25; selfishness and, 109, 270–71; Smith on, 17; tragedy of the commons and, 44 complexity, 218–20, 226–28, 274–75, 279, 281, 284, 287, 313n15 “Computer and the Market, The” (Lange), 277 computers: algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; automation of labor and, 222–23, 251, 254; central planning and, 277–85, 288–93; data and, 213–14, 218, 222, 233, 244, 260; Deep Blue, 213; distributed computing and, 282–86, 293; growth in poor countries and, 255; as intermediaries, 274; machine learning (ML) and, 214 (see also machine learning [ML]); markets and, 277, 280–93; Mises and, 281; Moore’s Law and, 286–87; Open-Trac and, 31–32; parallel processing and, 282–86; prices of, 21; recommendation systems and, 289–90 Condorcet, Marquis de, 4, 90–93, 303n15, 306n51 conspicuous consumption, 78 Consumer Reports magazine, 291 consumers: antitrust suits and, 175, 197–98; central planning and, 19; data from, 47, 220, 238, 242–44, 248, 289; drone delivery to, 220; as entrepreneurs, 256; goods and services for, 27, 92, 123, 130, 175, 280, 292; institutional investment and, 190–91; international culture for, 270; lobbyists and, 262; machine learning (ML) and, 238; monopolies and, 175, 186, 197–98; preferences of, 280, 288–93; prices and, 172 (see also prices); recommendation systems and, 289–90; robots and, 287; sharing economy and, 117; Soviet collapse and, 289; technology and, 287 cooperatives, 118, 126, 261, 267, 299n24 Corbyn, Jeremy, 12, 13 corruption, 3, 23, 27, 57, 93, 122, 126, 157, 262 Cortana, 219 cost-benefit analysis, 2, 244 “Counterspeculation, Auctions and Competitive Sealed Tenders” (Vickrey), xx–xxi Cramton, Peter, 52, 54–55, 57 crowdsourcing, 235 crytocurrencies, 117–18 cybersquatters, 72 data: algorithms and, 208, 214, 219, 221, 281–82, 289–93; big, 213, 226, 293; computers and, 213–14, 218, 222, 233, 244, 260; consumer, 47, 220, 238, 242–44, 248, 289; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; diminishing returns and, 226, 229–30; distribution of complexity and, 228; as entertainment, 233–39, 248–49; Facebook and, 28, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48; feedback and, 114, 117, 233, 238, 245; free, 209, 211, 220, 224, 231–35, 239; Google and, 28, 202, 207–13, 219–20, 224, 231–36, 241–42, 246; investment in, 212, 224, 232, 244; labeled, 217–21, 227, 228, 230, 232, 234, 237; labor movement for, 241–43; Lanier and, 208, 220–24, 233, 237, 313n2, 315n48; marginal value and, 224–28, 247; network effects and, 211, 236, 238, 243; neural networks and, 214–19; online services and, 211, 235; overfitting and, 217–18; payment systems for, 210–13, 224–30; photographs and, 64, 214–15, 217, 219–21, 227–28, 291; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; Radical Markets for, 246–49; reCAPTCHA and, 235–36; recommendation systems and, 289–90; rise of data work and, 209–13; sample complexity and, 217–18; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; social networks and, 202, 212, 231, 233–36; technofeudalism and, 230–33; under-employment and, 256; value of, 243–45; venture capital and, 211, 224; virtual reality and, 206, 208, 229, 251, 253; women’s work and, 209, 313n4 Declaration of Independence, 86 Deep Blue, 213 DeFoe, Daniel, 132 Demanding Work (Gray and Suri), 233 democracy: 1p1v system and, 82–84, 94, 109, 119, 122–24, 304n36, 306n51; artificial intelligence (AI) and, 219; Athenians and, 55, 83–84, 131; auctions and, 97, 99; basic structure of, 24–25; central planning and, 89; check and balance systems and, 23, 25, 87, 92; collective decisions and, 97–105, 110–11, 118–20, 122, 124, 273, 303n17, 304n36; collective mediocrity and, 96; competition and, 109, 119–20; Declaration of Independence and, 86; efficiency and, 92, 110, 126; elections and, 22, 80, 93, 100, 115, 119–21, 124, 217–18, 296n20; elitism and, 89–91, 96, 124; Enlightenment and, 86, 95; Europe and, 90–96; France and, 90–95; governance and, 84, 117; gridlock and, 84, 88, 122–24, 261, 267; Hitler and, 93–94; House of Commons and, 84–85; House of Lords and, 85; impossibility theorem and, 92; inequality and, 123; Jury Theorem and, 90–92; liberalism and, 3–4, 25, 80, 86, 90; limits of, 85–86; majority rule and, 27, 83–89, 92–97, 100–101, 121, 306n51; markets and, 97–105, 262, 276; minorities and, 85–90, 93–97, 101, 106, 110; mixed constitution and, 84–85; multi-candidate, single-winner elections and, 119–20; origins of, 83–85; ownership and, 81–82, 89, 101, 105, 118, 124; public goods and, 28, 97–100, 107, 110, 120, 123, 126; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 105–22; Radical Markets and, 82, 106, 123–26, 203; supermajorities and, 84–85, 88, 92; tyrannies and, 23, 25, 88, 96–100, 106, 108; United Kingdom and, 95–96; United States and, 86–90, 93, 95; voting and, 80–82, 85–93, 96, 99, 105, 108, 115–16, 119–20, 123–24, 303n14, 303n17, 303n20, 304n36, 305n39; wealth and, 83–84, 87, 95, 116 Demosthenes, 55 Denmark, 182 Department of Justice (DOJ), 176, 186, 191 deregulation, 3, 9, 24 Desmond, Matthew, 201–2 Dewey, John, 43 Dickens, Charles, 36 digital economy: data producers and, 208–9, 230–31; diamond-water paradox and, 224–25; as entertainment, 233–39; facial recognition and, 208, 216, 218–19; free access and, 211; Lanier and, 208, 220–24, 233, 237, 313n2, 315n48; machine learning (ML) and, 208–9, 213–14, 217–21, 226–31, 234–35, 238, 247, 289, 291, 315n48; payment systems for, 210–13, 221–30, 243–45; programmers and, 163, 208–9, 214, 217, 219, 224; rise of data work and, 209–13; siren servers and, 220–24, 230–41, 243; spam and, 210, 245; technofeudalism and, 230–33; virtual reality and, 206, 208, 229, 251, 253 diversification, 171–72, 180–81, 185, 191–92, 194–96, 310n22, 310n24 dot-com bubble, 211 double taxation, 65 Dupuit, Jules, 173 Durkheim, Émile, 297n23 Dworkin, Ronald, 305n40 dystopia, 18, 191, 273, 293 education, 114; common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 258; data and, 229, 232, 248; elitism and, 260; equality in, 89; financing, 276; free compulsory, 23; immigrants and, 14, 143–44, 148; labor and, 140, 143–44, 148, 150, 158, 170–71, 232, 248, 258–60; Mill on, 96; populist movements and, 14; Stolper-Samuelson Theorem and, 143 efficient capital markets hypothesis, 180 elections, 80; data and, 217–18; democracy and, 22, 93, 100, 115, 119–21, 124, 217–18, 296n20; gridlock and, 124; Hitler and, 93; multi-candidate, single-winner, 119–20; polls and, 13, 111; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 115, 119–21, 268, 306n52; U.S. 2016, 93, 296n20 Elhauge, Einer, 176, 197 elitism: aristocracy and, 16–17, 22–23, 36–38, 84–85, 87, 90, 135–36; bourgeoisie and, 36; bureaucrats and, 267; democracy and, 89–91, 96, 124; education and, 260; feudalism and, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239; financial deregulation and, 3; immigrants and, 146, 166; liberalism and, 3, 15–16, 25–28; minorities and, 12, 14–15, 19, 23–27, 85–90, 93–97, 101, 106, 110, 181, 194, 273, 303n14, 304n36; monarchies and, 85–86, 91, 95, 160 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, 121 eminent domain, 33, 62, 89 Empire State Building, 45 Engels, Friedrich, 78, 240 Enlightenment, 86, 95 entrepreneurs, xiv; immigrants and, 144–45, 159, 256; labor and, 129, 144–45, 159, 173, 177, 203, 209–12, 224, 226, 256; ownership and, 35, 39 equality: common ownership self-assessed tax (COST) and, 258; education and, 89; immigrants and, 257; labor and, 147, 166, 239, 257; liberalism and, 4, 8, 24, 29; living standards and, 3, 11, 13, 133, 135, 148, 153, 254, 257; Quadratic Voting (QV) and, 264; Radical Markets and, 262, 276; trickle down theories and, 9, 12 Espinosa, Alejandro, 30–32 Ethereum, 117 Europe, 177, 201; democracy and, 88, 90–95; European Union and, 15; fiefdoms in, 34; government utilities and, 48; income patterns in, 5; instability in, 88; labor and, 11, 130–31, 136–47, 165, 245; social democrats and, 24; unemployment rates in, 11 Evans, Richard, 93 Evicted (Desmond), 201–2 Ex Machina (film), 208 Facebook, xxi; advertising and, 50, 202; data and, 28, 205–9, 212–13, 220–21, 231–48; monetization by, 28; news service of, 289; Vickrey Commons and, 50 facial recognition, 208, 216–19 family reunification programs, 150, 152 farms, 17, 34–35, 37–38, 61, 72, 135, 142, 179, 283–85 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 50, 71 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 176, 186 feedback, 114, 117, 233, 238, 245 feudalism, 16, 34–35, 37, 41, 61, 68, 136, 230–33, 239 Fidelity, 171, 181–82, 184 financial crisis of 2008, 3, 121 Fitzgerald, F.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 4 Feb 2016

Given that Uber was operating in India as a technology company rather than as a transportation business, whose job was it to monitor these safety norms and take action when they were flouted? Whether or not banning the service completely was warranted, it served no purpose unless it was also accompanied by the introduction of rules and regulations designed specifically to apply to service aggregators.7 Uber is not India’s only service aggregator. Thanks to Airbnb, anyone can convert a spare room into a hotel without complying with hospitality industry regulations. eBay allows people to freely buy and sell goods from each other. All these services work as platforms, with buyers and sellers rating each other—a reputation that builds up over multiple transactions, making customers more inclined to use a service.

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All these services work as platforms, with buyers and sellers rating each other—a reputation that builds up over multiple transactions, making customers more inclined to use a service. Normally, this would require a regulator. Existing operators who bear regulatory costs—New York city taxi drivers who pay large sums to get a medallion, or hotels that meet regulatory requirements, making them more expensive—find disruptions such as Airbnb and Uber hard to compete with as they grow popular. Often, the new business models are different enough that they end up avoiding existing taxes. The incumbents label the newcomers as ‘tax evaders’ and the new solutions as ‘unsafe’. There is also the risk of the existing interests lobbying against innovations and using regulations to create a barrier to entry.

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With smartphones becoming increasingly ubiquitous, we can harness the power of cloud computing, big data and analytics to move towards a different kind of aggregation, one that is gaining traction in the private sector. Today, taxi services like Ola and Uber are aggregators, organizing thousands of individual drivers on a single platform. By pooling the homes and spare bedrooms of thousands of people, Airbnb now has more rooms than the biggest hotel chains. In India, Oyo Rooms has achieved much the same with budget hotels. Flipkart and Amazon provide marketplaces where merchants sell just about anything to hundreds of millions of customers. In his pioneering article, ‘The Nature of the Firm’, written in 1937, the economist Ronald Coase argued that the costs of carrying out transactions—the costs of search and information, coordination and contracting—meant that it made better financial sense for people to organize themselves into firms.

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity
by Kwasi Kwarteng , Priti Patel , Dominic Raab , Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss
Published 12 Sep 2012

There are now an estimated 5,000 technology companies in East London.44 While none has the importance of a Google or a Facebook, Last.fm, Songkick and TweetDeck are genuinely global brands. Swedish music company Spotify has chosen to locate its head office in London. A busy schedule of hackathons, meetups and pitching days are helping cement the entrepreneurial culture. Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm which has previously backed LinkedIn, Zappos and Airbnb, has just made its first investment in the UK. New crowdfunding solutions like Crowdcube and Seedrs are making it easier to access seed capital. The new Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme offers some of the best tax incentives for initial investment in the world. There is nothing in the British national character, no flaw in the British people, which would prevent us from excelling in the same way as Israel or America.

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Wood, Sydney, ‘The School History Curriculum in Scotland & Issues of National Identity’, International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research (2003). World Economic Forum, Global Competitiveness Report 2011/12 (2012). Index Compiled by Sue Carlton 9/11 terrorist attacks 29 Addison Lee minicabs 62, 63 Airbnb 98 Allensbach Institute 40 America see United States Amin, Idi 9 antisemitism 86 Antrobus, Lavern 75 AOL 81 Apple 60, 81, 91, 105 The Apprentice 75 apprenticeships 74 ArcelorMittal 73 Argentine military junta, defeat of (1982) 10 ARM 68 austerity measures 3, 36, 66 Australia 30, 32–3, 65, 88, 111 Bakewell, Joan 109–10 Balls, Ed 25–6, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33 Balls, Michael 25 Bank of England independence 25 see also central banks bankruptcy 91, 92 see also business, and failure banks Australian 33 bailouts 12, 33 Canadian 4, 13, 33–5 Chinese 95 and mathematical knowledge 45, 47–8 Bar-Natan, Bernard 78–80, 84 Basel II regulations 47 Beleza Natural 103–4 Beuchler, Simone 102 Black Wednesday 25 Blair, Tony 17, 24, 27, 29, 115 Blanchflower, David 20 boom and bust, end of 25, 27, 30, 115 Branson, Richard 97 Brazil 5, 100–6, 112, 113, 115 crime 102–3, 105 democratic elections 104 demographics 104 education system 105 and global recession 101 and international investment 105 military coups 104 Olympic Games (2016) 101–2, 103 and optimism 5, 100–2, 103, 105, 106, 111 poverty and inequality 102, 104–5 productivity 105, 115 BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) economies 10 see also emerging economies Britain see United Kingdom British Chamber of Commerce survey (2011) 87 British film industry 97 British Social Attitudes survey 109 Brittan, Samuel 20 Brown, Gordon 17, 24, 25, 26–9, 30, 33, 36 Buckley, Sir George 58 business 2, 3–4 enterprise zones 88 and failure 91–2, 95–6, 99 and informal economy 88–9 and regulation 87–8, 89 Callaghan, James 24, 114 Cameron, David 20 Campbell, Kim 16 137 138 Britannia Unchained Canada 4, 12, 13–19, 32, 33–7 banks 4, 13, 33–5 cutting deficits 4, 14–18, 30, 32, 37 diversified economy 34 education 36, 37 financial regulation 34–5 points-based immigration system 36 spending cuts 17–18 CDOs (collateralised debt obligations) 47, 48 CDSs (credit default swaps) 47 celebrity culture 4, 74–5, 76, 115 central banks independence 25, 27 see also Bank of England Centre for Economics and Business Research 101 Centre for Social Justice 67, 70, 73 Charles II, King of England 21 childcare, cost of 71 Chile 30, 32 China 10, 46, 53, 113, 115 aging population 106, 107 education 43, 44, 113 Chinese students in UK 58–9, 72 enterprise culture 95 informal economy 89 patent registration 54 Chrétien, Jean 16–18, 35, 36 chutzpah 81–2 Cidade de Deus slum 100 City of God (2002) 100 Clark, Joe 15 Clarke, Ken 27–8 Clinton, Bill 25 ComRes poll 87 Confederation of British Industry 74 Conservative Party (Canada) 35 consumer law 89 Cool Britannia 10, 115 Costa, Edivan 103 credit card debt 12, 30 Crosland, Anthony 26 Crow, Bob 63 Crowdcube 98 crowdfunding 98 Darling, Alistair 111 Day Care Trust 71 De Gaulle, Charles 8, 105–6 Deak, Lex 92 debt 10, 12, 19–24, 30–3, 115 debt delusion 19–20, 23 and default 21–2, 101 and economic growth 21, 22, 23–4 and financial crises 22–3 and future generations 67, 70 and responsible spending 24, 33 deficits 23–4 see also United Kingdom (UK), and deficit; Canada, cutting deficits; debt delayed gratification 71–2 demographics 106–11 population aging 32, 100, 101, 106–7 population growth 9, 113 Devey, Hilary 75–6 Dickson, Julie 35 Diefenbaker, John 15 dot com bubble 11, 29, 94 Dragons’ Den 75 Duncan, Arne 38 Duncan, Emma 57 Duncan-Smith, Iain 75 Dyson, , James 97 Economic Freedom of the World (Cato Institute) 36 economic growth 113 and demographic dividend 108 unsustainability of 9, 10 Economic Stabilisation Plan (Israel) 83 Edison, Thomas 91 education 4–5, 38–60 comparing school systems 38–41 cramming establishments 43–4 and graduate jobs market 44–5 and hard work 50, 57, 59 Index and parental aspiration 57, 59, 72–3 students choosing easier subjects 42–3, 45, 46–7 and work experience 43, 74 see also United Kingdom (UK), education; Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Edward III, King of England 21 emerging economies 3, 11, 113, 115 and scientific development 52, 53 and women 50 see also Brazil; China; India; Mexico; South Korea Enron 92 enterprise zones 88, 94 entrepreneurship Brazilian shantytowns 103–4 and courage 98–9 in US 90, 93–4, 96–7 and work ethic 67–8 see also Israeli entrepreneurial culture Erlich, Yigal 83, 84–5 Eurozone crisis 3, 12, 21, 37, 114 Exchange Rate Mechanism 24–5, 115 Facebook 55, 76, 95 failure as part of business 91–2, 95–6, 99 see also risk Famine, 1975!

Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World
by Jesse Krieger
Published 2 Jun 2014

I wanted to do what I wanted to do, go where I wanted to go, and spend time with whomever I wanted to spend time with,” he said. “I wanted to do what I wanted to do, go where I wanted to go, and spend time with whomever I wanted to spend time with.” With that vision firmly held in his mind, Jasper quit his job and listed his apartment in Holland on AirBnB.com to start funding his initial travels. While still helping run the poker website, he said, “I decided to launch an online nutritional supplement business together with my partner who takes care of the production and distribution. This allows me to be location independent.” The business consists of an online web store with a number of popular nutritional supplements.

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Taking advantage of the SEO skills gained from studying at night after his former job, Jasper was able to get the website ranked highly for a number of popular search terms, sending a steady stream of customers to their site every day. With a few online businesses up and running and his apartment in Holland making money on AirBnB, Jasper managed to visit 13 countries last year! “I started off celebrating NYE in Bangkok, went surfing and diving in the Philippines, hiked the great wall in China, went skiing in Austria, skydiving in Hungary, and visited friends in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Tokyo and partied in Vegas, Amsterdam, Montreal, Budapest and Stockholm,” he said.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
by Bharat Anand
Published 17 Oct 2016

For years, hotels grew by building new properties. Airbnb chose a different route—focused on connecting those who needed rooms with others who already had them. Uber did the same with cars. (There, too, when it restricted its service to “Uber Black” cars that relied on commercially licensed drivers with high-end cars, growth was steady; once it opened its platform to any driver-partner, growth was exponential.) The contrast between “ product versus platform” strategies was plainly, though somewhat garishly, summarized in a recent tweet from an Airbnb executive: “Marriott wants to add 30,000 rooms this year.

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User connections come in different forms: network effects (as in the PC wars or news classifieds), preference connections (as in print-digital usage or broadband-cable viewership), or fixed costs (as in most content businesses). See these connections and exploit them and you’ll create the conditions for large success—as Microsoft, eBay, Uber, Airbnb, Schibsted, and Tencent have done. Remarkably, in nearly every case billions of dollars of value were created without owning content or a product—simply by leveraging connections. Miss these connections and you’ll pay a price—as Apple did for two decades, and as so many content businesses did in reacting to digital threats.

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that website loading speed “Using Site Speed in Web Search Ranking,” Google Webmaster Central Blog , April 9, 2010; see also Robinson Meyer, “72 Hours with Facebook Instant Articles,” Atlantic, October 23, 2015. ease of getting a cab…or paying for it Leena Rao, “UberCab Takes the Hassle Out of Booking a Car Service,” TechCrunch , July 5, 2010; Alexia Tsotsis, “Why Use UberCab When Calling a Cab Is Cheaper?,” TechCrunch , October 26, 2010; Michael Arrington, “What If UberCab Pulls an Airbnb? Taxi Business Could (Finally) Get Some Disruption,” TechCrunch , August 31, 2010. Fox News decided to enter Bharat Anand et al., “CNN and the Cable News Wars,” HBS No. 707-491 (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, rev. July 23, 2007). Differentiation was central to the Fox News strategy See Neil Bendle and Leon Li, “Fox News: Competing to Deliver the News,” Case No. 13243 (Ivey Publishing, rev.

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route
by Rough Guides , James Bembridge and Barbara McCrea
Published 4 Jan 2018

ZOOM LEFT ZOOM RIGHT Noordhoek Alternatively minded Noordhoek is the heart of the “lentil curtain”, as the peninsula’s arty, surfy Atlantic seaboard is jokingly known (Cape Town’s Afrikaner-dominated Northern Suburbs, meanwhile, are nicknamed the “boerewors curtain”). Noordhoek even has a hemp house available for the night, through Airbnb. The desirable settlement at the southern end of the descent from Chapman’s Peak Drive, a 35km drive from the city centre, consists of smallholdings and riding stables in a gentle valley planted with oaks. When Chapman’s Peak is closed, Noordhoek is accessible via the M3 south over Ou Kaapse Weg.

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Prices start around R400 for a double or twin room, which is considerably cheaper than the centre of Cape Town, and you’ll get to experience something totally different. Some B&Bs will send someone to meet you at the airport; if you’re driving, they’ll likely give you detailed directions or meet you at a convenient and obvious landmark. Many properties are listed on Airbnb and you can make bookings through Khayelitsha Travel (021 361 4505, khayelitshatravel.com), while Maboneng Township Arts Experience and the Guga S’Thebe Arts & Cultural Centre can suggest options in Langa. GUGULETHU Liziwe’s Guest House 121 NY 111 021 794 1619, mycapetownstay.com/Liziwe_s_Guest_House.

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Meals include traditional dishes such as mielie pap (maize porridge), after which you can watch TV with the family or visit a local shebeen. The next day there's an English breakfast of sorts, which may include bacon and egg alongside fish cakes, sausages and home-made steamed bread. R900 Malebo’s 18 Mississippi Way 021 361 2391, airbnb.com/rooms/2156844. This B&B consists of five rooms, three en-suite, in the welcoming family home of chef Lydia Masoleng and husband Alfred. Her generous breakfast and traditional Xhosa meals are a treat, and activities include shebeen outings, township tours and Sunday church visits.R550 langa Nomase’s Guesthouse Cnr King Langalibalele/Washington Dr and Sandile Ave 021 694 3904 or 083 482 8377, tinyurl.com/y7729hun.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

These second-order infrastructures seem to present a different temporality—a different sense and scale of time—in many cases due to the rise of networked software platforms. Today’s platforms can achieve enormous scales, spreading like wildfire across the globe. As Facebook and YouTube illustrate, in just a few years a new platform can grow to reach millions, even billions, of people. In cases such as Airbnb and Uber, platforms set old, established systems on fire—or, as their CEOs would say, “disrupt” them. Yet platforms themselves burn much more readily than traditional infrastructures; they can vanish into ashes in just a few years. Remember Friendster? It had 115 million users in 2008. What about Windows Phone, launched in 2010?

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Digital culture scholar Tarleton Gillespie notes that social media companies such as YouTube and Facebook deploy the term “platform” strategically, using its connotations to position themselves as neutral facilitators and downplay their own agency. Recent public debates about the legal and regulatory status of Uber and Airbnb illustrate this strategy. Unlike taxi companies and hotels, these enterprises started with neither cars nor buildings, presenting themselves instead as platforms that “merely” connect car or property owners with potential customers. In this context, “platform” is both “specific enough to mean something, and vague enough to work across multiple venues for multiple audiences,” such as developers, users, advertisers, and (potentially) regulators.14 Thus, a key role of what we might call “platform discourse” is to render the platform itself as a stable, unremarkable, unnoticed object, a kind of empty stage, such that the activity of users—from social media posts to news, videos, reviews, connecting travelers with drivers and apartments for rent—obscures its role as the enabling background.

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Others retort that users already pay cellular operators for the data service over which these apps run. The extremely rapid rise of Facebook and WhatsApp—from a few tens of thousands to well over one billion users in just a few years—again exemplifies a temporality very different from that of older forms of infrastructure. Like Uber and Airbnb, OTT systems do not own or invest in the physical infrastructure on top of which they run; their principal product is software, and their capital investment is limited to servers and internet routers. Competing apps such as Tencent QQ and WeChat, emerging from the dynamic Chinese market, may eventually displace Facebook and WhatsApp as the largest virtual “communities.”

Fodor's Essential Belgium
by Fodor's Travel Guides
Published 23 Aug 2022

o Ride-Sharing Uber wwww.uber.com. 6 Taxi CONTACTS Taxi Antwerpen. EAntwerp P0474/390–766 wwww.taxibedrijfantwerpen.be. Taxis Verts. EBrussels P02/349–4949 wwww.taxisverts.be. q Train RAIL COMPANIES SNCB/NMBS. EBrussels P02/528–2828 wwww.belgiantrain.be. RAIL PASSES Eurail. wwww.eurail.com. h Lodging APARTMENT AND HOUSE RENTALS Airbnb. wwww.airbnb.com. Gîtes et Chambres d’hôtes de Wallonie. ELiège P081/311–800 wgitesdewallonie.be/en. 1 Taxes V.A.T. REFUNDS Global Blue. wwww.globalblue.com. x U.S. Embassy/Consulate CONTACT U.S. Embassy in Belgium. EBlvd. du Régent 27, Upper Town P02/811–4000 wbe.usembassy.gov. i Visitor Information REGIONAL TOURIST OFFICES Visit Flanders.

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There is often a one-week minimum, although it’s possible to rent for shorter periods during the winter months. Traditional bed-and-breakfast accommodations (chambres d’hôtes in French or gastenkamers in Flemish) are less common in Belgium than in the United Kingdom or the United States; the ones you do find are usually in rural or residential areas. As in many other countries, however, Airbnb has become very popular in Belgium. Here you’ll find houses and apartments in both urban and rural areas, as well as properties that are some way off the beaten track, often with a more intimate feel and lower prices than more traditional places. FACILITIES You can assume that all rooms have private baths, phones, TVs, and air-conditioning, unless otherwise indicated.

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Outside the capital, particularly among the villages, hotels often take the form of inns, and the better ones typically double as the finer places to eat in town. Rates here are considerably lower than in the city, where you will rarely find a night’s stay for less than €120, even in low season, and there are few to no Airbnb options. Youth hostels can be an appealingly wallet-friendly alternative in the cities and are mostly very modern, while those in the villages often rent bikes, kayaks, and outdoor equipment in summer. Alternatively, the Grand Duchy is well organized for campsites, especially in and around the Ardennes and Mullerthal regions where walkers are more prominent.

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing
by Lisa Gansky
Published 14 Oct 2010

To get started, both travelers and hosts set up profiles, define their expectations, and start connecting. The best way to verify a CouchSurfer is to check out his or her references, the required evaluations written by both surfers and hosts at the end of a stay. Airbnb: Online marketplace allowing anyone, from private residents to commercial property managers, to rent out their extra space. http://www.airbnb.com CouchSurfing: Connects travelers with locals. Enables members to share hospitality. http://www.couchsurfing.org Dopplr: Members share personal and business travel plans with their private networks. http://www.dopplr.com Driftr: Platform for sharing travel information.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

France and Spain have the highest share of independent workers, with almost a third of their labour force doing so either full- or part-time. The US and Britain are somewhat lower, at just over a quarter. The largest platforms are household names, such as Uber, with 1 million drivers, Freelancer.com with 18 million users and Airbnb with 2.5 million listings. Smaller ones include Task Rabbit, where people are available to do odd jobs of all kinds, and Hourly Nerd, which temps out software and finance professionals to organise your digital files or do your taxes. Not all are in financial straits. Some people get a nice boost renting out their apartments online, without the bureaucratic headache of setting up a bed and breakfast.

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advertising, 65–6, 178 Afghanistan, 80 Africa: Chinese investment in, 32, 84; economic growth in, 21, 31, 32; future importance of, 200–1; and liberal democracy, 82, 83, 183; migration from, 140, 181; slave trade, 23, 55, 56 African-Americans, 104 age demographics, 34–5, 155, 156; ageing populations, 39; baby boom years, 39, 121; and gig economy, 64; life expectancy, 38, 58, 59, 60; millennials, 40–1, 121–2; and support for democracy, 121–2; and voter turnout, 103–4 Airbnb, 63 Albright, Madeleine, 6 American Revolution, 9 Andorra, 72 Andreessen, Marc, 61 Apple, 27, 31, 59, 60, 156 Arab Spring, 12, 82 Arab world, 202 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 128 Aristotle, 138, 200 artificial intelligence, 13, 34, 51–5, 56, 60–2 Asian Development Bank, 84 Asian economies, 21–2, 162; as engine of global growth, 21, 30, 31, 32; and Industrial Revolution, 23–4; and optimism, 202; of South Asia, 31; see also China; India Asian flu crisis (1997), 29 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), 84 Attlee, Clement, 90 Australia, 84, 160, 167, 175 Austria, 15–16, 116 autocracy: and America’s post-9/11 blunders, 80–1, 85, 86; authoritarian nature of Trump, 133, 169, 171, 178–9; China as, 78, 80, 83–6, 159–60, 165, 201; and end of Cold War, 5, 78–9; and First World War, 115; and Great Recession, 83–4; and illiberal democracy, 204; myth of as more efficient, 170–1; popular demagogues, 137; rising support for, 11, 73, 82–3, 122 automation: and Chinese workforce, 62, 169; communications technology, 13, 52–5, 56–7, 59–60, 61–6, 67–8 see also digital revolution; and education, 197, 198; and Henry Ford, 66–7; political responses to, 67–8; steam revolution, 24, 55–6; techno-optimists, 52, 60; in transport, 54, 55, 56–7, 58, 59, 61 Bagehot, Walter, 115 Baker Institute, 68 Baldwin, Richard, 25, 27, 61 Bangladesh, 32 bank bail-outs, 193 Bannon, Steve, 130, 148, 173, 181–2 Belgium, 140 Bell, Daniel, 37 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 3–5, 6, 7, 74, 77 Bernstein, Carl, 132 Berra, Yogi, 57 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 159 Bismarck, Otto von, 42, 78, 120, 156, 161 Black Death, 25 Blair, Tony, 45, 89–90, 91 Blum, Léon, 116 Boer War (1899-1902), 155, 156 Bortnikov, Alexander, 6 Botswana, 82 Brazil, 29 Brecht, Bertolt, 86, 87 Breitbart News, 148 Brexit, 15, 73, 88, 92, 98, 101, 104, 119, 120, 163; UKIP’s NHS spending claim, 102; urban–hinterland split in vote, 47, 48, 130; xenophobia during campaign, 100–1 Britain: elite responses to Nazi Germany, 117; foreign policy goals, 179; gig economy, 63; growth of inequality in modern era, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50–1; history in popular imagination, 163; Imperial Preference, 22; London’s elites, 98–100, 130; nineteenth-century franchise extension, 114–15; policy towards China, 164; rapid expansion in nineteenth century, 24; and rise of Germany, 156, 157; rising support for authoritarianism, 122; separatism within, 140; Thatcher’s electoral success, 189–90 British East India Company, 22 British National Party (BNP), 100 Brown, Gordon, 99 Brownian movement, 172 Bryan, William Jennings, 111 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 60 Buffet, Warren, 199 Bush, George W., 31, 73, 79–81, 103, 156, 157, 163, 165, 182 Bush Republicans, 189 Cameron, David, 15, 92, 98, 99–100 Carnegie, Andrew, 42–3 Cherokee Indians, 114, 134 Chicago, 48 China: as autocracy, 78, 80, 83–6, 159–60, 165, 201; circular view of history, 11; colonial exploitation of, 20, 22–3, 55; decoupling of economy from West (2008), 29–30, 83–4; democracy activists in, 86, 140; entry to WTO (2001), 26; exceptionalism, 166; expulsion of Western NGOs, 85; future importance of, 200–1; and global trading system, 19–20, 26–7; Great Firewall in, 129; handover of Hong Kong (1997), 163–4; history in popular imagination, 163–4; hostility to Western liberalism, 84–6, 159–60, 162; and hydrogen bomb, 163; and Industrial Revolution, 22, 23–4; internal migration in, 41; investment in developing countries, 32, 84; military expansion, 157, 158; as nuclear power, 175; Obama’s trip to (2009), 159–60; political future of, 168–9, 202; pragmatic development route, 28, 29–30; pre-Industrial Revolution economy, 22; rapid expansion of, 13, 20–2, 25–8, 30, 35, 58, 157, 159; and robot economy, 62; Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 80; Trump’s promised trade war, 135, 145, 149; and Trump’s victory, 85–6, 140; US naval patrols in seas off, 148, 158, 165; US policy towards, 25–6, 145–6, 157–61, 165; US–China war scenario, 145–53, 161; in Western thought, 161–2; Xi’s crackdown on internal dissent, 168; Zheng He’s naval fleet, 165–6 China Central Television (CCTV), 84, 85 Christianity, 10, 105 Churchill, Winston, 98, 117, 128, 169 cities, 47–51, 130 class: creeping gentrification, 46, 48, 50–1; emerging middle classes, 21, 31, 39, 159; in Didier Eribon’s France, 104–10; Golden Age for Western middle class, 33–4, 43; Hillaryland in USA, 87–8; ‘meritocracy’, 43, 44–6; mobility as vanishing in West, 43–6; move rightwards of blue-collar whites, 95–9, 102, 108–10, 189–91, 194–5; poor whites in USA, 95–6, 112–13; populism in late nineteenth century, 110–11; and post-war centre-left politics, 89–92, 99; ‘precariat’ (‘left-behinds’), 12, 13, 43–8, 50, 91, 98–9, 110, 111, 131; and Trump’s agenda, 111, 151, 169, 190; urban liberal elites, 47, 49–51, 71, 87–9, 91–5, 110, 204; West’s middle-income problem, 13, 31–2, 34–41 Clausewitz, Carl von, 161 Clinton, Bill, 26, 71, 73, 90, 97–8, 157–9 Clinton, Hillary, 15, 16, 47, 67, 79, 160, 188; 2016 election campaign, 87–8, 91–4, 95–6, 119, 133; reasons for defeat of, 94–5, 96–8 Cold War: end of, 3–5, 6, 7, 74, 77, 78, 117, 121; nuclear near misses, 174; in US popular imagination, 163; and Western democracy, 115–16, 117, 183 Colombia, 72 colonialism, European, 11, 13, 20, 22–3; anti-colonial movements, 9–10; and Industrial Revolution, 13, 23–5, 55–6 Comey, James, 133 communism, 3–4, 5, 6, 105–8, 115 Confucius Institutes, 84 Congress, US, 133–4 Copenhagen summit (2009), 160 Coughlin, Father, 113 Cowen, Tyler, 40, 50, 57 Crick, Bernard, 138 crime, 47 Crimea, annexation of (2014), 8, 173 Cuba, 165 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 165, 174 cyber warfare, 176–8 Cyborg, 54 D’Alema, Massimo, 90 Daley, Richard, 189 Danish People’s Party, 102 Davos Forum, 19–20, 27, 68–71, 72–3, 91, 121 de Blasio, Bill, 49 de Gaulle, Charles, 106, 116 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 38, 112, 126–7 democracy, liberal: as an adaptive organism, 87; and America’s Founding Fathers, 9, 112–13, 123, 126, 138; and Arab Spring, 82; Chinese view of US system, 85–6; communism replaces as bête noire, 115; concept of ‘the people’, 87, 116, 119–20; damaged by responses to 9/11 attacks, 79–81, 86, 140, 165; and Davos elite, 68–71; de Tocqueville on, 126–7; declining faith in, 8–9, 12, 14, 88–9, 98–100, 103–4, 119–23, 202–3; demophobia, 111, 114, 119–23; economic growth as strongest glue, 13, 37, 103, 201–2; efforts to suppress franchise, 104, 123; elite disenchantment with, 121; elite fear of public opinion, 69, 111, 118; failing democracies (since 2000), 12, 82–3, 138–9; and ‘folk theory of democracy’, 119, 120; Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’, 5, 14, 181; and global trilemma, 72–3; and Great Recession, 83–4; and Hong Kong, 164; idealism of Rousseau and Kant, 126; illiberal democracy concept, 119, 120, 136–7, 138–9, 204; in India, 201; individual rights and liberty, 14, 97, 120; late twentieth century democratic wave, 77–8, 83; and mass distraction, 127, 128–30; need for regaining of optimism, 202–3; need to abandon deep globalisation, 73–4; nineteenth-century fear of, 114–15; and plural society, 139; popular will concept, 87, 118, 119–20, 126, 137–8; post-Cold War triumphalism, 5, 6, 71; post-war golden era, 33–4, 43, 89, 116, 117; post-WW2 European constitutions, 116; and ‘precariat’ (‘left-behinds’), 12, 13, 43–8, 50, 91, 98–9, 110, 111, 131; the rich as losing faith in, 122–3; Russia’s hostility to, 6–8, 79, 85; space for as shrinking, 72–3; technocratic mindset of elites, 88–9, 92–5, 111; Trump as mortal threat to, 97, 104, 111, 126, 133–6, 138, 139, 161, 169–70, 178–84, 203–4; and US-led invasion of Iraq (2003), 8, 81, 85; Western toolkit for, 77–9; see also politics in West Diamond, Larry, 83 digital revolution, 51–5, 59–66, 67–8, 174; cyber-utopians, 52, 60, 65; debate over future impact, 56; and education, 197, 198; exponential rate of change, 170, 172, 197; internet, 34, 35, 127, 128, 129–30, 131, 163; internet boom (1990s), 34, 59; and low productivity growth, 34, 59, 60; as one-sided exchange, 66–7; and risk-averse/conformist mindset, 40 diplomacy and global politics: annexation of Crimea (2014), 8, 173; China’s increased prestige, 19–20, 26–8, 29–30, 35, 83–5, 159; declining US/Western hegemony, 14, 21–2, 26–8, 140–1, 200–1; existential challenges in years ahead, 174–84; multipolarity concept, 6–8, 70; and nation’s popular imagination, 162–3; parallels with 1914 period, 155–61; and US ‘war on terror’, 80–1, 140, 183; US–China relations, 25–6, 145–6, 157–61, 165; US–China war scenario, 145–53, 161; US–Russia relations under Obama, 79 Doha Round, 73 drugs and narcotics, 37–8 Drutman, Lee, 68 Dubai, 48 Durkheim, Émile, 37 Duterte, Rodrigo, 136–7, 138 economists, 27 economy, global see global economy; globalisation, economic; growth, economic Edison, Thomas, 59 education, 42, 44–5, 53, 55, 197, 198 Egypt, 82, 175 electricity, 58, 59 Elephant Chart, 31–3 Enlightenment, 24, 104 entrepreneurialism, decline of in West, 39–40 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 137 Eribon, Didier, 104–10, 111 Ethiopia, 82 Europe: ‘complacent classes’ in, 40; decline of established parties, 89; geopolitical loss, 141; growth of inequality in modern era, 43; identity politics in, 139–40; migration crisis, 70, 100, 140, 180–1; nationalism in, 10–11, 102, 108–9; nineteenth-century diplomacy, 7–8, 155–6, 171–2; post-war constitutions in, 116; Putin’s interference in, 179, 180; as turning inwards, 14 European Commission, 118, 120 European Union, 72, 117–19, 139–40, 179–80, 181, 201; see also Brexit Facebook, 39, 54, 67, 178 fake news, 130, 148, 178–9 Farage, Nigel, 98–9, 100, 184 fascism, 5, 77, 97, 100, 117 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 131–2, 133 Felt, Mark, 131–2, 134 financial crisis, global (2008), 27, 29, 30, 91; Atlantic recession following, 30, 63–4, 83–4 financial services, 54 Financial Times, 136, 200 Finland, 139 First World War, 115, 154–5 Flake, Jeff, 134 Florida, Richard, 47, 49, 50, 51 Flynn, Michael, 148, 149 Foa, Roberto Stefan, 123 Ford, Henry, 66–7 Foucault, Michel, 107 France, 15, 37, 63, 102, 104–10, 116; 1968 Paris demonstrations, 188; French Revolution, 3 Franco, General Francisco, 77 Franco-German War (1870–1), 155–6 Frank, Robert H., 30, 35–6, 44 Franklin, Benjamin, 204 Freelancer.com, 63 Friedman, Ben, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, 38 Friedman, Thomas, 74 Frontex (border agency), 181 FSB, 6 Fukuyama, Francis, 12, 83, 101, 139, 193–4; ‘The End of History?’

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society
by Charles Handy
Published 12 Mar 2015

My wife has designed and taught her own photography course via the web to some lucky students. You can monitor your own health and diagnose your illnesses, using the Apple Watch if you want to know the time as well. You can download your favourite music almost free, but you can also make your own music available to others, also for almost nothing. Or you can turn hotelier by using Airbnb to rent out your spare rooms. The auction site eBay creates hundreds of thousands of virtual traders, buying and selling through the site. Everything you can do as a customer you can also do as a supplier, even write your own computer game if you so wish. You can sell a seat in your car, a meal in your home, a parking space outside your house, a loan of your bicycle, even time with your dog, along with limitless other services in the newly christened ‘sharing economy’.

…

You can sell a seat in your car, a meal in your home, a parking space outside your house, a loan of your bicycle, even time with your dog, along with limitless other services in the newly christened ‘sharing economy’. This new fashion is just one more example of the excluded middle, allowing you as an individual to bypass the conventional suppliers of these services by doing it yourself on the web. It is big business for some. By April 2014 Airbnb was valued by investors at $10 billion, bigger than Hyatt or the Intercontinental hotel groups, while the homeowners each earned an average of $7,530 in 2013 by renting out their rooms. Because the start-up costs are minimal, thanks to the internet, the number of new digital enterprises is legion, even though many of them are destined to fail.

Unleashed
by Anne Morriss and Frances Frei
Published 1 Jun 2020

Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, and Jill Tracie Nichols, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (New York: HarperBusiness, 2017). 17. Ibid, 4–11, 80–95. INDEX absence leadership, 131–132 culture and, 165–192 strategy and, 135–163 Adams, John, 3 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), 62 after-action reviews, 79 agony of the super smart (ASS), 40 AirBnB, 102 “A” leaders, 132 Amazon, 158 Anheuser-Busch, 107–108 Apple, 113, 143 Aristotle, 34 attribute maps, 137, 139–140 auftragstaktik, 17 authenticity in digital age, 52–54 triggers, 52–53 trust and, 34–37, 47–54, 57 Average You, 139 Azzarello, Patty, 139 “balanced slates,” 103–104 Basch, Michael, 165–166 Bee, Samantha, 102–103 belonging, 12, 13, 87, 89–127 Bezos, Jeff, 158 bias, 47, 92, 93, 115, 116 Bird, Larry, 45 Black Googlers Network, 5 Black Lives Matter, 24 black working moms, 126–127 Blendoor, 103 blind submissions, 102 bro culture, 180 Brown-Philpot, Stacy, 5, 148–152, 161 Bummer You, 139 Burns, Ursula, 101 Carlzon, Jan, 159–160 change beginning, 90–91 to culture, 167, 182–185, 186–190 managing, 152 resistance to, 92–94 Chouinard, Yvon, 42 Coleman, Debi, 77 common information effect, 48–49 communal workspaces, 40 communication of change, 152 of devotion, 82–84 directness in, 22–23 effective, 45–46 of strategy, 156–161 communication triangle, 46, 56 compensation, 121–122, 146–148 constructive advice, 75–76 Corning, 80–81 Costco, 44 cultural fit, 102–104 cultural values, 166–172 at Netflix, 168–169, 172 at Riot Games, 124, 181 at Uber, 32, 55 culture, 12–14, 132, 165–192 changing, 167, 182–185, 186–190 defined, 166–169, 172 examining your, 176–178 humor and, 170–172 of inclusion, 104–108 problems, 172–182 role of, 165–166 Culture Change Playbook, 182–185 culture of inclusion, creating, 104–107 culture warrior, 168, 177, 182 Curl-Mix, 157 deeply/simply communication, 158 #deleteUber, 31 DeLong, Tom, 90–91 Dempsey, Martin, 16–17 development, 109, 112–114 devotion, 62–67, 72–73, 74, 81, 82–84 diverse teams, 48–49 diversity, 89–90 attracting diverse talent, 95–104 celebrating, 105, 107 cherishing, 105, 107–108 Doukeris, Michel, 107–108 Drucker, Peter, 132 Drybar, 157 Dunaway, Cammie, 96–97, 102 Duolingo, 96–97 Dweck, Carol, 72–73, 74, 191 Edmondson, Amy, 107 1844 organization, 96 empathy constructive advice and, 75 future of work and, 42–44 trust and, 34–41, 51, 57 empathy wobble, 39–41, 42 employees attracting diverse, 95–104 development of, 109, 112–114 firing, 84, 85–86 investment in, 44, 55–56 outside lives of, 83–84, 100–101 promotion process for, 114–115, 116 retaining, 120–122 selection of, 102 supporting queer, 110–113 toxic, 123 wages of, 146–148 empowerment leadership, 4–5, 10–15, 18–21 in action, 16–18 belonging and, 90 commitment to, 116 development of, 71–87 getting started with, 22–23 Endeavor, 121 equal opportunity, 104–114 equal pay, 121–122 Escobari, Marcela, 43–44 exit interviews, 175 Facebook, 102 FedEx, 165–166 feedback giving effective, 22–23 positive, 73–76 fidelity, 61, 63, 64, 66, 73 firing, with respect, 85–86 forgiveness, 123 Fowler, Susan, 31, 174 Franco-Prussian War, 17 Freire, Paulo, 44 Gandhi, Mohandas, 24 Gelb, Scott, 124–126 gender bias, 117–118 gender equity, 91, 115 gender identities, 110–112 gig economy, 148 GLAAD, 110 good jobs research, 147–148 Google, 5, 79 grace, 123, 124–126 Grace Hopper Celebration, 96 Gross, Terry, 82 growth mindset, 72–73, 191 Hannenberg, Emily, 17–18 Harvard Business School, 91, 115, 122, 186–190 Hastings, Reed, 169, 172 high standards, 77–81 hiring quotas, 104 Hoffman, Reid, 9, 11 Hogan, Kathleen, 116, 191 Holder, Eric, 51 homogenous teams, 48–49 Hoobanoff, Jamie, 98 HP, 139 Hsieh, Tony, 146 Huffington, Arianna, 7, 32 human resources life cycle, 90 Human Rights Campaign, 110 humor, 170–172 identity gender, 110–112 letting go of, 71–72 implicit bias, 116 improv, 20–21 inclusion, 50, 89–91 attracting diverse talent and, 95–104 commitment to, 116 culture of, 104–108 dial, 104–105 equal opportunity to thrive and, 104–114 growth and, 124 levels of, 104–108 promotions process and, 114–115, 116 of queer people, 110–112 resistance to, 92–94 at Riot Games, 124–126 talent retainment and, 120–122 working toward full, 126–127 inclusive hiring, 97 inclusive meetings, 108–109, 112–114 inclusive teams, 49, 89 “indignities” list, 101 informal development, 112–114 information common information effect, 48–49 learning from new, 54 Innova Schools project, 69–70 Intel, 79 Intercorp, 67–70 Isaac, Mike, 172–173 Isaacson, Walter, 77 JetBlue, 44, 167 Jobs, Steve, 77, 80–81 Johnson, Claire Hughes, 14 jokes, 170–172 Jordan, Michael, 3 Joyce, Meghan, 31 justice, 60–61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 71, 87, 122–123 Kalanick, Travis, 31–32, 51, 54, 172–176, 178–179 Kelleher, Herb, 136–138, 161 Khosrowshahi, Dara, 55, 56, 178–179 Krause, Aaron, 157 Landit, 14 language, “I” vs.

…

The correction to these concerns is inclusive recruitment processes and rigorous, transparent selection criteria that everyone understands. d. Software tools such as Blendoor have automated the reduction of hiring bias through functionality that includes anonymization of candidate profiles. Blendoor is now being used by recruiters at Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Airbnb, among other high-influence firms. e. See histories of the civil rights movements in the United States and South Africa for the compelling case for quotas as a necessary but insufficient response to systematic discrimination. a. Peter Drucker allegedly once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” setting up a debate about which of the two is more powerful.

Playing With FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early): How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom?
by Scott Rieckens and Mr. Money Mustache
Published 1 Jan 2019

We compromised on a yard, square footage, safety, schools, anything short of running water! And we lowered our budget: Instead of spending $500,000, we wanted a home for no more than $400,000. We played with the idea of buying a duplex; we’d live in one of the units and rent out the other. We talked about renting an extra bedroom to a roommate or to Airbnb travelers. Maybe we’d downsize and move back into an apartment. Then one day I started looking at other areas of the country, including my hometown in Iowa. I knew it was cheaper, but I didn’t realize how much: Taylor and I could buy a four-bedroom house in the place I’d grown up for around $150,000.

