It tackles one of the most difficult and interesting problems facing sharing economy platforms: the relationship (technically speaking, i.e., the business relationship) between the companies operating the platform (e.g., Lyft or Airbnb), the “sellers” on the platform, and the buyers or users.
The nuances of this relationship are the source of many legal and regulatory head scratchers, most notably two recent suits against Lyft and Uber by their drivers, which allege that Lyft and Uber are really more like direct employers and less like information platforms or technology service providers. This distinction is a really really really important one, both in terms of labor law and professional regulation (in transportation and all other sectors).
The solution that Orsi suggests is that sharing economy platforms should be organized as “T-Corps”. She cleverly uses this term, which is the official IRS classification for co-ops.
She argues that this classification is not only more aligned with the community’s interests (i.e., the major stakeholders are equal owners), but it also avoids all of the messy legal and regulatory issues that are making things hard for many platforms in the space.
Finally, she suggests a path for doing a “Community IPO”, i.e., selling a sharing economy platform to its users (both on the buy and sell side):
Could or would each of the 2.1 million registered users of Airbnb come up with about $120 per year to complete the buy-out of a $2.5 billion dollar company in 10 years? Maybe. The number of users is growing rapidly, which would reduce the buy-in cost for each user.
This is a really interesting conversation to be having, and fits right along side the discussion of the role of the B-Corp in the space.
It seems fair to say that the founders of collaborative / peer-driven companies like Airbnb, Sidecar, Meetup, Etsy and Kickstarter are idealistic, change-the-world types as much as they are businesspeople. And that there will continue to be an appetite for alternative investment arrangements which fit these new models well.
A natural question is whether this approach is actually / practically compatible with traditional venture investment, especially with regards to when & how such a community IPO would take place (such that it was affordable by the community and also delivered an appropriate return for that risk capital). That’s the billion dollar question (if you will).
I’m here today at the Adaptive Metropolis conference at UC Berkeley, organized by ReBar. Which, as I suspected it would be, is awesome. The premise of the conference is how cities, and the way we plan, manage and engage with them, is changing — an in particular, how bottom-up, diy, adaptive, responsive, agile, and user-generated approaches to city making are exploding in their scale and impact.
What I realized today — which I suppose I have known for a little while now — is that now is an incredible time to be an urban planner. (And by urban planner, I suppose I really mean “urbanist”).
This is a gross generalization, but in the past, the options for urban planners were pretty limited. Go work for a city (when I was in school I interned at San Jose redevelopment agency, and was wasn’t accepted for a job a the Santa Cruz planning department — a job I would have hated anyway had I gotten it), go work for a private sector planning firm, or maybe for a commercial real estate developer.
Those are all fine options — but my experience, at least, was that up close, all of those options felt a bit dry, and didn’t live up to the hopes and interests that brought me to the space. And it certainly wasn’t clear to me what my other options were.
I’m writing this from a plane en route to Berkeley for what should be an awesome conference: Adaptive Metropolis: User Generated Urbanism. Among the organizers is my favorite DIY city-making collective: ReBar.
Back in 2005, ReBar did something amazing. They pulled up to a San Francisco parking space and put in a few quarters. But instead of parking a car there, they rolled out sod, set up a park bench, and created a tiny, temporary public park. They called it Park(ing). Check it out:
The point, of course, is that charging cars $1 or $2 / hr to be there is a pretty lousy use of public space. And that becomes really obvious when we experiment with using that space for other, more awesome things.
That stunt, and the video about it, ended up sparking something of a mini movement. Later that year, there was an entire day in SF devoted to Park(ing). After that, more cities joined in. Back at OpenPlans, we helped organize NYC’s Park(ing) days in
It tackles one of the most difficult and interesting problems facing sharing economy platforms: the relationship (technically speaking, i.e., the business relationship) between the companies operating the platform (e.g., Lyft or Airbnb), the “sellers” on the platform, and the buyers or users.
The nuances of this relationship are the source of many legal and regulatory head scratchers, most notably two recent suits against Lyft and Uber by their drivers, which allege that Lyft and Uber are really more like direct employers and less like information platforms or technology service providers. This distinction is a really really really important one, both in terms of labor law and professional regulation (in transportation and all other sectors).
The solution that Orsi suggests is that sharing economy platforms should be organized as “T-Corps”. She cleverly uses this term, which is the official IRS classification for co-ops.
She argues that this classification is not only more aligned with the community’s interests (i.e., the major stakeholders are equal owners), but it also avoids all of the messy legal and regulatory issues that are making things hard for many platforms in the space.
