- Hi everyone, Jason Hoch here,
chief content officer at How Stuff Works.
I'm here today with Chris Saad,
head of the developer platform for Uber,
and Jeremiah Owyang who is the founder
and CEO of Crowd Companies.
(calm music)
- So let's get this out of the way first.
Jeremiah, tell me exactly what is the collaborative economy
and what are the different versions of that?
- Oh, when it comes to lexicon and terms,
oh, there's so many.
There's on-demand economy, there's sharing economy,
there's peer economy, there's freelancer economy.
There's so many. So I just make it easy,
I use the term collaborative economy,
which is kind of a catch-all for all
of these different models because people
tend to be collaborating with each other.
- At Uber we kind of think of these things as on-demand,
and the way I tend to think about it is,
it doesn't necessarily matter where the supply
is coming from, is it coming from peers,
is it coming from collaboration, is it coming from sharing,
is it coming from contractors in the case of Uber,
but I think for me the thing that matters the most
is that it's instant gratification. It's on-demand.
You press a button and a car or a taskrabbit
or something shows up and fulfills your very tacticle
or you know, need essentially.
- [Jeremiah] Well certainly Uber is the category leader in,
when it comes to on-demand rides,
but then we also know about Airbnb
which is about home sharing and you might have heard
of crowdfunding with Kickstarter
or peer-to-peer lending with Lending Club.
Those are the most popular categories that we all know,
but there's many others.
In the health space there's Cohealo
where hospitals are sharing things with each other.
In the wellness space Popexpert allows
people to share tips and tricks on how to cook
or how to do yoga together.
And also even in the energy space
there's some Dutch startups that allow you to share
energy credits with each other home-to-home.
So basically Jason, we're seeing that these collaborative
or on-demand or peer models are in every area
of society, it's growing, it's really a movement.
- I also like to think about it in this way,
which is a lot of the things that were products
are now becoming services.
And so, you know, the way I like to talk about it
is cars were a product and now they're a service
as it relates to Uber, and so.
I think, how big is the economy?
I think that's how big it can potentially get.
- So this is really powerful.
It means that people don't need to worry about
the cars or parking, or car ownership or maintenance.
In urban areas we're finding that people are giving up
their cars cuz these services make it so easy
to have mobility services.
This has significant impacts to the economy.
In our research we asked over 50,000 consumers
of this space, we just call them people
cuz in some cases there not even consuming things now
they're just borrowing them on-demand,
so they're really not even goods.
- [Chris] Or sharing them as well there's a...
- [Jeremiah] Or they're sharing them, right,
so there's some significant behavioral change
in what they're doing.
But essentially we asked them
"Why do you use these services?"
and the number one reason is convenience.
Number two is always ranked,
and this is from other studies beyond ours,
is value, it's less expensive.
Further on down the line we see things
like connecting to other humans,
which big brands are not usually great at doing,
and then also for sustainability reasons as well.
Reusing resources in your own local neighborhood,
which by the way makes it faster
and therefor on-demand.
So these are reasons why people use this.
And what we found is that in all areas of society,
weather it's urban or rural, low income, high income,
that everybody's using these services,
but in different ways.
So in urban areas we find more adoption
of on demand services,
but we found that in rural areas that people are sharing
their time more online using sites like Freelancer or Upwork
because they have more remote areas that they have to cover.
So it really depends on where.
But one interesting finding in the earlier study we did
is that people that make over 100k were more likely
to use these services than those that do not.
And we also found that there's a slight increase of males
that use these services more than females,
and that might be due to perceived
and real privacy or safety issues.
- I like these, this work, these work platforms
that you talked about, and in a sense
a lot of these things are really about work,
distributed work or on demand work.
Also Uber is about this kind of on demand,
it's not just about on demand cars,
but on demand work, like how do I
have the flexibility to work when I want,
not work when I want and in a sense is democratizing
effort and work, and in these rural areas where they might
not have had access to these jobs
there's a whole new supply class,
or a whole new class of work, it's very exciting.
I remember way back in the day
Amazon Mechanical Turk was like the most exciting thing
that I had ever heard of.
All the sudden people can now get access
to micro-chunks of work and this is, I think,
just continued more and more
and now become mobile thanks to
iPhone and Android and so on.
