Yesterday I gave a talk at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum.  For those who don’t know it, PDF is a great event, and is now in its 10th year of bringing together the community of folks working at the intersection of tech, politics, and civics.  You can see all the talks from yesterday (and today’s videos will be posted tomorrow) on PDF’s youtube channel. I was paired up with Robin Chase (co-founder of Zipcar and Buzzcar) to talk about the opportunity and challenges presented by the “peer economy”.  Robin introduced the opportunity and I followed up with the challenges (and some ideas for addressing them). This is a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time on — with the team at USV, companies in the USV portfolio, and many other companies in the peer-to-peer sector. As is apparent to everyone following tech news, there has been a ton of activity, both positive and negative, in this space.  It’s new, and it challenges many fundamental notions of professionalism, person-to-person relationships, and regulation.  We’ve got a lot to figure out. Here is the video of my talk: And here are the slides. Kudos: many thanks to the folks at the Berkman Center who helped me find examples of our historical responses to new user-empowering technologies, to Arun Sundararajan for his consistently insightful work on these issues, and to the folks from Sidecar, RelayRides, Etsy and Airbnb for giving their input to the talk. Enjoy!

Yesterday I gave a talk at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum.  For those who don’t know it, PDF is a great event, and is now in its 10th year of bringing together the community of folks working at the intersection of tech, politics, and civics.  You can see all the talks from yesterday (and today’s videos will be posted tomorrow) on PDF’s youtube channel. I was paired up with Robin Chase (co-founder of Zipcar and Buzzcar) to talk about the opportunity and challenges presented by the “peer economy”.  Robin introduced the opportunity and I followed up with the challenges (and some ideas for addressing them). This is a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time on — with the team at USV, companies in the USV portfolio, and many other companies in the peer-to-peer sector. As is apparent to everyone following tech news, there has been a ton of activity, both positive and negative, in this space.  It’s new, and it challenges many fundamental notions of professionalism, person-to-person relationships, and regulation.  We’ve got a lot to figure out. Here is the video of my talk: And here are the slides. Kudos: many thanks to the folks at the Berkman Center who helped me find examples of our historical responses to new user-empowering technologies, to Arun Sundararajan for his consistently insightful work on these issues, and to the folks from Sidecar, RelayRides, Etsy and Airbnb for giving their input to the talk. Enjoy!