Finally, she suggests a path for doing a “Community IPO”, i.e., selling a sharing economy platform to its users (both on the buy and sell side):
Could or would each of the 2.1 million registered users of Airbnb come up with about $120 per year to complete the buy-out of a $2.5 billion dollar company in 10 years? Maybe. The number of users is growing rapidly, which would reduce the buy-in cost for each user.
This is a really interesting conversation to be having, and fits right along side the discussion of the role of the B-Corp in the space.
It seems fair to say that the founders of collaborative / peer-driven companies like Airbnb, Sidecar, Meetup, Etsy and Kickstarter are idealistic, change-the-world types as much as they are businesspeople. And that there will continue to be an appetite for alternative investment arrangements which fit these new models well.
A natural question is whether this approach is actually / practically compatible with traditional venture investment, especially with regards to when & how such a community IPO would take place (such that it was affordable by the community and also delivered an appropriate return for that risk capital). That’s the billion dollar question (if you will).
I’m here today at the Adaptive Metropolis conference at UC Berkeley, organized by ReBar. Which, as I suspected it would be, is awesome. The premise of the conference is how cities, and the way we plan, manage and engage with them, is changing — an in particular, how bottom-up, diy, adaptive, responsive, agile, and user-generated approaches to city making are exploding in their scale and impact.
What I realized today — which I suppose I have known for a little while now — is that now is an incredible time to be an urban planner. (And by urban planner, I suppose I really mean “urbanist”).
This is a gross generalization, but in the past, the options for urban planners were pretty limited. Go work for a city (when I was in school I interned at San Jose redevelopment agency, and was wasn’t accepted for a job a the Santa Cruz planning department — a job I would have hated anyway had I gotten it), go work for a private sector planning firm, or maybe for a commercial real estate developer.
Those are all fine options — but my experience, at least, was that up close, all of those options felt a bit dry, and didn’t live up to the hopes and interests that brought me to the space. And it certainly wasn’t clear to me what my other options were.
I’m writing this from a plane en route to Berkeley for what should be an awesome conference: Adaptive Metropolis: User Generated Urbanism. Among the organizers is my favorite DIY city-making collective: ReBar.
Back in 2005, ReBar did something amazing. They pulled up to a San Francisco parking space and put in a few quarters. But instead of parking a car there, they rolled out sod, set up a park bench, and created a tiny, temporary public park. They called it Park(ing). Check it out:
The point, of course, is that charging cars $1 or $2 / hr to be there is a pretty lousy use of public space. And that becomes really obvious when we experiment with using that space for other, more awesome things.
That stunt, and the video about it, ended up sparking something of a mini movement. Later that year, there was an entire day in SF devoted to Park(ing). After that, more cities joined in. Back at OpenPlans, we helped organize NYC’s Park(ing) days in
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
Contrast that to now, and there is no shortage of amazing and really interesting jobs for folks who understand how cities work. For instance, ReBar is a new kind of planning firm, that’s activist and artist at its core.
Most interesting of all (to me at least) are the businesses and jobs that blend urbanism, data and technology. Governments are creating “chief innovation officer” and “chief data officer” positions left and right. Urban analytics and data visualization is a rapidly growing and super interesting field. Nonprofits like Code for America, OpenPlans and MySociety are doing awesome work at the intersection of cities and technology. And innumerable startup businesses are touching on urban issues (just to name a few: airbnb, lyft, sidecar, relayrides, getaround, honest buildings, neighborland, nextdoor, citymapper, coUrbanize).
Put another way, cities have always been interesting. Now they’re sexy.
. In 2011 (the last year for which they kept stats, since it got so big), Park(ing) Day was celebrated at 975 mini-parks, in 162 cities, in 35 countries, on 6 continents.
Beyond all that, the city of San Francisco now has an official “Parklet” program, which facilitates the citizen-led transformation of under-utilized public spaces into mini-parks, including this nifty Parklet-o-matic infographic:
This is “user-generated urbanism” at its best. And I would encourage everyone to take part in next year’s Park(ing) day, wherever you are (unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a whole year until Sept 2014). But the really interesting thing to note is the way the city (eventually) embraced this, and made space for it in their policies.
Back to 2007: at the same time, NYC was experimenting with “hacking public spaces”. That year, they began a massive program to do low cost experiments in public space transformation. The first one simply painted over an empty parking lot in DUMBO. Over the next few years, major street redesigns in Times Square, Madison Square, Union Square, the Meatpacking District, and elsewhere all over the city were started with paint and planters, not with jackhammers and concrete.