- Let's talk about your role at Uber, Chris,
working with developers. - [Chris] Yeah.
- [Jason] Give me a little bit of background on that.
- Yeah, so essentially if you ever use Uber
to request a ride, but not from the Uber app,
then you're using the developer platform,
and so a good example of that is Facebook Messenger,
the Hilton app or OpenTable, or even a bunch
of these thousands of small sites or small apps
built by entrepreneurs, kind of everyday entrepreneurs
in Silicon Valley or Israel or all around the world.
And so the developer platform allows
for that deep integration into third party apps
to make it easier to get Uber when you really want it,
which is maybe when you're chatting with friends
about going to dinner or maybe when you're thinking
about going to a Hilton Hotel,
and so you can just click request a ride right there
and the ride is pre-configured for you
where you are, where you're going,
the kind of Uber product you want,
and it just shows up for you.
My favorite one is the Amazon Alexa,
where you just go, "Hey, Alexa, get me a ride."
and it goes, "There's an Uber X five minutes away from you,
"do you want me to get that for you?"
and you just say, "Yes." and it goes,
"Okay, it's on its way." and just like,
whenever people see that their eyes light up.
- So you lived this dream before
where there's a certain degree of openness at the beginning
from various social platforms that will go unnamed,
and then as they get to a certain size
or certain age it becomes very proprietary, right?
How do you look at that within Uber?
- [Chris] So I think the idea that Uber would build at all
is, that's not gonna play out I think, I think, you know,
we're not gonna build our own Amazon Echo
or our own Hilton chain.
There are things in the world that are deeply integrated
into people's lives that are, you know, what we would call
in the software industry best-of-breed
and there are very exciting use cases out there
that Uber is not gonna, is not gonna solve for.
The argument might be, why doesn't Uber just create
these exclusive partnerships, or these very white glove
handheld partnerships, and that is, that's an argument.
I think the way we think about that is,
and certainly the way I think about it is,
let 1,000 flowers bloom and see where
the innovation comes from and see where
things that we wouldn't have thought of before,
or you know, some of large companies
have a vested interest in the status quo
and so what kind of innovation can we unlock,
what kind of new disruption can we unlock
on top of Uber's already very exciting innovation?
The other thing that's different about Uber
versus these social platforms that came out
is that our business model is different.
Our business model is actually transactional,
not ad based, and so our incentives are better aligned
with the developer because in a sense
it doesn't matter if the Uber request
came from an Amazon Echo or from the Hilton app
or from the Uber app, because, you know,
it's still a transaction on our platform.
- We've talked a lot of different and great examples,
what's your favorite thing going on right now
in this collaborative economy?
- When I was first interviewing at Uber
and thinking about working at Uber I,
you know every Silicon Valley says,
"Oh, we're changing the world."
And I'm like, "Yeah, I wanna change the world too,
"that's fine." But only when I really got into the company
and I'm embarrassed to say that
the full scope of that change really set in.
In terms of land values are changing
and parking structures are potentially being replaced with,
you know, parkland and you know, potentially with UberPool
greenhouse gasses are being reduced,
and I mean, we are...
- [Jeremiah] And DUIs are going down.
- [Chris] Exactly, yeah, drunk driving and DUIs
are going down, so like, in a very material way,
in a profound way, and in a very broad way
the world is actually changing
thanks to Uber and some of these other services.
- I think that these services are going to help
many of those that are retiring.
So we're seeing a lot of on-demand doctors
and first responders and people even providing
peer-to-peer health care support to each other.
Around 40% of United States is a baby boomer,
and so they're gonna need these services
and the federal services and hospitals
are gonna struggle to deal with this largest
generation we ever had with health care services.
So they're gonna turn to each other,
they're gonna turn to apps, they're gonna find
idle resources in, able to solve their healthcare woes.
So that's the thing that I think is really important to us.
And the second thing is this, these startups
like Uber and Airbnb, they're actually influencing,
if not scaring these big companies
who I tend to work with, that they have to change
their business model, be more efficient, be faster
and use localized resources.
So it's actually changing Wall Street economics as well,
and so those are the two main reasons.
- Fascinating conversation guys, thank you so much,
I hope you're having a great week here in Austin
at South by Southwest.
For more from How Stuff Works here at Austin, Texas
South by Southwest join us every day
at now.howstuffworks.com.
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