…

I got chills and felt grateful to be part of this community and able, through the documentary, to amplify this conversation. Another gift in Dallas was the chance to spend more time with Brandon. We had really bonded in Ecuador, and after the interview at FinCon, Taylor and I invited him over to our Airbnb for coffee. Brandon publishes some of the most current research related to tax code, retirement savings, and investing strategy. Taylor and I were hoping he could look at our jumble of numbers and help us come up with a more comprehensive plan for achieving FIRE. Here is what he told us: 125 The Basics of Cutting Spending: mad fientist’s Advice Brandon (Mad Fientist) kicked off by stressing how simple the FIRE concept is.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore
Published 18 Jun 2018

From the beginning, GOV.UK was designed as a publishing platform – a platform being something that a whole range of actors can make use of without needing to start from scratch. Platforms are the bedrock of digitally native companies. eBay, Alibaba and Amazon are retail platforms that allow anyone to sell their goods there; AirBnB is an accommodation platform, Uber a transactions platform, and so on. Much as the world’s biggest shops now hold almost no stock of their own, GOV.UK is the largest publisher of UK government information despite the central team writing only a tiny percentage of the words. Other services will offer opportunities to build widgets that can be copy and pasted into other projects later.

…

The power of architecture, visual design, art and iconography has been undervalued by a generation of public officials who instinctively discount what cannot be fitted into a rigid business case assessment. Making things look good is seen as a luxury at best, and a distraction at worst. This is unwise, because today’s best services are very well designed. The most successful digital organisations invariably find a strong voice for design (Airbnb was famously started by two designers). Services offered by organisations that are not digital natives need to be well designed too. But to do that, they will have to go about design in an unfamiliar way. Good design meets a clear user need. User needs are hard to identify. You find them by studying what people do, not what they say they do.

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

(Titanic) or “It’s Toy Story with talking animals!” (The Secret Life of Pets). In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also sift through a surfeit of proposals, high-concept pitches are so common that they’re practically a joke. The home rental company Airbnb was once called “eBay for homes.” The on-demand car service companies Uber and Lyft were once considered “Airbnb for cars.” When Uber took off, new start-ups took to branding themselves “Uber for . . .” anything. Creative people often bristle at the suggestion that they have to stoop to market their ideas or dress them in familiar garb. It’s pleasant to think that an idea’s brilliance is self-evident and doesn’t require the theater of marketing.

…

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abercrombie & Fitch, 133–34 absolute value theory, 41 academic world, 60 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 126–27 achievable challenges, 59 Adele, 36 advertising, 12, 38, 40, 41, 57, 181 agglomeration, 75, 75n “aha” effect, 7, 48, 57–60, 71, 98 Airbnb, 61 Alter, Adam, 131 Amazon Video, 12 AMC, 244–45, 249, 251, 252 American Idol (television show), 233 American Press Institute, 266 The Americans (television series), 246 anaphora, 283 animated films, 110–11 anticipation, 80, 116 antimetaboles (ABBA structure), 94, 283 antitheses, 89, 93 aphantasia, 98n aphasias, 86 aphorisms, 93 apocalypse movies, 112–13 Apple, 231–33, 235 Apple Music, 37 art collections, 32 Asimov, Isaac, 106, 108 audiences, 209–23 and advertising, 181 clustering behaviors of, 206 and dark side of fluency, 132 expectations of, 112–14, 143 and film industry, 107–8 of Forrest’s Etsy shop, 209–15, 219–220 and gender equality in movies, 127–28 influence of rankings on, 205–6 and journalism, 253–54 and mediums of communication, 225–230 size of, 226–29 and social networks, 215–223 of Star Wars, 285 automobiles, 53–54, 156, 159 Avatar (2009), 115 Axis of Awesome comedy group, 59 Ayala, Robby, 13, 14 Bakula, Dave, 33 Bal du Moulin de la Galette (Renoir), 23–24, 25–26 Ballmer, Steve, 232 Barasch, Alixandra, 226–27 Barber, Paul, 120 Barker, Eileen, 217 Barry, Sumi, 240 Baum, Matthew, 38 beauty, 27–28, 29, 31–32, 314n42 Beethoven, Ludwig, 4 Bell, Alexander Graham, 151 Beller-McKenna, Daniel, 4 Ben-Hur (1959), 10 “Benign Violation Theory,” 146–47 Berger, Jonah, 227 Bezos, Jeff, 248–49 bias, unconscious, 125, 130 Bieber, Justin, 34, 36 Bieschke, Eric, 67–68 Billboard, 80–82, 134, 166, 175, 176–77, 238 Birkhoff, George David, 27 birthrates, 155–56 Blackboard Jungle (1955), 157, 173–75, 177, 183 The Blacklist (television series), 239 #BlackLivesMatter movement, 82n black musicians, 176–77, 289 Blair, Tony, 44 Blogojowitz, Peter, 121 books and reading and audience expectations, 143, 143n and bookstores, 254, 292 classic literature, 203–4 comic books, 157, 179, 235 and communication with fans, 205 e-books, 292 golden age of, 254, 255, 258 and Gutenberg’s printing press, 150, 288 and literacy, 137, 150, 288 Pareto principle in, 180 power of, 98–99 and prizewinners, 143 Borges, Jorge Luis, 1, 15 Bose, Satyendra Nath, 179 Bourdieu, Pierre, 279 Boyd, John, 278 Boyer, Walter, 77–78 Brahms, Johannes, 2–5, 6–7, 100, 285, 306 brands, 40–41 Braque, Georges, 57 Bratches, Sean, 63 Braudel, Fernand, 138 Breaking Bad (television series), 249 broadcasters and broadcast diffusion, 189–190, 194–97, 200–203, 206, 207–8 Brooks, Richard, 173–74 Bruzzese, Vincent, 106–8, 111–14, 127–28 Buffett, Warren, 234–35 Bulgrin, Artie, 63, 64 Bumble, 222–23 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 115 Bush, Jeb, 39 business executives, portrayals of, 127–28 BuzzFeed, 300–301 Caillebotte, Gustave, 20–27, 24n, 32–33, 251, 306, 312n22 Caillebotte effect, 37 Caillebotte Seven, 24, 312n22 “Call Me Maybe” (Jepsen), 34 Calvino, Italo, 1, 14–15 Cameron, James, 115 Campbell, Joseph, 104–5, 108–10, 109n,110n, 111, 117 Carnegie, Dale, 93–94 Cassandras, 234–35 Cedrone, Danny, 165 celebrities, 194, 195 Cézanne, Paul, 22, 23, 24, 312n22 challenges, thrill associated with, 49–50, 57 change, societal/cultural, 128–130, 292 chaos, 167, 172, 175–76, 177, 180–81, 183 Chartbeat, 276–79, 280 Chase, David, 247, 252 Cheers (television series), 241, 242 chiasmus, 90n, 93 children’s entertainment, 123–25 chills, 96–101 cholera, spread of, 191–93, 194, 327n193 Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberley, 138 Cialdini, Robert, 142, 144 Citizen Kane (1941), 116 Clarke, Richard W., 262 Clemens, Nicole, 245–46, 251 clickbait, 270–71 cliffhangers, 103 Clinton, Bill, 38 clothing fashions, 137–39, 152, 159 clustering effects, 179, 180, 206 CNN, 64–65 Cochran, Johnnie, 93 collaborative filtering, 69–70 comic books, 157, 179, 235 communication effect of mediums on, 225–230 with fans, 205 inside jokes, 210, 213, 215 technologies of, 149–153 usage trends in, 288, 288–89 complexity, desire for, 71 consumer preferences and habits, 55–56, 70, 160, 179 coolness, 158–160, 218 Coppola, Francis Ford, 104, 105 Cosmopolitan magazine, 47 Courtier-Dutton, David, 36 Crawford, Evans, 91 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 42 Culbertson, Patch, 236–38 cults, 217–18 cultural capital, 279–280 cultural cognizance, 279–280 curiosity gap, 66 Cutting, James, 23–26 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand), 224–25, 228, 230 Dante, 204 dark broadcasters, 194, 195, 201 dating, 156 dating apps, 220–23, 229–230 Davis, Geena, 123 Dawson, Jim, 175 death, 119–122 Decca Records, 164–65, 175n Degas, Edgar, 21, 22, 23, 24, 312n22 density variable in Watts’ theory, 170 designers, 48–49, 50–56, 68, 70, 71–72 Deutsch, Diana, 78–79, 94–95 De Vany, Arthur, 177, 181 The Devil Wears Prada (2006), 128 Di Nonno, Madeline, 123–24, 125, 129 Discover Weekly, 68–70 discovery, pursuit of, 49–50 disfluency, 43–44 and “aha” moments, 57 and anticipation of fluency, 58 benefits of, 131–32 and “less is better” effect, 44, 314n44 mixing fluency with, 62 in social media, 285 distribution and broadcasters, 194–97 and chaos mitigation, 180–81 and Disney merchandise, 300 of Fifty Shades of Grey, 202–3 importance of, 8, 33–34, 36 of Instagram, 9 and Internet, 10, 301 Diva Moms, 197–98 Dodds, Peter, 205, 206 Dorsey, Jack, 9 double standards, 127–28 Douglass, Charles, 144–48 Duchamp, Marcel, 169 Dumb and Dumber (1994), 99, 100 Dunham, Lena, 247 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 26, 251 Dutton, Denis, 31 earworms, 79–80 Eco, Umberto, 118, 300 economics, 154, 155–56, 157, 159, 255 education and birthrates, 156 and first-name choices, 137 and the printed word, 255 and teenagers, 154, 155, 156, 157 80-20 rule (Pareto principle), 179–180 Einstein, Albert, 179 Eisenhower, Dwight, 157 elections of 2016, 64–65 emojis, 152 Enlightenment, 32 epic poems, 86 ER (television series), 243 ESPN, 62–64, 65 Etsy, 209–12, 219–220 exposure, 19–45 of Caillebotte Seven, 27 and familiarity, 56 importance of, 36 “mere exposure effect,” 29, 40n origin of, 42 pervasive power of, 42 on radio, 33, 34 of “Rock Around the Clock,” 166 Faber, Bertha, 3, 100 Facebook backlash against, 150n and biases, 130 and clickbait, 270–71 and communication trends, 151, 152 and consumer behavior, 14 and disfluency, 285 early success of, 222 most popular stories on, 225–26, 277 and network effects, 220n and news consumption, 265, 266, 273, 275 News Feed of, 267–68, 269, 269n, 274–75 and reader preferences, 267–273, 274 self-promotion on, 229 and size of audience, 228 and suppression of conservative content, 274 and teenagers, 159 faces, beautiful, 30–31 familiarity in academic world, 60 and biases, 130 and derivation, 59–60 downsides of, 132 and ESPN, 63–64 and falsehoods, 130–31 and fluency, 43–45, 56 and headlines, 66–67 and meaning, 214 and movie making, 181–82 in music, 67–68 and news coverage, 64 power of, 7 preference for, 29, 49, 284 and surprise, 62, 65, 70–71 too much, 56–57 and “Wiegenlied” (lullaby), 7 fan fiction, 185–87, 202, 203–5, 306 FanFiction.net, 185–86, 202 fashion, 133–153 and choice, 133 in clothing, 137–39, 137n, 152 and communication, 149–153 and economics, 133–34 and first-name choices, 135–37, 139–142, 152–53, 322–23n135 and laugh tracks on television, 144–49 and Laver’s law, 139 and Loewy, 49 and marketing, 49, 134 and popularity, 140–43 and social influence, 142 Favreau, Jon, 86–91 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 28 Fellini, Federico, 104 Fifty Shades of Grey (Leonard), 185–87, 197–205, 206–7, 306 first-name choices, 135–37, 139–142, 152–53, 322–23n135 Fiscus, Kathy, 263 Flash Gordon (television series), 104–5 Flesch-Kincaid readability test, 91–92 The Floor Scrapers (Caillebotte), 21 fluency, 43–45 and “aha” moments, 57, 71 and audiences, 132 and biases, 130 and cost of information, 131 dark side of, 132 and repetition, 85 and resistance to marketing, 56–57 See also disfluency Ford, Gerald, 38 Ford, Peter, 172–74, 306, 324 Forrest, Vincent, 209–15, 219–220, 285 Foundation trilogy (Asimov), 106, 108 “4 Chords” video, 59 Fowler, Will, 263 Fox News, 115n, 130 France, fashion on, 138 free play of the mind, 42, 44 Friends (television series), 240, 243 Friendster, 151 Fun (band), 134 FX (television channel), 245–46, 251 Gallup, George, 258–261, 259n, 260n, 267, 269, 275 Game of Thrones (television series), 247–48 gay marriage, 128–29 Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, 123–26 gender equality in entertainment, 123–28, 321n126 General Motors, 48 German immigration to the United States, 5, 7 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 22 Gestetner, Sigmund, 51 The Ghost Map (Johnson), 191 Giffords, Gabby, 86 Girls (television series), 247 Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), 128 golden ratio, 27, 28 Goldman, William, 233 Goodreads.com, 143, 201–2 goose bumps, 96–101 Gordon, Flash (fictional superhero), 103–4, 105, 115, 118 Gordon, Robert, 282 Greco, Al, 178 Gutenberg, Johannes, 150, 288 habituation/dishabituation, 82–85, 83n, 84n Haile, Tony, 277–79 Haley, William, Jr., 163–67, 174, 183–84, 306 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 98, 99 Harmsworth, Alfred, 256, 256n Hayward, Amanda, 187, 200 HBO, 244, 246–48, 252 headlines, Reddit, 66–67 Heidegger, Martin, 29 Hekkert, Paul, 49–50 heroes and hero’s journey, 103–4, 108–11 The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell), 108, 110 The Hidden Fortress (1958), 114–15, 118 high-concept pitches, 61–62 Hill, George Washington, 53 hindsight bias, 171n hip-hop/rap music, 81–82 history, 129 History of Impressionism (Rewald), 24n HitPredictor, 35, 37 Hollywood.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 28 Jan 2020

In some cases, firms like Uber have tried to take advantage of legalistic arguments by claiming that their workers are independent contractors—even as the company controls many details of what they do. In some countries, courts have ruled against these obvious ruses. Box 9.1: The Gig Economy in Europe, Its Problems, and Possible Solutions Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit are examples of internet-based companies that connect clients with service providers (mini-cab drivers, owners of accommodation, and domestic work, respectively) through easy-to-use mobile apps. They often operate in a legal vacuum. While owners and shareholders reap large profits from low labor costs, workers–contractors pay for fuel, maintenance, insurance, and other direct costs.

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Some aspects of the new technologies should enable better enforcement of at least minimum wage and hourly conditions.¶ Platforms that fail to comply with regulations or engage in other illegal activities should be dealt with harshly. Importantly, claiming to be a “technology company,” a common dodge, should not be seen as a free pass for exploitation. Taxation. A value-added tax has been applied to Airbnb; other taxes could be applied automatically to other internet transactions. In Uruguay, the government requires mandatory social security coverage for all taxi drivers who operate through Uber and other platforms. This is done through a customized electronic application—again showing that the new technologies can actually be used to implement better policies.

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Page numbers in italics refer to charts. accelerated depreciation allowances, 194 activation of labor force, 273 active labor market programs, 273 Africa, 315 aggregate demand cycle of, 58 decrease in, 40–41, 44–46 inequality growth and, 46–48 as spillover issue, 58 stimulating, 60–61 structural policies and, 69 Airbnb, 269 alcohol and tobacco taxes, 200–201 Amazon, 15–16, 129, 131–32 antitrust issues, 131, 132, 134, 135, 326–27 Apple, as tax avoider, 195, 197 artificial intelligence (AI), 298 asset management industry, 169–70 asymmetric shocks, 76 austerity alternatives to, 24, 53–55 breaking from, 50 endangering social protection, 246–47 expansionary austerity, 42 health care weakened by, 242 impacting too-low public investment, 101–6 in 2008 crisis aftermath, 35–37 unemployment, as adverse effect of, 49–50 Austerity Doctrine, 17 balanced budget multiplier, 52–53 banking sector.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

But despite their best efforts, a recent high-profile partnership between the Watson team and MD Anderson, a large American cancer hospital, ended in conspicuous failure: the $60 million system designed to help treat cancer was deemed “not ready for human investigational or clinical use.”8 Indeed, the companies behind the health care technologies that really change our lives may not exist yet. And the same goes for the rest of the economy. After all, many of today’s most familiar technology names—Airbnb, Snapchat, Spotify, Kickstarter, Pinterest, Square, Android, Uber, WhatsApp—did not exist a dozen years ago.9 Many technologies that will be household names in the future probably have not yet been invented. WHY BIG? Like today’s tech giants, the technology companies that dominate in the future are also likely to be very big.

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Today, of course, we have moved beyond telephone landlines, and the obvious place to start when thinking about networks is with social media platforms. Facebook and Twitter, for instance, would be far less fun for their users (and far less lucrative for their owners) if there were no other people online to read what they share. This is also true of many other systems. Platforms like Airbnb and Uber become more valuable the more people there are using them: more apartments to rent and travelers looking for a place to stay, more cars to hire and passengers wanting a ride. What’s more, they are built upon rating systems so that users can avoid a dud service—and, again, the more feedback there is, the more reliable such systems become.

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abandonment ability bias Acemoglu, Daron adaptive learning systems admissions policies, conditional basic income and affective capabilities affective computing Age of Labor ALM hypothesis and optimism and overview of before and during twentieth century in twenty-first century Agesilaus AGI. See artificial general intelligence agoge agriculture Airbnb airborne fulfillment centers Alaska Permanent Fund Alexa algorithms alienation al-Khwarizmi, Abdallah Muhammad ibn Musa ALM (Autor-Levy-Murnane) hypothesis AlphaGo AlphaGo Zero AlphaZero Altman, Sam Amara, Roy Amazon artificial intelligence and changing-pie effect and competition and concerns about driverless vehicles and market share of network effects and profit and Andreessen, Marc ANI.

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere
by Tsedal Neeley
Published 14 Oct 2021

The country-of-origin effect: Robert D. Schooler, “Product Bias in the Central American Common Market,” Journal of Marketing Research 2, no. 4 (1965): 394–97. Mexican consumers began boycotting American products: Jack Jenkins, “Why Palestinians Are Boycotting Airbnb,” ThinkProgress, January 22, 2016, https://archive.thinkprogress.org/why-palestinians-are-boycotting-airbnb-d53e9cf12579/; Ioan Grillo, “Mexicans Launch Boycotts of U.S. Companies in Fury at Donald Trump,” Time, January 27, 2017, http://time.com/4651464/mexico-donald-trump-boycott-protests/. heavily trending hashtags: Grillo, “Mexicans Launch Boycotts.”

Retire Before Mom and Dad
by Rob Berger
Published 10 Aug 2019

One of them was Abby Hayes. Abby worked with me for years as a writer and editor, and she continues to write for the site today. One topic she has covered is Airbnb. She and her husband rent out a room in their home. The income has grown to the point where it covers their mortgage. I get that not everybody wants to rent out a room in their home. Abby’s story, however, is a reminder of the creative ways people can make the most of their money. You can read more about Abby and Airbnb here: https://www.retirebeforemomanddad.com/AbbyHayes. Question 3: Can I get what I need for less? The simple act of comparison shopping once a year can save you a bundle.

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth
by Nick Maggiulli
Published 15 May 2022

Though some people can leave the rat race at 35 and enjoy their lives, others find it much more difficult (and not for financial reasons). For example, after having a discussion about the FIRE movement online, a man named Terrence (not his real name) reached out to me on Twitter to describe his experience as a FIRE nomad. Terrence had retired two years earlier and was now traveling the world and living out of Airbnbs for one to three months at a time. Though his lifestyle would be considered glamorous to many, Terrence described his life as a “lonely existence” that ultimately wouldn’t work for most people. He concluded: “Embracing a nomadic FIRE lifestyle means accepting that you are no longer relevant or important and in some ways now operate in the ether between existence and non-existence.”⁵⁸ It can be scary stuff.

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While doing all of this, you also have to deal with the added stress of having another liability on your balance sheet. When this goes right, owning an investment property can be wonderful, especially when you have borrowed most of the money to finance the purchase. However, when things go wrong, like they did in 2020 with pandemic-induced travel restrictions, they can go really wrong. As many Airbnb entrepreneurs learned the hard way, investment properties aren’t always so easy. While the returns on investment properties can be much higher than stocks or bonds, these returns also require far more work to earn them. Lastly, buying individual investment properties is similar to buying individual stocks in that they aren’t diversified.

The Passenger: Paris
by AA.VV.
Published 26 Jun 2021

But Hidalgo did not give in to the opinion polls (in 2018 only 16 per cent of Parisians were happy with her work) and resubmitted the measure on new grounds that could not be challenged. As well as making large areas of the city centre free of cars she wants to replace thousands of parking spaces with trees. School canteens must serve organic food, and she is dreaming of a blanket ban on single-use plastics. She has denounced and fought Airbnb in an attempt to slow down mass tourism and, in Covid-19, seems to have found an ally in opening up the population’s eyes to the need to rethink the city. MS AVERAGE So far I’ve neglected to mention one more Other, one who is less directly under attack than the types of femininity discussed so far but just as fictitious and essential to the shoring up of our notorious Parisienne.

…

Every multi-millionaire wants a pied-à-terre in the capital, but Paris has more than ten thousand homeless. In 2015 the poverty rate reached 16.1 per cent. Meanwhile, the middle classes do what they can in the city and, although they know they’re making a pact with the devil, willingly sublet their apartment on Airbnb to help make ends meet, something they would struggle to do otherwise. Furthermore, those friends I met when I arrived in Paris, such as Anne – whom I also believed at first to be a snob – were they not also mostly renters themselves? Did they not have money troubles, too? They were cultured, true, but did they really live in luxury?

Lonely Planet Iceland
by Lonely Planet

Most places open year-round and many offer discounts or variable pricing online. SHORT-TERM RENTALS Reykjavík's sky-high summertime accommodation prices have led enterprising locals in the capital’s prized neighbourhoods to rent their apartments (or rooms) to short-stay visitors. Prices often beat commercial rates, though of course there's no maid, concierge etc. Try Airbnb (www.airbnb.com), Booking.com (www.booking.com) and Couchsurfing (www.couchsurfing.org), and aim for a Reykjavík 101 postal code to be centrally located. Old Reykjavík CenterHótel PlazaHOTEL€€ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %595 8550; www.plaza.is; Aðalstræti 4; d incl breakfast from kr28,300; i) A full-service hotel in an enviably central spot in the Old Reykjavík quarter, this bland member of the CenterHótel chain has business-oriented rooms with polished wooden floors, and great views from the higher levels.

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When polled, 56% of Icelanders acknowledge the job opportunities created by tourism, and 62% say that it has increased their interest in Iceland's natural landscapes. But there's a flipside. Short-term apartment rentals such as Airbnb in the centre of Reykjavík are pushing locals out of the rental market. News reports consistently feature the destruction of the environment, or rescues of stranded tourists from glaciers, mountainsides and wave-swept beaches by Iceland's search and rescue team, a volunteer- and donation-based operation. In 2016 more than 75% of Icelanders considered the pressure from tourism on the environment to be too high. Responses include limits on Airbnb-type rentals, additional cautionary signs and barriers at some sights, restrictions on free camping in campervans, an educational campaign (http://inspired.visiticeland.com/academy), and improved methods for learning about safety and logging hikes (www.safetravel.is).

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Grundarfjörður HI HostelHOSTEL€ (%562 6533; www.hostel.is; Hlíðarvegur 15; dm from kr4750, d with/without bathroom from kr17,900/12,900; i) This outfit features everything from prim dorm rooms to smart, apartment-style lodging. Reception is in the red house (at the listed address), while accommodation is spread across several buildings in town. HI members get a discount of kr750. H5 ApartmentsAPARTMENT€€ (%898 0325; Hrannarstígur 5; apt kr23,700) Large modern apartments in the centre of town. Book via Airbnb or booking.com. Hótel FramnesHOTEL€€ (%438 6893; www.hotelframnes.is; Nesvegur 8; s/d incl breakfast from kr17,100/24,000; i) This basic dockside inn has a spacious lobby, and small rooms, some with sea or mountain views. A secondary building nearby holds the least costly rooms. The restaurant gets mixed reviews. 5Eating Emil's CafeCAFE€ (Grundargata 35, Saga Centre; mains kr1190-1950; h9am-9pm) In the Saga Centre, this cheery cafe is tops for cappuccinos, hot soup and sandwiches.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young entrepreneurs around the world use computers and computer technologies to disrupt business models that held sway for centuries. Think of Airbnb, which has placed digital dynamite at the foundations of the hotel industry; or Uber, which has done the same for taxis. Both companies have reinvented how their respective industries are making money by pulling down barriers to entry and allowing anyone who can drive a car (Uber), or has a place to rent (Airbnb), to become taxi drivers and hoteliers. The list goes on and on. Twenty-something start-up founders become billionaires overnight, demonstrating that in the twenty-first century everyone can become a Thomas Edison.

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You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. 3D printers 290 A Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 49 abduction (form of logic) 196–7 abiogenesis 184 Adams, Douglas xviii Aesop’s fables 19–20 aesthetic practices in early humans 9 Africa, exodus of human ancestors 3–4, 6–7, 8–9 A.I. (film) 56–7 AI Singularity 58, 126, 127, 129, 247, 270–5, 290, 302–3 Airbnb 233 algorithms 210–11 Al-Jazari 34 alternative therapies 40 Amazon 233, 246 androids 53–9, 66–73 Andronicus of Cyrrhus 30, 31 animal magnetism 40 Anthropic Principle 126–9 anthropomorphism 19–23, 25–7 antibody recognition system 282–3 Apple 81–2, 233 application programming interface (API) 265 Archimedes (287–212 BCbc) 30, 31 Aristotle 102, 103, 143, 134–42, 195–7 art 3–5, 9, 12–13, 15–18 Artificial Intelligence and human representations of the world 17–18 and the advent of computers 51–3 anthropomorphising inanimate objects 26–7 attitudes towards 45–7 challenges for researchers 52–3 computational model 211–16 current research directions 255 definitions of intelligence 48–9, 52 emergent properties of systems 182–3 emotional connection with 66–73 empirical perspective 152–3 evolution into a simulated universe 127–9 extracting meaning from data 255 human relationships with androids 53–9 imagining true AI 296–303 impacts in the second machine age 266–9 inability to perform basic human functions 275–9 limits of conventional computer technology 275–9 narrative of fear 45–7 narrative of love 45–7 origins of the discipline 256–9 potential for catastrophe 63–6 renewed interest from the 1980s 259–66 sentience in computers 65–6 theological reactions to 67 threat of taking over 58–9 see also AI artificial neural networks 285–7 Ashby, W.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

We go to it anytime to fulfill an ever-widening range of needs—to shop, eat, exercise, travel and meet with one another. We can match partners for love or sex (Match.com, Tinder), match entrepreneurs with investors (kickstarter.com, indiegogo.com), drivers with riders (Uber, Lyft), spare rooms with travelers (Airbnb), public stewards with street-level concerns (SeeClickFix.com), people in need with good Samaritans (causes.com, fundly.com), problems with the talents to solve them (hackathons, InnoCentive.com) and victims with aid-givers and watchdogs (ushahidi.com), to name a few. None of these feats or forums were possible even 10 years ago.

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No fortune is wholly earned by its possessor’s own efforts. Parents, teachers and luck all play a big part along the way—as do publicly provisioned goods like knowledge, technology, markets and infrastructure. Digitization, by multiplying the market reach of a single good idea, yields a “winner-take-all” effect (think Facebook, Uber or Airbnb) that only widens the gap between what one justly earns and what one accumulates.74 The evidence says that the rich haven’t done nearly enough to make that gap acceptable to the societies they live in. Since the turn of the century, total global private wealth has more than doubled; the number of millionaire households worldwide has more than tripled (from 5.5 to 16.3 million); and those millionaires—despite making up only 1.1 percent of households globally—have concentrated more than half of all private wealth into their own hands.75 Global private giving is harder to quantify, but it certainly hasn’t kept pace.

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Afghanistan, 59, 166, 230 Africa, 195, 236–8, 249, 252–3 and development, 59, 78, 99–101, 161 and Ebola, 181–3 and education 81, 82, 95 and exploration, 18–19, 21, 40, 55–6, 63, 67 and global financial crisis, 188 and HIV/AIDS, 76, 98, 185 and Internet access, 96, 197 and life expectancy, 76 and politics, 23, 90 and population growth, 53–5, 84 and trade, 63, 72, 97, 183 and urbanization, 54–5 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS Airbnb, 145, 261 Al-Qaeda, 166, 207, 210 ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, 241 Apple, 43, 241 Arab Spring, 24, 36, 211, 222–4, 228 architecture, 142–5 Aristarchus, 133–4 Aristotle, 89, 144, 256, 260 Arthur, Brian, 132, 246 astronomy, 29–30, 105–7, 133, 148, 150, 156, 263.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age
by Robert Wachter
Published 7 Apr 2015

We sat around a low table, the garage door that serves as the front entrance open to the street. As Zeiger sees it, the Internet has gone through two distinct phases. The first, in which his old employer, Google, was the victor, involved democratizing access to content. The second, characterized not only by Facebook and Twitter, but also by Uber, Airbnb, and Yelp, has been about democratizing access to other people. When Zeiger was at Google, one of his roles was to help the company understand this transition as it pertained to healthcare. He discovered a small, e-mail-based cancer community run by a guy named Gilles Frydman whose wife had a serious cancer.

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This makes it harder for nimble new entrants to come in and begin taking over a previously ignored part of the market, the pattern of disruptive innovation famously described by Clay Christensen. It was the deregulation of the airlines in the 1980s that paved the way for Southwest Airlines and JetBlue. And the relatively unencumbered world of the Internet has allowed the emergence of companies like Amazon and Airbnb. Such disruptors often sneak around the edges of a market (and sometimes the law; think Napster or Uber), and, by the time the incumbents wake up and begin trying to defend their franchise, the new service is too entrenched to take down. When this example is applied to the world of healthcare IT, the incumbent that everyone refers to is Epic.

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This slide was rapidly followed by a series of videos that displayed a smorgasbord of unflattering, histrionic, and sometimes buffoonish Bush interviews and stage appearances. In one particularly damning mash-up, Bush slings around virtually every Internet buzz-term: “creating network effect, creating an Airbnb.” “a little bit of Facebook.” “it’s a little bit like Salesforce.com, but we do more work.” “athenahealth is a cloud-based service—we sell results. Amazon has great software, athena has great software; Amazon sells stories, we sell paid claims, settled appointments, filed claims.” Einhorn then cued another clip, this one of the King of Market Hype, Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

Gox—generated so much confidence that Wences and Micky began moving their trading to Bitstamp. Mt. Gox still had 80 percent of all Bitcoin trading, but Bitstamp’s market share began to creep up. For those looking to buy smaller quantities of Bitcoin—BitInstant’s specialty—people found their way to Coinbase, a San Francisco–based startup that had been opened by a veteran of Airbnb and a former trader at Goldman Sachs at the beginning of 2013. The company had managed to interest several investors and had maintained a bank account with Silicon Valley Bank. But even with Coinbase executives at the bank made it clear that the Bitcoin business was testing their patience. In order to stay on top of anti–money laundering laws, the bank had to review every single transaction, and these reviews cost the bank more money than Coinbase was bringing in.

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In May, Pete Thiel’s Founders Fund announced that it was putting $2 million into BitPay, the payment processing company that allowed merchants to accept Bitcoin and end up with dollars in their bank—taking advantage of the Bitcoin network’s quick and cheap transactions. But the company that was attracting the most attention was Coinbase, founded by the veterans of Airbnb and Goldman Sachs. The twentysomething cofounders had clean-cut looks and soft-spoken ways that naturally engendered confidence. Investors liked that the pair avoided the ideological talk of overthrowing the Fed and instead sold their company as a safe and easy place for consumers to buy and hold coins that wouldn’t be subject to endless delays and scrutiny from the authorities.

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As the comments at Lawsky’s hearing suggested, this was nearly the opposite of the attitude in Silicon Valley, which had not been implicated in the financial crisis. The tech industry was increasingly confident about its own ability to change the world, emboldened by the success of companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. Some of the most popular tech companies were ones such as Airbnb and Uber that openly challenged cumbersome regulations like those imposed on hotels and taxis. In the financial networks that Bitcoin was hoping to challenge, tech investors like Fred Wilson saw just another set of regulations that could be disrupted to create a more efficient market. If anything, the financial industry seemed even more open to disruption because the incumbent businesses were so afraid of breaking the rules.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

The Crowd Economy: This includes crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, ICOs, leveraged assets, and staff-on-demand—essentially, all the developments that leverage the billions of people already online and the billions coming online. All have revolutionized the way we do business. Just consider leveraged assets, which allow companies to scale at speed. Airbnb has become the largest “hotel chain” in the world, yet they don’t own a single hotel room. They leverage (that is, rent out) the assets (spare bedrooms) of the crowd. These models also lean on staff-on-demand, which provides a company with the agility needed to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.

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The majority of our organizations and institutions were built in another era, at a time when success was measured in size and stability. For most of the last century, standard metrics for business success were number of employees, ownership of assets, that sort of thing. In our exponential world, agility beats stability, so why own when you can lease? And why lease when you can crowdsource? Airbnb built the largest hotel chain in the world, yet doesn’t own a single room. Uber and Lyft have all but replaced cab companies in every major metropolis yet don’t own a single taxi. And this level of flexibility, while now a requirement in business, is equally necessary in governance, which is our third and final category.

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Abe, Shinzo, 47 Ablow, Keith, 247 Abu Dhabi, 217 abundance, exponential technologies and, 261–63 Abundance (Diamandis and Kotler), xi, 7, 78, 82, 99, 145, 163, 204, 213, 261–62 Abundance Digital, 264, 265 Abundance360, xii, 264, 265 Advano, Aman, 108–9 advertising: AI assistants and, 123–24 big data and, 118 Spatial Web and, 118–20 technological change and, 117–24 aerial ridesharing, 4 AeroFarms, 205 aeroponics, 204, 205 Affectiva, 137 affective computing, 136–38 Affective Computing Group, 137 aging, 170–72 as programmed process, 88–89, 169–70 see also longevity agriculture, reinvention of, 225–26 AI assistants, 35, 37, 132, 135–36, 138, 198 advertising and, 123–24 shopping and, 100–102, 113, 123–24 AI personas, 132 Airbnb, 84, 234 Akonia Holographics, 52 Aleph Farms, 208 Alexa, 100 algorithms, 87, 88 Alibaba, 99, 100, 107, 114 Alipay, 192 Alkahest, 178 Allen, Mark, 178 Allen, Paul, 176 All Nippon Airways (ANA), 26 Alphabet, 46, 89, 162, 235 Project Loon of, 39–40 Verily Life Sciences of, 157 see also Google AlphaFold, 167 AlphaGo, 36 AlphaGo Zero, 36, 37 Alzheimer’s disease, 82, 178 Amarasiriwardena, Gihan, 108–9 Amazon, 4, 21, 47, 100, 107, 108, 114, 119, 127 disruptive business model of, 98–99 Echo of, 35, 101, 132 Project Kuiper and, 40 Amazon Go, 105, 196, 229 ANA Avatar XPRIZE, 26 anandamide, 247 Andreesen, Marc, 32 Andrews, T.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

Similar to the way the hardware engineers of the 1970s and ’80s had brought about a shift in venture funding from Wall Street and the East Coast world of finance to Sand Hill Road and the West Coast world of software, many of the engineers who had ridden the first dot-com wave became poised to fund the next round of tech companies. Marc Andreessen would swap the jeans he had worn on the cover of Time for a sports jacket, founding the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with his longtime colleague Ben Horowitz in 2009. Their firm would become an investor in Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Lyft, and Airbnb. In an oft-quoted 2011 piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Andreessen explained how the capital needs of tech companies had changed: On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.

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At two batches a year, that’s half a billion dollars of capital a year pouring into start-ups from one organization alone. As YC recently noted on its website, “Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded over 2,000 startups. Our companies have a combined valuation of over $100B,” and include names such as the gig economy companies DoorDash, Instacart, and Airbnb, as well as the self-driving car company Cruise. The YC program is so competitive that just being accepted into it is often touted as a badge of success by would-be entrepreneurs, even if their start-up ideas turn out to be failures. Not wanting to miss out on the action, in 2011 Andreessen Horowitz created a separate fund to invest $50,000 in each start-up accepted into YC’s program.

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We can see around us the beginning of a modern revival of the Luddites, nineteenth-century textile workers who destroyed machines they believed might one day replace them at their jobs: taxi drivers organizing against ride-share applications in New York and other major cities; Barcelona’s crackdown on Airbnb in an effort to sustain the hospitality industry and prevent further urban gentrification. One recent Nobel Prize–winning economist, Paul Romer, even warned that as anger at tech companies boils over, it may result in the bombing of data centers. But like that of the Luddites, whose tactics did not achieve their goal of stopping industrialization, violence aimed at destroying computing machinery will not stop the juggernaut of automation.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Imagine how big and smelly a physical bazaar that offered 7,000 different pairs of used sneakers would need to be. The growth potential of these companies is turbocharged further by another factor: platforms are incredibly capital-efficient. The platforms facilitate an exchange without actually having to spend any (or much) money. The world’s largest cab company, Uber, owns no cabs and employs no drivers. Airbnb hosts more overnight guests than any hotel chain, yet owns no hotels. Alibaba is the world’s largest online showroom for businesses, yet holds no stock. The marketplace takes care of much of the business’s actual logistical processes. Whereas the executive of yesteryear had to worry about where they would find products, when to buy the warehouses to store them, and how to ensure deliveries happened on time, the modern platform executive has done something smarter.

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Cities are often at the forefront of tackling problems caused by exponential technology. It was places like London that first had to contend with the sudden growth of gig-working platforms such as Uber. Barcelona was among the earliest to reckon with the explosion of digital accommodation marketplaces like Airbnb, and all the economic effects that brought. And, as we have seen, cities will be the engine of the Exponential Age economy. The solution may be to develop more federal models of national politics, which give more power to regions and cities to manage their own affairs. They need the ability to attract people and regulate the quality of their citizens’ lives, by increasingly governing their own energy, resources and climate agendas.

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Abu Dhabi, UAE, 250 Acemoglu, Daron, 139 Acorn Computers, 16, 21 Ada Lovelace Institute, 8 additive manufacturing, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 Adidas, 176 advertising, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227–8 AdWords, 227 aeroponics, 171 Afghanistan, 38, 205 Africa, 177–8, 182–3 Aftenposten, 216 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil), 77 agglomeration, 181 Air Jordan sneakers, 102 Airbnb, 102, 188 aircraft, 49–50 Alexandria, Egypt, 180 AlexNet, 33 Algeciras, HMM 61 Alibaba, 48, 102, 108, 111, 122 Alipay, 111 Allen, Robert, 80 Alphabet, 65, 113–14, 131, 163 aluminium, 170 Amazon, 65, 67–8, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122, 135–6 Alexa, 25, 117 automation, 135–6, 137, 139, 154 collective bargaining and, 163 Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21), 135–6 drone sales, 206 Ecobee and, 117 Go stores, 136 Kiva Systems acquisition (2012), 136 management, 154 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 monopoly, 115, 117, 122 Prime, 136, 154 R&D, 67–8, 113 Ami Pro, 99 Amiga, 16 Anarkali, Lahore, 102 anchoring bias, 74 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 Angola, 186 Ant Brain, 111 Ant Financial, 111–12 antitrust laws, 114, 119–20 Apache HTTP Server, 242 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 63 Apple, 47, 62, 65, 85, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122 App Store, 105, 112, 115 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data collection, 228 iOS, 85 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 105 media subscription, 112 watches, 112 APT33 hacker group, 198 Aral, Sinan, 238 Aramco, 108, 198 Armenia, 206–7 Arthur, William Brian, 110, 123 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88, 113, 249 academic brain drain, 118 automation, 125–42 data and, 31–2, 142 data network effect, 106–7 drone technology and, 208, 214 education and, 88 employment and, 126–7 healthcare and, 88, 103 job interviews and, 153 regulation of, 187, 188 arXiv, 59 Asana, 151 Asian Development Bank, 193 Aslam, Yaseen, 148 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 asymmetric conflict, 206 AT&T, 76, 100 Atari, 16 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 Aurora, 141 Australia, 102, 197 automation, 125–42 autonomous weapons, 208, 214 Azerbaijan, 173, 206–7 Ballmer, Steve, 85 Bangladesh, 175 banking, 122, 237 Barcelona, Catalonia, 188 Barlow, John Perry, 184 Barrons, Richard, 195, 211 Bartlett, Albert, 73 batteries, 40, 51, 53–4, 250, 251 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Bayraktar TB2 drone, 206 Bee Gees, 72 Bekar, Clifford, 45 Bell Labs, 18 Bell Telephone Company, 100 Benioff, Marc, 108–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 152 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 4 Bermuda, 119 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 55, 100, 160, 239 Bessen, James, 46 Bezos, Jeffrey, 135–6 BGI, 41 Biden, Joseph, 225 Bing, 107 biological weapons, 207, 213 biology, 10, 39, 40–42, 44, 46 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 biopolymers, 42 bits, 18 Black Death (1346–53), 12 BlackBerry, 120 Blair, Tony, 81 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 22 blitzscaling, 110 Blockbuster, 138 BMW, 177 Boeing, 51, 236 Bol.com, 103 Bollywood, 181 Boole, George, 18 Bork, Robert, 114–15, 117, 119 Bosworth, Andrew, 233 Boyer, Pascal, 75 Boyle, James, 234 BP, 92, 158 brain, 77 Braudel, Fernand, 75 Brave, 242 Brazil, 202 Bremmer, Ian, 187 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 87 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 87, 129, 191 Brookings Institution, 130 BT, 123 Bulgaria, 145 Bundy, Willard Legrand, 149 Busan, South Korea, 56 business, 82, 92–124 diminishing returns to scale, 93, 108 economic dynamism and, 117 economies of scale, 50, 92 growth, 110–13 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 linear value chains, 101 market share, 93–6, 111 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24 network effect, 96–101 platform model, 101–3, 219 re-localisation, 11, 166–79, 187, 252, 255 state-sized companies, 11, 67 superstar companies, 10, 94–6 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252, 255 taxation of, 96, 118–19 Butler, Nick, 179 ByteDance, 28 C40 initiative, 189 Cambridge University, 127, 188 cancer, 57–8, 127 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 car industry, 93 carbon emissions, 35, 90, 251 Carlaw, Kenneth, 45 Carnegie, Andrew, 112 Carnegie Mellon University, 131 Catholic Church, 83, 88 censorship, 216–17, 224–6, 236 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 194 Cerebras, 34 cervical smears, 57–8 chemical weapons, 207, 213 Chen, Brian, 228 chewing gum, 78 Chicago Pile-1 reactor, 64 Chile, 170 China automation in, 127, 137 brainwave reading in, 152 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 245 drone technology in, 207 Great Firewall, 186, 201 Greater Bay Area, 182 horizontal expansion in, 111–12 manufacturing in, 176 misinformation campaigns, 203 raw materials, demand for, 178 Singles’ Day, 48 social credit systems, 230 superstar companies in, 95 US, relations with, 166 chips, 19–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 Christchurch massacre (2019), 236 Christensen, Clayton, 24 CIPD, 153 cities, 11, 75, 169, 179–84, 188, 255 Clegg, Nick, 225–6, 235 climate change, 90, 169, 187, 189, 251, 252 cloud computing, 85, 112 Cloudflare, 200 cluster bombs, 213 CNN, 185, 190 coal, 40, 65, 172 Coase, Ronald, 92 Coca-Cola, 93 code is law, 220–22, 235 cold fusion, 113–14 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 Colombia, 145 colonialism, 167 Columbus, Christopher, 4 combination, 53–7 Comical Ali, 201 commons, 234–5, 241–3, 256 companies, see business comparative advantage, 170 complex systems, 2 compounding, 22–3, 28 CompuServe, 100 computing, 4, 10, 15–36, 44, 46, 249 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88 cloud computing, 85, 112 internet, 47–8, 55, 65, 84 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 machining, 43 Moore’s Law, see Moore’s Law quantum computing, 35 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52 conflict, 87, 189, 190–215 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 de-escalation, 212–13 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 institutional change and, 87 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225 new wars, 194 non-proliferation, 213–14 re-localisation and, 189, 193, 194, 209 consent of the networked, 223 Costco, 67 Coursera, 58 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 12–13, 59, 78–9, 131, 245–9 automation and, 127, 135, 136 cities and, 183 contact-tracing apps, 222–3 gig economy and, 146 lockdowns, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 manufacturing and, 176 misinformation and, 202–4, 247–8 preprint servers and, 60 recession (2020–21), 178 remote working and, 146, 151, 153 supply chains and, 169, 246 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 workplace cultures and, 151, 152 cranks, 54 credit ratings, 162, 229 critical thinking skills, 212 Croatia, 145 Crocker, David, 55 crowdsourcing, 143–4 Cuba, 203 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 99, 212 cultural lag, 85 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 CyberPeace Institute, 214 Daniel, Simon, 173–4 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 183 Darktrace, 197 data, 8, 11, 71, 217–19, 226–31, 235, 237–42, 256 AI and, 8, 32, 33, 58, 106 compensation for, 239 commons, 242 cyberattacks and, 196 doppelgängers, 219, 226, 228, 239 interoperability and, 237–9 network effects, 106–7, 111 protection laws, 186, 226 rights, 240 Daugherty, Paul, 141 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroe thane), 253 death benefits, 151 Dediu, Horace, 24, 30 deep learning, 32–4, 54, 58, 127 deforestation, 251 dehumanisation, 71, 154, 158 deindustrialisation, 168 Deliveroo, 154, 163 Delphi, 100 dematerialised techniques, 166, 175 Denmark, 58, 160, 199–200, 257 Deutsche Bank, 130 Diamandis, Peter, 5 Dickens, Charles, 80 digital cameras, 83–4 Digital Geneva Convention, 211 Digital Markets Act (EU, 2020), 122 digital minilateralism, 188 Digital Nations group, 188 Digital Services Act (EU, 2020), 123 diminishing returns, 93, 108 disinformation, see misinformation DoorDash, 147, 148, 248 dot-com bubble (1995–2000), 8, 108, 150 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 DoubleClick, 117 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 Dubai, UAE, 43 Duke University, 234 dystopia, 208, 230, 253 Eagan, Nicole, 197 eBay, 98, 121 Ecobee, 120 economies of scale, 50, 92 Economist, The, 8, 65, 119, 183, 239 economists, 63 Edelman, 3 education artificial intelligence and, 88 media literacy, 211–12 Egypt, 145, 186 Elance, 144 electric cars, 51, 69, 75, 173–4, 177, 250 electricity, 26, 45, 46, 54, 157, 249–50 see also energy Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 email, 6, 55 embodied institutions, 82 employment, 10, 71, 125–65 automation, 125–42 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 dehumanisation and, 71, 154, 158 flexicurity, 160–61, 257 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 lump of labour fallacy, 139 management, 149–54, 158–9 protections, 85–6, 147–9 reskilling, 159–60 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 Enclosure, 234–5, 241 energy, 11, 37–8, 39–40, 44, 46, 172–4, 250 cold fusion, 113–14 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172, 250 gravitational potential, 53 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 storage, 40, 53, 114, 173–4, 250, 251 wind power, 39–40, 52 Energy Vault, 53–4, 173 Engels, Friedrich, 81 Engels’ pause, 80, 81 environmental movement, 73 Epic Games, 116 estate agents, 100 Estonia, 188, 190–91, 200, 211 Etzion Airbase, Sinai Peninsula, 195 European Commission, 116, 122, 123 European Space Agency, 56 European Union, 6, 82, 147, 186, 226 Excel, 99 exogeny, 2 exponential gap, 9, 10, 67–91, 70, 89, 253 cyber security and, 193 institutions and, 9, 10, 79–88, 90 mathematical understanding and, 71–5 predictions and, 75–9 price declines and, 68–9 superstar companies and, 10, 94–124 exponential growth bias, 73 Exponential View, 8–9 externalities, 97 extremism, 232–4 ExxonMobil, 65, 92 Facebook, 27, 28, 65, 94, 104, 108, 122, 216–17, 218, 219, 221–2, 223 advertising business, 94, 228 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228, 239–40 extremism and, 233–4 Instagram acquisition (2012), 117, 120 integrity teams, 234 interoperability, 237–8 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 misinformation on, 201, 225 network effect and, 98, 223 Oculus acquisition (2014), 117 pay at, 156–7 Phan photo controversy (2016), 216–17, 224, 225 platform model, 101 polarisation and, 233 relationship status on, 221–2 Rohingya ethnic cleansing (2018), 224, 225 US presidential election (2016), 217 WhatsApp acquisition (2014), 117 facial recognition, 152, 208 Factory Act (UK, 1833), 81 Fairchild Semiconductor, 19, 21 fake news, 201–4 family dinners, 86 farming, 170–72, 251 Farrar, James, 148 fax machines, 97 Federal Aviation Administration (US), 236 feedback loops, 3, 13 fertilizers, 35, 90 5G, 203 Financial Conduct Authority, 122 Financial Times, 183 Finland, 160, 211–12 Fitbit, 158 Fiverr, 144 flashing of headlights, 83 flexicurity, 160, 257 flints, 42 flywheels, 54 Ford, 54, 92, 162 Ford, Gerald, 114 Ford, Henry, 54, 162 Ford, Martin, 125 Fortnite, 116 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172 France, 100, 138, 139, 147, 163 free-market economics, 63–4 freelance work, 10, 71, 142–9 Frey, Carl, 129, 134, 141 Friedman, Milton, 63–4, 241 Friedman, Thomas, 167 FriendFeed, 238 Friendster, 26 Fudan University, 245 fund management, 132 Galilei, Galileo, 83 gaming, 86 Gates, Bill, 17, 25, 84 gender, 6 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 87 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 226 General Electric, 52 General Motors, 92, 125, 130 general purpose technologies, 10, 45–8 generative adversarial networks (GANs), 58 Geneva Conventions, 193, 199, 209 Genghis Khan, 44 GEnie, 100 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 Germany, 75, 134, 147 Giddens, Anthony, 82 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 Gilbreth, Lillian, 150 Ginsparg, Paul, 59 GitHub, 58, 60 GlaxoSmithKline, 229–30 global financial crisis (2007–9), 168 Global Hawk drones, 206 global positioning systems (GPS), 197 globalisation, 11, 62, 64, 156, 166, 167–71, 177, 179, 187, 193 internet and, 185 conflict and, 189, 193, 194 Glocer, Thomas, 56 Go (game), 132 GOAT, 102 Gojek, 103 Golden Triangle, 170 Goldman Sachs, 151 Goodfellow, Ian, 58 Google, 5, 35, 36, 94, 98, 104, 108, 115, 122 advertising business, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data network effect, 106–7 death benefits, 151 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 Maps, 113 quantum computing, 35 R&D, 114, 118 vertical integration, 112–13, 116 X, 114 YouTube acquisition (2006), 112, 117 Gopher, 59, 100 GPT-3, 33 Graeber, David, 133–4 Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, 102 Graphcore, 34, 35 graphics chips, 34 Grateful Dead, The, 184 gravitational potential energy, 53 gravity bombs, 195 Greater Bay Area, China, 182 Greenberg, Andy, 199 Gross, Bill, 53 Grove, Andrew, 17 GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije), 199 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 182 Guardian, 8, 125, 154, 226, 227 Guiyang, Guizhou, 166 H1N1 virus, 75 Habermas, Jürgen, 218 Hard Times (Dickens), 80 Hardin, Garrett, 241 Harop drones, 207–8 Harpy drones, 207–8 Harvard University, 150, 218, 220, 221, 253 healthcare artificial intelligence and, 57–8, 88, 103 data and, 230, 239, 250–51 wearable devices and, 158, 251 Helsinki, Finland, 160 Herlev Hospital, Denmark, 58 Hinton, Geoffrey, 32, 126–7 HIPA Act (US, 1996), 230 Hitachi, 152 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Hoffman, Josh, 174 Hoffman, Reid, 110, 111 Holmes, Edward, 245 homophily, 231–4 Hong Kong, 182 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 Houston Islam protests (2016), 203 Houthis, 206 Howe, Jeff, 143 Hsinchu, Taiwan, 181 Hughes, Chris, 217 Hull, Charles, 43 Human + Machine (Daugherty), 141 human brain, 77 human genome, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 250 human resources, 150 Hussein, Saddam, 195 Hyaline, 174 hydroponics, 171 hyperinflation, 75 IBM, 17, 21, 47, 98 IDC, 219 Ideal-X, 61 Ikea, 144 Illumina, 41 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 190 ImageNet, 32 immigration, 139, 168, 183–4 Impossible Foods, 69 Improv, 99 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 India, 103, 145, 181, 186, 224, 253, 254 Indonesia, 103 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81, 157, 235 informational networks, 59–60 ING, 178 innovation, 14, 117 Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen), 24 Instagram, 84, 117, 120, 121, 237 institutions, 9, 10, 79–88, 90–91 path dependence, 86–7 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 integrated circuits, 19 Intel, 16–17, 19, 163 intellectual property law, 82 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), 237 International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers, 164 International Court of Justice, 224 International Criminal Court, 208 International Energy Agency, 77, 82 International Labour Organization, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 87, 167, 187 international organisations, 82 International Organization for Standardization, 55, 61 International Rescue Committee, 184 International Telecommunication Union, 55 internet, 7, 47–8, 55, 65, 72, 75, 84–5, 88, 115, 184–6 code is law, 220–22, 235 data and, 11, 32, 71 informational networks, 59–60 localisation, 185–6 lockdowns and, 12 network effect, 100–101 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 platform model and, 102 public sphere and, 223 standardisation, 55 Wi-Fi, 151 interoperability, 55, 120–22, 237–9, 241, 243, 256–7 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 115, 175 Iran, 186, 196, 198, 203, 206 Iraq, 195–6, 201, 209 Ireland, 57–8, 119 Islamic State, 194, 233 Israel, 37, 188, 195–6, 198, 206, 207–8 Istanbul, Turkey, 102 Jacobs, Jane, 182 Japan, 37, 152, 171, 174 Jasanoff, Sheila, 253 JD.com, 137 Jena, Rajesh, 127 Jio, 103 job interviews, 153, 156 John Paul II, Pope, 83 Johnson, Boris, 79 Jumia, 103 just in time supply chains, 61–2 Kahneman, Daniel, 74 KakaoTalk, 27 Kaldor, Mary, 194 Kapor, Mitchell, 99 Karunaratne, Sid, 140–41, 151 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Keynes, John Maynard, 126, 158 Khan, Lina, 119 Khartoum, Sudan, 183 Kim Jong-un, 198 King’s College London, 179 Kiva Systems, 136 Kobo360, 145 Kodak, 83–4, 88 Kranzberg, Melvin, 254 Krizhevsky, Alex, 32–3, 34 Kubursi, Atif, 178 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 206 Kurzweil, Ray, 29–31, 33, 35, 77 Lagos, Nigeria, 182 Lahore, Pakistan, 102 landmines, 213 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 Laws of Motion, 20 learning by doing, 48, 53 Leggatt, George, 148 Lemonade, 56 Lessig, Larry, 220–21 Leviathan (Hobbes), 210 Li Fei-Fei, 32 life expectancy, 25, 26 light bulbs, 44, 157 Lime, 27 Limits to Growth, The (Meadows et al.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Advocates of a UBI could greatly strengthen their case by focusing their first demands for redistribution on fairly taxing the wealthy, and then gradually expanding their proposed tax base.31 FROM UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME TO JOB GUARANTEE Funding issues may not be the most significant challenge for a UBI. Whether framed as humanitarian relief, Keynesian intervention to stimulate the economy, or just compensation, UBI runs into practical difficulties quickly. Landlords will not ignore a new subvention; they may simply raise rents to capture it. Indeed, platform capitalists like AirBnB are even now accelerating the monetization of “spare rooms,” eerily reminiscent of a Tory policy to impose a “bedroom tax” on benefits recipients in the United Kingdom whom the state deemed to have too much space in their homes. Other powerful players in the contemporary economy are also likely to raise prices.

