 Let me just tell you just before we start, my apologies if my back is to you but I have no option, I'm going to swing from time to time. But do shout or I'll get other people to tell me if you want to intervene. This is about a conversation. All of you know probably what we're talking about, but some of you may be intrigued as well about where the way things are going but I do want this to be a conversation if possible. That's why this in the round works so well. So what I'm going to do is invite our guests to talk about what they're doing and also the cutting edge of where there are already problems emerging or issues emerging which are actually strengthening but also challenging some of the models which have been developed around the world. And I want as many contributions from you as possible and so I will be asking for that. So I will be swinging looking to see who wants to intervene at some point or you can pass me a piece of paper if you want from behind. So I apologise that you're looking at the back of my head. Good. Well, welcome everybody. We've got an hour for this session and this is about the on-demand economy and it's about sharing. It's about peer-to-peer. It's about on-demand platforms, how they're shifting consumption patterns. Many of you and many of you watching on the web stream will probably be using this now as a matter of course but which way is the business model developing? Three years ago, four years ago, we wouldn't even been talking about the kind of things we're talking about today. It really has been a kind of rocket launch of a new sector of the economy and a very successful sector of the economy in virtually all parts of the world. And it's being called the gig economy rather than work. Is it employment? What kind of occupation is being developed for the people who are involved in some of the areas that we're going to be talking about today? These are fascinating and challenging times, particularly if you're in what in the airline business would be called a legacy airline but if you're in the legacy business of providing bed and breakfast or hotel accommodation or a taxi company and making vast amounts out of the licensing. Now all that is being challenged in ways which we're going to talk about this morning. The valuations are extraordinary, of course. And let me just remind you of the kind of valuations there are. The market value of Airbnb, it may have changed, of course, but the latest figure I have is 10 billion. You may want to change that in a moment. Didi Daiche at 8.8 billion, Uber 41.2 billion dollars and lifted $2.5 billion and Uber claims to create 20,000 jobs every month on the platform. Are they jobs or is it work? What is the status of those who are working in these new on-demand platforms? And of course there's a lot of resentment from existing businesses who are being put under enormous pressure, feeling resentful, but having to face up to this new reality. Let me introduce the four panellists we have here today because I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves and explain for the benefit of those of you who don't know quite what they maybe do exactly what their business is about. Nathan Blacharczyk, welcome. You are from Airbnb, you're the co-founder and the chief technology officer. A lot of people know about Airbnb, but just in one minute explain for those of who've never decided to test you, go on the website and book an overnight accommodation, what you do. Airbnb allows individuals to rent their primary home when they're not using it. That might mean an extra bedroom, that might mean the entire place. Today 1.5 million properties are now available to travelers and it's just as easy to book these homes as a hotel. And this summer, as many as 1 million guests per night were doing this. Why are they doing this? It's a way to experience a destination differently, a more local experience, it's a way of experiencing more personal hospitality by connecting with the local, the host who owns the home. Is evaluation correct, 10 billion? It's actually 25 now. Since when? Since about June. Okay, but when you started this out, did you expect it to explode in the way it has take off like a rocket? It's been about seven and a half years. I think the first year was very difficult. Nobody expected it to succeed then, but since 2009 it's been up and to the right. What is the critical thing which has made this work for you? I think the critical thing is a compelling value proposition. It's a different product, it's fundamentally different than what was available before. It's not a substitute for a hotel, it's something entirely different, which stresses cultural exchange, the meeting of people, the experiencing of residential neighbourhoods and all the great local shops that exist in those neighbourhoods. All right, thanks. We'll be back with you in a moment. Let's go to Stefan Krug. He's the real chief executive of Upwork USA. What is Upwork? Upwork is a new name and seemingly a new company, but it's actually the merger of two fairly established Silicon Valley-based companies. There was a company called Elance which was founded in 1998 and a company called Odesk which was founded in 2005. And two years ago we merged the two companies and just relaunched them as a single new platform a few months ago. And to be clear what you do. Yeah, so what do we do? We are a marketplace for freelance work. So our mission is to connect businesses of all sizes across the world with freelance talents irrespective of location, faster and more efficiently than before. And what does that mean? It means that at any point in time on the site we have about 100,000 open jobs, about 30,000 new freelancers sign up on the site every week. We process about a billion dollars of work every year right now. And we do this across 75 different work categories. So pretty much anything that you can do in front of a PC or a mobile device from customer support all the way to data science and everything in between can be done on our site. And we do this for millions of people every year. Connecting four million businesses with 10 million freelancers right now. Tell us though what is it? Work? Employment? What is it that you're providing? You've used several different terms, several different words there. So it's freelance work. What that means is you can sign up on our site without committing to become an employee of us or an employee of anybody else for that matter. However, what we find more and more is freelancers that are realizing this is a new way of managing your career and they actually quit their day to day job and they start to exclusively work on the platform. And whether that means they work for one client's fun extended period of time and essentially exclusively with that client or whether they take on many many small gigs and potentially several of