On paper, Frederic Larson is just one data point in five years of U.S. government statistics showing underemployment in dozens of industries and stagnant income growth across the board. The 63-year-old photographer with two children in college was downsized by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009. He now spends his time teaching at Academy of Art University with occasional lecturing gigs in Hawaii. A far cry from the salary, benefits and company car he used to have.
But Larson is also a data point in an economic revolution that is quietly turning millions of people into part-time entrepreneurs, and disrupting old notions about consumption and ownership. Twelve days per month Larson rents his Marin County home on website Airbnb for $100 a night, of which he nets $97. Four nights a week he transforms his Prius into a de facto taxi via the ride-sharing service Lyft, pocketing another $100 a night in the process.
It isn’t glamorous–on nights that he rents out his house, he removes himself to one room that he’s cordoned off, and he showers at the gym–but in leveraging his hard assets into seamless income streams, he’s generating $3,000 a month. “I’ve got a product, which is what I share: my Prius and my house,” says Larson. “Those are my two sources of income.” He’s now looking at websites that can let him rent out some of his camera equipment.
The “gig economy,” the plethora of microbes fueled by online marketplaces offering and filling an array of paid errands and office chores, has been well-documented, and sites like Task Rabbit, Exec and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk continue to grow apace. What Larson finds himself in, however, is something lesser-noticed and potentially far more disruptive–a share economy , where asset owners use digital clearinghouses to capitalize the unused capacity of things they already have, and consumers rent from their peers rather than rent or buy from a company.
Just as YouTube did with TV and the blogosphere did to mainstream media, the share economy blows up the industrial model of companies owning and people consuming, and allows everyone to be both consumer and producer, along with the potential for cash that the latter provides. Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures and an investor in Get around, Task Rabbit, Uber and other startups in this space, believes these services will have a major impact on the economics of cities. “This is much bigger than any specific app,” he says. “This is a movement as important as when the web browser came out.”
FORBES estimates the revenue flowing through the share economy directly into people’s wallets will surpass $3.5 billion this year, with growth exceeding 25%. At that rate peer-to-peer sharing is moving from an income boost in a stagnant wage market into a disruptive economic force. Technology has vastly improved on the newspaper classifieds that brokered the sweating of assets for a century. Bay's much-duplicated rating system bestows commercial credibility on individuals. With Facebook you can go further, checking people’s profiles before renting to them. Smartphone apps let sharers transact anywhere, see what’s being shared nearby and pay on the spot. “We’re moving from a world where we’re organized around ownership to one organized around access to assets,” says Lisa Gdansk, who started the photo-sharing site, before selling it in 2001 to Eastman Kodak.
Big issues also have yet to be worked out over how these services are taxed and whether they protect customers sufficiently from liability and fraud. And who’s to say whether what works among the hipsters in Brooklyn and San Francisco translates in between.