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Jathan Sadowski and Frank Pasquale, “The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of the Smart City,” First Monday 20, no. 7 (July 6, 2015), https://firstmonday.org/article/view/5903/4660. 79. Violet Blue, “Your Online Activity Is Now Effectively a Social ‘Credit Score,’ ” https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/17/your-online-activity-effectively-social-credit-score-airbnb/. 80. Audrey Watters, “Education Technology and the New Behaviorism,” HackEducation (blog), December 23, 2017, http://hackeducation.com/2017/12/23/top-ed-tech-trends-social-emotional-learning. 81. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 82.

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INDEX Acharya, Ashwin, 292n84 advertising, 49, 69, 101, 109, 301n10; algorithmic, and new media, 20, 30, 73, 89, 92, 94, 95, 99–100, 101, 113; “dark ads,” and manipulative / misleading ones, 89–90, 110 Affectiva, 130 affective computing, 7, 69, 72, 73, 76–77, 112, 130, 214 Afghanistan, 160 Africa, 82, 126, 203 African Americans: and bias in facial recognition software, 123, 125, 126; discrimination against, by diagnostic AI, 38; discrimination against, in Google searches, 98–99; police violence against, 122; suppression of voting by, via Facebook, 94 Afrofuturism, 123, 124 Agency for Digital Italy, 6–7 agriculture, 5, 186, 297n37 AI. See artificial intelligence (AI) A.I. (Spielberg), 8 Aibo, 79 AirBnB, 183 Alaska, 184 Alexa, 81, 121 algorithms: accountability / responsibility for potential harm done by, 11–12, 19, 40, 49, 92, 98–101, 105, 114, 115–118, 197–198, 204; bias, inaccuracy, and unjustness of, 20–21, 38, 87, 92–100, 105–107, 113, 115–116, 212; in art creation, 218, 219; in education, 67, 75, 85; and Facebook, 73, 181, 225; free speech for, 109–110; and Google, 181, 225; and high-freqency trading, 11, 20, 155; in hiring, 66, 119; inadequacy of, in certain human endeavors, 23–28, 35; in law enforcement, 121, 123, 126; in lending, 131; and management, 227–229; in military settings, 145, 147, 155–156, 157, 158, 168; and non-standardizable judgments, 104; optimizing ad revenue and “engagement” in online media, 29–30, 89, 92; and reason, 222; rise in studies of, 224; and scheduling of workers, 176–177; for self-driving cars, 21–22; and smart machines mimicking humans, 7; in social credit systems, 138; and YouTube, 72 alt-right, 95 Amazon, 76, 104, 155, 165, 287–288n42; Rekognition (software), 125 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 125 Andrejevic, Mark, 91, 302–303n29 anti-Semitism, 95 Aoun, Joseph, 173 Apple’s App Store, 45 apps, 4, 15, 34, 57, 88, 134, 227; therapy, for mental health, 45–49, 57–58, 187 Arendt, Hannah, 77, 258n56 Arkin, Bill, 127 Arkin, Ronald, 149, 158 arms control agreements, 157, 162 arms races, 17, 31, 142–144, 146, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 170, 189, 198, 202, 206–207, 225, 230; for online media attention, 91, 101, 118; and the third new law of robotics, 9–11, 91, 101, 136, 171, 217 Arnold, Zachary, 292n84 Article 36, 156 artificial intelligence (AI): in education, 60–88; evaluative, 119–144; as governed by the new laws of robotics, 3–12; in health care, 33–59; in the military, 145–169; in online media, 89–118; and political economy, 170–198; as reflected in the arts and culture, 199–231 Arunanondchai, Korakrit, 220 Asaro, Peter, 151–152 Asia: Central, US presence in,168; values of, toward technology, 54–55.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

And many skilled-trade Hand roles, like plumber or car mechanic or IT support worker, require cognitive diagnostic skills that are not that different from the problem-solving abilities of a medical consultant. Belong Anywhere Yet, Head abstraction and detachment increasingly dominate our culture. The ethos of digital giants like Google and Facebook is self-consciously unrooted and global. It is best summed up in Airbnb’s oxymoronic slogan: “Belong Anywhere.” The internet and social media kept us connected in the Covid-19 crisis, and even in normal times these can help friends and communities come together more easily. But the advance of digital platforms into our lives has tended to reduce opportunities for craft and the need for human contact or attachment to specific places.

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A levels (UK), 35, 46, 57–60, 95–96, 98, 105, 108–10, 124, 141, 192 Abitur (Germany), 35, 117–19 Adams, John, 153, 154 Adonis, Andrew, Saving Britain (with Hutton), 168 adoption studies, of cognitive aptitude, 72–73 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, 221–22 adult social care, 223–25, 229, 231, 233–34, 238–42, 244, 249, 291–94 in Germany, 218, 239 in Japan, 27, 218, 223, 239, 293–94 in the UK, 239–41, 242 Airbnb, 16 alienation, 154–55, 159–61, 175–78, 276, see also Brexit Britain; Trump, Donald Allen, Nicholas, 171 Amazon, 25, 33 Anderson, Robert, 47 Anywhere-Somewhere divide, 12–20 achieved vs. ascribed identities, 12 “Anywheres” in, 12, 16–20, 27, 160, 277 geographic mobility and, 17–19, 125–31, 273–74, 277, 287–91 Hubs vs.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix
by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski
Published 18 Apr 2022

In 2016, speaking at a Hollywood Chamber of Commerce event, content chief Ted Sarandos said of Icon, “A building like this is a statement of who you are, what you believe, and what you want to do.” The aesthetics of Netflix’s newest office spaces have been overseen by San Francisco–based architecture and design firm Gensler. The firm has worked with a range of clients, including tech firms like Facebook, Airbnb, and Salesforce. The activities of employees are not incidental to the way the buildings look and operate. In a description of Netflix’s main office in Japan, Gensler said it “playfully incorporated functions and spaces that allude to the company’s rich selection of streaming internet content, allowing staff to immerse themselves in various scenes, just as customers do with Netflix’s ubiquitous programming.”

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The best-loved of these creation stories involve disruptive change that holds the promise of rich rewards. Consider the alcohol-soaked genesis of Uber, an idea StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp began incubating after he and his friends spent $800 to hire a private driver on New Year’s Eve. Or the voilà moment when Airbnb founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia turned their loft into a bed-and-breakfast—renting out air mattresses at $80 a guest—as a way to cover their exorbitant San Francisco rent. Netflix’s saga starts, at least according to popular legend, with a moon shot. Cofounder Hastings describes getting socked with a $40 late fee on Apollo 13 at Blockbuster and wondering, “What if there were no late fees?”

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J., 98, 103, 222–24 Academy Awards (Oscars), 11, 13, 15, 188, 193, 208, 230, 233, 264, 288, 294–95, 316 Acosta, Jim, 158 Adalian, Josef, 105 ad-supported video on demand (AVOD), 139–40 Adult Swim, 114, 221 advertising, 67–68, 80, 85–86, 91, 127–28, 138–41, 146, 203, 210, 220–21, 307–8 Affleck, Casey, 294 AGBO, 266–67 Airbnb, 33 Alba, Jessica, 98 Albrecht, Chris, 48, 49, 50, 71, 72–73 Ali, Yashar, 30 Alias, 222 Alibaba, 112 Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference, 107–8, 184 Allen v. Farrow, 186 All in the Family, 36–37 Alpha House, 293 Altered Carbon, 233 Altman, Jeffrey, 300 Altman, Robert, xviii Alvarez, Canelo, 135 Amazing Stories, 183 Amazon, xv, 5, 291–301, 316–17 acquisition of MGM, 291–92, 298–99, 300–301, 316–17 founding of, 23, 27 Netflix and, 34, 229–30, 292, 316 sports licensing, 134–35, 139, 141–42 streamatis personae, ix streaming, 46–47, 94, 139, 140, 229–30 Amazon Fire TV, 124, 139, 203, 204, 281, 282 Amazon Prime, xv Amazon Prime Video, ix, 123, 146, 159, 191, 258, 265, 281, 291–301, 316 Amazon Studios, 81, 146, 182, 264–66, 291–98 Amazon Unbound (Stone), 295 Amazon Web Services, 242–43 Ambeault, Joe, 86–87 Amblin Television, 183 AMC Networks, 5, 14, 88, 98, 140, 201, 309–10 American Beauty, 193 American Cinematheque, 30 American Film Institute, 186, 257–58 American Horror Story, 29, 75, 174, 234 American Idol, 143, 145 American Pickle, An, 260 Americans, The, 152 America’s Cup, 38 Amodei, Joe, 37–38, 261 Anchorage Capital Group, 299 Andersen, Thom, 30 Anderson, Chris, 81–82 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 156 Anderson, Wes, 156 Andreessen, Marc, 255–56 Andrews, Julie, 169 Angels in America, 68 Angelyne, 197–98 Anheuser-Busch, 161, 162–63 Animal Kingdom, 212 Aniston, Jennifer, 6, 8, 10, 98, 103, 246 Annette, 265 Anthony, Marc, 304 Antioco, John, 35–36 AOL Time Warner, 25, 69–71 Apodaca, Nathan “Doggface,” 193 Apollo 13, 33 Apple alliance with Disney, 78, 79–81, 83–84, 173 deal with Beats, 101–2 Netflix and, 48, 98, 105 sports licensing, 133–35 streamatis personae, ix streaming, 7–8, 46–47, 97–106, 178–86, 198 Apple Arcade, 103, 178 Apple iPads, 7, 81, 100, 101, 178, 179 Apple iPhones, 7, 10, 84, 100–101, 178, 179 Apple iPods, 7, 79–80, 84, 180 Apple iTunes, 27, 47, 80, 102, 105, 180–81, 185, 245 Apple Music, 8, 179 Apple News, 102–3 Apple Park, 104 Apple Pay, 179 Apple TV, 48, 99–103 Apple TV+, xix, 6–10, 69, 103–6, 178–86, 196, 216, 244–48, 308–9, 317.

Pocket New York City Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet
Published 27 Sep 2012

If you are visiting over a weekend, try the business hotels in the Financial District, which tend to empty out when the work week ends. › If you don’t have your heart set on a particular property, check out discount juggernauts like Expedia (www.expedia.com), Orbitz (www.orbitz.com) and Priceline (www.priceline.com). › If you do have an inkling of where you’d like to stay, it’s best to start at your desired hotel’s website as it’ll often include deals and package rates. › Also worth checking out are the slew of members-only websites, such as Jetsetter (www.jetsetter.com), that offer discounted rates and ‘flash sales’ for their devotees. › These days, finding a place to sleep is hardly restricted to the traditional spectrum of lodging. Websites like Airbnb (www.airbnb.com) are providing a truly unique – and not to mention economical – alternative to the wallet-busting glitz and glam by offering locals the opportunity to rent out their apartments while they’re out of town or lease a space (be it a bedroom or pull-out couch) in their home. Useful Websites Lonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com) Lots of accommodation reviews and online booking.

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
by Jim Whitehurst
Published 1 Jun 2015

However, I purposely included a number of examples from Delta and other organizations like Whole Foods, W. L. Gore, and Zappos to demonstrate that any kind of organization can benefit from these principles. Many conventional competitors will face an onslaught of new entrants into their markets; just look at how Amazon continues to expand into retail or how Airbnb has disrupted the hospitality industry. These new players are likely to have a different, more modern organizational model driving their success. Competing against them isn’t just about matching up your products in a market-based chess game. It’s more about pitting organizational capabilities against each other.

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New York: Random House, 2010. INDEX Page numbers followed by an f indicate a figure. A Company of Citizens (Manville and Ober), 85, 87 accountability conventional model of, 65–66 of leaders, 69–70 of managers, 66–67 openness to feedback and, 67–69 owning mistakes and, 70–72 to peers, 63–64 Airbnb, 188 Alexander, DeLisa, 90, 147–149 Amazon, 188 announce-list at Red Hat, 74 Ansari XPRIZE, 4 authenticity, 36, 93–94 aviation industry, 183–186 BarCamp, 158 Behar, Howard, 57 behavioral economics, 33 “Billion Dollar Celebration” at Red Hat, 147–149 Bill-Peter, Marco, 129, 171, 172 Blaylock, Leigh, 158, 159 Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 11, 67, 89, 110, 154, 156 Boyd, John, 61 brainstorming, 112–114 Bristol, Scott, 139 Brown, John Seely, 115 Cameron, Thomas, 41, 65, 94 Catmull, Ed, 115, 130 Ceylon, 98 Chairman’s Award at Red Hat, 96–97 change management, 136–137, 140, 145, 153–154 Chernoff, Melanie, 49–50, 148 Chesbrough, Henry, 3 Collective Genius (Hill, Brandeau, Truelove, and Lineback), 27, 30, 114, 141–142 Connor, Jason, 77 Conscious Capitalism (Mackey and Sisodia), 27, 122 context creation employee engagement and, 57, 60, 62–63, 71–72, 81, 156 igniting passion and, 38–40 leader’s role in, 18, 40, 46, 57–58, 66, 72, 166, 171 conventional organizations accountability in, 65–66 avoidance of debate in, 109–110, 119, 130, 180 decision making in, 16–17, 135, 146, 150 directed team approach in, 170–171 focus on career advancement in, 95, 128 functions in, 20f leader’s avoidance of feedback in, 68, 124, 141 limitations of, 11, 62 mind-set of leaders in, 190 reliance on rules in, 75 conventional business management.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by Dan Conway
Published 8 Sep 2019

He says, “The Internet evolved media from physical to digital, from paid to free, from editorial to social. Next up: from corporate to ownerless.” The gig economy provides some measure of freedom, but it still requires people to play by the corporate rules, like Google’s army of contractors, or hand over a disproportionate cut to its market maker, like Uber and Airbnb. In the gig economy, workers more or less still need to know the right people, laugh at the right jokes, and have the right credentials. On this open Internet, blockchains would allow independent agents to compete on an even playing field. They would choose when they want to work in communion with those they select, for a price they set.

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Bitcoin is the oldest blockchain, and it is already three hundred thousand times more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer, at least 100 times more powerful than all of Google’s server farms combined. The bounty of decentralized networks is the wide distribution of the spoils of innovation. On the Facebook-like dApp (decentralized app) of the future, users will be rewarded if they grant access to their personal shopping habits; on the AirBnB-like dApp of the future, the server farms won’t be able to increase their cut, and a true peer-to-peer marketplace will flourish. A reckoning is coming, which is why you are starting to hear about blockchain in nervous corridors of power, among the disenfranchised and among the awake. Rebellions can be messy — the Bitcoin blockchain has been supplanted by Ethereum as the most decentralized network, the one less likely to ever be controlled by server farms.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business
by Edward Tse
Published 13 Jul 2015

Its marketing has improved enormously, not just for its smartphones but also for its tablets and high-end PCs. One of its smartest moves was signing up Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher as a “product engineer” to help promote new products. Kutcher, who played Steve Jobs in the Jobs movie, also has a strong record as an investor in tech start-ups, among them Skype, Foursquare, and Airbnb. Even if its purchases of Motorola Mobility and IBM’s low-end servers both fail, that wouldn’t bring down the company. If they succeed, however, they have the potential to transform Lenovo from a $50 billion company into a $100 billion one. THE TACTICS OF EXPANSION Which Chinese companies will be most successful at internationalizing themselves?

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To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable. Additionally, page numbers in italics refer to figures and tables. A123 Systems, 130 ABN AMRO, 150 Abrami, Regina M., 93–94 Adidas, 195 Africa, rise of Chinese business in, 137 agriculture, 43, 109 Airbnb, 129 Airbus, 73, 110, 213 air-conditioning business, 12–13 Alcatel, 84, 102 Alibaba.com, 34, 39, 57 Alibaba Group, 10, 11, 33–40, 41, 49, 52, 53, 60, 62, 72, 80, 83–85, 87, 99, 100, 101, 136, 139, 148, 151, 153, 162, 184, 185, 191, 194, 197, 201, 215, 222, 225 innovation by, 94 interest in American companies, 135 IPO of, 33, 85, 90 lending transformed by, 39, 149–50 overseas listing of, 85, 89 sales by, 33–34 share listing of, 61 Sina Weibo purchased by, 87–88 start of, 37 water quality mapped by, 170 Alipay, 35–36, 39, 78, 88, 99, 192 Alta Devices, 123 Aluminum Corporation of China, 119 Amazon, 57, 68, 69, 95 Amazon.cn, 57 AMC Entertainment, 120 Amelio, William, 126, 127 Andersen Consulting, 95 Angola, 137 Apple, 67, 68, 69, 89, 112, 128 Asian financial crisis of 1990s, 16 B2B business, 36, 38, 39, 184 BAIC, 133 Baidu, 11, 39, 52, 81, 82, 83–84, 87, 88, 139, 158, 161, 191, 225 copyright violations by, 114 founding of, 49 innovation by, 94 IPO of, 50 overseas listing of, 89 Bain & Co., 151, 159 Barra, Hugo, 197 Beijing Zhongkuan, 45 Biden, Joe, 93 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 109 BlackBerry, 136 Blackstone Group Asia, 224 BMW, 180 Boeing, 73, 110, 213 Booz & Company, 25, 178 Bosch Siemens, 196 Boston Consulting Group, 20, 25 brand development, 122 brand loyalty, 19–20 Brazil, 68, 139 Broad Group, 20, 54, 63, 148, 216–18, 221, 225 Broad Sustainable Building, 217 Broad Town, 216 Brown, Shona L., 182–83, 185–86, 187 BYD, 20, 76, 134 C2C market, 34–35, 184 C919, 110–11 Caixa Seguros, 123 cars, 12, 20, 44, 74, 76, 123, 130–34 Chang, Gordon, 9 Chang’an, 133 Changhong, 76 Chen, Steve, 112 Chen Dongsheng, 45, 54, 55, 148, 168–69 Chengdu, 24 Chen Haibin, 12, 155–56 Chery, 134, 138 China, People’s Republic of: agricultural output in, 43, 109 authoritarian rule in, 22–23 billionaires in, 8, 10, 45, 48 buying-power in, 19 consuming classes, 72–77, 74, 151 critics of, 8–9 debt in, 78, 80, 167 Deng’s reforms in, 17, 27, 28, 42–43, 47, 132, 140, 148, 166, 167, 176 earthquake in, 217 economic growth in, 8, 25, 70–71, 77–79, 97, 154, 165, 209–10 exports of, 9, 44, 48, 79, 104, 109, 133, 134–36, 140, 152, 188, 214 foreign currency reserves of, 22 founding of, 3 high-net-worth individuals in, 150, 151 housing privatized in, 48–49 hybrid government of, 71, 167, 210, 212, 213–16 innovation in, 93–116 institutional development in, 166, 195, 221 logistics costs in, 78 monthly wages in, 98 multinationals invited into, 46–51, 70, 71, 72–77, 188–90, 192, 195, 197–201, 222–23 number of companies by ownership in, 15 opportunities in, 41, 49–50, 115–16, 140–41, 180–81, 203–30 outbound investment from, 28, 120–24, 121, 138–39, 140 per capita GDP of, 113 per capita income in, 229 pioneers of 1980s in, 46 R&D spending in, 106–7, 107, 121, 122, 192, 193 revenues by company type in, 15 rising urban class in, 96 scale of, 71–72, 83, 85, 180–81 traded goods of, 109 trends shaped by, 18–19 U.S. and European investment in, 181, 223 as world’s biggest manufacturer, 19 China Auto Rental, 194–95 China Banking Regulatory Commission, 149 China Development Bank, 138 China Entrepreneurs Forum (CEF), 145, 169, 171, 223 China Food and Drug Administration, 155 China Guardian Auction Company, 45 China Investment Corporation, 149 China Merchants Bank, 205 China Mobile, 102, 212 China National Offshore Oil Corporation, 120 China Pages, 37 China Post, 100 China Resources Enterprise, 180 China Smart Device Innovation Fund, 113 China Telecom, 102 China Unicom, 102 China UnionPay, 36, 78 Chinese Academy of Sciences, 44 Chinese Academy of Sciences Computer Technology Research Institute New Technology Development Company, 54 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, 81 Chongqing, 193, 224 Chu, Gary, 196 Cisco, 105 Citic Pacific, 123 climate change, 25, 29, 227, 229 clothes, 9 Club Med, 194 Cold War, 23 Coming Collapse of China, The (Chang), 9 Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), 110–11, 213 Communist Party, China, 22, 42, 44, 55, 77, 211, 218, 220, 226 purge of, 4 “competing on the edge,” 181–86, 188 computers, 9, 11, 125–28, 178 Congo, 137 Consumption Promotion Month, 73 copyright, 114 corporate flexibility, 190, 191–92 costs, controlling of, 97 counterfeiting, 75 creative destruction, 163 Ctrip, 113 Cultural Revolution, 4, 42, 43, 54, 207 Daimler, 180 Dalian Wanda, 48, 88, 120, 172 Datascope Corporation, 123 decision-making, 23, 58, 190–91, 211 Decorvet, Roland, 196 Dell, 95, 96, 126, 128 Deng Xiaoping: reforms of, 17, 27, 28, 42–43, 47, 132, 140, 148, 166, 167, 176 southern tour of, 44 Detroit Electric, 133 Development Research Center, of the State Council, 45 DHgate.com, 12, 57 Dian Diagnostics, 155–57 Diaoyu, 181 Digital China, 148 Ding Xuedong, 149 D’Long, 13 Dongfeng, 133 dotcom bubble, 37 Drivetrain Systems International, 133 eBay, 34, 40 e-commerce, 10, 11, 20, 38, 39, 78, 81–84, 88–89, 96–97, 99, 225 Economist Intelligence Unit, 140 education, 27 rising standards of, 98 Eisenhardt, Kathleen M., 182–83, 185–86, 187 Emerald Automotive, 133 energy, 9, 19, 25, 29, 42, 115, 119, 137, 186, 216–17 energy-efficient buildings, 216 engineering, 27 entrepreneurs, 56, 199–201, 226–28, 229–30 ambition of, 55, 57–61 boundaries pushed by, 26–27 everyday life changed by, 164–65 Gang of ’92, 45–46, 54 innovation by, 93–116 international talent of, 196–97 1980s generation of, 51–53 origins of, 42–46 overseas, 139 pride of, 55, 57 reforms sought by, 145–49 shared heritage of, 55, 61–64 strengths of, 24–26 see also specific entrepreneurs environment, 60, 168, 169–70 Epic Games, 135 Ericsson, 101, 102, 105 European Union, R&D spending in, 107 EV71 virus, 109 Evergrande Real Estate, 48 Export-Import Bank of China, 138 Facebook, 83, 87, 94, 222 Fanfou.com, 53 Feng Lun, 45–46, 148 finance, 149–53, 157, 162, 163, 186, 192–93 deregulation of, 164, 212–13, 229 1st Dibs, 135 Fisher & Paykal, 7 Fisker Automotive, 130 Food and Drug Administration, U.S., 123 Forbes, 10 Ford Motor Company, 123, 131, 133 Forever 21, 195 Fosun, 123, 138, 148, 155, 156, 194 Foursquare, 129 Foxconn, 112 Gang of ’92, 45–46, 54, 148, 168–69 Gao Feng Advisory Company, 25 Gavekal Dragonomics, 73 Geely Auto, 12, 44, 76, 123, 131–34, 138, 175, 185, 212 General Mills, 196 General Motors, 133, 137, 179 Gerke, Roland, 196 Germany, 121, 216 doctorates in, 108 global financial crisis, 73, 78 Global Solar Energy, 123 Golden Monkey, 194 Goldman Sachs, 37, 136 Gome Electrical Appliances, 13 Google, 83, 87, 112, 127, 128, 197 Great Firewall of China, 82 Great Leap Forward, 3–4 Great Wall Technology, 76, 126 Guo Guangchang, 148 Guo Wei, 148 Haier, 3, 5–8, 10, 47, 49, 58–60, 76, 84, 94, 98, 100, 101, 175, 185, 187, 200, 208, 224 Hainan, 46 Hangzhou Wahaha Group, 52, 76 Harvard Business Review, 93–94 health-care system, 12, 153–57, 162, 163, 212 Hengan International, 12, 53, 175–78, 199, 200 Hershey, 194 Hertz Global Rental, 194–95 Hewlett-Packard, 125, 128 Hoffman-La Roche, 155 Home Depot, 180 Honda, 133 Honeywell, 190, 192, 196 Hong Kong, 68, 214, 223–24 Hong Kong Stock Exchange, 68, 86, 177 hospitals, 154–56, 212 Household Responsibility System, 43 Huang Guangyu, 13 Huang Nubo, 45, 63, 168 Huawei Technologies, 11, 20, 43–44, 47, 54, 60, 67, 75, 84, 89, 122, 128, 136, 138, 139, 140, 175, 200, 222 innovation by, 94, 101–5 Hui Ka Yan, 48 Hu Jintao, 147 Hutchison Telecom, 103 Hyundai, 133 IBM, 125, 127–28, 129, 178 ICBC, 149 ICQ, 85 IDG, 85–86 India, 68 infrastructure, 71, 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 99, 105, 111, 114, 137–38, 153, 163, 164, 166, 188, 191, 192, 210, 223, 224 Innovation Works, 111–12 Intel Capital, 113 interest-rate liberalization, 40, 152–53 Internet, 27, 81–90, 82, 135–36, 161, 186, 197, 209–10, 218–19, 221–22 iPhone, 68, 69, 94 iQiyi.com, 162 Japan, 94, 121, 141, 216 R&D spending in, 107 JD.com, 84, 87 revenue of, 89 Jialing, 76 Jiang Jianqing, 149 Johnson & Johnson, 175 Joyo.com, 12, 57, 68 Jumei.com, 206 “just-in-time” production system, 94 Kan, Michael, 69 Kandi Technologies Group, 133 Kao, 175 KFC, 180 Kimberly-Clark, 12, 175 Kingsoft, 68 Kirby, William C., 93–94 Konka, 76 Koo, Victor, 158–59, 160, 218 Krugman, Paul, 9 Kutcher, Ashton, 129 Lardy, Nicholas, 17 Lau, Martin, 136 Lau, Ricky, 225 Lee, Hudson, 196 Lee, Kai-fu, 111–12 legal infrastructure, 114 Legend, 44 Legend Holdings, 112, 126 Lei Jun, 11, 12, 57, 67, 81, 112, 162, 197, 226 Lenovo, 11, 20, 44, 54, 67, 75, 89, 112, 139, 140, 148, 171 expansion by, 124–29, 130 revenue of, 125–26, 127, 128 Leung, Antony, 224 Levi’s, 195 Li, Richard, 85–86 Li, Robin, 11, 49, 50, 64, 81, 88, 139 liberalization, 44, 55, 71, 72, 75, 78–79, 152, 154, 166–67, 178, 181, 210, 211, 223 of interest rates, 40, 152–53 Li Dongsheng, 148 Liebherr, 5–6 Lifan, 76 Li Ka-shing, 85 Li Keqiang, 210, 215 Lin Bin, 68 Li Shufu, 12, 44, 47, 131–34, 138, 175, 185 Little Emperors, 51–53 Liu Chuanzhi, 54, 171 Liu Junling, 96 Liu Mingkang, 149 Loncin, 76 L’Oréal, 205 Lu Guanqiu, 130 Lyft, 135 Ma, Jack, 10, 33–40, 41, 47, 50, 54–55, 60–61, 62–63, 64, 86, 136, 148, 197, 201, 221 background of, 36–37 environmental work of, 60, 168, 169–70 and U.S.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

Mobile workers and entrepreneurs are ditching coffee shops for shared workspaces. Every day, more than 1.2 million people go to an “office” that’s full of other freelancers or small corporate teams. People are finding all sorts of cool new getaway experiences on vacation rental sites like VRBO or digital nomad platforms like Roam. In response to Airbnb, hotel companies are realizing that they’re in the business of creating compelling travel experiences, not just putting their names on big resort properties, so they’re diversifying into apartment rental platforms. Subscription-based digital services are a big part of the business models powering these sites, whether you’re signing up directly with HomeAway or your real estate agent is taking advantage of a professional service on Zillow to reach more buyers.

…

abandonment rate, 31 Acquire subsystem, of PADRE operating model, 203 acquisition strategies, 170–71 ad-based business model, 66–70 ad blockers and, 66–70 inconsistency of ad revenue, 68–69 insidious effects of, 68 number of digital publications relative to ad revenue, 67–68 as secondary revenue source, 69–70 smart paywalls and, 69 ad blockers, 67 Adobe, 80–82, 86–89, 96 Adore Me, 29 Adyen, 121 Aetna, 115 Agratchev, Alexei, 24, 35 Airbnb, 120 airline industry, 59–61 Allbirds, 23 Allison, Jamie, 58 Amazon, 13, 18, 23–25, 26, 32, 33, 34, 55, 115 Anderson, Matt, 109 annual recurring revenue, 179–81 Antony and Cleopatra (film), 38 Apple, 13, 32, 56, 77 iPhone, 3, 21, 26, 27 service revenue growth at, 26–27 Watch, 107 AriadNEXT, 63 Arrow Electronics, 108–9 artificial intelligence, 111 assembly line, 14–15 asset transfer model, 14 Atlantic, The, 65 Autodesk, 89, 147–48 automobile industry, 51–59 connected vehicles, 55–56 ridesharing services and, 53–55 subscription model and, 51–53 traditional automakers, advantages of, 57–59 transportation solutions, reimagining of automakers as, 57–59 average revenue per account (ARPA) growth, 211–13 Away, 23 B2Any subscription revenue growth, 215 B2B subscription revenue growth, 213–14, 215 B2C subscription revenue growth, 214–15 b8ta, 34 BarkBox, 119 Barra, Mary, 57 Barzdukas, Gytis, 104, 105 Bass, Carl, 89 Batman v.

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social
by Steffen Mau
Published 12 Jun 2017

Those with the highest market reputation (more than a million positive ratings) are distinguished with a silver shooting star. It will come as no surprise that even portals which surround themselves with an aura of freedom, community and independence and are regarded as part of the sharing economy, such as Airbnb or Couchsurfing (‘Stay with locals and make travel friends’), are not averse to the use of ratings (Hamari et al. 2015; Lauterbach et al. 2009). On the contrary, these brokering systems would be unlikely to survive without the systematic recording and communication of reputational data, given that the interacting parties enter into a transaction with no knowledge of each other – a potentially high-risk proposition, especially when entrusting someone with your own four walls.

…

Index ‘20-70-10’ rule 155 academics 139 and altmetrics 77–8 and h-index 75–6, 139, 144 self-documentation and self-presentation 76–7 status markers 74–8 accountability 3, 91, 115, 120, 134, 147, 159 accounting, rise of modern 17 activism alliance with statistics 127 Acxiom 164–5 ADM (automated decision-making) 63 Aenta 108 Airbnb 88 airlines and status miles 71–2 algorithms 7, 64, 127, 167 and nomination power 123–5, 126, 141–2 AlgorithmWatch 127 altmetrics 77–8 Amazon 96, 150, 156 American Consumers Union 167 apps 99, 105, 150 finance 66–7 fitness and health 68, 102–3, 104, 107 Moven 65–6 Asian crisis (1997) 57 audit society 24–5 automated decision-making (ADM) 63 averages, regime of 155–7 Barlösius, Eva 113 Baty, Phil 48 Bauman, Zygmunt 143 behavioural reactivity 131 benchmarks, regime of 155–7 Berlin, television tower 40 Better Life Index 20 Big Data 2, 79, 123 biopolitics 19 of the market 70 biopower 19 Boam, Eric 104 body images, regime of 156–7 Boltanzki, Luc 125–6 border controls 73–4 borders, smart 74 Bourdieu, Pierre 111, 114, 115, 162 BP 108 Bude, Heinz 37 bureaucracy 18 calculative practices 11, 124 expansion of 11, 115 and the market 15–17 Campbell, Donald T. 130–1 Campbell's Law 130–1 capitalism 15, 54, 55 digital 150 capitalists of the self 163 Carter, Allan 48 Chiapello, Ève 125–6 Chief Financial Officer (CFO) 17 China Sesame Credit 67 Social Credit System 1, 166 choice revolution 118–19 class and status 33 class conflict switch to individual competition 168–70 classification 60–80 see also scoring; screening collective body 104–6 collective of non-equals 166–8 commensurability 31–3, 44, 159 Committee of Inquiry on ‘Growth, Wealth and Quality of Life’ (Germany) 127 commodification 163, 164 Community (sitcom) 96 companies 16–17 comparison 7, 26–39, 159 and commensurability/incommensurability 31–3 and competition 28 dispositive(s) of 7, 28–31, 159, 169 new horizons of 33–5 part of everyday life 27 prerequisites for social 35–6 registers of 135–9 and self-esteem 30 shifts in class structure of 33 and status 29–30, 36–7 universalization of 27–8 COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling or Alternative Sanctions) 79 competition 6, 7, 115–19, 159–60 and comparison 28 increasing glorification of 159 and neoliberalism 23 and performance measurement 115–19 and quantification 116–17 and rankings 45 switch from class conflict to individual 168–70 competitive singularities 169 consumer generated content (CGC) 85–6 control datafication and increased 143, 147, 169 individualization of social 143 levers of social 144 relationship between quantification and 78 conventionalization 128 Cordray, Julia 97 Correctional Offender Management Profiling or Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) 79 Corruption Perceptions Index 26 cosmetic indicators 135 Couchsurfing 88 credit risk colonialization 64 credit scoring 63–7 and social status 67 criminal recidivism, scoring and assessment of 62–3, 79 criteria reductionism 22 cumulative advantages, theory of 174 CureTogether 106 customer reviews 82–6, 87, 88 Dacadoo 68 Daily Telegraph 149 darknet 87 data behaviourism 171 data leaks 152 data literacy 21 data mining 4, 22, 163 data protection 72, 142 data repositories 62, 73–4 data storage 22, 73, 135 data voluntarism 4, 152, 153, 159 dating markets and health scores 70 de Botton, Alain 30 decoupling 133, 136, 174–5 democratization and digitalization 166 difference 2 visibilization and the creation of 40–3 ‘difference revolution’ digitalization giving rise to 166–7 digital capitalism 150 digital disenfranchisement of citizens 151 digital health plans 70 digital medical records 67 digitalization 2, 7, 21–2, 25, 63, 73, 80, 111, 123, 180 and democratization 166 giving rise to ‘difference revolution’ 166–7 as ‘great leveller’ 166 quantitative bias of 124 disembedding 13 distance, technology of 23–4 diversity versus monoculture 137–40 doctors, evaluation of by patients 92–3 Doganova, Liliana 5–6 double-entry bookkeeping 15, 163 e-recruitment 61 eBay 87 economic valuation theory 5 economization 22–4, 38, 115, 117 and rise of rankings 46 education and evaluation 89–91 evaluation of tutors by students 89–90 law schools 44, 138–9 output indicators and resource allocation in higher 132 and Pisa system 122, 145–6 Eggers, Dave The Circle 41, 82–3 employer review sites 83 entrepreneurial self 3, 154 epistemic communities 121 equivalence 16, 27 Espeland, Wendy 44, 139 esteem 29, 30 and estimation 15, 38 see also self-esteem Etzioni, Amitai The Active Society 20 European Union 122 evaluation 81–98 connection with recognition 38 cult and spread of 7, 97–8, 134 education sector 89–91 loss of time and energy 136 and medical sector 91–3 peer-to-peer ratings 87–8 portals as selectors 84–6 pressure exerted by reviews 147–8 and professions 89–93 qualitative 117 satisfaction surveys 82–4 and social media 93–8 of tutors by students 89–90 evidence-basing 3 exercise and self-tracking 101–4 expert systems 7 transnational 121–2 experts, nomination power of 119–23, 126 Facebook 94 FanSlave 95 Federal Foreign Office (Germany) 53 feedback power of 147–8 and social media 93–4 Fertik, Michael 66 Fitch 56 fitness apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 Floridi, Luciano 105 Foucault, Michel 19 Fourcade, Marion 163–4 Franck, Georg 29 fraud 137 Frey, Bruno ‘Publishing as Prostitution’ 146 ‘gaming the system’ 132 GDP (gross domestic product) 14 dispute over alternatives to 127–8 General Electric 155 Germany Excellence Initiative 51 higher education institutes 52–3 Gerstner, Louis V. 130 Glassdoor.com 83 global governance 122 globalization 34, 73 governance 12 self- 19, 37, 105 state as data manager 17–20 ‘government at a distance’ 145 governmentality 112 GPS systems 150 Granovetter, Mark ‘The strength of weak ties’ 147 gross domestic product see GDP h-index 75–6, 139, 144 halo effect 90 Han, Byung-Chul 154 Hanoi, rat infestation of 130 happiness and comparison 30 Hawthorne effect 107 health and self-tracking 101–4 health apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 health scores 67–71 health status, quantified 67–71 Healy, Kieran 163–4 Heintz, Bettina 14, 33, 34 hierarchization/hierarchies 1, 5, 6, 11, 33, 39, 40–59, 174 and rankings 41–2, 43, 44, 48 higher education, output indicators and resource allocation 132 Hirsch, Jorge E. 75 home nursing care 135–6 hospitals and performance indicators 131 Human Development Index 14 hyperindividualization 167–8 identity theory 29 incommensurability 31–3 indicators 2, 3, 5, 20, 23–4, 34, 114, 159 and competition 116–17 and concept of reactive measurements 129–33 cosmetic 135 economic 7 governance by 24 politics of 14 status 35, 75 see also performance indicators individualization of social control 143 industrial revolution 19 inequality 6, 8, 158–76 collectives of non-equals 166–8 establishment of worth 160–2 inescapability and status fluidity 170–4 reputation management 162–6 switch from class conflict to individual competition 168–70 inescapability of status 170–4 information economy 2 information transmission interfaces, between social subsystems 165–6 institutional theory 113 insurance companies 72, 108, 151, 152, 167 International Labour Organization 122 investive status work 36–7 Italian Job, The (film) 138 justice 126 Kaube, Jürgen 2 Kula, Witold 16 Latour, Bruno 34 law schools 44, 138–9 league tables 35, 43, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 91, 138, 139, 146, 162, 175 legitimate test, concept of 125–6 Lenin, Vladimir 116 lifelogging 99, 109, 153 Luhmann, Niklas 166 Lyon, David 142 McClusky, Mark 101 McCullough, Nicole 97 Mann, Steve 153 market(s) calculative practices of 15–17 and neoliberalism 23 and rating agencies 55–6 Marron, Donncha 65 Matthew effect 174–5 measurement, meaning 10 media reporting 33 medical sector and evaluation 91–3 hospitals and performance indicators 131–2 MedXSafe 70 meritocracy 23, 161 Merton, Robert K. 161, 174 ‘metric revolution’ 16 Miller, Peter 112 mobility 71–4 border controls 73 digital monitoring of 72 and scoring 71–4 smart cars 72 and status miles 71–2 money as means of exchange 16 monoculture versus diversity 137–40 mood, self-tracking of 101–4 Moody's 56 motivation 106–10 and rankings 45 Moven 65–6 Münch, Richard 145 Nachtwey, Oliver 150 naturalization 113 neoliberalism 3, 12, 23, 25 basic tenets of 23 New Public Management 3, 117, 136, 155 NHS (National Health Service) 118 nomination power 111–28 and algorithms 123–5, 126, 141–2 critique of 125–8 and economization 115 of experts 119–23, 126 performance measurement and the framing of competition 115–19 and the state 112–15 non-equals, collectives of 166–8 normative pressure 144–6 North Korea 144 ‘number rush’ 2 numbers 13–14, 15 numerical medium 8, 14, 16, 18, 28, 33, 113, 160, 166 objectivization 35, 154, 160 OECD 122 Offe, Claus 175 Old Testament 17 omnimetrics 9 O’Neil, Cathy Weapons of Math Destruction 79 optimization 12, 25 Oral Roberts University (Oklahoma) 108 Peeple app 96–7 peer-to-peer ratings 87–8 Pentland, Alex 151 people analytics 150–1 performance enhancement 12 performance indicators 12, 38, 53, 74, 118, 119, 120, 129, 155 and hospitals 131–2 performance measurement 23, 38, 115–19 performance-oriented funding allocation 22 performance paradox 132 performance targets 4 Personicx 165 Pisa system 122, 145–6 politicians 14, 120 politics 114 portals 84–6, 88, 90–1 power of nomination see nomination power prestige 8, 29, 67, 144 principal–agent problem 147–8 private consultancy services 117 professional control, loss of 133–4 professionalization 19, 133 professions and evaluation 89–93 publicity 33 QS ranking 52 qualitative evaluation 117 quantification advantages of 8 engines of 21–5 history 11 impact and consequences of 5, 6 meaning 10, 12–15 risks and side-effects 7, 129–40 role of 35 quantified self 99–110 Quantified Self (network) 99–100 quantitative evaluation see evaluation quantitative mentality 11–12 quasi-markets 116, 118–19 race and assessment of criminal recidivism risk 79 rankings 47–53, 58–9, 60, 144 and competition 45 and compliance 44 differences between ratings and 42–3 disadvantage of 43–4 economization and rise of 46 and evaluation portals 84–6 and hierarchies 41–2, 43, 44, 48 and image fetishization 47 and motivation 45 as objectivity generators 41 performance-enhancing role 46 popularity of 41 as positional goods 45 purpose of 45 and reputation 48, 49, 50, 52 as social ushers 42 and status anxiety 46–7 university 6, 7, 43, 47–53, 144, 175 Welch's forced 155–6 rating agencies, market power of 53–9 ratings 41–3, 53–9, 60 definition 54 differences between rankings and 42–3 and evaluation portals 84–6 as objectivity generators 41 peer-to-peer 87–8 as social ushers 42 rationalization 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 105, 110, 154, 163 Raz, Joseph 31–2 reactive measurements 129–33 recommendation marketing 85 recruitment, e- 61 reference group theory 29 reputation 29, 39, 66, 74, 121 academic 75–6 cultivating good 47 and rankings 48, 49, 50, 52 rating of 87–8 signal value of 87 social media and like-based 93–8 reputation management 4, 50, 162–6 reputation scoring 87–8 research community 146 and evaluation system 146 and review system 146–7 ResearchGate 77 reviews 136 customer 82–6, 87, 88 doctor 92 high demand for 136 lecturers/tutors 90 performance 25, 149 pressure exerted by popular 147 Riesman, David 37 risks of quantification 129–40 loss of professional control 133–5 loss of time and energy 135–7 monoculture versus diversity 137–40 reactive measurements 129–33 Rosa, Hartmut 94, 173 Rose, Nikolas 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 28–9 running apps 107 Runtastic app 107 satisfaction surveys 82–4 Sauder, Michael 44, 139 Schimank, Uwe 134 Schirrmacher, Frank 152 Schmidt, Eric 147 schools and choice 118–19 evaluation of 90–1 league tables 46 and Pisa system 122, 145–6 scoring 7, 60, 61, 78–80 academic status markers 74–8 and assessment of criminal recidivism 62–3 credit 63–7 health 67–71 mobility value 71–4 pitfalls 79 screening 7, 60–1, 78–9 border controls 73–4 e-recruitment 61–2 function 60–1 smart cars 72 self-direction 105, 121, 143 self-documentation 153 and academic world 76–7 self-enhancement 3, 137 self-esteem 29, 37, 170 and comparison 29, 30 rankings and university staff 50–1 self-governance 19, 37, 105 self-image 37, 47, 50, 89 self-management 3, 20, 25 self-observation 25, 42 quantified 99–110 self-optimization 3, 19, 104, 109, 163 self-quantification/quantifiers 4, 13, 25, 101, 154–5, 156 self-reification 105 self-responsibility 25, 110 self-tracking 4, 7, 99, 100, 106, 109–10 collective body 104–6 as duty or social expectation 108 emotions provoked 109 health, exercise and mood 101–4 and motivation 106–10 problems with wearable technologies 103–4 running and fitness apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 and sousveillance 153 as third-party tracking 154 self-worth 29, 36, 38, 47, 51, 170 and market value 67 Sesame Credit (China) 67 Shanghai ranking 47 ‘shared body’ 105 shared data 142, 152–3 Simmel, Georg 28 ‘small improvement argument’ 32 smart borders 74 smart cars 72 smart cities 21 smart homes 21 ‘social accounts’ 20 Social Credit System (China) 1, 166 social engineering 20 social management 20 social media 93–8, 153, 166 drivers of activity 93 and feedback 93–4 forms of connection 93 likes 93–5 and online disinhibition 153 and reputation building 95 resonance generated by 94 and running/fitness apps 107 social research 19–20 social security systems 19 social status see status social worth see worth socio-psychological rank theory 46 sociometrics/sociometers 2, 5, 36, 74, 141, 150–1 Sombart, Werner Modern Capitalism 15–16 sousveillance 153 sport 33 rise of world 35 Staab, Philipp 149–50 Stalder, Felix 124 Standard & Poor's 54, 56 statactivism 127 state as data manager 17–20 nomination power of the 112–15 statistics 14 origins of word 17 status and class 33 and comparison 29–30, 36–7 and credit scoring 67 inescapability from 170–4 and life satisfaction 30 seeking of 36 status anxiety 30 and rankings 46–7 status competition 26–39 status data 2, 80, 159, 161–2, 169, 174 functioning as symbolic data 8, 162 status fluidity 170–4 status insecurity 4 status miles 71–2 status sets 161–2 status symbols 158 status work 4, 36–7, 174 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (France) 127 Streeck, Wolfgang 171–2 subprime crisis (2007) 57, 64 surveillance 8, 142, 152 interdependence of self- and external 153–5 and neoliberalism 23 workplace and technological 149–51 surveys, satisfaction 82–4 symbolic capital 174 status data as 8, 162 target setting 22 tariff models 152–3 technological surveillance, in the workplace 149–51 technologies of the self 25 tertium comparationis 32 Thomas theorem 59 Thompson, David C. 66 Times Higher Education ranking 47, 48, 53 tourism portals 85 tracking as double-edged sword 142 see also self-tracking trade relations 16 transnational expert systems 121–2 transparency 3, 91, 141–3, 144, 147 Transparency International 26 ‘transparent body’ 105 TripAdvisor 85 Trustpilot 86 Turkey 54 tutors evaluation of by students 89–90 Uber 156 űbercapital 163–4 UN Sustainable Development Goals 20 United Nations 122 university lecturers evaluation of 89–90 object of online reviews 90 university rankings 6, 7, 43, 47–53, 144, 175 valorization 5, 58, 124, 161 valuation 5–6 value registration 161 Vietnam War 131 visibilization, and the creation of difference 40–3 Webb, Jarrett 104 Weber, Max 15, 16, 154 Weiß, Manfred 119 Welch, Jack 155 ‘winner-take-all society’ 136 Wolf, Gary 99–100 Woolgar, Steve 34 workplace technological surveillance in the 149–51 World Bank 122 worth 5–6, 7, 11, 78–80, 170 assessments of 27 establishment of 160–2 orders of 11, 15, 29 self- 29, 36, 38, 47, 51, 67, 170 Young, Michael 161 The Rise of Meritocracy 23, 161 Zillien, Nicole 105 Zuckerberg, Mark 158 POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.politybooks.com/eula to access Polity's ebook EULA.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free
by Cody Wilson
Published 10 Oct 2016

The Bay Area libertarians were a small and closeted number. Startup cultures were of different strains. There were men who made millies and there were men who made billies. The rule is to get big and to get big fast, in the name of libertarianism, of course. “The cities fine your customers tens of thousands of dollars if you’re Airbnb; the attorneys general and the unions come after the ridesharing apps. There are undercover cops literally pulling people from Ubers. You have to move to many markets quickly, make it too hard to uproot you everywhere at once.” I met a few more people while I was there. I heard about a man collecting the notes of Peter Thiel to release as a book, about the Massive Online Open Course insurgents trying to drive a wedge between dot gov and dot edu, about Patri Freidman and those charting the high seas for zones of libertarian secession.