them in parallel is really a matter of choice and depends on people's desires and preferences. Okay, we're going to open that area up because it still is a major problem for you. What about what you've found in the market the niche you've found in the market after all big organizations like Manpower have been doing exactly this and making vast amounts of money. What are you doing which is different? So, you know, like, you know, just like Nathan was saying about Airbnb. I mean, this is not an overnight success. You know, we've been at this for a decade now. And I think there's, you know, three components that have made us successful. One is getting to really understand what is the customer need both on the freelancer side and on the client side and really building a compelling product that meets those needs in a very unique way. The second one I would say is getting to liquidity which tends to be a really big topic for marketplaces. You know, you need to have enough supply in order to attract the demand. You need to have enough demand to attract the supply. How do you get that spin well started and how do you maintain it moving forward and doing this in a fast moving job market? You know, the jobs that exist today on our site did not even exist in the world for many of them 10 years ago. So how do you keep evolving this? And I think the third one is, you know, being patient and being there when the market is ready for you. You know, I think the idea of the founders of this company back in the 90s, brilliant idea but too early for what people were willing to do and it's now starting to become really mainstream. And you see this younger generation, you know, the millennials, the YGLs that are in this room, usually it resonates with them really well. The younger generation really aspires for this type of career. They don't want the 9 to 5 job working with the same employer or needing to be on-premise all the time. They like the flexibility, they like the independence and the control they have of being in control of their own debt. So you are redefining work and its value and what people want to do and how much money they expect for it? In a very visionary sense, yes. Okay. Right. Let's now move headsets on if you're in English or another language. And Tchengywe, who's founder, chairman of the board and chief executive for Didi Kwaithi and also Didi Kacib which is essentially in English, take a car. So tell us how you developed your business. Thank you, Mr Moderator. So Didi, three days ago, we changed our name in Chinese from Didi to Didi Chuxing which means Didi Mobility. We would like to make use of internet to connect people, vehicles and all the other means of transportation. We are advocating the pooling of cars. So as to make use of something like buses to enable transportation for more commuters going to and back from work in order to improve efficiency and the experience of mobility and commuting. Three years ago, we had 8 million drivers on our platform and 200 million users. Everyday we are serving 10 million consumers. So we have enjoyed rapid growth. Say rapid, how rapid. Give me an idea, 10 million at the moment. What was it say six months ago? Well, about half a year ago, well, one year ago, we only had the taxi service on our platform without a private car service or dedicated private car service. Around five months ago, we started to have a non-taxi private car service for the commuters. And three months ago, we had a kind of car pooling service. It's kind of a C2C model like Airbnb. Around one month ago, we started to roll out the bus service. With the internet, there's more information symmetry. You will be able to know when the bus will come and there will be seats for everybody and it's point to point. Every month we're growing a lot. Is this involved in your mind? Has demand been pushing it or have you dictated the framework which you believed would work? How flexible have you had to be? Day one, we simply want to roll out a taxi software. Three days ago, no platform could connect all the taxis. Uber in the United States started with private car services. But in China at that time, there was huge taxi penetration. We would like to roll out mobile application for a taxi app in order to address information symmetry. But then during the peak hours, no matter how many taxis you have, there's still more demand than supply. Then we started to roll out more service like private cars, the pooling, a pooled cars. And then the road resources, the availability of a road has become the biggest bottleneck, hence the bus service. So it's a step-by-step fashion. Okay, and already you've changed the identity of what you're doing to mobility, not just car, mobility. Right, now let's look at the framing of this from the intellectual or the academic point of view as you've tried to sort of define the models. Aaron, welcome. You're from the Rosenfaculty at New York University. Aaron Senderarjan. What's your analysis of what's happening with this gig economy? And before I go to Aaron, what I'd like to do then is come to several of you in the audience and ask what's on your mind about the way this on-demand economy is going because I can respond to the demand in this room to find out what's on your mind about where it's heading. Aaron, what's your analysis of where this is going? Is there now a clear business model? Absolutely. I think what we're seeing is the emergence of a new family of alternatives to the institutional provision of stuff. We're transitioning from getting the goods and services that we want from a company and moving towards getting these goods and services from peer-to-peer platforms. And what this does is that it makes supply crowd-based. Like you have a million and a half hosts on Airbnb, you've got 10 million drivers on DD, you've got like 4 million freelancers on Upwork. So the crowd becomes like the source of supply. The peer-to-peer platform becomes the conduit to sort of fulfilling the demand. We start to blur the lines between personal and professional in the provision of commercial services. So an Airbnb host is not a professional hotelier. A sort of a DD car-sharing driver may not be a professional driver. Perhaps a lot of the freelancers on Upwork did not do this for a living before they started doing it on Upwork. And so this is at the heart of all of the regulatory challenges that the sector has faced, this blurring of lines between personal and professional. But what we're also doing is that we are increasing the impact of capital and of labour, the spare capacity in people's cars, the spare capacity in people's homes, the spare cycles of people's time. We start to increase the impact of that capital and that labour and therefore lead to sort of a more efficient production model. But along the way, what ends up happening is that we redefine what it