By doing these projects at super low cost, with cheap (but nice enough) materials, and by leaving the option open to change their minds if things didn’t work out, NYC DOT unleashed a torrent of public space innovation across the city. I’m not sure any established city has ever seen the level of micro-scale street redesign that NYC saw from 2007-2012. And the process of doing low-cost experiments, then collecting data and iterating was a breath of fresh air.
That’s what you might call “agile urbanism”.
So, we’ve got “user-generated urbanism” and “agile urbanism”. That sounds a lot like how we describe the evolution of the internet and the software development process, respectively. It might just be my internet centrism showing through, but it makes sense to me, and I see it continuing.
Now, in 2013, we’re seeing a new trend in our cities, which we might call “peer to peer urbanism”.
This latest wave has caused more than its share of problems as cities grapple with the implications of the rapid expansion of peer-to-peer everything. It challenges fundamental notions of professionalism and trust, the same way Ebay did in 2001. For example, if I use SideCar and give someone a ride, am I a taxi driver? (the state of California just decided I’m not, but it took a while to figure that out). Does renting out my apartment on Airbnb turn it into a hotel? (New York state thinks it does).
As this continues, we have an opportunity to re-think how we regulate city activities for the public interest. I think the big opportunity is to harness the data streaming out of all of these activities and use it to enable a more permissive, but more accountable, “2.0” regulatory regime.
Contrast that to now, and there is no shortage of amazing and really interesting jobs for folks who understand how cities work. For instance, ReBar is a new kind of planning firm, that’s activist and artist at its core.
Most interesting of all (to me at least) are the businesses and jobs that blend urbanism, data and technology. Governments are creating “chief innovation officer” and “chief data officer” positions left and right. Urban analytics and data visualization is a rapidly growing and super interesting field. Nonprofits like Code for America, OpenPlans and MySociety are doing awesome work at the intersection of cities and technology. And innumerable startup businesses are touching on urban issues (just to name a few: airbnb, lyft, sidecar, relayrides, getaround, honest buildings, neighborland, nextdoor, citymapper, coUrbanize).
Put another way, cities have always been interesting. Now they’re sexy.
. In 2011 (the last year for which they kept stats, since it got so big), Park(ing) Day was celebrated at 975 mini-parks, in 162 cities, in 35 countries, on 6 continents.
Beyond all that, the city of San Francisco now has an official “Parklet” program, which facilitates the citizen-led transformation of under-utilized public spaces into mini-parks, including this nifty Parklet-o-matic infographic:
This is “user-generated urbanism” at its best. And I would encourage everyone to take part in next year’s Park(ing) day, wherever you are (unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a whole year until Sept 2014). But the really interesting thing to note is the way the city (eventually) embraced this, and made space for it in their policies.
Back to 2007: at the same time, NYC was experimenting with “hacking public spaces”. That year, they began a massive program to do low cost experiments in public space transformation. The first one simply painted over an empty parking lot in DUMBO. Over the next few years, major street redesigns in Times Square, Madison Square, Union Square, the Meatpacking District, and elsewhere all over the city were started with paint and planters, not with jackhammers and concrete.
By doing these projects at super low cost, with cheap (but nice enough) materials, and by leaving the option open to change their minds if things didn’t work out, NYC DOT unleashed a torrent of public space innovation across the city. I’m not sure any established city has ever seen the level of micro-scale street redesign that NYC saw from 2007-2012. And the process of doing low-cost experiments, then collecting data and iterating was a breath of fresh air.
That’s what you might call “agile urbanism”.
So, we’ve got “user-generated urbanism” and “agile urbanism”. That sounds a lot like how we describe the evolution of the internet and the software development process, respectively. It might just be my internet centrism showing through, but it makes sense to me, and I see it continuing.
Now, in 2013, we’re seeing a new trend in our cities, which we might call “peer to peer urbanism”.
This latest wave has caused more than its share of problems as cities grapple with the implications of the rapid expansion of peer-to-peer everything. It challenges fundamental notions of professionalism and trust, the same way Ebay did in 2001. For example, if I use SideCar and give someone a ride, am I a taxi driver? (the state of California just decided I’m not, but it took a while to figure that out). Does renting out my apartment on Airbnb turn it into a hotel? (New York state thinks it does).
As this continues, we have an opportunity to re-think how we regulate city activities for the public interest. I think the big opportunity is to harness the data streaming out of all of these activities and use it to enable a more permissive, but more accountable, “2.0” regulatory regime.