…

It’s a demon Lenin with his hand on the shoulder of some kid at the computer. It says, ‘Remember, when you pirate MP3s, you’re downloading communism!’ ” Varol flew into Austin the next week for South by Southwest, a local tech conference held in March. He found an apartment on Eleventh Street with Airbnb, a service he mentioned to me more than a few times. “Austin is already moving against this,” he told me when I caught up with him. “Fines for homeowners running unlicensed hotels. It’s on.” He was in a fine mood. We stayed in his rented apartment the night before my scheduled speech at the conference to finish the new concept behind DEFCAD, but I was determined to at last duck this enterprise idea; to turn it into something nonmilitary.

Leave the World Behind
by Rumaan Alam
Published 15 Dec 2020

THERE WAS SOMETHING alluring about that red so transformed. The house looked old but new. It looked solid but light. Perhaps that was a fundamentally American desire, or just a modern urge, to want a house, a car, a book, a pair of shoes, to embody these contradictions. Amanda had found the place on Airbnb. “The Ultimate Escape,” the ad proclaimed. She respected the chummy advertising-speak of the description. Step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind. She’d handed the laptop, hot enough to incubate tumors in her abdomen, over to Clay. He nodded, said something noncommittal. But Amanda had insisted upon this vacation.

…

Clay looked at the built-in shelves with remaindered art books and old board games. “It would tell us more if there were more to tell.” Ipso facto. “The satellite television is so unreliable. But it’s impossible to get them to run the cable out this far, so it’s the only option.” Ruth had wanted the house to be far from everything. She’d been the one who wrote that Airbnb listing, and she meant it. That the house was a place apart from the rest of the world was the best thing about it. “The wind is enough to knock it out.” G. H. sat in one of the armchairs. “Rain. It’s not very reassuring, that rain can affect a satellite. But it’s true.” Clay shrugged his shoulders.

Early Retirement Guide: 40 is the new 65
by Manish Thakur
Published 20 Dec 2015

Now since one of financial independence's main purposes is to live the best life you can for your goals, if you have found your dream home and are appalled at the idea of moving, that's perfectly ok. This just means financial independence might be a little further away or you might have to make tradeoffs in other purchasing decisions. There are a few other ways of reducing the impact of your housing costs on your early retirement timeline: 1. Rent out unused rooms on Airbnb.com, and earn some extra money and make new friends along the way 2. Use space heaters to only heat frequently used rooms and cut down on money spent to heat the whole house. 3. Get roommates who cover your monthly mortgage payment with their rent payments. If you do decide to start looking for a new home that truly fits your needs and aligns with your desired lifestyle and goals, keep an eye out for rooms that can serve multiple purposes.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

It reflects the largely preconscious valuations, priorities and internalized beliefs of the people who devised Home—at Google, as throughout the industry, a remarkably homogeneous cohort of young designers and engineers, still more similar to one another psychographically and in terms of their political commitments than they are demographically alike.11 But as with those who have embraced the practices of the Quantified Self, what is more important than the degree of similarity they bear to one another is how different they are from everyone else. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that at this moment in history, internet-of-things propositions are generally imagined, designed and architected by a group of people who have completely assimilated services like Uber, Airbnb and Venmo into their daily lives, at a time when Pew Research Center figures suggest that a very significant percentage of the population has never used (or even heard of) them.12 And all of their valuations get folded into the things they design. These propositions are normal to them, and so become normalized for everyone else as well.

…

Here’s where everything implied by intrinsic enforcement comes into its own, in the real world of apartments, storage lockers, conference rooms and cars: applied to such physical spaces, the smart contract functions as a potent gatekeeping mechanism, supporting ever-finer gradients of payment and remote access control. It’s easy to imagine such a module being retrofitted to doors and gates, replacing the code locks which have sprouted like fungus all over certain high-demand districts in recent years—the telltale sign of a property being rented on AirBnb. What we now know as the sharing economy, then, only begins to suggest what is possible in a world where the smart contract is grafted onto the pervasive fabric of sensing and actuation we think of as the internet of things. By giving blockchain-mediated smart contracts tangible real-world impact, Slock.it’s “smart locks” make something that might otherwise remain an abstraction concrete and easy to understand.

…

Index 15M movement, 110, 169 3arabizi, 311 3D printing, 8, 85–6, 88, 93–6, 98, 100–4, 107–8, 110, 281, 295–6, 302, 312 5 Point, the (Seattle dive bar), 84 51% attack, 139 Accenture, 198, 231 accuracy, machine learning, 217 acrylonitrile butadiene styrene plastic filament, ABS, 94–5 Aetna, 36 aerogel, 95 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, ACT UP, 167 Air America, CIA front organization, 228 Airbnb, 41, 156 Alcoholics Anonymous, 167 Aldiss, Brian, 291 Alibaba, 106, 286 Alphabet, company, 275–9, 284 AlphaGo, 264–6, 278, 270 Amazon, 36–9, 46–7, 193, 195, 211, 275, 277–82, 284, 286, 314 acquisitions of, 280–1 Alexa (virtual assistant), 39 Dash Button, 36–7, 42, 46–8, 279 Echo, 38, 279 Echo Dot, 38 Flex, 278 labor conditions at, blue-collar, 47, 195 labor conditions at, white-collar, 195n Amnesia, Anne, 181 Android operating system, 18, 44, 275, 278 Annapurna Labs, 281 anticipatory surveillance, 242 AntPool mining pool, 139 Apple, 15, 18, 33, 36–9, 85, 197, 275, 277, 279, 283–5 Apple TV, 277 App Store, 18 iOS, 18 iPad, 277 iPhone, 15, 64–5, 277 iTunes, 277 Macintosh, first-generation, 85 Siri virtual assistant, 39 Watch, 33, 36, 197 application programming interface, API, 26, 39, 60, 196, 248, 274 application-specific integrated circuits, ASIC, 128, 138, 141 AR-15 assault rifle, 108 Arlington National Cemetery, 65 Armadillo police vehicle, 29 artificial intelligence, 259–71 Asawa, Ruth, 261 Atelier Populaire, 269 augmented reality, AR, 63–84 Auschwitz, 61, 65, 71 automated teller machines (ATM), 1, 3, 7, 52, 135 automation, 8, 153, 183–207, 226, 236, 255–7, 260, 275, 280, 311 economic implications of, 192–206 “four D’s of,” 184, 202 motivations behind, 186–91 autonomous organizations, 115, 147, 175, 302 autonomous trucking, 193, 255, 278 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 261 Back, Adam, 121 Baidu, 243 Baihe, 286 Balochistan, 179 Bank of America, 120 Bank of England, 194 baseband processors, 15 beacons, 49, 51 becoming-cyborg, 80 Beer, Stafford, 155, 302 Bennett, Jane, 307 Bergen-Belsen, 61 BetterWorks, 199 Bezos, Jeff, 193, 278 bias: human prejudice, 188–9, 234 machine learning, 218 big data, 211, 221 Bitcoin, 115–17, 119–26, 128–9, 131–43, 145–51, 153, 155, 157, 159–63, 165–6, 179 as infrastructure for micropayments, 133 mining of, 126–8, 130–1, 135, 138–41, 145 putative anonymity of, 137 Bitcoin Magazine, 148 “black boxes,” 244, 253 Black Lives Matter movement, 177, 236, 244 blockchain, 8, 115–81, 207, 209–10, 288, 290, 293, 295–6, 303, 307, 318 Bois de Boulogne, 2 Borges, Jorge Luis, 244 Boston Dynamics.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

Zoom out, however, and you’ll realise that on a day-to-day basis we share more with one another than we keep for ourselves. This communal basis is a vital mainstay of capitalism. Consider how many companies are utterly dependent on the generosity of their customers. Facebook would be worth far less without the pictures and videos that millions of users share for free. And Airbnb wouldn’t survive long without the innumerable reviews travellers post for nothing. So why are we so blind to our own communism? Maybe it’s because the things we share don’t seem all that remarkable. We take sharing them for granted. Nobody has to print flyers explaining to people that it’s nice to take a stroll in Central Park.

…

By multinationals, for instance, that are buying up water supplies and patenting genes, by governments that are privatising whatever they can get a buck for, and by universities that are selling off their knowledge to the highest bidder. Also by the advent of platform capitalism, which is enabling the likes of Airbnb and Facebook to skim the fat off the prosperity of the Homo cooperans. All too often, the sharing economy turns out to be more like a shearing economy – we all get fleeced. For the moment, we’re still locked in a fierce and undecided contest. On one side are the people who believe the whole world is destined to become one big commune.

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INDEX Abdeslam, Salah and Brahim, here Abrahams, Ruben, here, here, here Aché people, here, here, here Acton, Lord, here ADHD, here advertising industry, here aeroplane crashes, here see also Malaysia Airlines Flight here Agincourt, Battle of, here Agnelli, Susanna, here Agora school, here, here, here Airbnb, here, here Alaska Permanent Fund, here Allen of Hurtwood, Lady, here Allport, Gordon, here, here, here Al-Qaeda, here, here Amazon, here American Civil War, here, here American Indians, here American Psychological Association, here American Psychologist, here American Scientist, here animals, domesticated, here ants, here Arab Spring, here Arendt, Hannah, here, here, here, here Ariely, Dan, here, here Aristotle, here Ash, Timothy Garton, here Ashworth, Tony, here asymmetrical feedback, here Athens, ancient, here Atlantic, The, here, here Auschwitz, here, here Australopithecus africanus, here, here availability bias, here Aztecs, here babies and infants, here, here Bach, J.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

But consider the birth of buyer/seller feedback. eBay was an unknown startup until it rolled out a feature in which buyers and sellers could rate one another. Today, buyer/seller feedback is what has made us comfortable with the online economy—from buying products that we’ve never seen before on Amazon to staying in the homes of people we’ve never met, through Airbnb. In a previous era, we used brands to create trust—when you saw a toothpaste stamped with Colgate, you knew it was the product of a big, stable company whose long-term success depended on good products. Today, we have feedback from people who’ve tried out something we might like; even if you don’t know them, you put your faith in there being a lot of them.

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Mobile phones and social media have put companies directly in contact with the end user in ways they’ve never been before; the fate of their products lies in the social proof of how well those things work, whether tracked through word of mouth or a mere app rating in the App Store. Companies now can’t merely focus on striking the right deal with an HR manager or insurance agent. They have to deliver services knowing that they’ll be compared with Uber and Airbnb, because they all exist in hand and in comparison, one tap away. In the arc of moving industries from things to pixels, it took a hundred years to codify what it meant to make something easy to use. By now, we know what usability means—it’s feedback, mental models, and all the other nuances we’ve seen in this book.

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You got my heart, you got my soul … —Robert Fabricant Index The page references in this index correspond to the print edition from which this ebook was created, and clicking on them will take you to the the location in the ebook where the equivalent print page would begin. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader. Acumen, 283 addiction, 257, 274 Adler, Felix, 57 advertising, 58–59, 240–42; on Facebook, 267 AEG, 333 Aeron chair, 204, 208, 341 affordances, 124 Airbnb, 35, 287 Air Force, U.S., 80, 82–85, 102–103 airplanes, 70; cockpit controls in, 83–84, 106, 124; crashes of, 77, 81–85, 102–103, 104, 106, 121, 173, 257 alarm clocks, 154 Alexa, 122, 123, 190, 227, 341, 346 algorithms, 35–36, 42, 44, 156, 231, 241, 243 Amazon, 35, 117, 118, 227, 231, 243, 269, 351n33; Alexa, 122, 123, 190, 227, 341, 346; Apple and, 145–46; Kindle, 41; one-click purchases, 145–46, 342 America, 59–63, 93 American Express, 59 American Management Association, 64 ancestor thinking, 274–75 Anthropometric Source Book, 337 APL (A Programming Language), 7 Apple, 3–6, 8, 140–41, 145, 148, 177, 195, 227–28, 231, 239, 243, 269, 289, 295, 296, 299, 317, 326–27; advertisements of, 8, 43; Amazon and, 145–46; App Store, 149–50, 292, 344; graphical user interface, 143, 145, 146, 148; iCloud, 351n32; iMac, 5, 23, 149; iPad, 5, 296; iPhone, 5, 23, 43, 127, 145–47, 149, 191, 216, 228, 259, 274, 289–90, 291, 296, 313, 327, 338, 343; iPod, 5, 23, 145, 338, 342–43, 346; iTunes, 146, 343; Ive at, 23, 149, 299, 338, 342; Jobs at, 3–4, 7, 139–41, 145, 149, 157, 183, 190, 317, 340, 343; laptop trackpads, 359n25; Lisa (Apple II), 140, 141, 143, 145; Macintosh, 8, 143–46, 157, 338, 340; mouse, 141, 169, 177, 182–83; Norman at, 22–23; Shortcuts, 151; Siri, 122, 151, 190–91, 193, 195, 208, 312; Stores, 150; touchscreens, 127, 145–47, 343, 359n25; visual metaphors and, 148–49, 210; Xerox and, 8, 139–44, 146 Apple Park, 4–5 appliances: home, 63, 117, 179, 230, 333, 370n16; medical, 69 apps, 26–27, 69, 147, 192, 194, 242, 255, 261, 288, 315–16; Apple App Store, 149–50, 292, 344; consistency of, 31; metaphors and, 149–52; navigability of, 31 arguments, 42 Army, U.S., 87 Arnold, John, 165–68, 170, 174, 190 artificial intelligence (AI), 105, 189–90, 208–209, 242, 312; in assistants, 108; Capital One chatbot, 211–12, 259, 268; Eliza conversational bot, 337–38; feedback and, 35–36; Google Lens and, 44; and suit to augment muscles of the elderly, 107 Art Nouveau, 148 Asana, 248, 291 assembly lines, 60, 333 assistants, digital, 108, 122–24, 199; trust in, 193–94, 208 “As We May Think” (Bush), 189 AT&T, 337, 371n21 Atkinson, Bill, 140–44, 145 Atlantic, The, 188 atomic bomb, see nuclear weapons Audi, 99–104, 106, 108, 111–13, 118–20, 126, 144, 355n5 automation, 105; paradox of, 272, 273 autopilot, 119, 124, 272, 346 B-17 Flying Fortress, 83–84, 335–36 Bach, Richard, 60–61 bag-mapping technique, 307–308 banks, 287 Barbaric, Mladen, 49–55, 71, 117 Barrett, K.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

A related matter was Afterpay USA’s use of options to lure staff and to recruit consultants and other aides to Afterpay’s cause. Dana Stalder had impressed upon Eisen and Molnar that to win in Silicon Valley, they had to attract the right talent. But that wasn’t going to be easy. The top engineers at the likes of Uber and Airbnb had millions of unvested shares and options, and if they were going to walk away from these it had to be worth their while. Working in Afterpay’s favour was that many engineers desired to build stuff from the ground up, and Afterpay offered them that opportunity. After its investment in January 2018, Matrix had sent dozens of staff, from its extensive start-up venture capital networks, into Afterpay USA as Molnar and Stalder spent four months bedding down a team.

…

There was a lot of negative sentiment among Australian investors who had seen companies fail in their efforts to expand offshore, Molnar explained. So Afterpay had set up a separate US company. ‘We want people to feel heavily invested in our business. So we set up a structure with Dana that let us bring people in out of Google, Airbnb, Harvard and Stanford MBA students,’ Molnar said.6 What the future conversion of US option holders meant for the future value of Afterpay was too detailed for most analysts, who largely chose to ignore it. The general view was that the conversion would be limited to less than 20 per cent of the shares on issue, and the enormous growth of the US business would mean everyone got rich.

…

now=true> ‘Affirm: The morality of money’, The Generalist, 10 December 2020, <https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/affirm-the-morality-of-money> WWD & PayPal, The Power of Later, Research report, 17 March 2021 Donna Fuscaldo, ‘Struggling online lender OnDeck sold to Enova International’, Forbes, 29 July 2020 Sarah Thompson, Anthony Macdonald & Tim Boyd, ‘Zip Co goes shopping for US investors, mulls second listing’, The Australian Financial Review, 7 February 2021 Tom Richardson, ‘Zip valuation frustrates boss after “absolutely cracking” quarter’, The Australian Financial Review, 21 January 2021 Jeff Kaufli, ‘Inside the billion-dollar plan to kill credit cards’, Forbes, 8 February 2021 Thea de Gallier, Harvey Day & Hannah Price, ‘Influencer: “Why I stopped working with Klarna”’, BBC, 11 February 2021 HM Treasury, ‘Buy-now-pay-later products to be regulated’, 2 February 2021, <www.gov.uk/government/news/buy-now-pay-later-products-to-be-regulated> Simon English, ‘City watchdog launches clampdown on buy-now-pay-later loans’, Evening Standard, 2 February 2021 Julia Kollewe & Kalyeena Makortoff, ‘Buy now pay later firms such as Klarna to face FCA regulation’, The Guardian, 3 February 2021 Hans van Leeuwen & James Eyers, ‘Britain wields regulator’s rod on buy now, pay later firms’, The Australian Financial Review, 3 February 2021 Danielle Wightman-Stone, ‘London Fashion Week names Clearpay as principal partner’, FashionUnited, 10 February 2021 Danielle Wightman-Stone, ‘MPs criticise London Fashion Week sponsorship deal with Clearpay’, FashionUnited, 22 February 2021 James Eyers, ‘ASIC lashes buy now, pay later code of conduct’, The Australian Financial Review, 10 June 2020 John Kehoe, ‘Responsible lending laws to be axed’, The Australian Financial Review, 24 September 2020 Consumers’ Federation of Australia, ‘Joint Consumer Submission: Australian Finance Industry Association (AFIA) Buy Now Pay Later Code of Practice’, 6 May 2020, <http://consumersfederation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20200506-FINAL-Submission.pdf> Tom Richardson, ‘PayPal flags extraordinary demand in buy now, pay later space’, The Australian Financial Review, 3 November 2020 Ashwini Chandra, Some observations on US BNPL from PYPL’s 4Q20, Goldman Sachs research report, 4 February 2021 Tom Beadle, ‘PayPal’s entry into “Pay in 4”: Running the scenarios’, UBS Global Research, 10 September 2020 Tim Piper, BNPL: Payments giant PayPal enters “Pay in 4”, RBC Capital Markets report, 6 September 2020 James Eyers, ‘Consumer groups attack the new buy now, pay later code of conduct’, The Australian Financial Review, 24 February 2021 Chapter 17 Matthew Wilson & Nikolai Dale, ‘Afterpay: Launched by Gen Y, embraced by Gen Z, positioning for Gen Alpha’, E&P Financial, 25 February 2021 Richard Henderson, ‘Nowhere to hide from market’s growth traps’, The Australian Financial Review, 9 March 2021 James Eyers, ‘Afterpay readies for battle with CBA’, The Australian Financial Review, 18 March 2021 Credit Suisse, ‘Research bulletin’, 17 March 2021 Macquarie Research, 24 March 2021 Tony Boyd, ‘Buy now, pay later has an image problem’, The Australian Financial Review, 16 March 2021 Michael Roddan & Jonathan Shapiro, ‘ASIC will test new powers on buy now, pay later’, The Australian Financial Review, 10 March 2021 Chay Fisher, Cara Holland & Tim West, ‘Developments in the buy now, pay later market’, RBA Bulletin, March 2021 Karen Maley, ‘Bringing an end to the buy now, pay later lunacy’, The Australian Financial Review, 22 March 2021 Lucy Maken, ‘Afterpay’s Nick Molnar makes like a billionaire, buys block next door for $18.5m’, Domain, 20 March 2021 Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology, ‘Australia as a Technology and Financial Centre’, Committee Hansard, Sydney, 11 February 2021 Lauren Sams, ‘In Vogue’, The Australian Financial Review Magazine, 26 March 2021 INDEX A2 Milk 166 Abeles, Sir Peter 8 Abercrombie, Andrew 50, 51, 117 Aboud, Anthony 84 Aconex 155–6 Adalberth, Niklas 190 Adler, Rose 19 Adler, Simon 19 Affirm 81, 187, 190, 245, 279, 284, 285, 291, 316, 317 US IPO 312–13, 315, 316 Afterpay $100 share price 291 2018 capital raising 184, 185 2019 capital raising 228, 239, 251 2020 sell-down 280–1 2021 capital raising 331–3 advertising, unauthorised 153–4 advisory board 83 Afterpay Touch, shareholders 118 ASIC review 137, 140, 144, 145, 148, 191 ASX200 index inclusion 173 ASX300 index inclusion 132 AUSTRAC and 227, 228, 239, 258 average age of users 268 board changes 2019 229 chargeback risk 120 code of conduct 324–6, 328 competitors 81, 82, 285, 291, 314 costs 129 COVID-19 and 273–6 credit cards distinguished 80–1, 106 credit checks 80, 114, 147, 163, 169, 186, 203, 211 credit licence 227 customers, number 120, 121, 157, 167 digital card launch 344 earnings forecasts 82–3 Edible Blooms 56, 76 escrow period 158, 169, 173 Facebook groups 114 first raising 78–85 governance 241 growth 106–7, 117, 121, 135, 157, 183, 208, 227, 261, 264, 284, 330, 342–3 health sector, move into 160–1 Ice Online 55, 307 identity checks 167, 227 initial IPO investors 117 instore retail 113, 130 IPO 90, 97–8, 103 late fees 123, 146, 163, 164, 167–8, 203, 286 lobbyists 195, 198, 199, 214, 323, 340 logo, placement by merchant 106 loss rate on transactions 123–4, 256 merchants, number signed up 121 merger with Touchcorp 118, 129 name 53–4, 138 National Australia Bank 108–10, 121, 123 net transaction loss figure 124–5 online sales in Australia, percentage of 121 options for employees, advisers 197, 242, 243, 332 Pagantis purchase 286 payments platform, development 54, 55, 59, 68, 72 pitch deck 78–80 products 79–80 repeat business 264 Senate inquiry see Senate Economics References Committee inquiry share values 136, 167 shop directory 264, 314, 330 staff 195, 289 success, reasons for 346–7 Touchcorp see Touchcorp Holdings Pty Ltd Transaction Integrity System 123–4 transactions, economics of each 122–3 United Kingdom, expansion into 184, 224, 264 United States, expansion into 157–8, 173–4, 243–4, 265 US hedge funds, interest in 237–8 US listing, possible 345 Visa and 108 Westpac and Afterpay Money 290, 338, 339, 340 women, early adoption 160 young customers 106, 150, 151, 154, 160, 162, 163–4 Afterpay Day 135, 136, 268 Afterpay Touch (APT) first annual result 129 share values 136, 167 shareholders 118, 158, 159 AfterPay (United Kingdom) 184 Afterpay USA 331–2 expansion into USA 157–8, 173–4, 243–4 structure of 244 Ainsley, Lee 235, 236 Airbnb 242 Allen, Mike 35 Allingham, David Eley Griffiths 104, 105, 107, 187, 293 EMI 103 Almond, Peter 267 AlphaBeta 200, 208–9, 222 Altium 182 Amazon 92, 98, 102, 127, 180, 182, 263, 289 America Online 180 American Express 302 Anthony Hordern & Sons 44 anti-money laundering Afterpay 227–8 Commonwealth Bank 151–2, 217–18 Appen 182 Apple 92, 102, 182 Arowana Australian Opportunities 119, 120 Asham, Ian 55 Aston, Joe 242, 243 Atlassian 101, 237, 281 dual-class share structure 102 Auschwitz 6, 10 AUSTRAC 151–2, 217–18, 227–8, 239, 258 Westpac 258–9 Australian Banking Association 209–10, 217, 325 Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) 50, 326 Australian Consumers’ Association 45 Australian Fashion Laureate awards 2020 305 Australian Fashion Week 307 Australian Finance Industry Association 298, 325 Australian Financial Review 23, 29, 30, 103, 107, 114, 199 Banking and Wealth Summit 2020 300–1, 303 ‘Street Talk’ 137, 139, 140, 144, 168, 202, 316 Australian Guarantee Corporation (AGC) 44, 51 Australian Jewish Times 8 Australian Payments Network 301 Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) 50, 137, 139 banks, action against 140 Hayne Royal Commission and 142, 145 inquiry into BNPL sector 137, 141, 144, 145, 148, 165, 191 policy-maker, as 297, 300 product intervention powers 213, 224 reports into BNPL sector 202–4, 297, 298, 299 Westpac 140, 143 Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001 212 Avery, Deborah 137–8 A.W.

Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route
by Katrina Emery and Moon Travel Guides
Published 27 Jul 2020

Known as the hotel that Kickstarter built—per the social media campaign that funded its renovation—this hip place hosts artist residencies along with nine rooms. Each room has been designed by local Portland artists. Guests can enjoy a dry sauna, a community kitchen, and great views down Main Street. All check-ins are run through Airbnb, and there is no staff on-site, but the communal dining area and library encourage mingling. Located on the edge of town, the thoughtfully decorated Bronze Antler Bed & Breakfast (209 S. Main St., 541/432-0230, www.bronzeantler.com, $156-255) has six sumptuous rooms and serves a delicious breakfast.

…

RV Rentals Consider renting an RV, which allows for more freedom and the comforts of home on the road. Road conditions unsuitable for an RV are rare on this route, and are noted when necessary. RV camping sites generally cost $30-40 per night, and you can also park for free, without hookups, in some parking lots and many hotels (ask first). Sites like RVshare (www.rvshare.com)—like an Airbnb for RVers—allow you to rent an RV directly through the owner. Many local RV rental companies are near the bigger city travel hubs along the route, but be aware that you might need to make your trip a loop, as you’ll likely need to return the RV to its original location. For a one-way RV road trip, your best bet may be Cruise America (800/671-8042, www.cruiseamerica.com), a nationwide company with convenient locations along the route that allows out-of-state drop-offs for a $650 fee, contingent on fleet availability—so inquire well ahead of time (4-6 months).

…

Many budget-friendly hotels offer a decent rate for double occupancy (or two beds for a family) and come with breakfast included. Best Western’s line of Best Western Plus hotels are a good bet throughout the trip, offering similar levels of quality. Quality Inn, Holiday Inn, and Hilton Garden Inn are found in most locations and are good choices as well. Airbnb has great options in the cities along the route, but choices are drastically limited in smaller towns and rural areas. Consider alternating hotel stays with tent camping to save money along the way; you’ll be passing through some of the country’s most magnificent landscapes, with incredible campgrounds, so bringing a tent along ensures better access to the wilder places, typically at $10-15 per night.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow
Published 8 Sep 2014

That makes him one of the fastest risers in championship racing. Despite that, Heinemeier Hansson is far better known among computer programmers—where he goes by the moniker DHH—than car enthusiasts. Though most of his fellow racers don’t know it, he’s indirectly responsible for the development of Twitter. And Hulu and Airbnb. And a host of other transformative technologies for which he receives no royalties. His work has contributed to revolutions, and lowered the barrier for thousands of tech companies* to launch products. All because David Heinemeier Hansson hates to do work he doesn’t have to do. DHH lives and works by a philosophy that helps him do dramatically more with his time and effort.

…

Abagnale, Frank William, Jr., 7–8 Abrams, Jeffrey Jacob, 131–33 Academy of Management Review (journal), 117 Addieu (iPhone app), 58 Adidas AG (sports equipment), 192 “Advanced Chess” (Upworthy study), 218n73 Advertising Age (magazine), 149 Adweek (magazine), 149, 150 AHumanRight.org, 176–77 Airbnb (website), 80 Aldrin, Edwin Eugene (“Buzz”), 145, 147 Alexander the Great (king of Macedon), 38, 175 Alias (TV series), 132 Amabile, Teresa, 146 Anthony, Carmelo, 191, 192 Apple, Inc., 116 Aristotle (philosopher), 38, 46 Armstrong, Neil, 145 Arthur, Chester, 24–25 Ashton (video gamer), 14 athletics, recognition ahead of academics, 166 auto racing DHH driving skills, 95–98 Formula 1, 41–42 GT3/GT4/GTE races, 96–97 6 Hours of Silverstone, 79–80 Avicii (Tim Bergling), 134 Aykroyd, Dan, 56 Bad Robot Productions, 131–33 “Bad Romance” (video), 120, 142, 153 Barrie, J.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

In Philadelphia, venture capital firm First Round Capital moved from suburban Conshohocken to University City. The list goes on and on as companies competing for younger workers realize they need to move to where the talent wants to live. Nowhere is this more obvious than in San Francisco, where some of the hottest tech start-ups are forgoing Silicon Valley for the city itself. Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, Dropbox, Uber, Pinterest, and Yelp are among those that have opted to build new headquarters in San Franciscos proper instead of the stretch of suburbs that make up the Bay Area peninsula. Several venture capital firms, too, longtime fixtures of Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, have recently announced plans to either relocate or open satellite offices in San Francisco.

…

Motorola Mobility is shuttering: Sandra Guy, “Motorola Mobility Leaving Libertyville for Merchandise Mart,” suntimes.com, July 26, 2012. “The whole corporate campus seems”: Eddie Baeb, “Crain’s Special Report: Corporate Campuses in Twilight,” Crain’s Chicago Business, May 30, 2011. In New York City, UBS: Charles V. Bagli, “Regretting Move, Bank May Return to Manhattan,” New York Times, June 8, 2011. Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, Dropbox: A notable exception to the tech moguls’ fascination with cities is Steve Jobs, who lived and worked his whole life in the suburbs (he lived in a Tudor house in Palo Alto, and Apple’s headquarters were in nearby Cupertino). But when Apple-owned Pixar moved to a new headquarters in Emeryville, California, Jobs pushed the designers to emphasize central locations where employees could mingle with one another with the hope of fostering creativity.

Developing Backbone.js Applications
by Addy Osmani
Published 21 Jul 2012

Its workspace uses Backbone to create task views, activities, accounts, tags and more. Walmart Mobile Walmart chose Backbone to power its mobile web applications, creating two new extension frameworks in the process - Thorax and Lumbar. We’ll be discussing both of these later in the book. Airbnb Airbnb developed its mobile web app using Backbone and now uses it across many of its products. Code School Code School’s course challenge app is built from the ground up using Backbone, taking advantage of all the pieces it has to offer: routers, collections, models and complex event handling. Backbone Basics In this section, you’ll learn the essentials of Backbone’s models, views, collections, events, and routers.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

Although there is fierce resistance to the replacement of human activity by AIs in these areas – for instance in essay marking – Ford argues that no industry can ignore for long the benefits of cheaper, faster, more reliable ways of providing their products and services. He goes on to point out that the companies and industries which today are nascent and fast-growing, and tomorrow will be economic giants, are extremely parsimonious employers of humans. AirBnB, the peer-to-peer rooms rental business, for example, achieved a market cap of $20bn in March 2015 with just 13 employees. The challenge of UBI The final chapters of “Rise of the Robots” explore the consequences of the trends which Ford has described. Can an economy thrive and grow if a large minority of people cannot find sufficient work to give themselves and their families a decent life?

…

We have to go to Silicon Valley to find an experiment specifically designed to explore the impact of UBI in the context of a jobless future when machine intelligence has automated most of what we currently do for a living. Just such an experiment was announced in January 2016 by Sam Altman, president of the seed capital firm Y Combinator, which gave a start in life to Reddit, AirBnB and DropBox. Altman's task is not trivial: he will have to figure out a way to quantify the satisfaction his guinea pigs derive from their UBI, and whether they are doing anything useful with their time.[cccv] Socialism? With all these experiments bubbling up, the concept of UBI has become a favourite media topic, but it is controversial.

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer
by Eoin Ó Broin
Published 5 May 2019

The housing market no longer responds to human need, but to the rhythms of finance. Supporters of free-market economics insist this outcome is natural and spontaneous. In fact it is the result of relentless coercion and intervention by the State. The rundown terraced house, with every room turned into a bedroom; the ex-council flat turned into an Airbnb while people huddle under sleeping bags in doorways; the lights-off apartment blocks, bought off-plan and left empty by some footballer or crook. We walk past the evidence every day. Periodically it all goes bust, and some bankers flee the country, and some politicians are disgraced and people on radio phone-ins get shouty.

…

The biggest mistake would be to look at the current state of the built environment and see it as the product of randomness plus demographic change. It is the precise outcome of planned action by the rich against the poor. From the slums of Manila, built alongside the sewers, to depopulated cities in the American Rust Belt like Gary, Indiana; to places like Barcelona, whose social fabric is being destroyed by Airbnb – I’ve reported the way neoliberalism has massively redrawn the map of human dwelling patterns. The lesson I take from it is: it can all be redrawn again, this time with the people in control. In this hard-hitting and timely book, Ó Broin exposes the failures in politics and economics that plunged Ireland into a housing crisis.

Wanderland
by Jini Reddy
Published 29 Apr 2020

We listen to a band with the inelegant name of ‘Crunchy Frog’ made up of middle-aged men who play the blues so well we idly wonder if they’d once been session guitarists for a band like the Stones. It’s a fun and upbeat start, if not a particularly pilgrimage-like one. We have to tear ourselves away far too early in the evening, mindful of the long day ahead. Walking uphill to our Airbnb in the darkness, we shake the pub out of our skin and plot our intentions for our walk. After all, this is what any good pilgrim would do. ‘I want the land to show me beautiful, enchanting, unexpected things,’ I tell Olivia. My friend, in turn, wants out of the deadlock she is in, the life of a high-powered sustainability guru versus the poet and artist she longs to be.

…

Will loves his festivals, his singing and his workshops, but he can step outside of the bubble. ‘Do you fancy a stroll?’ he says. A stroll would be good. I’m desperate to stretch my legs. After dinner (in an Indian restaurant where the Indian waiter glares at me – why, I don’t know, seeing as I’m the only other person with a brown face in here) we walk past my Airbnb and Will points out a shortcut to the Tor. It’s past an ashram with Tibetan prayer wheels, glittering beneath the starry night sky. We’re only a few hours out of London and I’m astonished to see the stars. What we miss, in the city, with our veil of pollution. We spin the wheels clockwise to send prayers out to the world as per the custom, then we walk back slowly and I tell Will I’m not too sure what I’ll do after I go up the Tor.

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
by James Bloodworth
Published 1 Mar 2018

There is an app that can summon someone to pick up your clothes, wash them and iron them, and drop them back again smelling sweetly. One of the UK’s 15,000 Deliveroo riders can bike food over to you from a local restaurant. An app called Dropit can send someone to collect the heavy bags you don’t want to carry home from the shops and deliver them straight to your door. With the Airbnb app, you can lease your property out to short-term lodgers. Meanwhile, DriveNow lets you borrow a BMW from a street near to your home and you drop it off in any legal parking space when you have finished with it. The possibilities are potentially endless. Together with the convenience, such services are almost always much cheaper than the traditional service, whatever that is.

…

Aberfan disaster (1966) 170–1 ACAS 38 acid attacks, delivery drivers protest against, London (July, 2017) 256–7 Ackroyd, Peter 249 Admiral Insurance call centre, Swansea 150, 153–64, 180–1, 183, 185–6, 224 commission used as incentive for employees at 162–3 ‘fun’ culture 155, 161–2, 163, 164, 181 management 162–3, 224 performance league tables 183 politics, employee attitudes towards 164 ‘Renewals Consultant’ role 154 share scheme and dividends 159 staff turnover rate 159 training 155, 160–1 unions/collective action and 185, 186 university graduates employed at 153–4 wages/pay 155–6, 158–60, 164, 180 working hours and conditions 155, 160–4, 180–1, 185–6 Age UK 113 Aiden (building site worker) 135–6 Aiden (former miner) 175 Airbnb 217 Alex (former pit mechanic) 55, 57, 62–3 algorithmic management systems 16–17, 209, 210, 211, 217–18, 222, 223, 227, 231, 232, 242, 249 Aman (Uber driver) 236–8, 239–40, 241, 242, 255 Amazon: accommodation, employee 20–2, 24–6 algorithmic management system 16–17 blue badges 20, 41 breaks, employee 12–14, 36, 48, 49–50, 52–3, 64–5 British workers and 31, 33–4, 35–41, 57, 65, 72–3 diet/health of employees 51–2, 64–5, 70–1 disciplinary system 36, 39–41, 42–4 employment agencies, use of 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65–6, 86 see also Transline and PMP Recruitment employment contracts 19–20, 53, 58 food served to employees 12–13, 14, 64 fulfillment centres in former mining areas 54–5 JB’s weekly budget whilst employed at 68–9 migrant labour, use of 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 44, 45, 46, 51, 53, 57, 61–2, 65, 71–5, 258, 260–1 picker role 14, 16, 18, 19, 49, 65, 119, 258 process guide role 22–3 recruitment process 19–20 Rugeley distribution centre, Staffordshire 11–76, 79, 86, 119, 127, 128, 159, 258 security/security guards 11–13, 47, 48–9, 52 survey of employees, GMB 36 Swansea, warehouse in 145–6, 194 tax paid in UK by 146 tiredness/exhaustion of employees 44, 50–1, 65 transgender employees, treatment of 40–1 wages/salary 18, 19, 37–9, 42–3, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 159 Amodeo, Michael 223 Anne (pensioner in Cwm) 197–8 anti-depressant medication 188 Armitage Shanks 57 Arora brothers 124–5 Aslam, Yaseen 229–30, 250 Assured Shorthold Tenancy 96 Attlee, Clement 173 ‘austerity’ policies 1–2, 6, 108 B&M Bargains 124–5, 126–30 BBC 138, 157, 173, 236 Bentham, Jeremy 182, 194 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989) 263 Bertram, Jo 235, 250–1 Bevan, Aneurin 144, 149, 192–3, 247 Bezos, Jeff 18 Big Issue, The 122 Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenavon 167, 170 Blackpool, Lancashire 77–140, 169, 187 accommodation in 80, 124, 137–8 B&M Bargains warehouse in 124–5, 126–31 Bloomfield district 137 building site work in 135–6 Central Drive 81, 120, 132–3 Golden Mile 121–2 health of residents 137 home care work in 81–90, 106–20, 140 homelessness in 95–105 job centres in 133–5 suicide rates in 100 unemployment in 121–3, 138, 139–40 Blaenau Gwent, Wales 187, 188, 190 see also under individual area and place name Booth, William 205 Brereton Colliery, Staffordshire 55 Brian (former miner) 196 Bryn Colliery, Wales 196 Brynmill, Swansea, Wales 150–1 building site work 121, 124, 135–6 buy-to-let housing market 24 Cadman, Scott 244, 245–6, 247–9 call centres 35, 61, 139, 150, 153–64, 180–6, 192, 199, 224 see also Admiral Insurance call centre, Swansea Cameron, David 259 Cannock Chase 21, 28, 54 capitalism 83, 145, 181 co-opts rebellion against 149 consumerism and 146 debt, reliance on 62 English culture overwhelmed by 32–3, 198–9 fall of Berlin Wall (1989) and 263 ‘gig’ economy and 210, 215, 232 platform capitalism 215 religious fatalism appropriated by 161 care sector: Eastern European migrant labour and 114–15 length of home care visits and 108–9, 110 local authority budget cuts and 107–10 privatisation of social care and 106–8, 109 staff training in 85–6 staffing crisis within 84–5, 119 zero hours contracts and 87 see also home care worker Carewatch UK 81–90, 109, 110, 118, 132, 135, 136, 150, 159 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) process and 88–90, 109–10 employee reviews of 83–4 employment contracts/conditions 87–8, 118–19 length of care visits and 110 MAR (Medication Administration Record) sheets and 114, 115 recruitment 81–2, 84–5 ‘shadowing’ process 88, 109–10 training 85–6 see also care sector and home care worker Cefn Mawr No. 2, Afan Valley, Wales 171–2 Celcon 57 Centre for Cities 61 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development 153 Chartists 144, 149 China 183, 196–7 Chris (Amazon employee) 20, 21, 22–6, 65 Citizens Advice 243–4 CitySprint 246, 248–9, 251–2 Claire (Amazon employee) 36, 37–41, 50, 53 class: death of 4 erosion of class solidarity 193–4 fall of Berlin Wall and 263 liberalism and 263 scientific theories of 4, 17 see also middle-class and working-class Claudiu (housemate of JB) 22 coalition government (2010–15) 109, 115–16 coal mining: decline of industry 54, 55–6, 58, 144–5, 172–9 danger of/disasters 169–72 General Strike and 173 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 3, 174–7 South Wales Valleys and 143–4, 147–9, 165–79, 180, 188, 189, 190–1, 193, 195, 196 Thatcher and 174–5, 263–4 collectivism 228 communism 17, 173, 178, 228, 263 Compare the Market 155 Conservative Party 3, 7, 109, 175 consumerism 146 Coombes, B.

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way
by Tanja Hester
Published 12 Feb 2019

Those working toward an unconventional, work-optional life may choose to broaden this set of options even more, thinking not just about the question of whether to rent or to own a home but whether to be stationary at all. An increasing number of early retirees are choosing to retire on the road, either living full-time in a recreational vehicle (RV) or embarking on a life of full-time travel, paying for hotels and Airbnb rooms instead of paying rent or a mortgage. There’s no right or wrong answer here, but I recommend you make sure to build enough financial wiggle room into your plan that you can change your mind if you so choose. If you quit your job to hit the road as a full-time RVer and decide a year later that you are ready to live in a house again, you’ll be much happier if you have magic money streams coming in to afford to pay rent somewhere rather than being forced to stick it out.

…

Reduce Your Housing Costs You’ve already asked yourself what’s most important to you in life and what you need to be happy, so you probably already know the answer to the question: Could you decrease your housing costs? If you love your home and can’t picture your life anywhere else, no problem. In that case, focus on other ways to accelerate your progress. But if you could imagine downsizing, moving to a less expensive area, getting a roommate, or renting your home out on the weekends on Airbnb, then you have options to speed yourself along. If you own your home, you could even rent it out and use part of that income to rent a smaller home for yourself—just note that net rental income is taxable, so factor in income taxes before deciding whether this makes sense for you. I talked in chapter 5 about our thought process in setting our housing budget when we moved from Los Angeles to Tahoe.

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams
by Jono Bacon
Published 12 Nov 2019

Originally started by Google in 2015, this open-source, machine-learning project has attracted more than seventeen hundred contributors.16 Not only is the code open, but discussion of the project, working groups that define direction and focus, and issue and bug reports are all open too. This has resulted in TensorFlow being used by companies such as Coca-Cola, Airbnb, Swisscom, Intel, PayPal, Twitter, Lenovo, and many others.17 Their success and ability to solicit so many contributions would be significantly reduced without such a strong community backbone and an environment where everyone plays on the same playing field. Although volunteers, they are effectively members of the team, and as such expect to be treated as members of the team.

