Airbnb’s Brian Chesky: "It’s Only Day Two in the Sharing Economy"

From PandO Daily:

The sharing economy is just getting started and will change the world, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky told Sarah Lacy at PandoMonthly in San Francisco tonight.

“The sharing economy is incredibly profound,” Chesky said. In such an economy, large groups of people share utilities, goods, or services, such as accommodation (in the case of Airbnb) and private transportation (Lyft, Uber, Zipcar). Right now it’s written off like it’s a Web movement, he said, as if it’s a thing that’s happening “inside of the Internet.”

But the etymology of the sharing economy can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, he said. The Industrial Revolution created a multi-hundred-year world where everything was the same, he said. The sharing economy is something bigger than just “the sharing economy,” he said. “What it is is the thing after mass production.”

Now is only “Day Two” of the sharing economy, he said, and in the near future any business can be turned on its head. (A few days ago, prompted by the Avis acquisition of Zipcar, AOL founder Steve Case opined that the sharing economy had come of age.) For instance, Chesky said, soon Uber might have more cars than there are cabs in San Francisco.

“The sharing economy is a form of trade,” he said. “It’s an economy that just brings people together.”

I'll put this in the "This might be important but I'm a late adopter" file.