…

“Understanding Discourse Trust Levels,” Discourse, June 25, 2018, https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/. Index Abayomi, 1–3, 7, 9, 19, 35, 278 abuse of system, 158, 217, 233, 234 access, 7–8, 16–17, 54–55, 225, 226 accountability, 139, 146, 148, 149 actions, tracking, 158–59 active participation, 109 adaptability, 176–77, 268–69 Adobe, 244 advertising, 195–96 advocacy, 23–24, 49, 111 Airbnb, 57 ambiguity, 155–56 American Physical Society, 139 Amnesty International, 18 Anderson, Chris, 46, 47 Android platform, 65 Ansari XPRIZE, xviii Apache, 6, 26 Apple, 6, 58, 128 approachability, 69–70 Ardour, 44, 52, 66 Areas of Expertise, 172–75 Ariely, Dan, 17 assets, building, 68–69 assumptions, 137, 271 asynchronous access, 54 attendance, 157 attendees, summit, 247–49 audience personas, 100, 108–19 in Bacon Method, 33 choosing, 109–12 content for, 194–95 creating, 114–16 examples of, 116–19 on Incentives Map, 230–32 On-Ramp Model for, 131, 135–38 Participation Framework for, 130 prioritizing, 112–13 productive participation by, 162–67 and relatedness, 107 audience(s) access to, 7–8 assumptions about, 137 and community strategy, 13 irrational decision making by, 101–8 for local communities, 5 surprising, 73–74 understanding your, 33, 99–100 authenticity, 75, 111, 183, 224 authority, 55–56, 200–201 Author persona, 166–67 automated measuring of condition, 217–18 autonomy, 105–6, 123 awareness, 22–24, 59–61, 192 Axe Change service, 14 Axe-Fx processors, 49–50 backlog, 150–51 Bacon Method, 32–34 Bahns, Angela, 47 Bassett, Angela, 237 Battlefield, 24, 128, 228 behavioral economics, 102–4 Bell, Alexander Graham, 153 belonging, sense of, 15, 18, 20, 143, 187, 215 Bennington, Chester, 183, 184 Big Rocks, 33, 88–96 and cadence-based cycles, 168–70 in community strategy, 94–95 and critical dimensions, 157, 161 defined, 88–89 departmental alignment on, 263 examples of, 91–94 format and key components of, 89–91 and Quarterly Delivery Plan, 34, 145–46, 148, 149 realistic thinking about, 95–96 Black Lives Matter, 18 blocked (status), 147 blogs, 193, 275 Bosch, 13 brand awareness, 24, 59–60 brand recognition, 85 Branson, Richard, 190 Buffer, 214 Build Skills stage, 132, 136, 137 business cards, 241–42 buy-in, 67, 85 cadence, operating on, 34, 264–66 Cadence-Based Community Cycle, 167–70, 264 Canonical, 1, 121, 151, 167, 245 capabilities, persona, 114, 116–18 Capital One, 13 career experience, 83 CasinoCoin, 244 Casual members, 129, 140–42 advancing, 196–97 engagement with, 198–99 incentivizing, 219, 221, 226–27 maturity model for, 166 mentoring, 203 CEOs, reporting to, 260 certainty, 105 Champions model, 49–52, 63–64, 66–67, 113, 260 chat channel, 250 check-ins, 267 civility, 187 clarity, 69–72, 138–39, 234 closing party, 250 coaching, 82–83, 205–6 Coca-Cola, 57 Coffee Bean Rewards app, 145 Colbert, Stephen, 73–74 collaboration, 8–9, 74–75, 185–86 Collaborators model, 52–56, 64–67, 86, 260, see also Inner Collaborator community; Outer Collaborator community commitment, 122 communication, 121 Community Associate, 255 Community Belonging Path, 16–20 community building, 14 additional resources on, 274–76 Bacon Method of, 32–34 as chronological journey, 127–28 consultations on, 276–77 continuing to learn about, 272–74 defining your value for, 77–78 end-to-end experience in, 125–26 fundamentals of, 15–16 getting started with, 37–38, 62 key principles of, 67–74 monitoring activities related to, 206–8 risks associated with, 154–55 tools for, 8 see also successful community building community–community engagement, 157 community culture, 30–31, 70–72, 179–88 Community Director, 254–58, 260 Community Engagement Model(s), 49–67 in Bacon Method, 33–34 Champions model, 49–52 Collaborators model, 52–59 and Community Value Statement, 80 Consumers model, 45–48 importance of selecting, 43–45 and marketing/public awareness, 59–61 scenarios for selecting, 61–67 Community Evangelist, 255 community(-ies) defined, 13–15 digital, 2–3, 5–13, 237 experimenting in, 123 foundational trends in, 7–9 future of, 35, 277–79 local, 3–5 power of, 7 social dynamics of, 15–16 value generated by, 20–29 Community Launch Timeline Template, 191 Community Leadership Summit, 179, 239 community management staff, 254–61 Community Managers, 78, 125, 126, 195, 255–56, 260–61 Community Mission, 40–43, 169 Community Mission Statement, 42, 80, 113 Community On-Ramp Model, 33–34, 130–38 community overview cards, 241–42 Community Participation Framework, 128–45 building community based on, 151–52 and building engagement, 138–44 Community On-Ramp Model in, 130–38 described, 128–30 engagement strategy to move members along, 196–206 focusing on creativity and momentum in, 209 incentives and rewards in, 145 incentives on, 211–13 incentivizing transitions in, 218–22, 226–27 mentoring in, 202–6 Community Personal Scaling Curve, 184 Community Persona Maturity Model, 163–67 Community Promise, 70–71 Community Specialist, 255 community strategy, 30 Big Rocks in, 94–95 changing, 96, 208 control over and collaboration on, 74–75 Core members’ contributions to, 201 execution of, 253–54 importance of, 13 integration of, in organization, 261–68 learning from implementation of, 268–69 planning, 39 Regular members in, 143 risks with, 29–32 and SCARF model, 105–8 variability in, 30 community summits, 245–51 finalizing attendees and content for, 247–49 follow through after, 250–51 running, 249–50 structure for, 246–47 community value, 164–67 Community Value Proposition, 175 Community Value Statement, 80–88 and Big Rocks, 89, 95 in cadence-based cycle, 169 maintaining focus on, 97 and on-ramp design, 135–36 prioritizing audience personas based on, 113 updating, 83–84, 87–88 value for community members in, 80–84 value for organization in, 84–88 company–community engagement, 157 competitions, 194 complete (status), 147 CompuServe, 5 conditions, for incentives, 216–18, 230–32 Conference Checklist, 241 conferences, 194, 195, 239, 240–43 connection(s) desire for, 9 for Regular members, 200 constructive criticism, 122–23 consultations, on community building, 276–77 Consumers model, 45–48, 62–63, 260 content for community summits, 247–49 in Growth Strategy, 192–95 for launch, 189 as source of value, 82 Content Creators (persona), 110–11, 113–15 content development in Champion communities, 49–50 in Collaborator communities, 52–56 by communities, 26–27 as source of value, 82, 86–87 contests, 194 contributions, to communities, 17, 19 control over community strategy, 74–75 over Regular members, 143 co-organizing events, 239 Core members, 129, 140 advancement for, 196–97 characteristics of, 143–44 at community summits, 242 engagement with, 201–2 incentivizing, 215, 219–20, 222, 227 maturity model for, 165, 166–67 mentoring for, 203, 205 percentage of, 141 creativity, 209 critical dimensions, 156–58, 161 criticism, 122–23, 176 cross-functional communities, 88 crowdfunding, 23–24 Cruz, Ted, 73–74 culture, community, see community culture Culture Cores, 181–88 customer engagement, 20–22 customer growth, as source of value, 85 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, 21 Cycle Planning, 168 Cycle Reviews, 268 dashboards, 160–61 data analysis, 207, 208 Davis, Miles, 182 Debian, 6, 26 decision making irrationality of, 101–8 pragmatism about, 184 SCARF model of behavior, 104–8 System 1 and 2 thinking, 102–3 unpopular decisions, 186 decision paralysis, 38, 106 dedicated events, organizing, 239–40 delayed (status), 147 delivery commitment to, 263–64 successful, 162, 167–70 delivery, as critical dimension, 157 delivery plans, see Quarterly Delivery Plan demonstrations, 194, 244 departmental alignment, 263–64 developer community, Big Rocks for, 93–94 Developer Relations personnel, 255 Developers (persona), 111, 114, 115 Diamandis, Peter, 40 Dickinson, Emily, 211 difficulty, of condition, 217 diffusion chain, 54 Digg, 12–13 digital communities early, 5–7 evolution of, 9–13 foundational trends in, 7–9 in-person events for, 237 as local and global communities, 2–3 digital interaction, and in-person events, 251 digital training, 243–44 dignity, 17 discipline, for community building, 31 Discourse, 66, 228, 233, 267 discovery, in gamification, 233 discussion forums, 49 Disney, 128 Docker, 12, 56 documentation, 274 domain expertise, 256, 257 Dreamforce conference, 22 Drupal, 204 Early Adopter program, 189–90 Editorial Calendar, 192–95 education (about product or service) in communities, 24–25 as source of value, 82 efficiency, as critical dimension, 157 ego calibration, 234–35 empathy, 186–87 employees openness for, 182–83 training and mentoring for, 266–68 empowerment, 55–56, 222 end-to-end experience, 59, 125–26 engagement as Area of Expertise, 174 Big Rocks related to, 93–94 with community, 72 in Community On-Ramp Model, 133–34, 136, 137 and Community Participation Framework, 138–44 in Community Participation Framework, 129 at conferences, 242 critical dimensions related to, 157 customer and user, 20–22 and Growth Strategy, 192 positivity and, 185 quality of, 159 rules for engaging with community members, 119–22 and submarine incentives, 226 and understanding audience, 99–100 Engagement Strategy, 181, 196–206 engineering department, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 equal opportunity, in Collaborator communities, 55, 58–59 estimated units, on Incentives Map, 231, 232 Event Evolution Path, 238–40 Event Organizers (persona), 111, 114–15, 117–18 events in-person, see in-person events online, 193 Everett, Noah, 224 execution of community strategy, 253–54, 268 successful, 162, 167–70 expectations clear, 70–72 in gamification, 234 in great experience, 127 related to Big Rocks, 95–96 experience, of audience persona, 114, 116, 118 experimentation, 123, 171 to build organizational capabilities, 206–8 with events, 251 expertise of community leadership staff, 256, 257 of community members, 28 in digital communities, 8 as source of value, 83 Exploding Kittens game, 24 extrinsic rewards, 214, 215, 216 on Incentives Map, 231 submarine incentives for, 224–25 Facebook, 13, 24 failure, as opportunity for improvement, 151 fairness in SCARF model, 107–8 of submarine incentives, 225 Fans as audience persona, 110, 113 community model for, 44, 62–63 fears, of audience persona, 114–15, 117, 118 Fedora, 66, 264 feedback about audience personas, 116 on Big Rocks, 94–95 from communities, 72–73 and community culture, 186 from Core members, 202 on mission statement, 41 on Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, 176 in peer-based review, 204 from Regular members, 143, 200 Figment community, 10 Final Fantasy, 128 financial commitment, and creating value, 96 Firefox, 23, 209 Fitbit, 139, 145 focus for community building, 31 on Community Value Statement, 97 follow through after community summits, 250–51 after conferences, 242–43 formal experience, 114 forums, 91–92, 158 founders, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 Four Rules for Measuring Effectively, 156–61 Fractal Audio Systems, 14–15, 49–50 freeloaders, 54 fun, in community experience, 84 gamification, 232–35 Garmin, 190 GitHub, 24 global communities, digital communities as local and, 2–3 Global Learning XPRIZE Community, 189 GNOME, 26 GNU community, 6 goals for community summit sessions, 249 of Core members, serving, 202 for employee participation with community, 267 in incentives, 214 on Incentives Map, 230–32 for new hires, 259 Google, 13, 57, 58, 65, 128 Gordon-Levitt, Dan, 11–12 Gordon-Levitt, Joseph, 11–12, 219 governance, in Inner Collaborator communities, 66 gratification, 120, 127 group dynamics, 100, 119–22 group experiences, referral halo for, 61 grow, willingness to, 257 Growth (Area of Expertise), 174 growth, as critical dimension, 157 Growth Strategy, 181, 188–96 growth plan, 192–96 launch plan, 189–91 guest speakers, 238–39 habits, building, 142, 267 HackerOne, 69–70, 194, 214 Harley Owners Group, 132 help asking community members for, 120, 144 as source of value, 82 high-level objectives, see Big Rocks hiring, 27–29, 256 hiring away approach, 258–59 HITRECORD, 11–12, 219 Hoffman, Reid, 152 HomeRecording.com community, 81 humility, 187, 257 hypothesis testing, 207–8, 271–72 IBM, 6 idealism, 153–54 IGN (Imagine Games Network), 47–48 Ikea Effect, 101–2 impact in Community Belonging Path, 18 and Engagement Strategy, 199 multiplying, with communities, 2, 3, 9 imperfections, 188 imposter syndrome, 142 inauthentic participation, 233 incentives, xvii–xviii, 197 in Community Participation Framework, 145 on Community Participation Framework, 211–13 components of, 213–18 in Growth Strategy, 196 maintaining personal touch with, 235 in Outer Collaborator communities, 65 power of offering, 213–18 stated vs. submarine, 218–27 Incentives Map, 34, 229–32 Incentive Transition Points, 218–19 stated incentives for, 221–22 submarine incentives for, 226–27 incentivization building engagement with, 140 in Community Participation Framework, 130 Incubation stage, 171, 172 independent authenticity, 111 Indiegogo, 23 individual value, 164–67 influence, psychological importance of, 71 Influencing phase (Product Success Model), 52 information in community, 121 in digital communities, 8 infrastructure, for launch, 189 Inner Collaborator community, 56–58, 65–67, 86, 229 Inner Developers (persona), 111 in-person events community summits, 245–51 conferences, 240–43 and digital training vs. training workshops, 243–45 Event Evolution Path and strategy for, 238–40 fusion of digital interactions and, 251 in Growth Strategy, 195 launch, 190–91 in local communities, 4–5 managing, 237–38 value of, 77–78 in progress (status), 147 insight, from communities, 28, 72–73 intangible value, 78–79, 83 Integration stage, 171–72 Intel, 57 intentionality, 39, 69–70, 187 Intention stage, 171, 172 internal communities, 13 Community Engagement Model for, 66–67 importance of culture for, 180 personal interaction in, 185 value of, for community members, 83 Internet, 5–7, see also digital communities Internet Explorer, 23 intrinsic rewards, 215, 224–25 involved teams, on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 147, 148 Iron Maiden, 39 Jeep, 139 Jenkins, 26 job candidates, community members as, 27–29 job descriptions, community leadership staff, 258 Jokosher, 199 jQuery, 204 Kahneman, Daniel, 102 karma (Reddit), 228 Key Initiatives, for Big Rocks, 90, 91–93 keynote addresses, 245–47 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), 90–94 cadence-based cycles for delivery of work on, 169, 170 on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 146, 148–50 tracking progress on, 159–60, 160–61 Kickstarter, 12, 23 Kubernetes, 26, 53, 66, 134, 204 labor, community members as source of, 120 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (television series), 73–74 launch event, 190–91 launch plan, 189–91 leaders, community, 3, 4 leadership as Area of Expertise, 174 and autonomy in organizations, 123 clear and objective, 69–70 in community culture, 186 community involvement by, 262 by Core members, 144 in Inner Collaborator communities, 66 leadership value, 165, 167 lead generation, 28–29 A League of Their Own (film), 39 learning about community building, 272–74 from community strategy implementation, 268–69 Learning phase (Product Success Model), 51 Lego, 9, 10 Lego Ideas, 10 Lenovo, 57 Leonardo da Vinci, 37 Lindbergh, Charles, xvii Linkin Park, 183 Linux, 6, 26, 273–74 Linux Foundation, 26, 74 live stream, 250 local communities decline of, 3–5 digital communities as global and, 2–3 The Long Tail (Anderson), 46 Ma, Jack, 77 Ma Jian, 125 Make:, 195 Management (Area of Expertise), 173–74 marketing, 22–24 audience personas in, 108–9 and Community Engagement Model, 59–61 as source of value, 85 marketing department, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 Mastering phase (Product Success Model), 51–52 Mattermost, 214 maturity models, 34 Community Persona Maturity Model, 163–67 Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, 171–76 meaningful work, 9, 17–18, 27, 41 measurable condition, 217 measurable goals, 160 measurable value, in Community Persona Maturity Model, 164–65 measuring effectively, rules for, 156–61 meeting people, as source of value, 82 meetings after conferences, 242–43 with conference attendees, 241 in local communities, 4–5 Meetup.com, 133 meetups, organizing, 239 mentoring for Casual members, 142 for community-building employees, 267–68 for community leadership staff, 256 by community members, 29 in Community Participation Framework, 202–6 of new hires, 259 as source of value, 82–83 meritocracy, 55 message boards, 5–6 Metal Gear Solid, 128 Metrics (Area of Expertise), 175 Mickos, Mårten, 69–70, 74, 262 Microsoft, 6, 13, 23 Minecraft, 25 Minecraft Forum, 25 Minecraft Wiki, 25 Minimum Viable Product, 68–69 mission statements, 32, 42, 80, 113 momentum, in Engagement Strategy, 198 momentum effect, 209 in Growth Strategy, 188, 195 in marketing and brand/product awareness, 60–61 motivations for audience persona, 114, 117, 118 for community members, 119–20 Mozilla, 23 MySpace, 12–13 NAMM music show, 239 need, for community, 30 networking, 28–29, 242 New York Times, 23 Nextcloud, 134 niche interests, 45–47 Nintendo, 9, 228 norms, cultural, 70, 130, 180, 182 notification, 147, 148 not started (status), 147 objectives, see also Big Rocks objectivity, of leadership, 69–70 onboarding, 107 in Community Participation Framework, 129 Community Persona Maturity Model for members in, 164, 165–66 gamification for, 233 importance of, 130–31 in Outer Collaborator communities, 65 online events, 193 On-Ramp members, incentivizing, 218–19, 221, 226–27 openness, 182–84 open-source code, 26, 53 open-source communities, 57–58, 261 Open Source community, 10 OpenStack, 26 optimization, in Engagement Strategy, 199–200 Optimizing phase (Product Success Model), 51 organizational capabilities building, with communities, 27–29 cadence-based cycles for building, 265–66 executing strategy to build, 253–54 experimentation to build, 206–8 success in terms of building, 162, 171–76 organizational experience, of community members, 122 organizational values, and community culture, 182–88 organizations community members as labor for, 120 identifying value for, 84–88 integration of community strategy in, 261–68 internal communities at, 13 leadership and autonomy in, 123 Orteig Prize, xvii Outer Collaborator community, 56–59, 64–65, 86 Outer Developers (persona), 111–12, 136–37 Owner of Big Rocks, 90, 91 in cadence-based cycles, 168–69 on Incentives Map, 231, 232 on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 147, 148 Participant Rewards Peak, 215–16 participation active, 109 audience personas and types of, 109 by Casual members, 142 in Consumer communities, 48 inauthentic, 233 productive, 162–67 PayPal, 13, 57 Pebble Smartwatch, 23 peer-based review, 203–5 peer-review process, 55 peer support, 139–40 peer value, 164–67 Peloton, 133, 233 Penney, James Cash, 253 people person, 256–57 perfection, 268–69 performance review, community engagement in, 262 permanence, of communities, 14 personal interaction, 184–85, 199 personal touch with incentives, 235 and submarine awards, 222–26 personal validation, 120, 224–25 personas, audience, see audience personas Photoshop “Magic Minute” videos, 244 PlayStation, 233 podcasts, 194 Pop!

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
by Jenny Blake
Published 14 Jul 2016

CHAPTER 1: CALIBRATE YOUR COMPASS What Are Your Guiding Principles? What Is Your Happiness Formula? The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value. —Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People WHEN YOU SEARCH FOR A PLACE TO STAY ON AIRBNB, you narrow down the choices with criteria such as price, location, size, and amenities. Your dream room might be someone else’s nightmare. Think about your values as life filters, the search criteria that help clarify your priorities. They are rules of thumb for what makes you most fulfilled, the core operating principles by which you live your life.

…

Nick and his team lead groups through New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., museums in “highly interactive, subversive, fun, non-traditional museum tours.” Brokering between buyers and sellers by creating a marketplace, facilitating comparison shopping: Systematizing the buying and selling process, or finding ways to reduce fees in traditional industries by connecting buyers and sellers. For example: Airbnb for finding a place to stay, or Upwork for finding creative freelancers. Aggregating and analyzing data, conducting original research: With increasingly more data available on everything from how many steps we take, to our heart rate, to mapping our genome, people will need help making sense of this data, “separating the signal from the noise,” as political pollster Nate Silver does.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

It’s “similar to identical” to the extent, he says, that Apple’s patents may be invalid for failing to cite his system. “The very first development was done in 1972 for use in the SPS accelerator and the principle was published in a CERN publication in 1973,” he told me. “Already this screen was a true capacitive transparent multitouch screen.” So it came to pass that Stumpe picked me up from an Airbnb in Geneva one autumn morning. He’s a spry seventy-eight; he has short white hair, and his expression defaults to a mischievous smile. His eyes broadcast a curious glint (Frank Canova had it too; let’s call it the unrequited-inventor’s spark). As we drove to CERN, he made amiable small talk and pointed out the landmarks.

…

“Of course, now, everyone’s writing fart apps, but he was the original,” Grignon says. “Apple had minted this new economy. And the early gold diggers won big.” This new economy, now colloquially known as the app economy, has evolved into a multibillion-dollar market segment dominated by nouveau-riche Silicon Valley companies like Uber, Facebook, Snapchat, and Airbnb. The App Store is a vast universe, housing hopeful start-ups, time-wasting games, media platforms, spam clones, old businesses, art projects, and experiments with new interfaces. But, given the extent to which the iPhone has entered the app into the global vernacular, I thought it was worth taking stock of what, at its core, an app actually is, and what this celebrated new market segment represents.

…

In 2016, one report estimated that the app economy was worth $51 billion and that it would double by 2020. In early 2017, Apple announced it had paid out $20 billion to developers in 2016 and that January 1 was the single biggest day in App Store sales in the company’s history; people downloaded $240 million worth of apps. Snapchat, a video-messaging app, is valued at $16 billion. Airbnb is worth $25 billion. Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion five years ago, is allegedly worth $35 billion now. And the biggest app-based company of all, Uber, is currently valued at $62.5 billion. “The app industry is now bigger than Hollywood,” Dediu tells me, “but nobody really talks about it.”

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

There’s also a modicum of rational self interest to be had here: if workers weren’t (rightfully) scared to death at the prospect of losing employment, they might do less to seek government subsidy for industries that were in decline or in need of stark changes to their business models. Ahem … Hollywood? Or the hotel industry, from the perspective of bed-and-breakfast facilitator Airbnb, or the taxi industry, from the vantage of the on-demand car service Uber, and on and on. Specifically, government guarantees of health care—a Medicare-for-all program, more efficient than the private insurance system—and pensions more robust than Social Security—would give Americans some assurance that they wouldn’t starve.

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They were able to grow to over one hundred thousand users on less than $25,000. Craigslist radically reduced the cost of classified advertising. They replaced the call centers, printing presses, trucks and trees that used to be necessary to alert the world that you wanted to sell your couch—with a digital photo and a drop-dead simple electronic posting mechanism. Airbnb has re-invented the way travelers are matched with beds, and in the process enabled hundreds of thousands of people around the world to capture the value in their spare bedroom. Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare spend little or nothing to acquire new users or to propagate a new feature. We hear a lot about viral marketing but I did not internalize its implications until I watched David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, introduce a new feature: by hiding it.

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Over the next few years there will be a steady stream of these requests. The hotel lobby in New York City has already convinced the city council to outlaw temporary hotels. The bill was presented as a consumer safety measure to prevent slumlords from turning dilapidated tenements into squalid, unsafe hotels. The councilmembers never considered the bills’ impact on Airbnb but the hotel lobby knew exactly what their proposed language meant. The Research Works Act played out in a very similar way in Washington. Its original sponsors understood it as the elimination of a government mandate that forced researchers to embrace a specific business model. The academic publishers who sponsored the bill knew very well that it would slow competition from open-access journals.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

While insurance companies have recoiled, three states have passed laws to protect car-sharers from losing coverage.30 The model is spreading, and now there are social technologies powering peer-to-peer systems for sharing all kinds of expensive private assets. Airbnb does the same for renting out homes for short-term stays, and logged 5 million bookings worldwide in 2011. While they do compete on price with traditional businesses, these services also bait us into more efficient behaviors by turning faceless commercial transactions into human social encounters. It’s infinitely more rewarding to rent the poet’s flat in San Francisco on Airbnb than to book a soulless hotel room on Expedia. Sharing systems can be deployed rapidly—often the only additional infrastructure that’s needed is the Web.

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Finally, my brothers John Townsend and Bill Townsend, who were my original urban mentors, showed me the wonders of Boston and Washington as a teenager, and spurred my love of the city forever. Index Access Together, 166 Accountability Department, U.S., 265 ACM Queue, 266 Adams, Sam, 83 Aerotropolis (Kasarda and Lindsay), 24 Agent.btz, 269 Airbnb, 163 air-conditioning, early solutions for, 19–20 air defense, computer systems for, 63 Air Force, U.S., 63, 259 “air-gapping,” 269 AirPort, 128 air transportation, 63 digital technology in, 32–33 Albritton, Dan, 301–2 Alexander, Christopher, 142–44, 285–86 Alfeld, Louis Edward, 81–82, 86 Allan, Alasdair, 271 Altair, MITS, 153 Altman, Anne, 65 Amar, Georges, 106, 133 Amazon Web Services, 263–64 American Airlines, 63–64 American Express, 62 Amin, Massoud, 35 Amsterdam, 279 analog cellular, 53 Angelini, Alessandro, 91–92 Ansari X PRIZE, 202–3 API (application program interface), 150 Apple, 49, 128, 148, 271 Siri of, 233 apps, 121–26, 144–52, 183, 213, 235 to address urban problems, 156–59 badges for, 148 contests for, 156, 200–205, 212, 215, 225, 227–30 for navigation of disabled, 166 situated software as, 232–36 “Trees Near You” as, 201–2 variety of, 6 Apps for Democracy, 156, 200–201, 203 Arab Spring, social media in, 11–12 Arbon, 37 Arcaute, Elsa, 313–14 Archibald, Rae, 80 Archigram, 20–21 Architectural Association (London), 20 Architectural Forum, 142 Architecture Without Architects (Rudofsky), 111–12 Arduino, 137–41 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), 259 ARPANET, 111, 259–60, 269 ArrivalStar, 293 Arup, 32 Ashlock, Philip, 158–59 Asimov, Isaac, 73–75, 88 Association for Computing Machinery, 260 Astando, 244 AT&T, 35–37, 51–52, 111, 260, 272 dial-up Internet service at, 36 Atlanta, Ga., 66 Atlantic, The, 75 AutoCAD, 302 AutoDesk, 302 automobile, as new technology, 7 Ayers, Charlie, 252 Babajob, 178–79 “Baby Bells,” 195 Baltimore, Md., 211 Banavar, Guru, 66–67, 69, 90, 306 Bangalore, 66, 178–79 Cisco’s smart city engineering group at, 45 as fast-growing city, 13 Ban Ki-moon, 181–82 Banzi, Massimo, 137 Baran, Paul, 259–60 Barcelona, 10, 246–47 destruction of wall of, 43 Barragán, Hernando, 137 Barry, Marion, 199 Batty, Michael, 85–87, 295–97, 313, 315–16 Becker, Gene, 112–13 Beijing, 49, 273–74 Belloch, Juan Alberto, 223 Beniger, James, 42–43 Bentham, Jeremy, prison design of, 13 Berlin, 38 Bernstein, Phil, 302 Bettencourt, Luis, 312–13 Betty, Garry, 196 Bhoomi, 12–13 big data, 29, 87, 191, 292–93, 297, 305–6, 316, 319 “Big Ideas from Small Places” (Khanna and Skilling), 224 BlackBerry Messenger, riots coordinated via, 12 blogosphere, 155 Bloomberg, Michael, 147, 205–6, 304 Boing-Boing, 156 Booz Allen Hamilton, 30 Bosack, Len, 44 Boston, Mass., 212–17, 239–41, 306–7 “Adopt-A-Hydrant” in, 213 Discover BPS, 240–42 Office of New Urban Mechanics in, 213–16 “What Are My Schools?”

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

In 2018, far more Americans were fearful of computers replacing them in the workforce68 (30.7 percent) than in earlier years (25.3 percent in 2017 and 16.6 percent in 2016). Our fear of unemployment is justified when our safety net has too many holes: 52.9 percent of Americans in 2018 were afraid or very afraid of high medical bills.69 And our employment options are limited. The “gig” economy, like driving for Uber while renting out a bedroom on Airbnb, will not provide medical benefits and secure us financially in retirement. Avoiding corporate America is harder, as there are far fewer new businesses in the United States being created70 (as a share of the US economy) since the late 1970s. And even corporate America is getting smaller: Fewer public firms exist today in the United States than in the 1970s.

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And, as a survey of three thousand consumers conducted by the UK’s competition agency revealed, we hate drip pricing—with 75 percent of those surveyed objecting to it, and 70 percent stating that they believed all compulsory charges should be revealed up front.22 Consumer advocates also decry drip pricing. As the person who writes the Travel Troubleshooter blog says, “Quite simply, it’s lying.”23 So is competition eliminating this exploitation? To the contrary: We see drip pricing spreading across many seemingly competitive markets, including online booking sites like Airbnb and eDreams,24 airline tickets,25 car rentals,26 and prepaid telephone calling cards.27 If the marketplace is getting more competitive, yet more firms are resorting to the unpopular practice of drip pricing, something would seem to be wrong with this picture. To diagnose it, let’s start with our first factor: consumers’ weaknesses.

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Mann, “Bankruptcy Reform and the ‘Sweat Box’ of Credit Card Debt,” University of Illinois Law Review 2007, no. 1: 375–403, https://ssrn.com/abstract=895408. 14.Interview with Shailesh Mehta, CEO, Providian Financial Corp., “Frontline: The Card Game,” November 24, 2009, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/creditcards/interviews/mehta.html. 15.Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Report to the Congress on the Profitability of Credit Card Operations of Depository Institutions (June 2017) (Table 2), https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2017-report-to-congress-profitability-credit-card-operations-depository-institutions.htm (“Although profitability for the large credit card banks has risen and fallen over the years, credit card earnings have almost always been higher than returns on all commercial bank activities”). 16.Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Monthly Complaint Report, June 2017, https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/201705_cfpb_Monthly_Complaint_Report.pdf; Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Response Annual Report, January 1–December 30, 2017, 25, https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/2017-consumer-response-annual-report/. 17.Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Monthly Complaint Report. 18.Competition and Markets Authority, Retail Banking Market Investigation: Final Report (London: August 9, 2016), ¶ 54, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/57ac9667e5274a0f6c00007a/retail-banking-market-investigation-full-final-report.pdf. 19.Federal Trade Commission, Warning Letters on Hotel Pricing and Resort Fee Disclosures, April 11, 2013–June 3, 2013, https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/attachments/frequently-requested-records/2016-01006_warning_letters_49_pgs.pdf. 20.Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, “Drip Pricing,” accessed April 15, 2019, https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/online-shopping/drip-pricing. 21.Splitty Travel, “Booking Info: Circus Circus Hotel, Casino & Theme Park,” accessed April 15, 2019, https://www.splittytravel.com/checkout/cbe9c8bc-a2c2–42f4-aa2c-9146dd88f8f. 22.Amelia Fletcher, “Drip Pricing: UK Experience” conference presentation at The Economics of Drip Pricing, Federal Trade Commission Washington, D.C., May 21, 2012, https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_events/economics-drip-pricing/afletcher.pdf. 75 percent objected to the use of drip pricing—increasing further for products bought infrequently; 70 percent thought all compulsory charges should be in the headline price; 39 percent thought the cost of extras was much higher than expected; 44 percent would have bought elsewhere if they’d known the total price upfront; 74 percent thought the headline price was unclear on what was included; and 51 percent believed they could have gotten the product cheaper elsewhere. 23.Liz Benston, “Harrah’s Sees $$ in Resort-Fee Anger,” Las Vegas Sun, August 12, 2010, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/aug/12/harrahs-sees-resort-fee-anger/. 24.Anthony J. Cordato, “There’ll Be No More Drip Pricing by Airbnb and eDreams in Australia,” Lexology, November 2, 2015, https://www.lexology.com/r.ashx?l=8CEB4ZL. 25.See Lucy Cormack, “Jetstar and Virgin Handed Penalties for ‘Drip Pricing’ Techniques,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 7, 2017, http://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/jetstar-and-virgin-handed-penalties-for-drip-pricing-techniques-20170306-gurqjs.html; Alex Altman and Kate Pickert, “New Airline Surcharge: A Bag Too Far?

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

I was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that The Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). I have worked directly with senior executives at Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, WeChat, Spotify, Airbnb, SAP, Microsoft, Walmart, and The New York Times. Along with my longtime friend Paul Falzone, I’m a founding partner at Manifest Capital, an investment firm that helps young companies grow into the Hype Machine. From this perch, I evaluate hundreds of companies a year and get to look around the corner at what’s next.

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It’s not surprising, therefore, that word-of-mouth opinions of friends are consumers’ most trusted source of brand information. Given the persuasive power of digital word of mouth, brands spend a great deal of time, energy, and money on referral programs. Dropbox relied heavily on its “give us a customer, get free space” promotion, while Airbnb and Uber both used personalized referral messages and incentives to drive their growth. Joseph Ziyaee, an Uber driver from Los Angeles, even used such a referral program to become an outlier in Uber’s income distribution or, as he likes to call himself, “the Uber King.” The more Uber drivers drive, the more money they earn.

…

But at the time Joseph broke all the records, each referral was worth hundreds of dollars apiece. And Joseph took advantage of the program to become the Uber King. Some of the world’s fastest-growing companies have grown on the backs of referral programs that spread their services through social media messages propagated by the Hype Machine, including PayPal, Dropbox, Airbnb, Tesla, and Amazon Prime, to name a few. Referral programs, which give their consumers incentives to bring their friends to a product or service, make sense because they capitalize on the things that make social media persuasive. Word of mouth is the most trusted source of brand information because we trust our friends and family more than brand advertising.

The Rough Guide to New York City
by Rough Guides
Published 21 May 2018

Filling a much-needed demand for affordable accommodation, sites such as airbnb.com and couchsurfing.com offer cut-rates on housing; in the case of the latter, there is no cost at all. As with hotels, it is best to contact potential hosts as far in advance as possible, and exercise common-sense caution: be thorough in checking reviews, speak to the subletter personally and only give credit card information to a trusted source. Note also that since 2010, it has been illegal in New York to rent out a whole apartment on airbnb.com for fewer than thirty days (as of 2017 this law is being vigorously enforced by the city) – it is, however, permissible to rent out rooms or part of an apartment/house where the owner resides for shorter durations.

…

Note also that since 2010, it has been illegal in New York to rent out a whole apartment on airbnb.com for fewer than thirty days (as of 2017 this law is being vigorously enforced by the city) – it is, however, permissible to rent out rooms or part of an apartment/house where the owner resides for shorter durations. With airbnb.com, prices for rooms range $60–180 a night for Manhattan, with rates as low as $40 in the outer boroughs. Couchsurfing – just what it sounds like – conjures roommates and air mattresses; the pay-off is a fun community vibe, an unbeatable price and excellent insider tips. Booking and information Reservations Make these as far in advance as you can: although it is possible to get good last-minute deals, you may also find a special rate for an advance purchase (usually at least two weeks).

…

Neat, clean dorms, small but stylish doubles and spotless bathrooms, plus you get access to shared kitchen, TV lounge and pool and ping-pong tables. Dorms $33, doubles $120 Bed and breakfasts and apartments Staying at a bed and breakfast is an enjoyable way of visiting New York, with better rates than you’ll find at a hotel (guest rooms start at around $130 for a double), though airbnb has had a negative impact on traditional B&Bs, especially in Manhattan. B&Bs are a still good bet in the outer boroughs, especially in Brooklyn, where there are quite a few attractive townhouses to choose from. There are a number of official agencies keen to help with booking such as citylightsbedandbreakfast.com and bedandbreakfast.com.

The Rough Guide to Korea
by Rough Guides
Published 24 Sep 2018

Many include tea ceremonies and other activities such as kimchi-making in the cost. Lastly, Airbnb (airbnb.co.uk) has made inroads into the Korean accommodation market, though it usually provides questionable value for money relative to motels and cheaper hotels, and locations can be less than convenient. However, some travellers (particularly vegetarians) will be delighted to have access to their own cooking facilities. Beware of the very cheapest places though, since many are actually goshiwon – usually used as student accommodation, these minuscule rooms are nominally private (though noise carries very easily), and their Airbnb rates can be three or four times the usual price.

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There are five-stars around City Hall and Gangnam, upper-class venues around Myeongdong, some good mid-rangers in and around the tourist hive of Insadong, and hostel clusters in Hongdae and Daehangno. Motels form a cheap alternative to official tourist hotels, sometimes having rooms of comparable size and quality, and can be found all over the city, while the Bukchon area has some traditional wooden guesthouses. Airbnb is an option, but beware places at the very cheapest end of the scale. GYEONGBOKGUNG AND AROUND Bukchon Maru 북촌 마루 152 Changdeokgung-gil 02 744 8571, bukchonmaru.com; Anguk subway; map. Presided over by a delightful, English-speaking local couple, this hanok guesthouse is a homely affair, with granny whipping up breakfast (included), and guests encouraged to get to know each other.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
by William Davies
Published 11 May 2015

Meanwhile, neuromarketers have begun studying how successfully images and advertisements trigger common neural responses in groups, rather than in isolated individuals. This, it seems, is a far better indication of how larger populations will respond.7 The rise of the ‘sharing economy’, exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, and studies such as the pay-it-forward experiment, offer a simple lesson to big business. People will take more pleasure in buying things if the experience can be blended with something that feels like friendship and gift exchange. The role of money must be airbrushed out of the picture wherever possible.

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Index A4e, 110, 111, 112 Abrams, Mark, 99, 101 Accenture, 119 Achor, Shawn, 114 Activity Savings Account, 240 Ad Slam contest, 275 addiction, 204, 207 Adorno, Theodor, 99 advertising, 73, 85, 86, 93, 95–6, 100, 101, 102–3, 186, 188, 189, 215, 253, 256, 262, 275 advertising-free spaces, 275 affect scales/questionnaires, 241 Affectiva, 72 affective computing, 222, 237 Affective Computing research centre (MIT), 221 Airbnb, 188 Aldridge, Beren, 246, 247, 248, 250 Alfa-Bank, 240 algorithms, 6, 204, 220, 221, 226, 237, 239, 261 altruism, 131, 182, 191, 195, 211, 243 American Psychiatric Association (APA), 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 271 American Psychological Association, 87 amitriptyline, 164 Anderson, Chris, 185 Andrejevic, Mark, 260 antidepressants, 143, 163, 164, 166, 175 anti-psychiatry movement, 168 Apple, 37, 135, 159 apps, 3, 5, 26, 64, 135, 221, 228, 230, 232, 274 Ariely, Dan, 238, 257 Aristotle, 5, 20 Ashton, John, 274 Atos, 110, 112, 113 attitudinal research, 100, 147 Ayd, Frank, 164 Back, Les, 269 Bain, Alexander, 48 Barclays Bank, 178 Basu, Sanjay, 252 Beating the Blues, 222 Beck, Aaron, 165, 175 Beck Depression Inventory, 165, 175 Becker, Gary, 149, 151, 160 behaviour, 31–2, 262.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Alexa is integrated into Amazon Pay, which is integrated into banks, while Apple has launched Apple Card, backed by Goldman Sachs. Google has announced Google Cashe in partnership with Citigroup, while Facebook continues with its payment projects (a case we shall return to later). J. P. Morgan stands behind AirBnB and Amazon to provide new connections into the banking system, while in India Paytm integrates payment with e-commerce, and in China WeChat and Alibaba do the same. But if the initial drive is to create corporate clusters, the next is to tether people to them in ever more advanced ways, such as via biometrics.

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At this time, however, not all digital devices support this functionality. Therefore, we encourage you to please use your device’s search capabilities to locate a specific entry. Aadhar system, 44, 97, 169 abacuses, 159 ‘Abracadabra’, 50 accelerators, 17 active choice, 125 Acxiom, 109 Adventures of a Banknote, The (Bridges), 65 Aesop, 45–6 AirBnB, 150 Alameda, California, 102 alcohol, 102, 118, 170 Alexa, 147, 150 Alibaba, 2, 7, 114, 150, 178 Alipay, 114 Alphabet, see Google alt-coins, 13, 217–18 Althusser, Louis, 86 Amazon, 1, 2, 7, 133, 147, 149, 150, 174, 177, 249–50 Alexa, 147, 150 anti-cash lobbying, 41–2, 254 CBDCs and, 243, 244 Coin, 236 Pay, 150 Amazon region, 130, 176, 247, 249 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 60 Ames Research Center, 153 Amnesty International, 222 Amsterdam, Netherlands, 128–9 Amy, 147 anarchism, 7, 14, 106, 183, 191, 193, 215 anarcho-capitalism, 14, 184 Andes, 96, 129 anthropology, 124 anti-feminism, 226 anti-Semitism, 225, 262 anti-statism, 42, 184, 215–16 antidotes, 52–4 Apollo 11 mission (1969), 153 Apple, 7, 125 apps and, 141 Card, 150 data, 108 Pay, 78, 125, 130 Super Bowl advert (1984), 8 apps, 1, 2, 7, 17, 27, 40, 125, 139–51, 232 data collection, 165–6 interfaces, 139–51 ArcelorMittal, 24 Aria, 169 Armer, Paul, 105–6 Art of Not Being Governed, The (Scott), 228 artificial intelligence (AI), 8, 11, 17, 108, 114, 147, 153–72, 175, 252 biases, 167 credit-scoring, 17, 160, 162–3, 167, 168, 170 data analysis, 108, 153–72 interfaces, 146–8 Asimov, Isaac, 161, 170 Assange, Julian, 183 Assemblage, New York City, 226 Astana, Kazakhstan, 227–9 Athens, Greece, 131 ATMs (automatic teller machines), 32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 48, 61, 62, 248 CIT industry, 62 closure of, 32, 39, 48, 83, 84, 85, 132 crises and, 36, 244 note denominations, 62 profitability, 39 Atwood, Margaret, 117 austerity, 193 Australia, 118 Austria, 7, 109 authoritarianism, 111, 118, 168 automatic payments, 149 automation, 9, 10, 33, 41–2, 99, 123, 126, 133, 137, 142–3, 232 apps, 139–51, 232 artificial intelligence, 153–72 automation of, 153–4 surveillance, 112, 114, 153–72 aviaries, 171 Azure cloud, 233 Back to the Future (1985 film), 198 Baidu, 7, 178 Bangladesh, 32 Bank for International Settlements, 79 Bank Identification Codes (BIC), 76 Bank of America, 38, 75, 147 Bank of England, 40, 242, 243 banking sector, 38–9, 65–82 accounts, 31, 35, 46, 66, 132, 205–6 artificial intelligence, 153–72 ATMs, see ATMs bailouts, 113 centralisation of power, 15, 180–83 closures of ATMs/branches, 32, 39, 48, 83, 84, 85, 132 cloudmoney, 64, 66–82 data, 108–9, 156–7 deposits, 66–7, 69 electronic trading platforms, 158 exiting, 39, 48, 61, 63, 68, 83 federated frontline, 136–8, 147 high-street banks, 39–40, 158 interbank markets, 138, 231 interfaces, 138–51 international transfers, 74–6, 108, 179 Internet banking, 76–7, 139 investment banks, 6, 17, 22–3, 26, 113, 157–8 loans, 70–71, 107, 159 money creation, 59–63, 67–72, 202 operating system, 141–2 secondary system, 50, 63–4 sub-currencies, 72–3 transfers, 72–8 banknotes, 59–63 cash-in-transit companies, 62 counterfeiting of, 60–61 denominations, 62 polymer, 65 Bannon, Steve, 225, 234 Barclays, 38, 72–3, 116 base money, 69 beggars, 115 Better Than Cash Alliance, 34–5, 37, 45, 93, 96, 131 biases, 167 bicycles, 89, 90 Big Bouncers, 114, 170 Big Brother, 113–15 Big Butlers, 114, 170–71 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 44–5 biometrics, 44, 150, 169 biotechnology, 10, 11 Bitcoin, 13–15, 16, 184–5, 187–210, 211–18 blockchain technology, 13–15, 185, 189–90, 195, 197–202 Cash fork (2017), 214, 217 climate change and, 226 as commodity, 206–10, 213–14, 217, 246, 256 countertradability, 209–10, 213, 256–7 decentralisation, 14, 15, 189–94, 196, 258 fixed supply, 191–3, 206 gold comparison, 192–3, 207, 214 millenarianism and, 212, 213 mining, 203–4, 212–13 politics and, 191–3, 211–12, 215–17 proof-of-work, 203–4 public addresses, 194–5 speculation on, 213 syncing, 195–7, 200–202, 231 techno-clerks, 194–5, 196–7, 202–4, 212–13 wallets, 194–5 White Paper (2008), 13, 184–5, 187, 191 Bitcoin Cash, 214–15, 217, 226 Bitcoin Gospel, The (2015 film), 211 Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film), 10 blockchain, 13–15, 185, 189–90, 195, 197–202, 219–26, 258–60 decentralisation, 14, 15, 189–94, 196, 230, 234, 255, 258–60 distributed ledger technology (DLT), 229–46, 258 mutual credit systems and, 260 blood diamonds, 222 Bloomberg, 109 Body of Glass (Piercy), 150 BP, 24, 26, 28 bread-making machine, 164 Bridges, Thomas, 65 British Airways, 29–30 British Bankers Association, 83 Brixton Market, London, 177 Bulgaria, 13 Bundesbank, 35, 47 bureaucracy, 179 Burning Man, 101 busking, 90–91 Buterin, Vitalik, 221, 223 California Ideology, 180 Camberwell, London, 128 Cambridge Symposium on Economic Crime, 111 Cambridge University, 97 Canada, 35 Canary Wharf, London, 17–18, 20, 41, 62, 211 cannabis, 101–3 capitalism, 2, 10, 47, 65, 98–9, 173–4 blockchain and, 15–16, 231–46, 256, 258 charging up, 22–5 core vs. periphery, 28, 248 giant parable, 54–5, 63–4, 188 growth, 123, 126–7, 249 surveillance, 33, 114, 180, 250 carbon credits, 222 CARE, 131 cargo cults, 255–6 Caritas, 131 carnivals, 257 cars, 87–90 cash, 22, 29–48 banking sector and, see banking sector banknotes, 59–63 central banks and, 42–5, 254 crime and, 36, 42–3, 45, 81, 112 crises and, 36, 61 cycle, 63, 68 demonetisations, 43 fintech industry and, 41–2 hoarding, 36 issuance of, 59–63 libertarians and, 215 payments companies and, 39–41 refusal of, 29–30, 40, 41, 43, 84, 128, 133 social class and, 91–9 tax evasion and, 42, 43, 45, 46 thresholds, 42 transactional usage, 36 cash-in-transit companies, 62 ‘cash or card?’

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

The critical importance of accurately labeling massive datasets, especially for applications that involve understanding visual information, is especially well demonstrated by the meteoric ascent of Scale AI, which was founded by nineteen-year-old MIT dropout Alexandr Wang in 2016. Scale AI contracts with over 30,000 crowdsourced workers who label data for clients including Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Alphabet’s self-driving car division, Waymo. The company has received more than $100 million in venture capital and now ranks as a Silicon Valley “unicorn”—a startup valued in excess of $1 billion.3 In many other cases, however, nearly incomprehensible quantities of beautifully labeled data are generated seemingly automatically—and for the companies that possess it, virtually free of charge.

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Announced in 2014 as a way to reward “trustworthiness” throughout the population, the program’s declared intent is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”26 The social credit system begins with measures that are typical of commercially administered credit or consumer rating systems in the West, such as evaluations based on a person’s history of paying debt obligations or the kind of rating systems used on services like Uber or Airbnb. But the Chinese system goes much further, potentially intruding into virtually every aspect of daily life by taking into account violations of the law, as well as any behaviors deemed undesirable by the state. In addition to failing to pay your bills or fines in a timely manner, this might include playing too many video games, posting controversial thoughts on social media, associating with the wrong people, eating, littering or playing loud music on public transit, smoking where it is prohibited or even failing to properly sort garbage.27 The social credit calculation can also reward positive behaviors, such as winning a civic or employee award, giving money to charity or making an outsized effort to take care of family members or assist neighbors.

Jared Bibler
by Iceland's Secret The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Con-Harriman House (2021)

That year, a record number of Icelanders with college degrees moved away from the country. There was nowhere to work and nowhere to live: few good jobs to match education levels. With a university education, one could expect to take home only around $2,650 per month. And the post-crisis tourist boom had converted whole neighborhoods to Airbnbs, pushing families into desolate and undesirable exurbs. Even now, families who manage to purchase a home with a mortgage cannot get ahead, as the monthly inflation adjustment robs them of the equity they work so hard to establish. In this context, the Panama Papers hit the presses in April 2016. It turned out that the head of each of the big two political parties was hiding both offshore wealth and onshore conflicts of interest from the Icelandic public.

…

Foreign money flowed into the country again—this time via tourism. But that drop in the currency carried a tremendous cost for the average Icelander, who lost half his buying power. Effectively everybody in the country took a 50% pay cut during those years. Iceland today is Swiss prices on Polish salaries, or Manhattan living on Wisconsin money. By 2019, Airbnbs had taken over all the formerly charming neighborhoods of the capital Reykjavík. Most of the classic cafés and restaurants and bookshops that made Iceland’s only city charming were replaced by schlock shops selling stuffed-animal puffins. To handle the surge of tourists (ten times the country’s population in visitors each year), Iceland imported foreign workers.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

He had spent a lot of time researching AJAX, a method for organizing the underlying structure of a website that allows data to be retrieved from a server in the background while a user is viewing an apparently static site, and which was becoming more widely used at the time (Gmail, Kayak, and Delicious each employed it). Ruby on Rails, the soon-to-be common back-end framework for sites (Airbnb, Hulu, and Twitter were built on it), would not be released until months later. One night while working alone, Huffman left his desk and sat with the trusty graph-paper notebook on his bed. In it, he attempted to map out a sample structure of pages for links, and submitting, and the homepage. Despite having coded programs previously, he’d never built a website before, and this night he had gotten stuck on structuring a page with links to different pages, some of which performed a function, others that required continual refreshing.

…

The “neutral platform” defense had become a common one not just for Facebook, but also for tech companies of all stripes. Its core concept, that a platform merely connects buyers with sellers of a service, was one that allowed Uber to pay its drivers as independent contractors and therefore not provide them costly employment benefits, one that Airbnb had used at times to throw up its hands when rental listings broke local laws or when users behaved inappropriately. Reddit itself had been here before, in dealing with the dissemination of copyrighted material, and in arguing the fundamentals of the SOPA and PIPA legislation that could have held Internet companies responsible for the content they disseminated.

…

When Gab, which uses as its logo a green frog face, raised $1 million in crowdfunding, it boasted with a tweet that read, “FUCK YOU Silicon Valley elitist trash.” Others went back to 4chan’s /pol board. The alt-right’s prolific memetic warriors and its vigilante white nationalists weren’t just Reddit’s albatross. Other Internet gatekeepers took note—and Airbnb booted some of the Unite the Right rally’s organizers off of its services even prior to the rally. Facebook removed at least eight pages connected to the white nationalist movement. Spotify removed musicians deemed “hate bands” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and LinkedIn blocked a profile of the Daily Stormer.

Fodor's Oregon
by Fodor's Travel Guides
Published 13 Jun 2023

BED-AND-BREAKFASTS Oregon is renowned for its range of bed-and-breakfast options, which are found everywhere from busy urban areas to casual country farms and windswept coastal retreats. Many bed-and-breakfasts in Oregon provide full gourmet breakfasts, and some have kitchens that guests can use. Other popular amenities to ask about are fireplaces, jetted bathtubs, and outdoor hot tubs. Airbnb is an excellent resource, with listings throughout the state, including remote, rural areas. CAMPING Oregon has excellent state-run campgrounds, almost all of which accept reservations up to six months in advance. Campgrounds range from primitive tent sites to parks with yurts, cabins, and full hookups.

…

The city has undergone a major hotel building boom since 2015, with most of these new and often chic and trendy boutique properties having opened Downtown, but the Central East Side, Lloyd District, Old Town, and Pearl District have also seen several notable lodging additions. The influx of rooms—along with some of the challenges that Downtown experienced during the pandemic—has helped greatly to reduce hotel rates—it’s now much easier to find good deals, even during the busy summer months. Portland has a few bed-and-breakfasts and an enormous supply of Airbnbs; the latter provide a great way to stay in some of the trendy East Side neighborhoods that lack hotels, such as Alberta, North Mississippi, Hawthorne, and Laurelhurst. Downtown Portland is about a 20- to 25-minute drive from the airport. There are a number of chain properties near the airport, all offering much lower rates than comparable Downtown hotels.

…

The lodging landscape is dominated by family- or independently owned motels and hotels, quite a few of which have undergone stylish makeovers in recent years. “Glamping” resorts are also a fast-growing trend on the coast. You’ll also find a diminishing number of B&Bs (many have become rentals or private homes in recent years) as well as a great variety of vacation rentals through Airbnb, Oregon-based Vacasa, and several well-regarded local agencies. Properties fill up fast in the summer, so try to book well in advance. Many lodgings require a minimum two-night stay on summer or holiday weekends. Hotel and restaurant reviews have been shortened. For full information, visit Fodors.com.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

* * * For a good example of how the innovation economy is upending traditional models, check out Elance, a rapidly growing online service that enables entrepreneurial freelancers to earn income in hundreds of ways, including as editors, graphic designers, creative writers, software developers, and researchers. Need your logo designed? Go to Elance. Need careful research about an article? Go to Elance. Elance is hardly unique. Millions of people are generating income through the online microeconomies of sites like Care.com, Freelance.com, eBay, oDesk, TaskRabbit, Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Teachers Pay Teachers, iTunes, Kickstarter, and on and on. These marketplaces represent the wave of the future, where anyone can: • reach lots of customers readily. • build an online reputation through customer feedback and examples of work. • succeed in a world where customers don’t care about education credentials or standardized test scores

…

Increasingly, employers recruit in the same way you’d want to commission an artist to do a portrait—reviewing portfolios of work instead of interviewing Art History majors from Ivy League colleges. HireArt is a New York City start-up focused on providing employers with authentic ways to assess a candidate’s fit for open positions. The company works with employers (e.g., tech companies like Airbnb and Facebook) to craft rigorous and appropriate challenges that in turn gauge an applicant’s competence and passion for a position. For example, when applying for a sales role, an applicant might be asked to write an email pitching a product. It’s unlikely that someone without real expertise or interest would step up to this challenge.

How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong
by Elizabeth Day
Published 3 Apr 2019

It was in Los Angeles that the fog finally cleared. When I first got there, in August 2015, I knew no one other than my cousin, Andrea. Andrea had moved there several years previously as a singer-songwriter, met a jazz pianist, fell in love and had a daughter who spoke with an American accent. I booked an Airbnb around the corner from her place. It was a studio in a basement and it was clean, nicely furnished, with a bath, a fan and – crucially – very low rent. I later found out that basements are extremely rare in a city plagued by earthquakes, which might explain why it was such good value. Still, it was in a brilliant area, and I came to love waking up to the slivers of window above my head that gave out directly onto the car bumpers in the residents’ parking lot.

…

The film was The Martian, starring Matt Damon, and the story centres around an astronaut who is mistakenly presumed dead and left behind on Mars. It was somewhat similar to how I felt just then: a visitor who had landed on a strange and inexplicable planet. When the screening ended, it was dark outside. It took me a long time to drive to my Airbnb on the east side of the city. I got there, heaved my two suitcases out of the boot, found the instructions I’d been left for the key and then walked down the stairs into the single room that would be my home for the next three months. I had a jolt of unadulterated panic. What had I done, I wondered, exchanging my comfortable, settled life for this?

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
by Anne Helen Petersen
Published 14 Jan 2021

Uber, along with Lyft, Juno, and a handful of other ride-hailing companies, disrupted what has traditionally been known as the “livery” business: picking people up and taking them places. Their popularity launched an entire cottage industry of services reconceptualizing quotidian tasks: Rover disrupted pet care. Airbnb disrupted lodging. Handy disrupted handymen. Postmates and Seamless and DoorDash disrupted takeout. And while these apps have made vacationing and ordering in and getting from one place to another easier for consumers, they also created a massive swath of bad jobs—bad jobs that workers, still desperate from the fallout of the recession, were (at least temporarily) thrilled to take.

…

Young millennials stopped using Facebook as their parents signed on. Instagram took off, and with it the mandate to aestheticize and package experiences for public consumption. Our phones became extensions of ourselves—and the primary means of organizing our lives. I check email on my phone. I deposit checks using my phone. I schedule Airbnbs on my phone. I order groceries, and takeout food, and clothes on my phone. I split the bill for drinks using my phone, and figure out my subway route on my phone, and use my phone to make funny faces at my friends’ newborn children. I stopped bringing magazines to the gym and started just bringing … my phone.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 14 Oct 2021

If you were lucky, you were going from having a rich life outside the home (work, shopping, running errands, visiting friends and family) to abiding by stay-at-home orders. Adjusting to 24/7 interaction probably made you wonder how many “faux” shits you could take before your significant other / roomies / family members figured out you just wanted to be alone because at that point, the bathroom was the equiv of an Airbnb oasis in Turks and Cai-Cais aka Turks and Caicos. If you weren’t so lucky, maybe you were sick or dealing with the loss of a loved one to Covid. Or perhaps you were one of the essential workers—nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals, who are disproportionately Black and brown—and on the front lines, risking daily exposure to save lives for a public that was . . . well, how can I put this?

…

Yes to walking off the bridge, yes to traveling to Africa, yes to getting my passport, yes to listening to that tiny voice inside me, the one that often got drowned out by all the others saying that traveling isn’t a possibility. That small voice remained steady and constant, believing nonetheless, and, it seems, so did I. Although I’m not sure how. * * * Simply put: My parents are not travelers. For instance, if I ever said to my dad, “How about the whole family pools their money together and Airbnbs a cute house somewhere warm for Christmas? Maybe even a place that has a pool for my niece and nephew to swim around in?” he’d probably respond with, “I’m good. I’ve seen pictures of rectangular-shaped things that have liquids in them.” For real though, he and my mom are homebodies, don’t really have close friends, and don’t desire to travel anywhere.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
Published 7 Sep 2020

Our problem is that we’re all working too hard to have time to think up new ways to do things. So I’m trying to give everyone time to just think. We’re going to start ‘Innovation Fridays’ when, one day a month, all employees will do nothing but come up with great ideas. We work all day long in the world of Google, we buy stuff from Amazon, listen to music from Spotify, take Uber rides to Airbnb apartments, and spend our evenings watching Netflix. But we can’t figure out how these Silicon Valley companies move so fast and innovate so quickly.” “Whatever they’re drinking at Netflix,” he concluded, “that’s what we need to be drinking.” That was a funny thing to overhear. What are we drinking at Netflix?

…

A Academy Awards, xvii, 165, 233 “accept or discard” feedback guideline, 31, 33 accidents and safety issues, management style and, 213–14, 269–71 “actionable” feedback guideline, 30, 31, 33, 36, 193, 257 “adapt” feedback guideline, 264 “aim to assist” feedback guideline, 30, 31, 33, 36 Airbnb, 136 Alexa and Katie, 145 alignment, 217–18, 231 on a North Star, 218–21 as tree, 221–31 Allmovie.com, 87 Amazon, 3, 81, 97, 136, 208, 232 Prime, 146, 148 amygdala, 21 Anitta, 97 annual performance reviews, 191 Antioco, John, xi–xii AOL, xviii, 236 Apple, xvii, 77, 97 “appreciate” feedback guideline, 31, 33 Arc de Triomphe, 268–69 Ariely, Dan, 83 Armstrong, Lance, 207, 232–33 Aronson, Elliot, 124 Aspen Institute, 107–8 autonomy, 133 see also decision-making; decision-making approvals, eliminating Avalos, Diego, 151 B Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The, xviii Ballmer, Steve, 122–23 Baptiste, Nigel, 64–66, 68 Bazay, Dominique, 223, 224, 227–31 Bde Maka Ska, 267, 268 Becker, Justin, 35–36 belonging cues, 24–25 bet-taking analogy, 138–40, 153–57, 225–27 Bird Box, 165 Blacklist, The, 26 Black Mirror, 157–59 Blitstein, Ryan, 52 Blockbuster, 3, 171, 236 bankruptcy of, xii, xviii late fees of, 3 Netflix’s offer to, xi–xii size of, xi, xii bonuses, 80–84 Booz Allen Hamilton, 81 brain: feedback and, 20, 21 secrets and, 103 Branson, Richard, xxiv, 50 Brazil, 137, 150, 224–26, 243, 247, 249–51, 257, 264 Brier, David, xxiv brilliant jerks, 34–36, 200 Brown, Brené, 123 Bruk, Anna, 123–24 Bull Durham, 169 Bullock, Sandra, 165 bungee jumping, 194–95 C Canada, 241 candor, 18–21, 141, 175 cultural differences around the world, 250-55, 260, 263–64 culture of, 22–23 dentist visits compared to, 190–91 as disliked but needed, 20–22 failure to speak up, 18, 27, 141 increasing, xx, xxi, 1, 12–37, 72, 100–127, 188–205 jerks and, 34–36 misuse of, 29, 30, 36 “only say about someone what you will say to their face,” 15, 189–90 performance and, 17–20 and readiness to release decision-making controls, 133–35 saying what you really think with positive intent, 13–37 see also feedback; transparency Carey, Chris, 181 Caro, Manolo, 137 Caruso, Rob, 113–14 Casa De Papel, La, xviii celebrating wins, 140, 152 Chapman, Jack, 86 Chase, Chevy, 222 cheating, 62–64 Chelsea, 115–16 children’s programming, 144–45, 226–31 Choy, Josephine, 252–54, 257 Christensen, Nathan, 51 circle of feedback (360-degree assessments), 26–27, 189–205 benefits of, 202–3 discussion facilitated by, 194 in Japan, 256 live, 197–203 stepping out of line during, 200–201 tips for, 199–200 written, names used in, 191–97 Cobb, Melissa, 221–27, 231 Coen, Joel and Ethan, xii Coherent Software, 101, 104 collaboration, 170, 178 Colombia, 251 Comparably, xvii competitiveness, internal, 177–78 compliments and praise, 21, 23 computer software, 77–78, 216 conformity, 141–42 connecting the dots, xxiv first dot, 10–11 second dot, 36 third dot, 69 fourth dot, 98 fifth dot, 125 sixth dot, 160 seventh dot, 185 eighth dot, 203–4 ninth dot, 233 last dot, 264–65 consensus building, 149 contagious behavior, 8–10 context, see leading with context, not control contract signing, 149–51 control, leadership by, 209 ExxonMobil example of, 213–14 leading with context versus, 209–12 see also leading with context, not control controls, removing, xx, xxi, 1, 38–72, 128–61, 206–36 decision-making approvals, 129–61 bet-taking analogy in, 138–40, 153–57, 225–27 Informed Captain model in, 140, 149–52, 216, 223, 224, 231, 248 and picking the best people, 165–66 readiness for, 133–35 signing contracts, 149–51 travel and expense approvals, 55–72 cheating and, 62–64 company’s best interest and, 58, 59, 61, 66, 68–69 context and, 59–62 Freedom and Responsibility ethos and, 60–62 frugality and, 64–69 vacation policy, xv, 39–53, 56, 69–70 freedom and responsibility and, 52–53 Hastings’ nightmares about, 40–41, 42, 44 Hastings’ vacations, 44, 45, 47 Japanese workers and, 46–47 leaders’ modeling and, 42–47 loss aversion and, xv–xvi and setting and reinforcing context to guide employee behavior, 48–49 value added by, 50–52 see also leading with context, not control corporate culture, xiii of Netflix, xiii, xxii, xxiii, 45 Netflix Culture Deck, xiii–xvi, 172–73 Costa, Omarson, 150–51 coupling: alignment and, 218 loose versus tight, 215–17 Coyle, Daniel, 24 creative positions, 78–79, 83–84 criticism (negative feedback), 19–21, 23 belonging cues and, 24 brain and, 20, 21 cultural differences around the world, 251, 261 as disliked but needed, 20–22 language used in, 251–52 responding to, 24, 31 upgraders and downgraders in, 251–52 see also feedback Crook-Davies, Danielle, 19–20 Crown, The, xvii Cryan, John, 82–83 Cuarón, Alfonso, xii, 165 cultural differences around the world, see global expansion and cultural differences Culture Code, The (Coyle), 24 culture map, 242–50 Culture Map, The (Meyer), xxii, 19, 242–50 culture of freedom and responsibility, see Freedom and Responsibility D Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (Brown), 123 Dark, xvii days off, 39–40 see also vacation policy, removing decision-making: dispersed, 216–17 innovation and, 130, 131, 135, 136 and leading with context, 210, 216, 217 to please the boss, 129–30, 133, 152–53 pyramid structure for, 129, 221–23 spreadsheet system and, 143–44 talent density and, 131 transparency and, 131 decision-making approvals, eliminating, 129–61 bet-taking analogy in, 138–40, 153–57, 225–27 Informed Captain model in, 140, 149–52, 216, 223, 224, 231, 248 and picking the best people, 165–66 readiness for, 133–35 signing contracts, 149–51 Del Castillo, Kate, 138 Del Deo, Adam, 207–9, 232–33 Disney, 144, 221, 222, 226, 227 dissent, farming for, 140–44, 158 diversity, 241 Dora the Explorer, 145 Dormen, Yasemin, 157–59 dot-com bubble, 4 dots, see connecting the dots downloading, 146–48 dream teams, 76 DreamWorks, 145, 221, 226 driver feedback, 22 Dutch, Netherlands, 242, 243, 246, 248, 251, 261–63 DVDs, 3–4, 5, 129 Qwikster and, 140–42 shift to streaming from, xii, xvii, 140–41, 236 E Edmondson, Amy, xv Eichenwald, Kurt, 176 Eisner, Michael, 195 elephants, penguins versus, 174 Elite, xvii Emmy Awards, xvii, 145 “Emperor’s New Clothes” syndrome, 23–29 empowerment, 109, 133, 134 see also decision-making; decision-making approvals, eliminating; Freedom and Responsibility Engadget, 158 Enron, xiii entrepreneurship, 138 error prevention, and management style, 213–14, 220, 269–71 Escobar, Pablo, 132 Estaff meetings, 218–19, 243 Evening Standard, 25 Eventbrite, 50 expenses, see travel and expenses; travel and expense approvals, removing experimentation, 138 Explorer project, 154–55, 157 Express, 158 ExxonMobil, 213–14 F Facebook, xiii, 77, 97, 130, 137, 195 failures, 140, 152–59 asking what learning came from the project, 153, 155 not making a big deal about, 153–55 sunshining of, 153, 155–59 family business metaphor, 166–68 moving to sports team metaphor from, 168–70, 173–74 farming for dissent, 140–44, 158 Fast Company, xxiv, 213 fear of losing one’s job, xv, 178–80, 183–84 Fearless Organization, The (Edmondson), xv FedEx, 139 feedback, 14–17, 139, 175, 190, 240 annual performance reviews and, 191 belonging cues and, 24 brain’s response to, 20, 21 circle of (360-degree assessments), 26–27, 189–205 benefits of, 202–3 discussion facilitated by, 194 in Japan, 256 live, 197–203 stepping out of line during, 200–201 tips for, 199–200 written, names used in, 191–97 cultural differences and, 250-57, 260, 261–64 for drivers, 22 “Emperor’s New Clothes” syndrome and, 23–29 failure to speak up with, 18, 27, 141 4A guidelines for, 29–36, 255, 264 accept or discard, 31, 33 actionable, 30, 31, 33, 36, 193, 257 adding 5th A to (adapt), 264 aim to assist, 30, 31, 33, 36 appreciate, 31, 33 cultural differences and, 260 for giving feedback, 30 for receiving feedback, 31 frequency of, 18 Hastings and, 26–29 honesty in, 18; see also candor Japanese culture and, 251–57 loop of, 22–23 Meyer and, 19, 32 negative (criticism), 19–21, 23 belonging cues and, 24 brain and, 20, 21 cultural differences around the world, 251, 261 as disliked but needed, 20–22 language used in, 251–52 responding to, 24, 31 upgraders and downgraders in, 251–52 positive, brain and, 21 responding to, 24, 31 and speaking and reading between the lines, 253 spreadsheet system for gathering, 143–44 survey on, 21–22 teaching employees how to give and receive, 29–32 from teammates, 199 when and where to give, 31–34 see also candor Felps, Will, 8–9 firing, see letting people go Fisher Phillips, 50 five-year plans, 219–20 Flint, Joe, 178 flexibility, and leading with context or control, 220, 221 Fogel, Bryan, 207–8, 233 4K ultra high definition televisions, 65–66 Fowler, Geoffrey, 65–66 Fox, 221 France, 240, 251 Paris, 268–69 Freedom and Responsibility (F&R), xx–xxi, 191, 236, 267, 268 expenses and, 60–62 first steps to, 1–72 Informed Captain model in, 140, 149–52, 216, 223, 224, 231, 248 next steps to, 73–161 techniques to reinforce, 163–236 vacations and, 52–53 weight of responsibility in, 150–52 Friedland, Jonathan, 196 Fuller House, 145 G Game of Thrones, 131–32 Garden Grove, Calif., 22 Gates, Bill, 78 General Electric (GE), 177–78 Germany, 147–48, 250–51 Gizmodo, 178 Gladwell, Malcolm, 142 Glassdoor, xv, 50 global expansion and cultural differences, 237–65, 239–65 adjusting your style for, 257–61 Brazil, 137, 150, 224–26, 243, 247, 249–51, 257, 264 candor and, 250–55, 260, 263–64 culture map, 242–50 feedback and, 250–57, 260, 261–64 Google and, 240–41 Japan, 46–47, 183, 224, 225, 257, 261 in culture map, 243, 247, 248 feedback and criticism in, 251–57 Japanese language, 252–53 360 process and, 256 Netherlands, 242, 243, 246, 248, 251, 261–63 Schlumberger and, 240–41 Singapore, 243, 246, 248, 251, 257–59, 261, 264 trust and, 248, 249 Golden Globe Awards, xvii, 76 Goldman Sachs, 177 Golin, 50 Google, xvii, 77, 94–96, 98, 136 global expansion of, 240–41 gossip, 189 Guillermo, Rob, 207 H Handler, Chelsea, 115–16 happiness, xvii Harvard Business Review, xxii Hastings, Mike, 87 Hastings, Reed: childhood of, 10, 13 at Coherent Software, 101, 104 downloading issue and, 146–48 feedback and, 26–27 interview with, 173–80 in leadership tree, 224–25 marriage of, 13–15 Meyer contacted by, xxii–xxiii Netflix cofounded by, xi, 3–4 in Netflix’s offer to Blockbuster, xi–xii in Peace Corps, xxii, xxiii, 14, 101, 239–40 Pure Software company of, xviii–xix, xxiv, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13–14, 55, 64, 71, 101, 122, 123, 236 Qwikster and, 140–42 HBO, 113–14, 208 Hewlett-Packard (HP), 66–67 hierarchy of picking, 165–66 Hired, xvii hiring: hierarchy of picking and, 165–66 talent density and, see talent density honesty, xvi, xxiii, 178 and spending company money, 58–59 see also candor; transparency hours worked, 39 House of Cards, xvii, 65, 75, 171, 236 HubSpot, xvii, 50 Huffington Post, xxii Hulu, 208, 232 humility, 123 Hunger Games, The, 176 Hunt, Neil, 41, 45, 94, 98, 154, 196 downloads and, 146, 148 and Netflix as team, not family, 173–74 360s and, 197, 198 vacations of, 41 I Icarus, 207–8, 232–33 India, 83, 84, 147–48, 224–26 Mighty Little Bheem in, 228–31 industrial era, 269, 271 industry shifts, xvii–xviii, xix Informed Captain model, 140, 149–52, 216, 223, 224, 231, 248 innovation, xv, xix, xxi, 84, 135–36, 155, 271–72 decision-making and, 130, 131, 135, 136 and leading with context or control, 214–15, 217 Innovation Cycle, 139–40 asking what learning came from the project, 153, 155 celebrating wins, 140, 152 failures and, 140, 152–59 farming for dissent, 140–44, 158 not making a big deal about failures, 153–55 placing your bet as an informed captain, 140, 149–52 socializing the idea, 140, 144–45, 158, 159 spreadsheet system and, 143–44 sunshining failures, 153, 155–59 testing out big ideas, 140, 146–48 International Olympic Committee, 232 internet, 146–48, 154 internet bubble, 4 iPhone, 130 Italy, 131–32 J Jacobson, Daniel, 166–68 Jaffe, Chris, 153–57 Japan, 46–47, 183, 224, 225, 257, 261 in culture map, 243, 247, 248 feedback and criticism in, 251–57 Japanese language, 252–53 360 process and, 256 jerks, 34–36, 200 Jobs, Steve, xxiv, 130 Jones, Rhett, 178 K karoshi, 46 kayaking, 180 Keeper Test, xiv, 165–87, 240, 242 Keeper Test Prompt, 180–83 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), 81, 191, 209 Kilgore, Leslie, 14–15, 81, 94, 171 expense reports and, 61–62 on hiring and recruiters, 95–96 “lead with context, not control” coined by, 48, 208–9 new customers and, 81–82 signing contracts and, 149–50 360s and, 192, 193, 197, 198 King, Rochelle, 27–29 Kodak, xviii, 236 Korea, 224, 225 Kung Fu Panda, 221 L Lanusse, Adrien, 148 Latin America, 136, 241, 249 Brazil, 137, 150, 224–26, 243, 247, 249–51, 257, 264 Lawrence, Jennifer, 176 lawsuits, 175 layoffs at Netflix, 4–7, 10, 77, 168 leading with context, not control, 48, 207–36 alignment in, 217–18, 231 on a North Star, 218–21 as tree, 221–31 control versus context, 209–12 decision-making in, 210, 216, 217 Downton Abbey-type cook example, 211–12, 218 error prevention and, 213–14, 220, 269–71 ExxonMobil example, 213–14 Icarus example, 207–8, 232–33 innovation and, 214–15, 217 Kilgore’s coining of phrase, 48, 208–9 and loose versus tight coupling, 215–17 Mighty Little Bheem example, 228–31 parenting example, 210–11 spending and, 59–62 talent density and, 212, 213 Target example, 213–15 lean workforce, 79 letting people go, 173–76 “adequate performance gets a generous severance,” xv, xxii, 171, 175–76, 242 employee fears about, xv, 178–80, 183–84 employee turnover, 184–85 in Japan, 183 Keeper Test, xiv, 165–87, 240, 242 Keeper Test Prompt, 180–83 lawsuits and, 175 at Netflix, 185 Netflix layoffs in 2001, 4–7, 10, 77, 168 post-exit communications, 117–20, 183–84 quotas for, 178 LinkedIn, 50, 51, 137 Little Prince, The (Saint-Exupéry), 215 loose versus tight coupling, 215–17 Lorenzoni, Paolo, 131–33, 135, 138 loss aversion, xv–xvi Low, Christopher, 258–60 M Mammoth, 51 Management by Objectives, 209 Man of the House, 222 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 83 McCarthy, Barry, 14–15, 56 McCord, Patty, 4–7, 9, 10, 15, 27–28, 41, 53, 71, 173 all-hands meetings and, 108 departure from Netflix, 171 expense policy and, 55, 60–61 financial data and, 110 salary policy and, 78, 81, 94, 96 team metaphor and, 169 360s and, 197–99 vacation policy and, 40, 43, 45, 52–53 Memento project, 156, 157 Mexico, 136–38 Meyer, Erin, xxii The Culture Map, xxii, 19, 242–50 Hastings’ message to, xxii–xxiii keynote address of, 19, 32 Netflix employees interviewed by, xxiii, 19–20 in Peace Corps, xxii micromanaging, 130, 133, 134 Microsoft, 78, 122, 176–78 Mighty Little Bheem, 228–31 Mirer, Scott, 200–201 mistakes, 121–25, 271–72 distancing yourself from, 157 management style and, 213–14, 220, 270 sunshining of, 157 see also failures Morgan Stanley, 123 Moss, Trenton, 50–51 Mr.

Private Equity: A Memoir
by Carrie Sun
Published 13 Feb 2024

Because the houses there are properties of the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent, Carbon Beach homeowners have no need or desire to rent out their abodes. After I spoke to Jen and Maya, who consulted Elisabeth as well as the kids’ schedules, I settled on a Friday afternoon to Sunday evening starting in eleven days. I had to check, of course: Airbnb, Vrbo, Villaway—nothing. I checked Zillow’s satellite view and counted maybe fifty to sixty houses on Carbon Beach. Slim pickings. Jen gave me the name of a luxury-home rental broker she had used before. I contacted them, as well as a concierge service that Jen and Maya used for the Prescotts’ personal needs.

…

Patrick’s Day at 11:23 a.m. with a surprise ticket in my name to Stockholm for Easter weekend, I thought, Yes. In the Venice of the north, Parmita dragged me to the Moderna Museet. I had cast a vote for “stay in / do nothing” but was outvoted; Parmita had invited another friend, an analyst at a different hedge fund giant, to come. I was glad they made me leave our Airbnb. They were meandering through the exhibitions when I, several rooms ahead of them and trying to complete this viewing with economy, saw something and froze. I had not known I could feel so seen by an oval. A small black oval by what appeared to be the world’s finest pen, traced over and over in concentric ovals that lightened gradually but furiously with each inward curve until the ink, unable to escape the pull of the two loci, evaporated into the abyss—and yet something remained: the center was off-white.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere
by Christian Wolmar
Published 18 Jan 2018

The manufacturers needed government support along the way– often financial but also political – to establish the right conditions and legislation. And so it is with the tech companies today: Silicon Valley has used many of the same gambits. You only have to spend a few minutes listening to tech pioneers such as the founders of Facebook or Airbnb to hear how their Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere ‘disruptive’ companies are going to create a more inclusive and happier world. ‘Don’t be evil’, Google used to say; that has now been changed to ‘Do the right thing’. Silicon Valley built its very reputation on harnessing technology to make us happier, more fulfilled and more satisfied human beings.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

What the skeptics failed to see—beyond the surge of new apps, social networks, and connected digital devices—was that Moleskine’s greatest achievement was making the art of note taking a key behavior of the digital era. Whether it was a journal entry on vacation, a brainstorm for a new startup, such as AirBnB, or just the daily scribbling of work and life, Moleskine had made the action of putting pen to paper desirable for tech-savvy consumers, and others saw an opportunity to profit. The market is now swimming in notebooks. I poked around a bookstore one afternoon in Milan, and saw no fewer than two dozen notebooks that looked exactly like Moleskines—from the dimensions to the curved corners to the elastic band—but none were made by Moleskine.

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Index Abbey Road (studio), 25–26 Abrams, J. J., 71–73 Adam, Ryan, 27 ad-blocking software, 108, 133 Adobe, 36, 47, 205–206, 208–211, 218, 219, 221 ADOX, 71 advertising market, 110 advertising money, 106, 107–108, 109–110, 113 advertising tactics, 133 advertising value, 108, 112 Agfa, 55, 56, 63 AirBnB, 43 Alabama Shakes, 27 Albertine, 147, 148 algorithms, 108, 109, 116, 124, 129, 130, 156, 223, 224 Alibaba, 137 AlixPartners, 136 Allen, David, 37 Alone Together (Turkle), 80, 240 Alter, Adam, 131 Alternative Apparel, 132, 133 alternative schools, 208 Amazon, xv, 12, 43, 93, 108, 124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135–136, 137, 140, 143, 144, 145–146, 147, 161, 165, 170, 220, 228 Amerasinghe, Kush, 208–209 American Booksellers Association (ABA), 125 American Camp Association, 235 Amplify tablet, 186 Analog Game Studies (journal), 82 Analog Research Laboratory, 215–217 analog technology choosing, reasons for, 239–240 defining, xiv reasons for the rise of, xvi–xvii, 238–239 resurgence of, and trends, xiv–xv See also specific analog things, processes, and ideas analysis paralysis, 134 Anderson, Chris, 208 Andreessen, Marc, 124 AOL, 217 Apple, 20, 39, 125, 137, 138, 139, 154, 186, 215 Apple Store, 138–140, 144 apps, x, xiv, 43, 45, 46, 47, 109, 111, 132, 181, 182, 196, 199, 219, 223, 224 Ariello, Marco, 38 artificial intelligence, 163, 224 Astoria Bookshop, 146, 148 audio-taped lectures, 201 authenticity, xii, 39 Auto Tune, 23–24, 26 automation, 55, 65, 73, 134, 154, 156, 158–159, 163, 165, 167, 168, 192 Autor, David, 165 B.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

Thousands of Greeks opened their homes to refugees, millions of home-cooked meals were delivered to refugee camps, free health care was provided in community-run clinics, and a warehouse in a worker-run factory was opened to collect donated items such as clothes and baby food. In Germany, as proposals surfaced that migrants be housed in dodgy conditions that included school gyms, vacant office buildings, empty warehouses, army barracks, and even a former Nazi forced-labor camp, people organized an “Airbnb for refugees,” matching migrant families in need of a safe place to stay with spare rooms in local houses. The effort has now spread to thirteen other countries. My country is home to a remarkable pro-refugee movement that has seen thousands of Canadians sponsor Syrian families, taking financial and interpersonal responsibility for the newcomers’ needs for one year as they adjusted to a new language, culture, and climate.

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Theodoros Karyotis: “endured five years of austerity shock treatment…” Theodoros Karyotis, “Criminalizing Solidarity: Syriza’s War on the Movements,” Roar, July 31, 2016, https://roarmag.org/​essays/​criminalizing-solidarity-movement-refugees-greece/. Germany: proposals for housing migrants Dagmar Breitenbach, “Creative Housing for Refugees—but a Cemetery?” Deutsche Welle, January 21, 2016, http://www.dw.com/​en/​creative-housing-for-refugees-but-a-cemetery/​a-18996041. “Airbnb for refugees” Aza Wee Sile, “This Non-profit Wants to Use the Sharing Economy to Ease Europe’s Refugee Crisis,” CNBC.com, August 18, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/​2016/​08/​18/​refugees-welcome-aims-to-use-sharing-economy-to-ease-europe-immigration-crisis.html. Refugees Welcome, website, accessed April 1, 2017, http://www.refugees-welcome.net/.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg
Published 13 May 2019

Instead, the most important fact about the modern gig economy is its preoccupation with sweating capital as much as humanly possible—maximizing the profits from capital assets that a “sharing-economy” entrepreneur already owns—while investing as little as possible in labor. The central premise of Uber or Lyft or Airbnb or many other sharing platforms is that the app will allow a micro-entrepreneur (or the platform itself) to extract maximum profits from personal assets like a car or an apartment that otherwise would sit idle for large parts of the day. The companies are desperate to have as few employees as possible.

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Official data suggest that around 95 percent of American workers are employed in the traditional, full-time way, a percentage that has held roughly stable in recent decades, and the percentage of people reporting that they’re self-employed has actually fallen during the so-called ascent of the gig economy.45 But those indicators can be deceiving because they’re based on survey data measuring what people say they do in the labor market. Or rather, surveys can be as confusing as the complex new gig economy itself, both for workers answering the questions and for the government data-collectors asking them. For example, will a full-time employee at a large company think of renting out her spare room on Airbnb for extra cash as a “job”?* Differences in how surveys phrase the question may account for differences in the number of gig workers various polls find. For instance, another survey found that 24 percent of Millennials had reported working a freelance or independent contractor gig in 2015, compared to only 9 percent of Baby Boomers.46 Meanwhile, measurements of what people actually do and how they actually work tend to point to a much bigger gig economy than surveys.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan
Published 20 Feb 2020

De Blok didn’t try to second-guess the outcome of his experiment. He didn’t predicate future decisions, strategy or structure on information he didn’t have yet. Instead, he started with his idea of the best, of what mattered to the people who mattered most: the nurses and their patients. Similarly, when Brian Chesky founded Airbnb, he had only the loosest idea of what his company could or would become. He did what most business people do: he talked to customers. But he didn’t ask them about the existing products or make them fill out dreary surveys. Instead, he interrogated them about their fantasies. What would a six-star experience be for a customer?

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Aalto, Alvar, 226 abortion, 98, 141–2, 144, 145, 185, 192 Abortion Act (1967) (UK), 185 Abu Ghraib, 306 Ackroyd, Norman, 186, 188–9 ACT UP, 259–62, 268 Adorno, Theodor, 80, 277 Aeschylus, 177 agency, 40, 102, 103, 178 agreeableness, 92 agriculture, 17, 109, 113–16, 124, 148, 160, 167, 305, 306 AI, see artificial intelligence AIDS, 59, 257–69, 274, 280, 292, 308, 317, 318, 321 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), 259–62, 268 Airbnb, 127 airborne disease, 14 Alcatel-Lucent, 250 alibi of inertia, 124 ‘Alison’ anecdote, 279 almanacs, 17 Alphabet, 283 AL721, 261 Altman, Sam, 286 Amaldi, Edoardo, 206 Amazon, 3, 77, 101, 117, 230 ambiguity, 3, 5, 8, 23, 61, 78, 85–7, 95, 101–2, 108, 123, 135, 167, 175, 176, 178, 181, 183, 191–3, 199–203, 205–6, 231, 234, 269, 277, 297 American Civil War, 186 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990) (US), 78 ANC (African National Congress), 166 Android, 246–7 Ani (nurse), 125 anthropology, 278 anticipatory shopping, 101 apartheid, 166, 258 A Port Chalmers, 57 Apple, 4, 246 apps, 1, 70, 72–3, 80–1 Arab Spring, 55, 56 Arendt, Hannah, 2 art/artists, 8, 68, 177–203, 215, 224, 226, 276–8, 314 Article 36, 308–9, 316 artificial intelligence (AI), 2, 5, 6, 29, 33–4, 60, 77, 159, 245, 284, 319 artistic talent, 176–203 Arup, 200, 227 Asquith, Herbert H., 97 assassinations, 15 astrology, 13, 16, 21, 73, 76–7 astronomy, 317 Attenborough, Sir David, 109 Atwood, Margaret, 180, 191 Auden, W.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by Amy Webb
Published 5 Mar 2019

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital owned a 20% stake when Dropbox filed its IPO, making its shares worth $1.7 billion.71 In Silicon Valley, startups that are valued over $1 billion are called “unicorns,” and with a valuation ten times that amount, Dropbox is what’s known as a “decacorn.” By 2018, there were enough unicorns and decacorns to fill a Silicon Valley zoo, and several of them were partners with the G-MAFIA, including SpaceX, Coinbase, Peloton, Credit Karma, Airbnb, Palantir, and Uber. With fast money comes heightened expectations that the product or service will start earning back its investment, either through widespread adoption, acquisition, or hype in the market. You have a personal relationship with the G-MAFIA, even if you don’t use their well-known products.

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Hilary Mason, Twitter, March 28, 2018, https://twitter.com/hmason/status/979044821749895170 INDEX Abductive reasoning, 170 Accidents and mistakes, AI: in catastrophic scenario of future, 208. See also Safety issues, AI; Xiaoice/Tay.ai Adaptive learning systems, 167 AI R&D program, Obama-era: government defunding of, 179 AI Summer. See Dartmouth Workshop AI Winter, 37–38 Airbnb, 87 Alexa, 13, 14–15, 17, 43, 69, 90, 207 Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (DoD), 78; Project Maven, 78–79, 101 Algorithms: Alibaba values, 100; Amazon, 99; Amazon recognition, 139; Big Nine values, 99–103; competing, 184–185; evolutionary, 144, 164–165; Facebook, 100; first, 18; Google values, 99, 101–102; machine learning, 123, 183, 237; as part of AI ecosystem, 17; Tencent, 100 Ali-NPU chip, 92 Alibaba, 3, 5, 9, 49, 65, 67, 68–70, 93, 96, 158; AI chip development, 92; credit service, 81; Hema retail operation, 69; IoT, 76; Marriott hotels and, 69, 74–75; services, 69; Singles’ Day Festival sales, 72; sites, 68–69; smart speaker, 69; values algorithm, 100; Zoloz acquisition, 72 Alipay, 69, 186; social network, 81 Alphabet, 48, 49.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

Amortized across the Earth’s entire population, Merkle estimates a “surprisingly competitive” price of $24 to $32 per person.12 Currently, at least a thousand people are waiting for their chance, and they include a large selection of Silicon Valley pioneers. This being the tech industry, though, a newer iteration of the idea is already available. Nectome is one of the handful of start-ups chosen to be part of Y Combinator, the most important of California’s tech incubators. (They’re the people who first championed Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit.) In fact, Y Combinator head Sam Altman has already plunked down his $10,000 for Nectome’s service, which involves embalming your brain when you’re near death so that it can later be digitized and encoded. “The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation,” writes Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review.13 In fact, this notion that we will one day be meshed with computers and thus live forever has gained currency perhaps because, while bizarre, it seems somehow less absurd than the idea of Ted Williams lumbering around again in the real world.

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It’s the ultimate in what the business gurus happily call disruption, and it’s been a siren song for entrepreneurs with ambitions higher than the next Snapchat plug-in. Helgesen, for instance. Tall, with long lank hair, he could be the bassist in an indie band, but the Y Combinator T-shirt he’s wearing gives the game away. He didn’t actually do a stint at Silicon Valley’s most famous incubator (his wife did), but that’s his lineage, the same one that produced Airbnb and also the company that wants to embalm your brain so you can be digitally scanned and reimplanted in an android. The Y Combinator T-shirt reads, “Make Something People Want,” which pretty much defines cheap solar power. Africans are desperate for electricity. * * * “This is how the solar revolution happens,” Kim Schreiber, Off-Grid’s communications director, whispers to me.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

To aid his efforts, he wrapped a rubber band around his phone and changed the lock screen to ask three questions: What for? Why now? What else? Escalating things further, he locked his phone inside a safe at night and took up pottery to distract his empty hands. For an incredible forty-eight hours, he even left his phone at home and traveled to an Airbnb in the country, using only paper maps and directions from strangers. Horrifying, I know. And yet he persisted. “For the rest of the week, I became acutely aware of the bizarre phone habits I’d developed. I noticed that I reach for my phone every time I brush my teeth or step outside the front door of my apartment building, and that, for some pathological reason, I always check my email during the three-second window between when I insert my credit card into a chip reader at a store and when the card is accepted,” Roose noted.

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“A lot of people think that founders should be hungry and scrappy, and that necessity breeds genius. So, something like not having furniture was maybe a sign that they were scrappy, and therefore someone that would be a good steward of capital because we’re not spending on wasteful things,” Weinstein said, pointing to the founders of Airbnb, who raised $30,000 selling Obama-themed cereal and lived off soup for years before the company took off.) But that wasn’t even close to what was actually happening at Fyre: sources say the festival idea had developed largely because McFarland needed a business reason to justify what had by then amounted to months of alcohol-fueled team trips aboard private jets en route to private-island parties in the Exumas, trips on which they were sometimes accompanied by models, athletes, and potential investors.

The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
by Reid Hoffman , Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh
Published 15 Jan 2014

In 2003 he cofounded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service, in his living room in Mountain View, California. Today, LinkedIn has more than three hundred million members in two hundred countries and territories around the world. In 2009 Reid joined Greylock Partners, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm. His investments include Airbnb, Facebook, Flickr, and Zynga. He serves on a number of for-profit and not-for-profit boards, including Kiva.org and Endeavor. Reid earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University and a bachelor’s degree, with distinction, from Stanford University. BEN CASNOCHA is an award-winning entrepreneur and author from Silicon Valley.

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Published 1 Oct 2018

And when it comes to life, we’re all just trying to figure it out as we go. DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON is the cofounder of Basecamp and the New York Times bestselling coauthor of REWORK and REMOTE. He’s also the creator of the software toolkit Ruby on Rails, which has been used to launch and power Twitter, Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb, Square, and over a million other web applications. Originally from Denmark, he moved to Chicago in 2005 and now divides his time between the US and Spain with his wife and two sons. In his spare time, he enjoys 200-mph race cars in international competition, taking cliché pictures of sunsets and kids, and ranting far too much on Twitter.

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World
by Rufus Pollock
Published 29 May 2018

New entrants cannot compete on equal terms, and so small initial advantages lead to entrenched monopolies. The market converges on a single or a small number of platforms. It worked over centuries for fish-markets and stock-exchanges, and now it works for Google and Facebook as well as Microsoft, Uber and Airbnb. Costless copying The owners of fish-markets and stock-exchanges make very good livings. But the owners of the vast online platforms are in a different league because of one of the fundamental characteristics of the digital age: infinite, costless copying. When you start to glimpse the extraordinary ramifications of this simple fact, you begin to understand the modern world.

Lonely Planet's Best in Travel 2020
by Lonely Planet
Published 21 Oct 2019

The rates for the four pavilions include all meals, Australian wines and beers, daily activities and use of a personal ATV. www.mountmulligan.com 6 SWEETS HOTEL, the netherlands Breathing new life into 28 old bridge-operator cabins, some of which date back to the 17th century, the Sweets Hotel offers a truly novel way to experience Amsterdam. While there are no hotel-like services (think Airbnb apartment), these independent suites – each unique in design, furnishings and layout – are all found in scenic, watery locales throughout the captivating Dutch city. All 28 cabins are one-bedroom suites designed for a maximum of two guests. No guests under the age of 21 are permitted. www.sweetshotel.amsterdam © MIRJAM BLEEKER / SWEETS HOTEL 7 ACE KYOTO, JAPAN A short stroll from Nijō Castle, Museum of Kyoto, Kyoto Art Center and Nishiki Market, Ace Kyoto has been designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, the man responsible for the new V&A Dundee in Scotland, The Opposite House hotel in Beijing and Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic stadium.

Belgium - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
by Bernadett Varga
Published 14 Aug 2022

WHERE TO STAY Hotels in Belgium cover the usual range from expensive and luxurious to cheap and simple, some offering reduced rates for long stays. The Belgian Tourist Reservations Service (BTR) produces a list of approved hotels and relevant prices (not in English). You can book hotel rooms nationwide through the Belgian Tourist Office, via Booking.com, or Airbnb. Information can also be found on many Web sites, including www.hotelconnect.com/belgium. Belgium uses the Benelux Standard to classify its hotels or guesthouses, which are licensed by the appropriate government agency. Grades range from one to five stars. The system is based on facilities rather than location and cost.

Lonely Planet Pocket Vienna
by Lonely Planet

New Year’s Day (Neujahr) 1 January Epiphany (Heilige Drei Könige) 6 January Easter Monday (Ostermontag) March or April Labour Day (Tag der Arbeit) 1 May Ascension Day (Christi Himmelfahrt) Sixth Thursday after Easter Whit Monday (Pfingstmontag) Sixth Monday after Easter Corpus Christi (Fronleichnam) Second Thursday after Pentecost Assumption (Maria Himmelfahrt) 15 August National Day (Nationalfeiertag) 26 October All Saints’ Day (Allerheiligen) 1 November Immaculate Conception (Mariä Empfängnis) 8 December Christmas Eve (Heiligabend) 24 December; everything closed afternoon Christmas Day (Christfest) 25 December St Stephen’s Day (Stephanitag) 26 December Responsible Travel Overtourism Vienna has been one of the most active municipalities in Europe when it comes to tackling the woes of the shared economy. It’s also one of the world’s greenest cities. Give it a hand by avoiding Airbnb properties and other short-term rentals. Visiting Vienna in the low season (Feb-Mar and Nov) can help ease the strain. Safe Travel Vienna is a very safe city and in general women and men will have no trouble walking around at night. AKarlsplatz station and Gumpendorfer Strasse can be boisterous late in the evening.

Lonely Planet Lonely Planet's Best in Travel 2022
by Lonely Planet
Published 26 Oct 2021

The rates for the four pavilions include all meals, Australian wines and beers, daily activities and use of a personal ATV. www.mountmulligan.com 6 SWEETS HOTEL, the netherlands Breathing new life into 28 old bridge-operator cabins, some of which date back to the 17th century, the Sweets Hotel offers a truly novel way to experience Amsterdam. While there are no hotel-like services (think Airbnb apartment), these independent suites – each unique in design, furnishings and layout – are all found in scenic, watery locales throughout the captivating Dutch city. All 28 cabins are one-bedroom suites designed for a maximum of two guests. No guests under the age of 21 are permitted. www.sweetshotel.amsterdam © MIRJAM BLEEKER / SWEETS HOTEL 7 ACE KYOTO, JAPAN A short stroll from Nijō Castle, Museum of Kyoto, Kyoto Art Center and Nishiki Market, Ace Kyoto has been designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, the man responsible for the new V&A Dundee in Scotland, The Opposite House hotel in Beijing and Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic stadium.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future
by Alec Ross
Published 13 Sep 2021

Google’s glassy European headquarters (where Google Ireland Limited is based) ranks among the tallest buildings in Dublin, towering over the city’s Grand Canal. The surrounding neighborhood, a former industrial yard turned tech-bro hot spot, is also home to the European headquarters of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Airbnb. Apple set up shop in Cork, where it is the city’s largest private employer. According to the most recent data, American companies booked more revenue in Ireland than in the sixteen largest European countries, combined. Had the transaction between Google and the Ascani family taken place in Italy, the profit it generated would have been subject to the country’s 24 percent corporate tax rate.

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Abbott Laboratories Abercrombie & Fitch AB InBev accountability activist investing Adidas Affordable Care Act Afghanistan, Soviet invasion of AFL-CIO Africa. See also specific countries China and Chinese model and climate change and closed systems and corruption in democracy in open vs. closed systems in population explosion in social contract in tax avoidance and tax havens and African Union Afwerki, Isaias agriculture AI ethics Airbnb airline industry Alabama al-Assad, Bashar Alexander, Douglas Alibaba Alipay Alphabet Inc.. See also Google Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Amazon American Airlines American Federation of Labor Andrés, José Android Anduril Industries Angola Anguilla anti-monopoly measures antitrust protections.

Lonely Planet's Best of USA
by Lonely Planet

If you have a smartphone, each of these sites has a free app – which often are useful for finding great last-minute deals. The Hotel Tonight is another good app for booking rooms on the fly, and includes boutique hotels and historic properties. House & Apartment Rentals To rent a room, house or apartment from locals, visit Airbnb (www.airbnb.com), which has thousands of listings across the country. B&Bs In the USA, many B&Bs are high-end romantic retreats in restored historic homes run by personable, independent innkeepers who serve gourmet breakfasts. These B&Bs often take pains to evoke a theme – Victorian, rustic, Cape Cod and so on – and amenities range from comfortable to indulgent.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie
Published 25 Jun 2018

Here is a representative but not exhaustive list of the social media platforms I think about, and that will be central to my concern in this book: social network sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Hi5, Ning, NextDoor, and Foursquare; blogging and microblogging providers like Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, and Livejournal; photo- and image-sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Photobucket, DeviantArt, and Snapchat; video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion; discussion, opinion, and gossip tools like Reddit, Digg, Secret, and Whisper; dating and hookup apps like OK Cupid, Tinder, and Grindr; collaborative knowledge tools like Wikipedia, Ask, and Quora; app stores like iTunes and Google Play; live broadcasting apps like Facebook Live and Periscope.62 To those I would add a second set that, while they do not neatly fit the definition of platform, grapple with many of the same challenges of content moderation in platformlike ways: recommendation and rating sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor; exchange platforms that help share goods, services, funds, or labor, like Etsy, Kickstarter, Craigslist, Airbnb, and Uber; video game worlds like League of Legends, Second Life, and Minecraft; search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. At this point I should define the term that I have already relied on a great deal. Platform is a slippery term, in part because its meaning has changed over time, in part because it equates things that nevertheless differ in important and sometimes striking ways, and in part because it gets deployed strategically, by both stakeholders and critics.63 As a shorthand, “platform” too easily equates a site with the company that offers it, it implies that social media companies act with one mind, and it downplays the people involved.

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If that is a profitable move for Facebook, terrific, but its administrators must weigh that against the idea that the shift makes them more accountable, more liable, for the content they assemble—even though it is entirely composed out of the content of others.76 And this would absolutely include the marketplace services that present themselves as social media platforms, like Airbnb, Etsy, and Uber: though as part of their services they do host and distribute users’ speech (profiles, comments, reviews, and so on), and to that degree should enjoy protection from liability, they are also new kinds of employers and brokers, and should not get to use 230’s protection to avoid laws ensuring fair employment, fair housing, antidiscrimination, or fair pricing.77 A second possibility would be to redress a missed opportunity when Section 230 was first drafted.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

In the summer of 2010, Hassabis and Legg arranged to address the Singularity Summit, knowing that each speaker would be invited to a private party at Thiel’s town house in San Francisco. Thiel had been part of the team that founded PayPal, the online payments service, before securing an even bigger reputation—and an even bigger fortune—as an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Airbnb. If they could get inside his town house, they felt, they could pitch him their company and lobby for investment dollars. Thiel not only had the money, he had the inclination. He was someone who believed in extreme ideas, even more so than the typical Silicon Valley venture capitalist. After all, he was funding the Singularity Summit.

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In the fall of 2016, three days before the premiere of Westworld—the HBO television series in which amusement park androids turn on their creators after slowly crossing the threshold into artificial sentience—many of the cast and crew attended a private screening in Silicon Valley. It was not held at the local cineplex. It was held at the home of Yuri Milner, a fifty-four-year-old Israeli-Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, and Airbnb and a regular at the Edge Foundation’s annual Billionaires’ Dinner. A twenty-five-thousand-five-hundred-square-foot limestone mansion perched in the Los Altos hills overlooking San Francisco Bay, his home was called Chateau Loire. Purchased five years earlier for more than $100 million, it was one of the most expensive single-family homes in the country, spanning indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a ballroom, a tennis court, a wine cellar, a library, a game room, a spa, a gym, and its own private movie theater.

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade
Published 9 Jan 2024

Ben returned to the basement sofa of their 1,600-square-foot house, ill with nausea, fatigue, and shortness of breath, while Whitney quarantined upstairs with the boys, managing all three by herself for six days. Ben felt the company would collapse if he didn’t get in those orders and was still closing deals via email and text to make sure they had the cash to stay afloat. Whitney’s parents stayed at a nearby Airbnb and came over a few times to sit on the patio by the fire pit, but fear of infection kept them from being as helpful as they’d planned. Mary Ann held Owen outside while Whitney cared for Arlo and Wyatt, running back and forth and downstairs to tend to Ben. “It was insane,” Whitney recalls. Four days later, Dory texted me again: “Ben’s been really sick.

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In the meantime, Evan was losing his marbles trying to implement Marty’s system. Their production numbers inched up, but by December they’d plateaued and remained stubbornly below goals, much to Evan’s frustration. Marty flew out to Portland the second week of December and stayed at Dan and Dory’s house—they’d turned their sons’ second-floor bedrooms into an Airbnb to earn extra income. I drove up to Westbrook one last time and rented a room in The Elms, the rambling Queen Anne–style house across from the paper mill. I dropped off my bags in the giant master bedroom on the second-floor. The big, drafty bay windows overlooked a bend in the Presumpscot River, narrow and tame, nothing like the rushing falls a mile upriver at Dana Warp.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Ashton Kutcher FB: /Ashton aplus.com ASHTON KUTCHER is a prominent actor, investor, and entrepreneur. He began his acting career in the popular sitcom That ’70s Show, which aired for eight seasons, and he starred in the comedy and box office hit Dude, Where’s My Car? He is a renowned technology investor, with investments in Airbnb, Square, Skype, Uber, Foursquare, Duolingo, and others. He is currently a co-founder and chairman of the board of A Plus, a digital media company devoted to spreading the message of positive journalism, where he leads strategic partnerships with brands and influencers. In 2009, he became the first Twitter user to reach one million followers, and he now has close to 20 million

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Choose opportunities based on the quality of people you will get to work with. What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? “Industries are led by experts.” While we idolize the experts in our industry, we often forget that industries are often transformed by neophytes. The boldest transformations, like Uber disrupting transportation or Airbnb disrupting hospitality, are led by outsiders. Perhaps the playbook to change an industry is to be naive enough at the start to question basic assumptions and then stay alive long enough to employ skills that are unique and advantageous in the space you seek to change. Perhaps naive excitement and pragmatic expertise are equally important traits at different times.

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Samin Nosrat, 4; Steven Pressfield, 9; Susan Cain, 13; Debbie Millman, 30; Naval Ravikant, 34; Bozoma Saint John, 38; Graham Duncan, 61; Soman Chainani, 74; Mike Maples Jr., 76; Jesse Williams, 81; Richa Chadha, 89; Neil Strauss, 99; Veronica Belmont, 103; Patton Oswalt, 106; Lewis Cantley, 111; Jerzy Gregorek, 120; Aniela Gregorek, 125; Amelia Boone, 130; Anna Holmes, 144; Andrew Ross Sorkin, 146; Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 150; Vitalik Buterin, 155; Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, 162; Julia Galef, 165; Esther Perel, 181; Maria Sharapova, 184; Adam Robinson, 192; Josh Waitzkin, 198; Jason Fried, 209; Arianna Huffington, 214; Gary Vaynerchuk, 218; Tom Peters, 228; Bear Grylls, 231; Brené Brown, 233; Leo Babauta, 238; Mike D, 242; Esther Dyson, 245; Ashton Kutcher, 252; Jérôme Jarre, 264; Fedor Holz, 267; Eric Ripert, 270; Sharon Salzberg, 274; Franklin Leonard, 277; Greg Norman, 285; Strauss Zelnick, 291; Liv Boeree, 304; Anníe Mist Þórisdóttir, 307; Ed Coan, 318; Ray Dalio, 323; Jacqueline Novogratz, 327; Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, 339; Gabor Maté, 344; Linda Rottenberg, 351; Tommy Vietor, 355; Scott Belsky, 362; Muna AbuSulayman, 363; Sam Harris, 367; David Lynch, 381; Nick Szabo, 384; Jon Call, 388; Dara Torres, 391; Darren Aronofsky, 399; Neil Gaiman, 410; Michael Gervais, 415; Temple Grandin, 417; Katrín Tanja Davíðsdóttir, 424; Mathew Fraser, 427; Adam Fisher, 430; Aisha Tyler, 435; Laura Walker, 438; Marie Forleo, 454; Tim McGraw, 465; Steven Pinker, 478; Whitney Cummings, 485; Rick Rubin, 491; Ryan Shea, 493; Ben Silbermann, 499; Vlad Zamfir, 505; Steve Aoki, 524; Jim Loehr, 531; Daniel Negreanu, 535; Jocko Willink, 539; Robert Rodriguez, 545; Kristen Ulmer, 551; Yuval Noah Harari, 560 Subject Index A | B |C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z A About.me, 101 Absurdism, 502–4 AbuSulayman, Muna, 362–64 Activision, 298 Acumen, 324 Adeney, Pete, 376–78 Adirondack Guide Boat, 227 Adobe, 459 Advertigo, 286 Affirm, 92, 95 Agios, 198 AIGA, 24 Aiken, Howard H., 206 Airbnb, 250, 461 Alcatel-Lucent, 64 Alexander, Christopher, 207 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 53–55 Ali, Muhammad, 253 Ali, Muneeb, 468–69, 492 Alloy, LLC, 289 All Species Foundation, 246 Almaas, A. H., 343 Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation, 362 Amazon, 101 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 324 America Online (AOL), 101, 345, 346 Anderson, Chris, 41, 407–9 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 336 AngelList, 31 Aoki, Steve, 519–25 Aoki Foundation, 522 AOL, 101, 345, 346 A Plus, 250 Appiah, Kwame, 57 Apple AirPods headphones, 498 Apple Music, 37 Apple Pencil, 25 Arnold, John, 373–74 Aroma Housewares AHP-303/CHP-303 Single Hot Plate, 386 Aronofsky, Darren, 398–400 Ashley, Maurice, 368–70 Asna, 82 Aspen Institute, 324 Attia, Peter, 514–18 Audible, 133, 245 Authenticity, 81, 273, 344, 370, 530 Ayasdi, 200 B Babauta, Leo, 236–38 Back Buddy, 83 Ballmer, Steve, 59 Balsbaugh, Brian, 533–34 Bar complex, 466 Barkley, Gnarls, 204 Bartók, Béla, 341 Basecamp, 203 Bashō, Matsuo, 275 Bazaarvoice, 64 Be a STAR, 509 The Beastie Boys, 239 Beats Music, 37 Beats Solo headphones, 168–69 Behance, 459, 461–62 Bell, Mark, 309–12 Bell, Mike, 310 Belmont, Veronica, 100–103 Belsky, Scott, 459–62 Beltrame, Lorenzo, 563, 564 Benchmark, 459 Benioff, Marc, 445–50 Bergeron, Ben, 421–23 Bezold, Michael, 369 Big questions, 565 Birdhouse Skateboards, 298 Bitcoin, 153, 382, 507 Bitcoin magazine, 153 BitGold, 382 BitTorrent, Inc., 404 Black List, 277 Blaine, David, 448 Blakely, Sara, 352 Blinkist app, 301 Blockstack, 468, 492 Blogger, 401, 402 Blue Origin, 470 BMG Entertainment, 289 Bodily awareness, 552–53 in decision making, 61, 274 in exercise, 316, 426, 490 in handling overwhelm/lack of focus, 4, 238, 274 in meditation, 559, 560 with music, 57 Body Back Company, 83 Boeree, Liv, 300–304 Bohr, Niels, 39 Bono, 288 Boone, Amelia, xvii–xviii, 127–30 Bose noise-canceling earphones, 158 Botmakers.org, 101 Botwiki.org, 101 Boyle, Hal, 182, 184 Brach, Tara, 540 Brain.fm app, 168–69 Brand, Stewart, 332–34 Branson, Richard, 78, 451 Breakthrough Energy Ventures, 373 Breathing techniques, 99 to create nasal apnea sequence, 338 heart rate variability, 189, 198, 430 in meditation, 89, 559–60 when making decisions, 124 when stressed/overwhelmed/unfocused, 138, 144, 238, 274, 415, 438–39, 491 Bridgewater Associates, 321 Brown, Brené, 232–34, 356 B-School, 451 Bucky neck pillow, 509 Buddhism, 237, 270, 272, 285 Buffett, Warren, 204, 205, 209, 321 BuiltLean, 290 Burry, Mike, 62 Busyness, 26 Buterin, Vitalik, 153–55 Butterfly Petr Korbel table tennis racket, 330 C Cain, Susan, 10–13, 41 Call, Jon, 385–88 Callaway, 284 Cameron, James, 275 Cameron, William Bruce, 206 Campbell, Bill, 65 Campbell, Joseph, 16, 112, 335 Canfield, Jack, 432 Cantley, Lewis, 107–11 Carmichael, Christopher, 259 Carrey, Jim, 138 Carroll, Pete, 412 Carse, James P., 403, 540 Carter, Maverick, 79 Cartier, 75 Case, Jean, 345 Case, Steve, 345–48 Case Foundation, 345 Centaurus Energy, 373 Center for Applied Rationality, 163 The Center for Public Integrity, 211 Centre of Entrepreneurship, 451 Chadha, Richa, 85–90 Chainani, Soman, 70–74 Chanel No. 5, 87 Charell, Ralph, 156 Charitable giving, 202, 262–63, 321, 324, 345 Charyn, Jerome, 330 Chegg, 64 Chesterton, G.

The New Prophets of Capital
by Nicole Aschoff
Published 10 Mar 2015

They buy their groceries at the local food co-op. They attend classes. They teach classes. They go to networking events not just to hand out business cards, but to find other freelancers that share their passions.37 In the new sharing economy we’ll all be freelancers. We’ll rent out our spare rooms on Airbnb and drive our cars for Lyft. We’ll have a “portfolio of jobs” and live our lives by “essentialist” principles: We will live with “intention and choice” and celebrate the joy of “fulfilling a purpose” and making “small choices that lead to big change.”38 It’s all about adapting ourselves and acquiring the necessary skills and connections to make it in the world.

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders
by Mariya Yao , Adelyn Zhou and Marlene Jia
Published 1 Jun 2018

Most machine learning algorithms will require ongoing customizations that can make them harder to configure, maintain, and understand. Deployment and Scaling In order to support a large number of enterprise-wide machine learning systems, you will need a centralized technology architecture that provides a stable development and deployment environment. Companies such as Google, Facebook, and AirBnB have created internal Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) platforms to enable their engineering teams to build, deploy, and operate machine learning solutions with ease. These MLaaS systems, also known as end-to-end machine learning platforms, reduce the time required to push models to production from months to weeks.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

Richards wanted to create “Gate Hill Weekends,” creative workshops and retreats for adults from the city, but they also talked about creating a summer camp for kids, too. They thought of renting plots out for camping, or long-term shares for summer use, or single-use cabin stays, essentially something like Airbnb-ing in the 1950s. None of it had happened, though, by the time she was writing this essay. “The land is a problem to us,” she says. The taxes were expensive. At times, they had conversations about selling it, or donating it to the state park. “It is difficult to act clearly because we are unclear in our attitudes toward money, toward accrued value, toward profit . . .

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

At least in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, most of their businesses had cute one-word names (Meerkat, Sprig) and bright, simple logos, and they involved creating a network that people would reach through their mobile devices and use to buy a service that had previously been obtainable only through more conventional means. It was too late to emulate Google or Facebook, but maybe not too late to emulate Uber or Airbnb (where Hoffman was an early investor), if you could find a different realm—office space, meal delivery, pet care, trucking—where you could connect bargain-hunting customers with owners who had slack capacity. Hoffman and his partners would watch the company founders’ “deck”—its ten-minute slide presentation—and then pepper the supplicants with questions: Who else is in this space?

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Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. abolitionists Abrams, J. J. Absentee Ownership (Veblen) Addams, Jane advertising African Americans, see black Americans Agenda, The (Woodward) Airbnb airline regulation Allen & Company Alliance, The (Hoffman) alpha, as economic term Alphabet; see also Google Alsop, Joseph Aluminum Co. of America Amazon American Can Company American Capitalism (Galbraith) American Dream, An (Mailer) American Finance Association American Nazi Party American Telephone and Telegraph, see AT&T angel investors; see also venture capital Antitrust Paradox, The (Bork) antitrust suits, see trustbusting Apple Computer; funding of Arab Americans Arnold, Thurman Arrow, Kenneth artificial intelligence AT&T; job cuts at; research at auto dealers; associations of; franchise agreements of; online; see also General Motors automatic teller machines Automobile Dealer Economic Rights Restoration Act Baker, Kevin Baldwin, Robert Hayes Burns; changes made by; compensation of Bankers Trust banking; in auto industry; during Depression; deregulation of, see deregulation; local; regulation of; see also investment banking; Morgan Stanley; savings and loans Bank of America bankruptcy bank trust departments Barr, Michael Bartow, Jeff Bay of Pigs invasion Beard, Anson Beard, Charles and Mary Beard, Patricia Beard, Peter Bear Stearns Beck, Glenn behavioral economics “Being a Leader” (Jensen and Erhard) Bell, Daniel Bennington College Bentley, Arthur; on pluralism Berkshires Berle, Adolf Augustus, Jr.; airline regulation and; background of; at Columbia; corporations embraced by; critiques of; death of; ego of; on financial markets; marriage of; Modern Corporation by; pluralism and; post–Roosevelt administration career of; revival of ideas of; in Roosevelt campaign; as Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of state; in Roosevelt’s Brain Trust Berle, Adolf Augustus, Sr.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Instead, we’d contend with a “cyberspace divided.” Banks and other financial institutions didn’t use to share credit data, either—it was considered far too valuable and privileged. But eventually, they were convinced that credit scores with better data and more coverage would be of collective benefit. Competing homestay marketplaces Airbnb and Vrbo are now partnering with a third party to prevent guests with a history of poor behavior from making future bookings. Although this harms the individual offenders, all other guests, hosts, and platforms benefit. The best example of “economic gravity” comes from the game engines—the very companies pioneering the plumbing of the Metaverse.

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AAA games, 114, 133 ACH (Automated Clearing House), 168–71, 177, 188, 217, 226, 296 Activeworlds, 9 Activision Blizzard, 11, 44, 104, 179, 190, 225 game engines of, 106, 117 Microsoft’s acquisition of, 279 Tencent and, 303 World of Warcraft, 44, 48, 55, 68, 91, 179, 276, 305 see also Call of Duty Adidas, 9, 121, 262 Adopt Me!, 11, 31, 43, 111 Airbnb, 129 Airbus, 136 AirPods, 161 Akonia, 144 Alibaba, xiii, 4, 19 Alien, 139 Alipay, 167 Alphabet. See Google Altberg, Ebbe, 110 Amazon, xiv Amazon content via the Apple App Store, 184–85, 197 business model, 164 Fire OS, 213 Fire Phone, 143 gaming and, 178–79, 278, 281n investment in AR/VR hardware, 143, 277–78 market capitalization of, 166 positioning for the Metaverse, 274, 277–78 recommendation engine, 288 see also Bezos, Jeff Amazon Game Studios, 277 Amazon GameSparks, 107–8, 117 Amazon Go, 157 Amazon Lumberyard, 278 Amazon Luna, 96, 131, 277–78, 282 Amazon Music, 197, 277 Amazon Prime, 179, 185, 197, 277–78 Amazon Prime Video, 185, 277 Amazon Web Services (AWS), 84, 99, 277–78 AMC Entertainment, 28 American Cancer Society, 9 American Express, 172, 188 American Tower, 243, 244 America Online (AOL), 13, 15, 61, 130, 165, 273, 283 Andreessen Horowitz, 233 Android, 25, 61, 143, 212–14 Amazon Fire Phone, 143 backwards “pinch-to-zoom” concept, 149–50, 151 game development for, 131 gaming and, 32, 92, 133 Google Cardboard viewer for, 142 Google’s approach to, 184, 212–15, 275 progressive closure of, 213 Samsung’s approach to, 213 the 30% standard, 188, 190–91, 204–5 Animal Crossing: New Horizons, 30–32, 247 AOL Instant Messenger, 61 Apple Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF), 122 dominance of, 189 investment in AR/VR hardware, 143–44 lawsuit from Epic Games, 14n, 22–23, 32n, 134, 186, 284 lawsuit from the European Union, 184 market capitalization of, 166, 186–87 moral stance on pornography, 261 patents of, 143–44, 150 “There’s an app for that” ad campaign, 26, 150, 243 Apple App Store, 26, 132, 165, 309 categories of apps in, 183, 185–87 control over competing browsers, 194–95 control over payment rails, 201–4, 243–44 economics of, 186 as hindering the development of the Metaverse, 192–95, 197–99, 243–44, 309 policies on blockchain, crypto mining, and cryptocurrency trading apps, 200–201 the 30% standard, 120, 172–80, 183–84, 186–92, 197, 201, 203–4, 286 user identity and control, 299 Apple iOS, 60–61 Animoji, 159 “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT), 204–5 AssistiveTouch, 153 control over its NFC chip, 199–200 Face ID authentication system, 159 FaceTime, 65, 83 the home button, 148–49, 244 iCloud storage, 124, 200 “iPad Natives,” 13, 249 iPads, xi, 294 iPhones, 64, 131, 146, 242–44 Metal, 142, 175, 196 multitasking, 149, 244 Newton tablet, 145 “pinch-to-zoom” concept, 149–50, 151 Safari, 194–96, 209 Siri queries to Apple’s servers, 161 “slide-to-unlock” feature, 150–51 WebKit, 39, 194 Apple Music, 184, 197, 255 Apple News, 256 Apple Watch, 152, 161 application programming interfaces (APIs) authentication, 138 Discord APIs, 135 Instagram’s Twitter integration API, 287, 300 proprietary APIs and gaming consoles, 174–77, 287 in United States v.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

That kind of attention didn’t cause my modeling career to take off, but it did lead to a lot of offers to talk with leaders all over the world about the tectonic shifts taking place in industries, economies, and societies. And to keep learning. I rode in a Google self-driving car, watched robots scurry around an Amazon warehouse, talked with economists at Uber and Airbnb about using data and algorithms to dynamically balance supply and demand, and had countless other eye-opening experiences. Lots of industrial-era companies were also having eye-opening experiences at the time, and not pleasant ones. The iconic American retailer Sears, which was founded in 1886, went bankrupt.

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Let’s combine those two and call the resulting set the Likely Suspects for having geek cultures. These are the companies where I’d expect our geek norm detector to be making the most noise. The table below lists the thirty-three Likely Suspects, 60 percent of which were founded within our Northern California circle. Airbnb* Akamai Alphabet* Amazon Apple* Cisco Systems* DoorDash* eBay* Expedia Facebook (Meta)* GoDaddy Groupon Grubhub HubSpot IBM Intel* LinkedIn* Lyft* Microsoft Netflix* Oracle* PayPal* Postmates* Salesforce* Stitch Fix* Support.com* Twitter* Uber* Wayfair Workday* Yahoo* Yelp* Zillow *Founded in Northern California I calculated the average across the Likely Suspects of each of the Culture 500’s Big Nine values, and compared this group average to Netflix’s scores on each of the Big Nine.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

In San Francisco, drug dealers in Dolores Park began using Square, a small white plastic device that connects to the iPhone and allows anybody to accept credit card payments, enabling hipsters who eschew cash to charge their ecstasy and pot. In New York, prostitutes tired of the cameras and overly inquisitive doormen at chic Manhattan hotels have turned to Airbnb to rent apartments for their trysts. The prostitutes pose as students or tourists, and the unsuspecting New Yorkers who rent their apartments have no idea their own beds are being used to entertain multiple clients and to host orgies. One escort service claimed it was saving “a fortune” by using Airbnb. “It’s more discreet and much cheaper than The Waldorf,” said a twenty-one-year-old sex worker. Whatever the technology or Internet service, criminals are there at the earliest stages, innovatively turning the newfangled tools to their advantage.

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Golay, “Markets for Cybercrime Tools and Stolen Data,” Rand Corporation, 4. 7 Several executives were kidnapped: Byron Acohido, “How Kidnappers, Assassins Utilize Smartphones, Google, and Facebook,” USAToday.​com, Feb. 18, 2011. 8 Sensing a market need: “Woman ‘Ran Text-a-Getaway’ Service,” BBC News, July 16, 2013. 9 In San Francisco: This was based on the author’s personal observations, and I have a photograph of the incident. 10 “It’s more discreet”: Dana Sauchelli and Bruce Golding, “Hookers Turning Airbnb Apartments into Brothels,” New York Post, April 14, 2014. 11 While organized crime groups: The information on the organization of modern cybercrime organizations came from a variety of sources, including personal experience and investigation, consultation with senior law enforcement officials working in the field of cyber crime, and online resources such as “Cybercriminals Today Mirror Legitimate Business Processes,” Fortinet 2013 Cybercrime Report; Trend Micro Threat Research, “A Cybercrime Hub,” Aug. 2009; Information Warfare Monitor and Shadowserver Foundation, Shadows in the Cloud, Joint Report, April 6, 2010; Patrick Thibodeau, “FBI Lists Top 10 Posts in Cybercriminal Operations,” Computerworld, March 23, 2010; Roderic Broadhurst et al., “Organizations and Cybercrime,” International Journal of Cyber Criminology, Oct. 11, 2013. 12 Active criminal affiliates: Dmitry Samosseiko, “The Partnerka” (paper presented at Virus Bulletin Conference, Sept. 2009); “The Business of Cybercrime,” Trend Micro White Paper, Jan. 2010. 13 In other words: Cisco, Cisco 2010 Annual Security Report, 9. 14 Actors in these online crime swarms: Broadhurst et al., “Organizations and Cybercrime.” 15 As noted previously: Dunn, “Global Cybercrime Dominated by 50 Core Groups.” 16 Some Crime, Inc. organizations: See Brian Krebs, “ ‘Citadel’ Trojan Touts Trouble-Ticket System,” Krebs on Security, Jan. 23, 2012. 17 One group of cyber thieves: Bob Sullivan, “160 Million Credit Cards Later, ‘Cutting Edge’ Hacking Ring Cracked,” NBC News, July 25, 2013; “Team of International Criminals Charged with Multi-million Dollar Hacking Ring,” NBC News, July 25, 2013. 18 Some digital criminal marketplaces: Thomas Holt, “Exploring the Social Organisation and Structure of Stolen Data Markets,” Global Crime 14, nos. 2–3 (2013); Thomas Holt, “Honor Among (Credit Card) Thieves?

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

Even breastfeeding wasn’t really settled, because a woman feeding her baby might have some other kind of nudity. “If someone is breastfeeding, but not wearing pants, what is that?” says Willner, answering the question right away. “No pants wins. Take it down.” He sighs. Willner left Facebook and now heads content standards for Airbnb, where people too often defy propriety in apartment and home listings. His wife, Charlotte, is head of trust and safety for Pinterest. “Like, I cannot express to you how completely bananas Facebook would be if it were not for the moderation,” Dave adds. “It is basically a miracle that it’s as calm as it is

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What made it a major decision for Facebook was not the choice itself, but the outrage generated by Facebook’s adherence to its own rules. Interpretations that seemed logical when the rule book was written often could look outrageous when exposed to public scrutiny. “That photo got posted all the time,” says Dave Willner, who had taken a job at Airbnb doing similar work by then. “If you do not know that it is a nonconsensual nude image of a child who has had a war crime committed against her—if it were not a Pulitzer Prize–winning photo—everyone would lose their damn minds had Facebook not censored it.” Another keep-it-down advocate was Andrew Bosworth.

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Even as Facebook worked to improve its products, a relentless stream of headlines kept dragging down its reputation. First came the revelations that Facebook’s cutback on data-gathering—the one that supposedly ended after the one-year grace period that started in 2014—had not been uniformly employed. Some major companies, like Airbnb, Netflix, and Lyft were white-listed, allowing them to continue accessing information. (Also on the white list was Hot or Not, the inspiration for Zuckerberg’s 2003 folly, Facemash.) Especially embarrassing: some of these revelations came out in a lawsuit from a company, Six4Three, that actually was blocked from receiving user data.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

One night, right after he finished his 9 o’clock meeting with the Tesla Autopilot team, he called Parag Agrawal, the software engineer who had taken over from Dorsey as Twitter CEO. The two of them decided to meet secretly for dinner on March 31, along with Twitter’s board chair Bret Taylor. The Twitter staff arranged for them to use an Airbnb farmhouse near the San Jose airport. When Taylor arrived first, he texted Musk to warn him. “This wins for the weirdest place I’ve had a meeting recently,” he wrote. “There are tractors and donkeys.” Musk replied, “Maybe Airbnb’s algorithm thinks you love tractors and donkeys (who doesn’t).” At the meeting, Musk found Agrawal to be likable. “He’s a really nice guy,” he says. But that was the problem. If you ask Musk what are the traits needed in a CEO, he would not include “being a really nice guy.”

The Rough Guide to Paris
by Rough Guides
Published 1 May 2023

Apartment-hotels – a hotel made up of mini-apartments each with its own self-contained kitchen – may be useful alternatives for families or visitors on an extended stay. Staying on a bed and breakfast basis in a private house is also worth considering if you want to get away from the more impersonal set-up of a hotel. To help you in your search we’ve compiled a list of rental providers. Airbnb http://airbnb.com. Given the price of hotels in the city, it’s not surprising that Paris is one of the top Airbnb destinations – there are thousands of ‘hosts’ in the city, many of them offering rooms (or whole apartments) in trendier areas of town. Alcôve & Agapes http://bed-and-breakfast-in-paris.com. Bed-and-breakfast organization with a good selection of private rooms on its books.

Vue.js
by Callum Macrae
Published 23 Feb 2018

$store.state.users; } } }; The component gets the users when it is mounted, and then when the users have been loaded, they are available using this.users. vuex also provides helper functions to help avoid repetition in your code. For more information on vuex, check out Chapter 5. Unit-Testing Components A common way of unit testing React components is to use Enzyme. Enzyme is a library published by Airbnb that makes mounting and testing components easy. A test in Enzyme might look like this: import { expect } from 'chai'; import { shallow } from 'enzyme'; import UserView from '../components/UserView.js'; const wrapper = shallow(<UserView />); expect(wrapper.find('p')).to.have.length(1); const text = wrapper.find('p').text(); expect(text).to.equal('User name: Callum Macrae'); Vue has a similar library called vue-test-utils.

Your Money: The Missing Manual
by J.D. Roth
Published 18 Mar 2010

You can then volunteer to host—by offering a spare couch or bed to travelers—or request to "surf" in somebody else's home. Couch-surfing lets you save money and make new friends in the cities you visit. (Here's a real-life overview of the couch-surfing experience: http://tinyurl.com/GRS-couchsurfing.) You'll find similar communities at The Hospitality Club (http://hospitalityclub.org), Airbnb (http://airbnb.com), and Servas (http://usservas.org/), which has been around for over 60 years. (Note that you have to pay to join Servas.) Tip Hi Everywhere! (http://hieverywhere.com) is a free site that helps you find (or be) a volunteer tour guide. You tell the site when and where you plan to travel, and if a local guide is available, she can sign up to show you around the city.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

Following closely behind is the “rent economy” described very well in Klaus Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schwab is the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the host of what is more commonly known as Davos, and he highlights such facts as that Uber, the world’s biggest taxi company, doesn’t own any cars and that Airbnb, the world’s largest “hotel” chain, doesn’t own any hotels. In the Airbnb- and Uber-led economy, capital investment is low, incumbent businesses suffer reduced profitability, and cost optimization is pushed to individual producers and consumers. Of course, this plays havoc with the economic world as viewed by the traditional economist.

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World
by Andreas Herrmann , Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler
Published 25 Mar 2018

Otherwise, the car manufacturers are at risk of becoming sheet-metal processors producing commodities, leaving most of the value to be added by new players [70, 93, 94]. Many recent success stories have less to do with products and processes, and more to do with innovative business models. Amazon is the world’s most well-known bookseller without having its own shops. Netflix has reinvented the business with videos without owning a single video shop. Uber and AirBnB move and accommodate people without operating their own taxis or hotels. Companies have to re-examine their business models, however successful they have been in the past, more often and faster than ever before. In principle, the attitude of an innovator like Steve Jobs is required; he was always concerned that a new company could come along and destroy his own business model.

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This page intentionally left blank INDEX A9 autobahn in Germany, 134, 135, 407 ACCEL, 324 Accelerating, 8, 22, 27, 59, 78, 91, 122, 295, 296 Access Economy, 344 Acoustic signals, 108 Ad-hoc mobility solutions, 354 Ad-hoc networks, 133 Adaptive cruise control, 4, 51, 72 74, 78, 86, 96, 113, 116, 289, 297, 333 Aerospace industry, 153 Agenda for auto industry culture change, 396 increasing speed, 398 service-oriented business model, 397 398 V-to-home and V-to-business applications, 399 Agile operating models, 330 Agriculture, 154 productivity, 155 sector, 154 157 Air pollution, 27 AirBnB, 311 Airplane electronics, 144 Aisin, 9 Albert (head of design at Yahoo), 228 Alexandra (founder and owner of Powerful Minds), 228 Alibaba Alipay payment system, 372 Alternative fuels, autonomous vehicles enabling use of, 305 Altruistic mode (a-drive mode), 252 Amazon, 138, 141, 311 American Trucking Association, 68 Android operating system, 327 Anthropomorphise products, 290 Appel Logistics transports, 167 Apple, 9, 138, 327 CarPlay, 285 Apple Mac OS, 247 Apple-type model, 323 Application layer, 119 software, 118 Artificial intelligence, 115, 255, 291, 332 333 Artificial neuronal networks, 114 115 Asia projects, 371 374 Assembly Row, 386 Assessment of Safety Standards for Automotive Electronic Control Systems, 144 Assistance systems, 71 77 Audi, 5, 130, 134, 137, 179, 211, 301, 318, 322, 398 Driverless Race Car, 5 piloted driving, 286 piloted-parking technology, 386 387 Audi A7, 44, 198, 282 427 428 Audi A8 series-car, 79, 180 Audi AI traffic jam pilot, 79 Audi Fit Driver service, 318 319 Audi piloted driving lab, 227, 229 Audi Q7, 74 assistance systems in, 75 Audi RS7, 43, 44, 79 autonomous racing car, 179 driverless, 227 Audi TTS, 43 Audi Urban Future Initiative, 384 386, 406 Augmented reality, 279 vision and example, 279 280 Authorities and cities, 171 173 Auto ISAC, 146 Autolib, 317, 344 Autoliv, 285 Automakers’ bug-bounty programs, 146 Automated car, 233, 246, 264, 289, 384 Automated driving division of labour between driver and driving system, 48 examples, 51 53 image, 177 levels of, 47 51 scenarios for making use of travelling time, 52 strategies, 53 56 technology, 160 Automated vehicles, 9, 174, 246 Automated Vehicles Index, 367 368 Automatic car, 233, 244 Automatic pedestrian highlighting, 78 Automation ironies of, 76 responsibility with increasing, 235 Automobile, 3, 21 locations, 405 manufacturers, 311 Index Automotive design, 265 266 Automotive Ethernet, 126 Automotive incumbents operate, 330 Automotive industry, 332 335, 367, 379, 397 Automotive technology, 327 328 AutoNet2030 project, 369 Autonomous buses, 14, 81, 158, 159, 175, 302 Autonomous cars, 25, 126, 197, 205 206, 233, 244, 270 expected worldwide sales of, 85 savings effects from, 67 68 Autonomous driving, 3, 8, 39, 62, 94, 111, 116, 120, 121 123, 141, 160 162, 171, 173, 207 208, 217, 247, 252, 266, 332 333, 379 applications, 10 12, 160 aspects for, 93 Audi car, 5 autonomous Audi TTS on Way to Pikes Peak, 43 in combination with autonomous loading hubs, 166 driving to hub, 213 ecosystem, 18 20, 131 element, 243 facts about, 306 functions, 74 impression, 40 industry, 16 18 living room in Autonomous Mercedes F015, 44 milestones of automotive development, 4 NuTonomy, 6 projects, 41 45 real-world model of, 92 scenarios, 211 215 science fiction, 39 41 technology, 9 10, 92 Index time management, 215 218 vehicles, 12 16 See also Human driving Autonomous driving failure, 221 consequence, 221 222 decision conflict in autonomous car, 223 design options, 222 223 influencer, 223 224 Autonomous Mercedes F015, living room in, 44 Autonomous mobility, 12, 13, 16 17, 172, 405 establishment as industry of future, 404 405 resistance to, 171 172 Autonomous Robocars, 81 Autonomous sharp, 274 ‘Autonomous soft’ mode, 274 Autonomous trucks, 161 from Daimler, 163 savings effects from, 68 69 Autonomous vehicles, 26, 81, 99, 138, 155, 182, 221, 238, 249, 255, 353 354 enabling use of alternative fuels, 305 integration in cities, 406 promoting tests with, 407 uses, 153 AutoVots fleet, 350 Backup levels, 127 Baidu apps, 338, 372 Base layer, 119 Becker, Jan, 42 43 Behavioural law, 234 Being driven, 61, 63, 78, 342 343 Ben-Noon, Ofer, 142, 143, 145 Benz, Carl, 3, 4 Bertha (autonomous research vehicle), 42 Big data, 313, 332 333 BlaBlaCar, 359 429 Blackfriars bridge, lidar print cloud of, 104 Blind-spot detection, 78 Bloggers, 225 227 Blonde Salad, The, 226 Bluetooth, 130, 142, 154 BMW, 6, 130, 137, 174, 180, 316, 320, 322, 332 333, 372, 398 3-series cars, 338 BMW i3, 27 holoactive touch, 285 Boeing 777 development, 243 Boeing, 787, 261 Bosch, 9, 181 182 Bosch, Robert, 333 Bosch suppliers, 315 BosWash, metropolitan region, 384 Budii car, 272 273 Business models, 311, 353 355 automobile manufacturers, 311 content creators, 319 320 data creators, 320 322 examples, 312 hardware creators, 314 315 options, 312 314 passenger looks for new products, 321 passenger visits website, 321 service creators, 316 319 software creators, 315 316 strategic mix, 322 323 Business vehicle, 15 Business-to-consumer car sharing, 342 343 Cadillac, 180 California PATH Research Reports, 298 299 Cambot, 290 Cameras, 111, 126 CAN bus, 126, 143 Capsule, 33 Car and ride sharing, studies on, 348 430 Car dealers, repair shops and insurance companies, 173 174 Car manufacturers, 328, 396 397 business model, 312 Car-pooling efforts, 364 365 Car-sharing programs, 364 365 service, 383 Car-sharing, 206 Car2Go, 317, 345 Casey Neistat, 226 Castillo, Jose, 364 365 Celebrities and bloggers, 225 227 Central driver assistance control unit, 124 Central processing unit, 96, 124 zFAS, 125 Centre for Economic and Business Research in London, 189 Chevrolet, 40 app from General Motors, 316 Spark EV, 27 Cisco, 41 CityMobil project, 369, 406 CityMobil2, 14, 157 Cognitive distraction, 287 Coherent European framework, 246 Committee on Autonomous Road Transport for Singapore, 347 Communication, 198 200 investing in communication infrastructure, 403 404 technology, 261 Community, 341 detection algorithms, 389 Companion app, 316 Compelling force, 223 Competitiveness Iain Forbes, 368 369 projects in Asia, 371 374 Index projects in Europe and United States, 369 371 projects in Israel, 374 375 Computer operating systems, 247 Computer-driven driving, 108 Computerised information processing, 109 Congestion pricing, 296 Connected car, 129 ad-hoc networks, 133 connected driving, 137 138 connected mobility, 138 development of mobile communication networks, 130 digital ecosystems, 138 eCall, 136 137 online services, 136 137 permanent networks, 130 statement by telecommunications experts, 132 133 V-to-I communication, 134 135 V-to-V communication, 133 134 V-to-X communication, 135 136 See also Digitised car Connected mobility, 129, 138 Connected vehicles, 138 vulnerability of, 142 Connected-car services, 313 Connectivity of vehicles, 147 Consumer-electronics companies, 285 Container Terminal, 159 Content creators, 319 320 Continental (automotive suppliers), 9, 284, 315 Continuous feedback, 281 Convenience, 302 304, 306 Conventional breakthrough approach, 332 Index Conventional broadband applications, 132 Conventional car manufacturing, 10 Cook, Tim, 182 Cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS), 369 370 Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, 297 Cost(s), 187 192, 295 autonomous vehicles enabling use of alternative fuels, 305 fuel economy, 297 299 intelligent infrastructures, 299 301 land use, 304 operating costs, 301 302 relationship between road speed and road throughput, 296 vehicle throughput, 295 297 Croove app, 318 Culture, 330 change, 396 differences, 195 197 and organisational transformation, 395 Curtatone, Joseph, 387 Customers’ expectations attitudes, 204 207 incidents, 203 204 interview with 14 car dealers, 207 persuasion, 207 208 statements by two early adopters, 205 Cyber attacks, 141 Cyber hacking or failures in algorithms, 354 Cyber security, 141 146 Cyber-physical systems, 9 Daimler, 130 Data, 121 categories in vehicle, 147 creators, 320 322 431 from passengers, 94 95 privacy, 147 148 processing, 91 protection principles, 148 recorders, 239 Data-capturing technology, 103 Data-protection issues, 239 Database, 98 Decelerating, 91, 122 Decision-making mechanism, 369 Declaration of Amsterdam, 246 247 Deep learning, 115 Deep neural networks, 115 116 Deere, John, 154, 155 Deere, John, 154, 155, 263 Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), 41 Degree of autonomous driving, 53 Degree of autonomy, 262 Degree of market penetration, 84 Degree of not-invented-here arrogance, 332 Degree of vehicle’s automation, 233 234 Delhi municipal government, 21 22 Delphi, 9, 181 Delphi Automotive Systems, 6 Demise of Kodak, 111 Denner, Volkmar, 333 334 Denso, 9 Depreciation, 345 Destination control, 299, 300 Digital company development, 395 396 Digital economy, 225 Digital ecosystems, 138 Digital light-processing technology, 277, 279 Digital maps, 101 Digital products, 267 Digitised car algorithms, 113 117 432 backup levels, 127 car as digitised product, 111 112 data, 121 drive recorder, 125 126 drive-by-wire, 122 over-provisioning, 127 processor, 122 125 software, 117 121 See also Connected car Digitising and design of vehicle, 265 267 Dilemma situations, 61 Direct attacks, 141 Direct connectivity of vehicle, 130 Disruptions in mobility, 31, 34 arguments, 34 35 history, 32 33 OICA, 34 Disruptive technologies, 221, 223, 402 Document operation-relevant data, 263 Doll, Claus, 166 Dongles, 142 Drees, Joachim, 165 ‘Drive boost’ mode, 274 “Drive me” project, 370 Drive recorder, 125 126 ‘Drive relax’ mode, 274 Drive-by-wire, 122 DriveNow, 317, 345 Driver, 235 role, 235 238 Driver distraction, 55 causes and consequences, 278 Driver-assistance systems, 53, 71, 160, 174, 222, 298, 333, 353 Driverless cars, 3, 7, 27 28, 222, 233, 244 taxis, 302 vans, 406 vehicles, 168 Index Driverless Audi RS7, 227 229 Driverless Race Car of Audi, 5 Driving manoeuvres, 91 modes, 107 oneself, 342 343 Drunk driving, 303 Dvorak keyboard, 242 Dynamic patterns of movement in city of London, 390 eCall.

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
by Christopher Leonard
Published 11 Jan 2022

Asset price inflation, however, was accelerating without restraint. The stock market was doing so well in December that it didn’t even make sense to the people who were making money off it. A Web-based food delivery company called DoorDash went public that month, and its stock nearly doubled immediately. The online rental company Airbnb went public and its shares more than doubled. This might sound great for those companies, but when share prices jump so quickly it means that the firm’s original owners have lost out on a lot of money because they’ve priced their shares too low. A video game company called Roblox suspended its initial public offering in December “as it tried to make sense of the market,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

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INDEX A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function. Adams, Todd A., 186–88, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198 AIG, 23 Airbnb, 297 allocation of money, 19, 20 allocative effects of quantitative easing, 27, 28 of zero bound, 19, 20, 27 American Banker, 209 American Enterprise Institute, 18 announcement effect, 134 Apollo Management, 168–70, 172–74, 180, 186, 191 Ares Capital, 213 asset bubbles, 20, 29, 54–56, 63, 69, 82, 83, 85, 88–89, 91–93, 95, 105, 134, 142, 148, 222, 228, 231, 234, 300 China and, 235 Florida real estate, 54–55, 86 asset prices and value, 53–55, 57–59, 68, 81, 82, 86–87, 98, 237, 259, 262 coronavirus relief and, 288 inflation and, 50, 68–69, 81–84, 87, 95, 119, 148, 182, 224, 295, 297, 305 interest rates and, 300 loans and, 49–51, 57–60 quantitative easing and, 119, 132, 148, 182, 300 ZIRP and, 119, 192 assets, 235 coronavirus bailouts and, 287 defined, 54 ownership of, 119, 287 AT&T, 270 auto workers, 74 Axel, Ralph, 254 bailouts, 87, 208–11, 248–49, 302 coronavirus, see coronavirus relief and bailout programs repo market, 243–58 in 2008 and 2009, 10, 23, 100–102, 206, 249, 286 Bain Capital, 180 Bair, Sheila, 210 Baker, James, III, 162 balance sheets of banks, 50–51, 57–58 defined, 343 of Fed, 102, 138, 147, 211, 227, 231, 236, 256, 257, 290–91, 301–2, 343, 349 bank failures, 45–46, 48, 66, 67, 68, 73, 96n, 98, 100 Continental Illinois, 65–66, 68–69, 97, 98, 100 coronavirus and, 269–70 FDIC and, 208–9 Fed’s loans to banks during, 46, 58, 63 of 1873, 46 of foreign banks, 101 liquidation of insolvent banks, 64 living wills and, 208–9, 269 of 1980s, 53, 58–59, 96 Penn Square, 63–65, 67–69, 97, 98 “too big to fail” banks, 66–67, 97, 202, 203, 209, 219 Bank Policy Institute, 206–7 banks, 43 bailouts of, see bailouts balance sheets of, 50–51, 57–58 Basel III accord and, 203, 204, 209–10 big, Hoenig’s plan to break up (the Hoenig rule), 203–7, 209 capital set aside for times of crisis, 209–11 central, 103–4, 112, 139–40, 217–18, 232, 235, 237–38, 345 central, U.S. creation of, 44–47 community, 202 coronavirus and, 269 divided into commercial and investment, 80, 348 Dodd-Frank rules and, 203, 204, 207, 209, 229, 252, 277, 350 early American system of, 45 economics and, 302 European, 134, 210 FDIC liquidation of, 64 FDIC’s protection of consumer deposits in, 80, 202, 345 FDR and, 79, 100, 204 free banking era, 45 Global Financial Crisis’s effect on, 202, 206 Hoenig’s disputes with bankers, 49–50, 55, 58–59, 65 Hoenig’s views on, 43–44 interstate banking laws, 96–97 lobbyists for, 206–7 mergers and consolidation of, 43, 202 New Deal and, 79–80, 204 overnight loans between, 114, 248, 249 regional, 279 regulation of, 48, 79, 80, 97, 100, 203, 204, 207, 209 reserves of, 121, 221, 244, 248–49, 251, 256 reserves of, excess, 227, 243, 244, 248–50 shadow, 202, 252, 291, 350 stock value of, 269, 270 stress tests for, 207–8, 229, 269 symposium of directors of, 96–99 see also loans Barstool Sports, 288 Basel III accord, 203, 204, 209–10 basis risk trades, 252–55, 265 BDCs (business development corporations), 181 bear market, 236 Bear Stearns, 277 Beck, Glenn, 109–11 Bell, Steve, 158–60 Belly Up (Zweig), 64 Bernanke, Ben, 10, 22–26, 31, 73, 93–94, 96, 102, 105, 108, 132, 136, 146, 217, 222, 223, 229, 243, 258, 267, 291 Citadel and, 289–90 Congressional testimony of, 99, 109 final meeting as Fed chairman, 222 Fisher and, 131 Hoenig and, 15, 29, 93–94, 104 inflation and, 93 memoir of, 22, 34 press conferences of, 144–45 quantitative easing and, 10, 25–34, 105, 112–13, 118n, 121, 126–30, 132–34, 136, 140–46, 148, 182, 247 Yellen and, 130 Bianco, Jim, 261–63, 269–70 Biden, Joe, 298–99, 304 Binder, Carola, 108, 109, 144 Bloomberg News, 101, 109, 231, 298 BlueCrest Capital Management, 254 BNP Paribas, 99–100 Boehne, Edward, 72 Boeing, 298 Boies Schiller Flexner, 284 bonds, 119, 134, 142, 147, 155–56, 170, 211, 218, 235, 237, 262, 270, 272, 279, 347 coronavirus relief and, 288 defined, 344 developing nations and, 216–17 Fed’s purchase of, 101, 110, 139, 227, 267, 279, 280, 282 Fed’s sale of, 231–34, 236 junk, see junk bonds negative-interest-rate, 217–18 Operation Twist and, 127 Treasury, see Treasury bonds Boston Market, 284 Bowman, Michelle, 280n Brady, Nicholas F., 156–58, 160–61 Brainard, Lael, 272, 280n Brazil, 217 Brookings Institution, 224, 257–58 Brown, Sherrod, 206 Bryan, Vicki, 177–78, 182 Bryan, William Jennings, 9, 46 Buffett, Warren, 159–60 Bullard, Jim, 34 Burns, Arthur, 22 Bush, George H.

Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need
by Grant Sabatier
Published 5 Feb 2019

The easiest way to start house-hacking is to buy a two- or three-bedroom apartment or house and rent the additional rooms out to your friends or other tenants; you should charge them enough to cover your monthly mortgage payment. If you prefer not to live with roommates full time, you can rent out additional rooms on sites like Airbnb. If your monthly mortgage is $1,000, you could rent out one room for $100 a night for ten nights to cover the cost and live by yourself for free for the rest of the month. Another benefit of starting this way is that two- and three-bedroom apartments tend to appreciate faster than studios and one-bedrooms, so if you want to buy real estate anyway, this ends up being a better long-term investment.

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You can find foreclosures and short sales listed on websites like Zillow or Trulia or through a real estate agent. Just be ready to move quickly, since the good deals go fast. Test-drive the neighborhood. An easy way to test-drive a neighborhood is to rent a nearby apartment or home on a home-sharing website like Airbnb or VRBO. What’s the neighborhood like on the weekends? In the evenings? How easy is it to walk to things? Taking a look at the property a few times won’t give you these answers. Whether you are buying your primary residence or a rental property, you should always test-drive the neighborhood. If you like living there, then other people will, too.

Greater: Britain After the Storm
by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis
Published 19 May 2021

The Institute of Economic Affairs has spotted another problem. Director-General Mark Littlewood noticed that innovative, disruptive businesses, which were changing the way services were provided, were faltering because Whitehall simply couldn’t understand them. Similarly, the consumer was potentially being left without protection.100 He said, ‘Take Airbnb. Is it a hotel? A review site? A booking agency? Which department should be responsible for it? DCMS? Transport? We noticed that many businesses were not able to proceed because Whitehall didn’t know how to categorise them.’ The public sector needs to get back to its roots and partner more effectively with the private and third sectors and change some of its practices.

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. © More Partnership, 8 May 2018. 86 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/business/energy-environment/social-responsibility-that-rubs-right-off.html 87 https://www.morepartnership.com/library/The_Future_of_Corporate_Partnerships.pdf Its surveys show that over 90 per cent of charities and 85 per cent of businesses have a view that corporate partnerships will be more important in the next three years. 88 Small Business, Big Heart: bringing communities together https://www.fsb.org.uk/resource-report/small-business-big-heart-communities-report.html 89 https://charityfutures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/history-of-charity-lecture-online-copy-30-6.pdf 90 https://www.cbpp.org/blog/is-government-spending-really-41-percent-of-gdp 91 https://www.ageuk.org.uk/globalassets/age-uk/documents/reports-and-publications/reports-and-briefings/care--support/the_health_and_care_of_older_people_in_england_2017.pdf 92 https://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/default/files/jrf/migrated/files/1859352413.pdf 93 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Private-Economics/dp/0857282522 94 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Private-Economics/dp/0857282522 95 Interview with the authors, January 2020. 96 https://nfpsynergy.net/free-report/facts-and-figures-uk-charity-sector-2018 97 https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/news/latest/one-third-governments-spending-contractors 98 https://www.carepair.co.uk/ 99 https://www.redcross.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/uk-emergency-response/Covid-and-the-power-of-kindness 100 https://www.vox.com/2019/11/14/20961972/airbnb-scam-how-to-stay-safe-reset-podcast 101 https://www.amazon.com/How-Run-Government-Citizens-Taxpayers/dp/0141979585/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=michael+barber+government&qid=1574274608&s=books&sr=1-1 https://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn145.pdf 102 Together, these two functions made up 23 per cent of the public sector workforce in 1961, 42 per cent in 1991 and around 57 per cent in 2013. 103 In the mid-1990s, private sector nursery nurses and assistants accounted for around 40 per cent of the nursery workforce, but this figure increased to more than 70 per cent by 2010. 104 For personal care, a similar story can be told.

Lonely Planet Cyprus
by Lonely Planet , Jessica Lee , Joe Bindloss and Josephine Quintero
Published 1 Feb 2018

Booking Accommodation Advance booking is recommended for all accommodation during the busy summer season. Many expats have holiday homes on Cyprus and listings of apartments and villas for rent can be found through Rent Cyprus Villas (www.rentcyprusvillas.com), Rentvillacyprus (www.rentvillacyprus.net), AirBnB (www.airbnb.com), Owners Direct (www.ownersdirect.co.uk), HomeAway (www.homeaway.com) and Booking.com (www.booking.com). You can also find lots of accommodation on www.lonelyplanet.com/hotels. Where to Stay With the ease of crossing the border, you can stay in the North or the South and still easily explore the whole island.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

“Industrialization must be recognized”: RBF, “Industrialization,” in SD, 8047. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani: Allegra Hobbs, “Gentrification’s Empty Victory,” New York Times, June 1, 2018, MB1. geodesic cabin: Luke Winkie, “What’s It Like to Own the Most-Visited Airbnb in the World,” Vox, last modified September 20, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/9/20/20857633/airbnb-most-visited-popular-mushroom-dome-cabin. replacing doorknobs: RBF, EIK, session 9. Andrew Yang: While Yang’s platform was the closest to his ideas, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who expressed admiration for RBF most openly was Marianne Williamson, who called him “one of those world historic geniuses who reminded us of the extraordinary things that are possible” (Williamson, blurb for Sieden, Fuller View).

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The rise of the sharing, or gig, economy allowed companies to operate using minimal infrastructure and a workforce of contractors, which was close to Fuller’s ideal, but it also diminished protections for employees, and a lack of meaningful regulation ensured that its price was extracted from the most vulnerable. Millennials ephemeralized against their will, with rent replacing ownership and housing costs contributing to a fall in mobility. As Airbnb caused prices in its neighborhoods to rise, its single most popular property was a geodesic cabin in California. The greatest test of Fuller’s philosophy was the coronavirus pandemic, which initially seemed like a definitive moment of emergence through emergency. Fuller blamed his daughter’s death, which changed his life, on the conditions that contributed to the Spanish flu, and his views on decentralization, efficient manufacturing, online education, and remote working are more relevant now than ever.

Bosnia and Herzegovina
by Tim. Clancy
Published 15 Mar 2022

ACCOMMODATION PRICE CODES Peak summer price ranges: $$$$ Luxury Above 250KM $$$ Upmarket 140–250KM $$ Mid-range 60–140KM $ Budget 20–60KM Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka and Međugorje have the best large hotels. When travelling elsewhere, take a look at the smaller hotels or motels found on Booking.com and Airbnb. They are usually family owned, affordable and well kept, and most include breakfast in the price. Breakfast can be continental in the larger hotels but you are more likely to be served white coffee, juice, rolls, jam, butter, cheese and maybe a hard-boiled egg. There is a 2KM accommodation tax that is not usually included in the price.

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However, as dining in BiH is so inexpensive it may be wiser and more enjoyable to try out some of the restaurants in town. PRIVATE ROOMS/APARTMENTS Private accommodation is not as well organised as in neighbouring Croatia, but in the larger cities you can find a good selection of apartments or bed and breakfasts through Airbnb and Booking.com. Much effort has gone into upgrading existing private accommodation and opening new facilities according to best practice standards. There is a lot of good private accommodation in Bihać, Šipovo and many other areas, which can also be booked online or through the local tour operators listed on Click here and in each regional section.

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It’s also worth noting that some hotels do not serve alcohol, especially some of the newer luxury ones catering to visitors from the Middle East, so best to check before you book if you’re one who enjoys a nightcap in the hotel bar or lobby before retiring to your room. The number of affordable, high-quality private apartments available for booking online through sites like Airbnb have also greatly increased. There are a handful of hostels that also offer private accommodation in flats around town. All prices include breakfast unless otherwise specified. BAŠČARŠIJA Luxury City One Diamond [Click here C6] (13 rooms) Hadžiristića 1; 033 202 555; e info@hoteldiamond.ba; w hoteldiamond.ba.

Slow
by Brooke McAlary
Published 22 Aug 2017

In her 2012 TED talk, Rachel Botsman spoke of the sharing economy as a way to minimise buying things that have a limited use. Talking of handheld drills, which, on average, are used for a total of 12–13 minutes throughout their entire life, she exclaimed, ‘You need the hole, not the drill!’ Turo, Lyft, TaskRabbit and Airbnb are symbolic of the emergence of mainstream sharing, but there is a much more personal way to share that also taps into one of our most important resources—community. Is there a way you and your family, friends or neighbours could share common resources? Things you don’t use very often, but would probably go out and buy if the need arose?

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell
Published 29 Jul 2019

The owner was married to an Irishman and lived most of the year in Ireland, but a neighbor named Laura met us outside the three-story apartment building. The exterior was unremarkable—white with green paint and balconies on most units, with clotheslines hanging from them. Laura greeted us promptly and, unlike Hotel Tritón, had record of our payment through Airbnb. At the top of two flights of stairs, she opened the door to a well-kept, two-bedroom apartment. There was a combined living room and kitchenette, a room with a double bed, and one with two singles. The bathroom was clean, stocked with toilet paper, and had reliable hot water. The two air-conditioning units worked well, and the balcony had a view of the ocean and the Malecón, Havana’s famous seafront promenade.

Pocket Rough Guide Lisbon (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Mar 2019

All the rooms are different, but each includes a smart TV and digital radio, and most have period touches such as flagstone floors and fireplaces. Front rooms overlook the town hall and tram routes. There’s also a downstairs restaurant and small outdoor terrace. €160 Self-catering There are several fine options for self-catering in Lisbon. As well as airbnb.co.uk, good first points of call are fadoflats.pt (mostly in Chiado and Alfama), castleinnlisbon.com, which has apartments right by the castle, or travellershouse.com, a hostel which also has four attractive apartments near Elevador da Lavra. Geared up to families is the upmarket Martinhal Chiado (martinhal.com) in the Chiado district.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022

To consider just a few examples, it took, give or take a few months: ten years for the civil rights movement against racial segregation in the United States to go from its first boycott of segregated bus seating to the successful passage of the federal Civil Rights Act (1955–1964) ten years for the first international economic sanctions against South Africa’s segregationist apartheid system to lead to a new constitution that enfranchised Black South Africans and other racial groups (1985–1996) ten years for same-sex marriage to go from being considered controversial when it was legalized by a country for the first time (the Netherlands) to being supported in global surveys by a majority of people in a majority of countries (2001–2010) ten years for marijuana to go from being legalized for all uses in one US state, Colorado, to being decriminalized in forty-four out of fifty states (2012–2021) And it took: ten years from when just sixteen million people, mostly scientists and other academic researchers, were using the internet—they thought it would be used mostly to share scientific data—to when a billion people were using it (1991–2001) ten years from the first iPhone release until a majority of people on the planet had smartphones, creating a new era of always-on communication (2007–2017) ten years for Facebook to go from one user to one billion daily users, on its way to becoming the first product used by more than one in three humans on the planet (2004–2015) ten years for Bitcoin to go from being a hypothetical idea discussed in a scientific article to having a nearly US$1 trillion market capitalization, larger than the three biggest US banks combined (2008–2019) ten years from Airbnb’s and Uber’s foundings for a full 36 percent of US workers to be engaged in some form of “gig work” (2008–2018) ten years for Zoom to go from its first user testing session to becoming a critical lifeline for humanity during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the de facto tool for learning, work meetings, and staying in touch with friends and family (2011–2020) In other words: things that are small experiments today in ten years can become ubiquitous and world-changing.

Machine Learning Design Patterns: Solutions to Common Challenges in Data Preparation, Model Building, and MLOps
by Valliappa Lakshmanan , Sara Robinson and Michael Munn
Published 31 Oct 2020

Alternative implementations Many large technology companies, like Uber, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Netflix, and Comcast, host their own version of a feature store, though the architectures and tools vary. Uber’s Michelangelo Palette is built around Spark/Scala using Hive for offline feature creation and Cassandra for online features. Hopsworks provides another open source feature store alternative to Feast and is built around dataframes using Spark and pandas with Hive for offline and MySQL Cluster for online feature access. Airbnb built their own feature store as part of their production ML framework called Zipline.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Published 25 Feb 2020

In the near future, even individual ownership of cars may cease to exist as the dominant paradigm—the transportation we need might be offered by shared vehicles, probably self-driving and certainly electric.33 One day consumers may come to define themselves not as owners of products but as beneficiaries of systems of service delivery. Already the world’s largest provider of overnight accommodation (Airbnb) owns no buildings. The world’s largest provider of personal transport (Uber) owns no cars.34 This shift from ownership to stewardship will fundamentally change our relationship to consumerism. We can help accelerate it by engaging with it and welcoming it with open arms. * * * — The story of the happy fisherman, first made popular by Paulo Coelho, has several versions.

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism
by Fumio Sasaki
Published 10 Apr 2017

It’s economical: You don’t have to pay car ownership taxes, there’s no need to worry about paying maintenance fees, and it’s easier on the environment. I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing more of this trend, even outside of cities, in the future. We’re seeing the spread of a new sharing culture with our living spaces as well. There are services available today like Couchsurfing and Airbnb that allow us to rent out our houses and apartments to travelers from around the world. The Internet has made it possible for us to offer our resources to people who need them, and to receive resources from others in turn. The physical danger of our possessions Last, the Great East Japan Earthquake not only affected our sense of value, I think it prompted a big change in how we look at our possessions.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm
Published 11 Apr 2022

The book, which stayed on the bestseller list for seven years and made a zeitgeist millionaire out of Ferriss, coincided with the year the iPhone was born, Netflix streaming gained wings, and texting became ‘a thing’. By the following year GPS use was widespread, Android vastly increased the use of mobiles, cloud-based storage went mainstream with Dropbox, and Airbnb was born. The Co-Working Years made mobility part of our mindset and set in motion the end of the office as we know it. Ignoring hybrid is not an option, not least because by 2030 the majority of the office-based working community is likely to be freelance in the United States and therefore working flexibly, hybrid and in the Nowhere Office.36 The data is reflected globally: the UK and Brazil are the second and third largest freelance communities with Pakistan, India, Philippines and Bangladesh all seeing sharp rises; most of these freelancers will be digital nomads.37 Sir Martin Sorrell, who founded advertising behemoth WPP and now runs the growing global digital brand Media.Monks, gave me this view of the new working landscape: Apart from the destruction, which was terrible for people personally, all the pandemic did was just speed up change.

Pocket Rough Guide Berlin (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 16 Oct 2019

Sixty rooms include junior suites and apartments, decorated in striking colours with wooden floors and a mix of antique and modern furniture. Buffet breakfast €12. Doubles from €95 Apartment rentals Private apartments are a popular, and often good-value choice for many travellers to Berlin. The best apartments offer value for money, are well located and usually stylish or interestingly decorated. Although Airbnb was banned from renting out complete apartments in the city in 2016 (rooms within a house are still possible), that seems to have done little to diminish offerings on the site. Also check out brilliant-apartments.de, ferienwohnungen-berlin.de and oh-berlin.com, which all offer a good spread of apartments, rooms and regular special deals.

Pocket Rough Guide Istanbul (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 24 May 2019

This very stylish place blends the traditional and the modern with verve and makes an ideal retreat from the city hubbub. €195 < Back to Accommodation APARTMENTS Manzara İstanbul MAP. Cumhüriyet Cad 49 0212 254 7777, divan.com.tr. Offers some very chic open-plan, Scandinavian-style suites on Taksim Square, complete with work-stations, wi-fi and LCD TVs. €80 Manzara İstanbul MAP. Ayvansaray Cad airbnb.com. Open-plan, top floor flat with combined kitchen/living room/bedroom area, well located by the Golden Horn waterfront in hip Balat. The best feature is a lovely roof terrace with splendid views of the Horn and Galata, and friendly owner Mehmet, whose mum lives one flat below. €42 Manzara İstanbul MAP.

Ego Is the Enemy
by Ryan Holiday
Published 13 Jun 2016

(Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two Stanford PhDs working on their dissertations.) It’s not how YouTube started. (Its founders weren’t trying to reinvent TV; they were trying to share funny video clips.) It’s not how most true wealth was created, in fact. Investor Paul Graham (who invested in Airbnb, reddit, Dropbox, and others), working in the same city as Walsh a few decades later, explicitly warns startups against having bold, sweeping visions early on. Of course, as a capitalist, he wants to fund companies that massively disrupt industries and change the world—that’s where the money is. He wants them to have “frighteningly ambitious” ideas, but explains, “The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.”

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Published 2 Apr 2017

In 2010, Uber had no market share in providing rides to the U.S. Congress and their staffs. By 2014, despite the service’s continuing illegality in many of the constituencies of these political leaders, Uber’s market share among Congress was a stunning 60 percent.1 Talk about regulatory capture. Companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Skype play a bottom-up game to make it nearly impossible for legacy-entrenched interests and players to dislodge or outlaw newer ways of doing things. In fact, most of the smartphone-based healthcare applications and attachments that are on the market today are, in some manner, circumventing the U.S.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
by Cory Doctorow , Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman
Published 18 Nov 2014

Our cameras—digital betas—cost several times more than modern SLR and Red digital cameras, and produced footage that was nowhere near the same quality. Today, you could replicate our whole setup for much less than ten thousand dollars. And that’s not all: these days, when your crew goes on location, it can book its own plane tickets—no travel-agent fees—shop around for customs processing, save big money with Airbnb and hotel discounters, and so on. The time filmmakers spend writing their scripts and recording their interviews and editing down their footage costs just as much as it ever did. But every other cost has gone down. These are the capital costs—the costs that you’d typically borrow or raise funds to cover.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

A global pioneer is Italy’s Enel, the state-owned energy utility, which has deployed more than 30 million smart meters to its customers since 2001.552 The internet is also making it easier to connect people who want to rent out rooms, cars and all sorts of other things with those who want to borrow them – a new sharing economy that offers huge potential for growth. Airbnb, a company based in San Francisco, allows people to rent out accommodation for the night; by the end of 2013 ten million people had used its services, many of them in Europe.553 It now has several European rivals: Wimdu and 9flats, both based in Berlin, and London-based onefinestay, which also offers upmarket services.

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The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.” 540 Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics, Harvard Business School Press: 2006 541 John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936 542 John Maynard Keynes, The Great Slump of 1930, 1930 543 Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, Chicago: 1988 544 http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/16/business/fi-overheat16 545 The unemployment rate rose by only two percentage points. 546 James Mirrlees and others, "Mirrlees Review: Reforming the tax system for the 21st century", Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2010. http://www.ifs.org.uk/mirrleesReview/design 547 http://www.ifs.org.uk/mirrleesreview/design/ch17.pdf 548 The new Basel III capital-adequacy rules, which have been transposed into EU law through a package of regulations known as CRD IV. 549 Some countries, such as Switzerland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Slovenia do tax the imputed rental stream of owner-occupied housing. http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/events/2011/2011-11-24-property_taxation/pdf/andrews_housing_taxation_for_stability_and_growth_en.pdf 550 http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/events/2011/2011-11-24-property_taxation/pdf/andrews_housing_taxation_for_stability_and_growth_en.pdf 551 http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/events/2011/2011-11-24-property_taxation/pdf/andrews_housing_taxation_for_stability_and_growth_en.pdf 552 http://www.economist.com/node/13725843 553 http://www.indyposted.com/226135/airbnb-adds-250000-properties-6-million-guests-2013/ 554 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20890174 555 http://www.lamachineduvoisin.fr/ 556 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fd8a20ca-3b3a-11e3-a7ec-00144feab7de.html 557 On 1 January 2012 there were 78.6 million under 15s in the EU and 98.4 million people aged 50–64.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

Nowadays, he could have searched the internet and never left his armchair. Fourth, the internet makes more transactions possible by linking buyers and sellers who would otherwise not have been able to contact each other. This can be true for rare books, or old toys. But it is also true for services like Airbnb, where people who want to rent out their property can make contact with those looking for an alternative to hotel accommodation. And the internet allows companies to alert customers to their latest offers, whether they are cheap pizzas or luxury flats. Indeed, the company can target its marketing to customers who are more likely to be interested in their product.

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Across the OECD as a whole, demography started to be a drag on growth after 2010 and will continue to be so until 2040. Workers’ rights The gig economy (see Chapter 17) can be viewed as a way of enhancing the productivity of the entire economy – by bringing unused resources (in this case, labour) into play. Similarly, the growth of flat- and house-sharing services, such as Airbnb, allows property to be used for a greater percentage of the time; it is a more efficient use of resources. But the gig economy has raised questions about the issue of workers’ rights. Over the course of the late 19th century and the 20th century, workers demanded, and were granted, more rights: paid holiday, sick leave, maternity leave, pensions and healthcare.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

This is unconvincing. The IT revolution is touching ever more aspects of daily life. iPhones can do the work of thousands: they can help you find where you want to go, act as virtual secretaries, organize your book and newspaper collections. Uber uses information to revolutionize the taxi business. Airbnb uses it to revolutionize the hotel business. Amazon allows us to order from a vast virtual catalogue and have the goods delivered within a few days or even a few hours. Morgan Stanley estimates that driverless cars could result in $507 billion a year of productivity gains in America, mainly from people being able to stare at their laptops instead of at the road.

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Children’s Hospital, 194 advertising, 208, 208 affluent society, 205–6 Afghanistan, 267, 300, 369, 438 agrarian vs. industrial visions of America, 61–68 Agricultural Adjustment Act, 244–45, 248, 257–58 agriculture, 433, 434–35 collapse of southern, 83–86 Granger movement, 171–72 New Deal farm and rural programs, 241, 244–45, 248, 249, 257–58, 259 new nation, 33, 35–36, 46–48, 58, 65–66, 72–73 post–World War II, 275, 276 railroad age, 114–22 World War I and, 233–34 Ahamed, Liaquat, 227 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 303–4, 305 AIG (American International Group), 374–75, 385–86 Airbnb, 402 air-conditioning, 213–14 air flight, and Wright brothers, 107–9 air travel, 199–200, 262–63, 286–87 Alaska Purchase, 95 Alger, Horatio, 165 Alibaba, 391 alternating current (AC), 106 Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), 132 Amazon, 349, 355, 390, 396, 402 America-first nationalism, 217–18 American attitudes to government, 176–79 American Barbed Wire Company, 116 American Civil War, 9, 81–85, 161, 266, 267, 455 American colonies, 5–6, 29–34 American Economic Association (AEA), 178 American Enterprise Institute, 277, 324 American Express, 374 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 193–94, 261, 290 American Fur Company, 123 American Individualism (Hoover), 218 American Revolution, 5–6, 31, 34–35, 38–40, 62, 69, 135, 266, 266 “Americans” identity, 58–59 American Tobacco Company, 214 “American way of life,” 296–97 Amos ‘n’ Andy (radio show), 204 Anderson, Edward, 224–25 Anderson, Sherwood, 218 Andrews, Dan, 397 antibiotics, 284 antitrust, 182–83, 184, 257, 337–38 Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, 143, 154, 159–60, 162, 184 Apple, 323–24, 334, 347, 349, 353, 360, 390, 396, 402 Argonne National Laboratory, 285 arms race, 279–80 Army Air Corps, 212 Articles of Confederation, 39 Asian financial crisis of 1997, 366 assembly line, 146–47, 194–95 Astor, John Jacob, 35, 123, 135 AT&T, 91–92, 140, 144, 148, 149, 206, 288, 319, 341 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 277–78 Atomic Energy Act, of 1954, 285 Atomic Energy Commission, 284–85 atomic power, 284–85 Auden, W.

How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas
Published 15 Oct 2019

It started with the false magic trick of ATM deposits, then the very idea of money shapeshifted into calling cards and other new forms of currency, and finally the advent of the internet pushed us into an entirely new realm; in a few short years it became possible to execute everyday tasks and transactions—like hailing a ride, buying groceries or clothes or books, ordering food delivery, chipping in for your share of a restaurant meal—with the mere touch of a screen. So many popular apps and tech forces—Amazon, Uber, Venmo, Airbnb—simply provide the means to disintermediate humans from commerce. It’s not uncommon in several cities to see a knee-high robot, basically a fancy cooler on wheels, navigating through pedestrians en route to deliver lunch to some hungry office worker, who not only doesn’t need to offer a gratuity, but can skip the small talk and pleasantries too.

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accountability, 360, 362, 363, 368, 369 acquisitions, see mergers and acquisitions activist investors, 104, 106, 360 see also corporate raiders Adelson, Jay, 228, 240, 242, 244 Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, 218, 219 advertising, 294, 296, 298, 362 social media influencers and, 283, 294–96, 298 AEA, 182 aerospace and defense companies, 118, 124, 125, 137 Conquistadores del Cielo club and, 124–25, 146 “Last Supper” summit and, 124 see also Grumman Corporation; Martin Marietta; Northrop Corporation Aetna, 188 Airbnb, 246 air travel, 299–300 Albert, Mark, 94–95, 96–97 Alcatel, 202 algorithms, 23, 37, 242 All Things Considered, 349 Amateur Athletic Union, 274 Amazon, 233, 246, 292 American Express, 188 American Psycho, 144 American Toxxic Control, 155, 159, 168 Andonian, Nazareth, 16–19, 25–29, 31–36, 38–42 Andonian, Vahe, 16, 39–40 Anschutz, Philip, 212 anti-Semitism, 304 AOL, 237 Apollo Global Management, 165 Armstrong, Michael, 207, 208 Ashe, Danni, 226–27, 231–33, 244, 245 Aspen Institute, 210, 371 Aspin, Les, 124 asset division, 246 AT&T, 190, 196–97 Citi and, 197, 207, 208 IPO of, 197, 198, 207, 208 ATMs, 216–17, 246 Augustine, Norman, 124, 136 Avery, Al, 228, 240, 244 B-2 Stealth Bomber, 118, 136, 138 Bailes, Justin, 331, 332, 335, 344, 345 Bailey, Jeff, 154 bankers, 97, 358 author’s uncle John, 371–73 banks, 247, 259 ATMs at, 216–17, 246 Glass-Steagall legislation and, 189, 200 investment, going public, 52–53 local, managers of, 22 Bank of America: author at, 5, 7, 9–43, 111, 216–17, 285, 358 “five c’s of credit” in training program of, 13, 42 jewelry industry and, 5, 9–35 spreadsheets used at, 19–20, 24 Bank One, 196 Barbarians at the Gate (Burrough and Helyar), 144 Barss, Patchen, 233 B Corp, 105 Beach Boys, 178, 182 Bear Stearns, 118, 146, 188 Bell, Alexander Graham, 190 Bell Labs, 190 Bennett, Bruce, 331, 339 Bertelsmann, 170 Bibliowicz, Jessica, 196 Bieber, Justin, 296–97, 299 Big Brother, 302 Bitcoin, 245, 246, 308 Bizaardvark, 299 Black Monday, 37 Blockbuster, 160 Blockchain, 246 Blodget, Henry, 196, 207, 212, 215 Blyth & Co., 51 Boeing Company, 124 bonds, 50–51, 56, 77–78 high-yield (junk), 91, 93, 96, 97, 104 Salomon and, 50–51, 55–58, 62, 64, 67, 72, 74–76 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (Wolfe), 47, 116, 144 bonuses, see compensation Boob Cruise, 231 Booker, Cory, 340 Borde, Laurence (“Larry Bird”), 54, 55, 79, 203 Brannan, Sam, 230 Bruck, Connie, 93, 94 bubbles, 229, 244, 307, 362–63 crypto, 245–46 dotcom, 175, 211, 214, 228–31, 233–34, 236, 238, 240, 243, 244, 267, 322 education, 292 pension, 353–54 Budweiser, 162 Buffett, Warren, 275, 316, 324 Salomon Brothers and, 68, 75–76, 262–63 Businessweek, 68 cable industry, 96 Caesars Palace, 27–29 California Community Foundation, 347 California gold rush, 230 CalPERS (California Public Employees’ Retirement System), 335–36 Canal+, 170 Caporali, Renso, 119 Carpenter, Michael, 200–201 Carr, Michael, 118, 138, 145 Carter, Jimmy, 154 character, 13, 22–23, 34, 35, 40–43, 358 Chicago Daily Herald, 219 Chinatown, 150 Chrysler, Walter, 74 Cicero, 128 Citadel, The, 48 Citicorp-Travelers merger, 189, 253 Citigroup (Citi), 211, 214–15, 261, 315 AT&T and, 197, 207, 208 author at, 5, 199, 204–5, 211–12 bureaucracy and policies at, 203–4 creation of, 189 culture at, 209, 215, 264, 365–66 culture committee at (Project Passion), 204–6, 211, 264–65, 365–66 Lucent and, 200–201 Prince as CEO of, 208–10 TMT (technology, media, and telecom) group at, 5, 211–12, 253 Weill as CEO of, 188 Weill’s creation of financial supermarket model with, 189–90, 195, 196, 200, 209, 211 Weill’s resignation from, 208–9 Citron, Robert, 315–20, 324, 326, 343–45, 352, 367 Clinton, Bill, 189, 324 cloud, 225, 361 see also data centers Coachella, 292–93, 295, 296 CocaCola, 295 Cocktail, 355 college: admissions scandal, 291–92 financial aid, see student loans Colorado River, 162 COMDEX, 218 Comedy Central, 302 commerce: e-commerce, 232–33, 244, 245 physical world and, 247 CommScope, 201, 202 community and human contact, 233, 247, 307, 309, 358, 361 diminishment of, 216, 246–47 engagement with, 369–70 Compagnie Générale des Eaux, 169 compensation, 248–79, 361 and aligning incentives with investment horizons, 364 annual cycle of, 270–71 author’s bonuses, 248–51, 266–70 of CEOs, 275–76 and complexity and opacity of purpose, 260–61 contentment and, 268–70, 278–79 culture tied to, 205–6, 257–58, 264–65 and “having a number,” 251–53, 263–64, 274, 277, 278 reactions to bonus amounts, 256–59, 270 Salomon bonuses, 64, 248–51, 253–59, 262–63 talent and skills and, 261–62 transparency in, 260, 269, 270, 275, 361–62 CompuServe, 237, 241 computers, 38 algorithms, 23, 37, 242 Black Monday and, 37 spreadsheets, 19–23, 24, 37, 360 ConQuest, 221 Conquest of Happiness, The (Russell), 248 Conquistadores del Cielo, 124–25, 146 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), 217–19 Conway, Cathy, 109–12 Corbat, Michael, 315, 324 Corning Inc., 201 corporate raiders, 82, 84, 88, 89, 94, 96, 103–4, 360 as activist investors, 104, 106, 360 in Pretty Woman, 98, 100–102 see also hostile takeovers credit: five c’s of, 13, 42, 205 spreadsheets used for analysis in, 19–20, 24 worthiness, 22 credit cards, 233 in e-commerce, 232–33, 244, 245 Credit Suisse, 263–64, 273–74, 340 Crisanti, Jim, 203 cryptocurrencies, 245–46, 308 Culligan, 164–68, 182 currency(ies), 245–46 cryptocurrencies, 245–46, 308 phone minutes as, 245 Cutler, Carol, 207 Daily Stormer, 304 Danni’s Hard Drive, 226, 227, 231–33 data centers, 224–25, 227–28, 231 Equinix, 228, 230–31, 237–47 “naked woman in the server room” story and, 223–26, 232 security at, 225 Davis, Mark, 156–58, 165, 166, 221–22 DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), 31–33, 34, 39, 40 Deasy, John, 351 DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), 227–28 defense and aerospace companies, see aerospace and defense companies Defense Department, 124 Denham, Bob, 324 Denny’s, 154 Depression, Great, 51, 189 derivatives, 316–19, 324 de Vries, Peter, 81 Diamond, Neil, 321 diamond and gold wholesalers, see jewelry industry Diamond Club, 15 Dii Group, 213 Dimon, Jamie, 196, 197 Disney, 81–90, 85, 86, 111, 304 Eisner at, 88, 89, 109 Epcot Center, 86 films, 88, 102, 148–49 Steinberg’s hostile takeover attempt, 81–84, 86–91, 98, 102–4, 111 Touchstone Pictures, 88, 102 Disney, Roy, 85 Disney, Walt, 84–86, 87, 103, 112 Disney Channel, 299, 301, 302 Disneyland, 84, 85, 103, 112, 148, 288–90, 314 author’s career at, 4, 5, 10, 11–13, 40, 45, 61, 71, 81–85, 89–90, 106–12, 148, 158, 289, 290 Café Orleans at, 81, 106–12, 289 in Pretty Woman, 106 privilege and, 289–90 Disney World, 85–86 Dominguez, Bernardo, 132 Dominica, 285, 286 dotcom bubble, 175, 211, 214, 228–31, 233–34, 236, 238, 240, 243, 244, 267, 322 Doughty, Caitlin, 301 Douglas, Michael, 98 Drexel Burnham Lambert, 91–96, 188 author’s offer from, 91, 93, 94–95 bankruptcy of, 96 Milken at, 91–94 Ducasse, Alain, 168, 169 Dunkin’ Donuts, 294 earthquake, Whittier Narrows, 34–35 eBay, 233 Ebbers, Bernie, 212, 238 e-commerce, 232–33, 244, 245 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The (Keynes), 280 Economist, 245 Eisner, Michael, 88, 89, 109 Elmassian, George, 25, 31, 32, 34, 38 Elmassian, Richard, 25, 31–33, 38 Enron, 171, 177 Epcot Center, 86 Equinix, 228, 230–31, 237–47 Escobar, Pablo, 39 Euripides, 9 Evoqua, 182 exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 105 F9 mistake, 127 Facebook, 294, 305 Family Ties, 97–98 Fargo, William, 230 Federal Reserve, 370 FedEx, 127 Feuerstein, Don, 57 FICO score, 22 Finance Leaders Fellowship program, 371 financial crisis of 2008, 1–2, 7, 76, 211, 215, 259, 307 Equinix and, 242 financial supermarkets and, 211 see also Great Recession financial supermarkets, 204, 214–15, 361 financial crisis and, 211 Weill’s model of, with Citi, 189–90, 195, 196, 200, 209, 211 financial system, financial industry, 6, 328–30 causes of society’s dysfunctional relationship with money, 359–63 citizens’ disconnection from government finance, 328–29, 343–44, 351, 353, 362 clashes sparked by financial unrest and collapse, 355–58 compensation in, see compensation complexity of, 260–61, 277 estimated worth of financial instruments in the world, 209 net financial burden, 329–30 people’s feelings about working in, 277 preppers and, 306 see also Wall Street financial system, reform of, 363–64 accountability for public officials, 369 action items for banking system and investment management, 364–66 action items for each of us, 368–70 action items for government, 366–68 changing compensation structures to align incentives with investment horizons, 364 community engagement, 369–70 creating federal-level oversight or review board for pension systems, 366–67 creating independent review processes, 364–65 education in financial and economic matters, 368 forming culture or values committees, 365–66 requiring finance background for treasurers and other financial officers, 367 simplicity of regulations, 367–68 Fiorina, Carly, 190, 194–95 Fitzgerald, F.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

He also wanted to find new ways to make a useful contribution to the world. He and Marc Newson assembled a team at LoveFrom made up of several longtime Apple colleagues, including software designer Chris Wilson, industrial designer Eugene Whang, and Foster + Partners architect James McGrath. The collection of creatives picked up clients that appealed to their interest. Airbnb, the home rental company, hired Ive to assist with redesigning its app and developing new products, and Ferrari tapped Ive and Newson to assist in designing its first electric vehicle and expanding its luxury apparel and luggage businesses. The firm also continued to advise Apple. One of his biggest undertakings after leaving was a collaboration with Prince Charles on a sustainability initiative called the Terra Carta.

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Apple’s board of directors: Anders Melin and Tom Metcalf, “Tim Cook Hits Billionaire Status with Apple Nearing $2 Trillion,” Bloomberg, August 10, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/apple-s-cook-becomes-billionaire-via-the-less-traveled-ceo-route; Mark Gurman, “Apple Gives Tim Cook Up to a Million Shares That Vest Through 2025,” Bloomberg, September 29, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-29/apple-gives-cook-up-to-a-million-shares-that-vest-through-2025. In 2021, sales of the company’s: Apple Inc. Form 10-K 2020. Cupertino, CA: Apple Inc, 2020, https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/_10-K-2020-(As-Filed).pdf. The collection of creatives: Dave Lee, “Airbnb Brings in Jony Ive to Oversee Design,” Financial Times, October 21, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/8bc63067-4f58-4c84-beb1-f516409c9838; Tim Bradshaw, “Jony Ive Teams Up with Ferrari to Develop Electric Car,” Financial Times, September 27, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/c2436fb5-d857-4aff-b81e-30141879711c; Ferrari N.V.

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine
by Christopher Miller
Published 17 Jul 2023

The first time was in the summer of 2010, when I visited Peace Corps friends in Armiansk, a drab city of trains and buses and heavy trucks that served as the northern gateway to the peninsula from mainland Ukraine. We then took a bus two hours southwest to the coastal city of Yevpatoria, where we spent the day on the beach, cooking shashlik, drinking cheap beer, and swimming in the Black Sea. The next time was the following summer, when I took Bri to Sevastopol. We were hosted in an AirBnB apartment in a high-rise building by a lovely young woman named Anna, who prepared lunch for us and hand-sketched a map of all the places we should visit, along with the bus routes we needed to take to get to them. We walked around the Port of Sevastopol and saw the Russian and Ukrainian navy ships moored there.

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Several of them broadcast the first battle cry of the new war: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” they said. It was an homage to the final communication made by Ukrainian border guards stationed on Snake Island, a small rock off the coast of Odesa, just before the Russian missile cruiser Moskva opened fire on them in the first hours of the invasion. Our convoy collectively looked for AirBnB spots we could rent together or any hotel with available rooms. The only place we could find was a motel on the side of a main highway. It was on the southern part of the outer ring of the city and could give us a jumpstart if Russian troops stormed into the capital from the north. But we realized after we had already paid and checked in that it was only ten miles east of Vasylkiv, a main Russian target.

Lonely Planet Southern Italy
by Lonely Planet

From November to Easter, many places on the coast shut down. Accommodation in cities and larger towns usually remains open all year. Lonely Planet (lonelyplanet.com/hotels) You’ll find independent reviews, as well as recommendations on the best places to stay – and then you can book them online. Airbnb (airbnb.com) Average nightly price of €80 for an entire place, with plentiful options under €50. Camping.it (www.camping.it) Directory of campsites throughout Italy. Monastery Stays (www.monasterystays.com) Monastic sleeps in Campania and Sicily. Slumber Tax Cities and towns in Italy charge a tassa di soggiorno (hotel occupancy tax) on top of advertised hotel rates.

Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV
by Peter Biskind
Published 6 Nov 2023

The danger is summed up in the phrase, “go woke, go broke.”21 One of Zaslav’s weaknesses, as someone put it, is that he “doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”22 (For the record, CAA head Bryan Lourd says the opposite: “He knows what he doesn’t know.”)23 Zaslav seems like he’s ready to go to any extreme to reduce his debt, save, in the words of Puck’s Matthew Belloni, putting Evans’s house “on Airbnb,”24 including taking the ax to the heretofore untouchable HBO Max. He killed Plepler and Lombardo’s high-profile and expensive tentpole Westworld, after the fourth season of what was supposed to be a five- or six-season run, after the numbers fell off dramatically at the end of Season 3. (Season 1 cost at least a no-figure-is-too-much $100 million.)

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“He knows what he doesn’t know”: Lucia Moes, “How David Zaslav is transforming Warner Bros. Discovery, from layoffs and a major reorg to launching a new mega-streaming app, Max,” Insider, April 13, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/warner-bros-discovery-merger-compete-netflix-disney-streaming-david-zaslav. 24. “on Airbnb”: Matthew Belloni, “Hollywood’s Worsening Catch-22,” Puck, November 3, 2022, https://puck.news/hollywoods-worsening-catch-22. 25. “This is going to be about finding”: Matthew Belloni, What I’m Hearing . . . (newsletter), Puck, August 14, 2022, https://puck.news/newsletters/what-im-hearing. 26.

Canary Islands Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

The East ONLINE RESOURCES Casas Rurales (www.ecoturismocanarias.com) Has an extensive selection of rural accommodation throughout the islands, but doesn't cover La Gomera or Lanzarote. Ecoturismo Gomera (www.casasruralesdelagomera.es) A good network of casas rurales across La Gomera. Rural Accommodation (www.alorustico.com) A Spanish mainland website that includes some 60 choices for rural accommodation across every island except La Gomera. Airbnb (www.airbnb.com) There are some spectacularly located properties for rent across all the islands, ranging from city apartments with sea views to enormous houses in the mountains. Agüimes Hotel Rural Casa de los CamellosHOTEL€€ (%928 78 50 53; www.hotelruralcasadeloscamellos.com; Calle Progreso 12; r incl breakfast €85; paW) A lovely place tucked down a narrow pedestrian street in the historic centre.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction
by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham
Published 17 Jan 2020

Platform companies may well fear the consequences of greater transparency in their production networks. It is worth remembering Tom Goodwin’s now famous observation of the platform economy: ‘Uber, the world’s largest 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.’2 These companies, in other words, rely solely on their ability to control flows of information and act as intermediaries between clients and workers. If Uber and Upwork were to collapse tomorrow, the drivers, cars, computers and customers previously enrolled into their platform would still exist.

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy
by Callum Cant
Published 11 Nov 2019

It is a term that lumps together all different kinds of changes to society which only seem to share two things: they all look a bit tech and they all seem a bit new. This book junks that category. Instead, it uses ‘platform capitalism’, an idea developed by Nick Srnicek.14 The basic argument behind this change is that, rather than thinking about companies like Uber and Airbnb as tech start-ups with special tech start-up characteristics, we should think of them as capitalist companies with capitalist characteristics. Srnicek defines platforms as digital infrastructures which enable two or more groups to interact and extract data from that interaction. More specifically, Deliveroo is a geographically tethered platform.

Sustainable Minimalism: Embrace Zero Waste, Build Sustainability Habits That Last, and Become a Minimalist Without Sacrificing the Planet (Green Housecleaning, Zero Waste Living)
by Stephanie Marie Seferian
Published 19 Jan 2021

Before booking your lodging, seek out and support sustainable accommodations. Support a holistically sustainable hotel, lodge, or bed & breakfast that supports environmental, social, and economic issues. Such lodging will use renewable energy, conserve water, employ effective waste reduction measures, and give back to their local communities. Consider staying at an Airbnb—having a kitchen will enable you to cook more and waste less. Packing for Your Trip Oversized suitcases hold us back and slow us down. Embrace a smaller suitcase instead and just pack the essentials. Bring comfortable, versatile shoes you can walk long distances in, and pack multi-purpose items that dry quickly.

The Rough Guide to Brazil
by Rough Guides
Published 22 Sep 2018

Even cheaper hotels now have wi-fi (sem fio), and three-star hotels upwards have wi-fi and/or cable TV (cabo) in rooms as standard (though English-language channels are rare). Throughout this guide, the availability of free wi-fi has been denoted by a sign at the end of each review. AIRBNB AND COUCHSURFING IN BRAZIL Airbnb (airbnb.com) is booming in Brazil as a way to rent rooms in private houses or apartments and other private accommodation and can be a great way to lower your accommodation costs – as always, read reviews carefully (avoid places with no reviews just to be safe) and research the area in which the property is located, especially in Rio and São Paulo.

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Even in the centre, hotels may not be anything like as pricey as they appear, since most offer considerable discounts – often well over 50 percent – especially at weekends and in December and January, and many never actually charge the official rate at all (the rates we quote here are the official rates for weekday reservations and include breakfast). Private B&B rentals such as those on airbnb.com are often the best value. Staying in the campsites north of town is not recommended: besides being unsafe, it costs much the same as accommodation in Brasília. CENTRAL HOTEL SECTORS Airam SHN Q.5, Bloco A 61 2195 4000, www.airamhotel.com.br; map. A good-value midrange hotel midweek, with fine views from the upper floors, but no weekend discounts.

The the Rough Guide to Turkey
by Rough Guides
Published 15 Oct 2023

We quote prices in euros here because of the Turkish lira’s instability at the time of writing (see box, page 74). ₺ under €25 ₺₺ €25–85 ₺₺₺ €85–170 ₺₺₺₺ over €170 All the usual online booking engines operate in Turkey, including Airbnb, and the majority of places have their own online booking. Even on Airbnb, most of the properties in tourist areas are regular commercial rooms or apartments: in theory, any accommodation offered has to be registered and pay tax. The vast majority of hoteliers prefer you to book direct, however, rather than pay commission to a third party and will often offer a better deal for direct bookings.

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Even booked on a night by night basis, the price of a small apartment is often less than a hotel of a similar standard and for stays of a week or more the cost can drop substantially. The number of companies offering apartments for rent across the city has rocketed in recent years, with stiff competition offered by the controversial US-based Airbnb website (http://airbnb.com), which provides a listing service for private individuals who want to let a room, apartment or house, and a safe booking system for those who want to rent one. Below we list just a few of these companies, followed by some recommended individual properties (prices shown are per night).

The Rough Guide to Portugal (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Mar 2023

Some of the new boutique city hostels (such as the Rivoli Cinema Hostel in Porto and Lisbon Lounge or Travellers House in Lisbon) are very classy indeed. Accommodation alternatives Useful websites that can provide alternatives to standard hotel and hostel accommodation in Portugal. Airbnb http://airbnb.com CouchSurfing http://couchsurfing.org Vacation Rentals by Owner http://vrbo.com Camping, campervans and motorhomes There are hundreds of campsites, though many are huge, town-sized affairs by or near the beach that also have space for campervans/RVs, caravans and permanent bungalows and apartments.

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Located in a sixteenth-century Carmelite convent (and hidden from the main street by high walls), the rooms here are chic and minimalist. The best are grouped around a beautiful interior courtyard where drinks and meals are served in summer, and there’s a highly rated restaurant. €€€ Self-catering IN LISBON There are several fine options for self-catering accommodation in Lisbon. As well as http://airbnb.com, good first points of call are http://fadoflats.pt, with places mostly in Chiado and Alfama; http://castleinnlisbon.com, which has apartments right by the castle. The upmarket Martinhal Chiado (http://martinhal.com) is an apartment block in the Chiado district geared towards families. North Lisbon see map page 79 Avenida Park Av Sidónio Pais 6; http://hotelavenidapark.com; MParque.

The Docker Book
by James Turnbull
Published 13 Jul 2014

Kubernetes is primarily targeted at applications comprised of multiple containers, such as elastic, distributed micro-services. Apache Mesos The Apache Mesos project is a highly-available cluster management tool. Since Mesos 0.20.0 it has built-in Docker integration to allow you to use containers with Mesos. Mesos is popular with a number of startups, notably Twitter and AirBnB. Helios The Helios project has been released by the team at Spotify and is a Docker orchestration platform for deploying and managing containers across an entire fleet. It creates a "job" abstraction that you can deploy to one or more Helios hosts running Docker. Centurion Centurion is focussed on being a Docker-based deployment tool open sourced by the New Relic team.

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
by Matthew Brennan
Published 9 Oct 2020

People, resources, and advertising budget were all raised, leading an industry insider to comment later: “The sudden rise of Douyin wasn’t without good cause. Yiming threw more money at this than anyone and dared to hunt down and grab the best people.” 194 Commercialization began with the first three brand ad campaigns paid for by Airbnb, Harbin Beer, and Chevrolet. Douyin’s advertising business would soon make rapid progress. ByteDance already had hundreds of sales and marketing staff who would shortly be able to add Douyin’s advertisement inventory to their sales targets. Yiming revealed in a later interview that the company had made it compulsory for everyone on the management team to make their own Douyin videos with goals to gain a certain number of likes or suffer forfeits such as doing push-ups.

Soulful Simplicity: How Living With Less Can Lead to So Much More
by Courtney Carver
Published 26 Dec 2017

We finally realized that our home is not a container for our stuff. Instead, it is a place for love and connection. We wanted more of that, so we got rid of the stuff and made room for it, room for more love and connection. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Sound of Letting Go One morning I woke up in Portland, Oregon, in a cozy Airbnb rental at 5:30 a.m. I like to wake up gently, but that day I was startled awake. It was trash day in the neighborhood I called home for a few nights, and collecting the trash isn’t a gentle process. I was in Portland for the Tiny Wardrobe Tour, events in thirty-three different cities to chat about living and dressing with less.

Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living
by Elizabeth Willard Thames
Published 6 Mar 2018

The house was even better than the pictures: fairly new construction, wide expanses of open floor plan, four bedrooms, three bathrooms, custom woodwork and wood floors throughout, windows on every wall, new insulation, and no obvious faults. The real estate agent who showed us the home clearly doubted our intentions and abilities as homestead-buyers, seeing as we were so pregnant, so urban, and so young. Nate and I stayed overnight at a nearby Airbnb and came back the next day to hike the land by ourselves, which was a ritual we’d performed with every other potential homestead that’d passed our initial inspection. We needed to feel the woods surrounding a home and be present in them on our own, since we were making this move as much for the land as for the house.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
by Rachel Clarke
Published 26 Jan 2021

She landed in the airport to discover that, while she had been in mid-air, she had effectively been placed under compulsory quarantine, with fines of $50,000 for venturing outside, even to go and buy groceries. Emma’s ten-week adventure learning antipodean paediatrics turned into three dismal days locked down inside an Airbnb, living off Pot Noodles and cereal bars purchased from the airport shop. ‘I did glimpse one kangaroo from the Uber,’ she told me, ‘and that was it, I flew straight back home again.’ Emma and her twenty-four fellow students are now sitting at home, glued to their laptops, as I commence an online teaching session from within the ED about death and dying in pandemic times.

Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life
by Scott. Branson
Published 14 Jun 2022

In the city I live near, there is no central grocery store and no cheap market—only boutiques, art galleries, breweries, crystal shops, and high-end vintage stores. Likewise, there is no convenient public transportation. The city isn’t arranged to make life easy for the people living there but rather to make an imaginary space for tourists to consume the “flavor” of that city. The majority of property gets bought up by absentee landlords who rent out Airbnbs, which makes it nearly impossible to afford housing. People live further and further away from the places they are forced to work, making us more reliant on our own transportation vehicles and gasoline. I have piled up these examples in order to push towards reframing our questions around what we actually make use of to better our lives.

Frommer's Paris 2013
by Kate van Der Boogert
Published 24 Sep 2012

To rent an apartment in Paris, contact one of the following agencies: Paris Attitude ( 01-42-96-31-46; www.parisattitude.com); Parisian Home ( 01-45-08-03-37; www.parisianhome.com); France Lodge ( 01-56-33-85-85; www.francelodge.fr); Paris Appartements Services ( 01-56-33-85-85; www.paris-appartements-services.com); Appartement de Ville ( 01-40-28-01-28; www.appartementdeville.com); or Flip Key (www.flipkey.com). Through these organizations, you will likely deal with the agency (not the owners), and the minimum stay is usually 1 week. Another option is Airbnb (www.airbnb.com), a network of accommodations offered directly by local owners. It is possible to get a good deal at an aparthotel, a cross between a hotel and an apartment. Short on charm, these rentals are good on convenience, each with a kitchenette. Although rates are more than short-term studios, you get more of the services of a hotel, including fresh towels and a reception desk.