means to have a job. I think we're used to... You still use the word job, do you? Yep. Well, like you know, I use the word job as a very 20th century word. I still have a job. I also work for perhaps the only company here whose valuation was the same last year as it is today. And so I'm very much sort of a part of that economy. So we can't talk about a professor as having a gig anymore. Well, professors have always sort of had gigs on the side. And so we've been a lot more entrepreneurial, but we sort of do it from the safe confines of a full-time job. But what I think will happen in a decade, not just in my profession, but in a lot of others, is that you're going to be constructing a portfolio of work, some of which are making a living. A lot of people who host on Airbnb may not think of this as work. If you give a person a ride to work on the way to sort of... If you give a person a ride, you may not think of this as equivalent to a job. And so you sort of assemble different gigs, you assemble different tasks. And collectively that will be a substitute for a bigger and bigger fraction of the population from doing the same thing like every day, eight hours a day, five days a week, and getting a salary from someone. Do you think mindsets are changing significantly? Is there a generational change in the mindsets at the moment? Is it underway? Has it already happened? I think that we are still in the early stages of it. If you ask someone who's in their 20s... Like someone my age is more likely to talk about who they work for. Someone 20 years younger than me is more likely to talk about what they're working on. And so there is sort of a mindset of not working for one person, but working on projects. But we're sort of still in this liquidity-building phase of this. Like, you know, we're taking on sort of an industrial sort of setup that has been built over many decades, right? And, you know, as Stefan pointed out about Upwork over the last decade, they've built liquidity. With Airbnb and with DD, this liquidity building is far more challenging. Because it has to be done sort of city by city, locality by locality. And so it's going to sort of play out over the next three or four years before they sort of, you know, get up to capacity and start to be sort of a really effective substitute for what would have been industrially provided. And this issue of collaborative consumption now? Yes. I mean, like some people call it collaborative consumption. Some people call it the shared. What do you call it? I call it the sharing economy because it maximises the number of people who know what I'm talking about. But if I had to choose a term, I would choose crowd-based capitalism because that's really what it is. It's capitalism. It's a new sort of... It's the evolution of capitalism that is very fundamentally crowd-based. The supply is crowd-based right now. Over the next decade, blockchain technologies may make the market-making crowd-based as well. And so it's a very exciting time. All right, let's just have a quick reaction. I think this is something we're spending another minute on, which is the fact that we talk about on-demand economy, sharing economy, like these are one thing and the same thing. And in fact, I think there's a lot of diversity in terms of what's going on under the hood. And there's certainly some themes that apply to all of them. But when we get into the specific issues, I think the answers to those issues are very specific to the individual models. I mean, certainly each of our businesses are very different business models. They have some things in common. And I was struck just even by talking about DD. There's four models right within DD. You have professional taxis, you have individuals offering their cars, you have carpooling, and now you have buses all within one company. And each of those are going to have separate issues. So I think it's important to acknowledge that. And when you think about, in the last year, the term on-demand economy has risen up and somewhat replaced sharing economy. They're being used interchangeably. The difference I see in these two is on-demand economy really stresses the immediacy, speed. And speed is relevant whether it's peer to peer or consumer to business. It's just as relevant to taxis. And so you see the on-demand being applied to everything including laundry and groceries and food delivery. Sharing economy refers to the idea that there are folks with assets, things that they have sunk costs in. And technology now allows these individuals to monetize a slice of that and not be stuck owning with no way to get back a stream of income from it. These are different things. Let me do a reality check here before I open it up immediately. First of all, on Airbnb, for example, in many countries or some countries in the country I come from, the insurance companies are saying, don't do anything with Airbnb because actually not Airbnb specifically, but the insurance companies are saying it invalidates the insurance if someone uses their capacity overnight and rents it through you. In some cases that may be true of existing policies, but this is actually an opportunity for insurance companies to offer a new product. Are you seeing that happening already? We are seeing that. So insurance companies have modified their policies so that you can buy a slightly more expensive policy to get more coverage. And I think you're going to see more of this happening as they realize how big the market is. When the market's small, they're not going to offer this product and it's going to be about saying no. But once they realize there's enough demand, enough interest, there's going to be more a realization that this is actually an opportunity for them. So there are waves affecting other areas like insurance already from your business. Yes, that's beginning to happen and in the meantime also companies like Airbnb we can bridge the gap. So we also offer insurance for specific use cases. What about the argument on Upwork and also for others who are in the same business as you about the nature of employment and already you're under pressure now because of what you're offering and what you're defining or redefining because there are those who say what you're offering is employment status. Yeah, you know, so you know, as I would mention, like we operate a very global platform and so it's hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer. You know, we have freelancers in 160 countries. I think what you're referring to specifically is there's been a lot of debate in the US and the presidential campaign coming up in particular has made it a pretty hot topic. You know, the way we look at this is the law is the law. It may be something that you feel is antiquated. It may be something that, you know, there's a lot of debate around right now. Let me step back. There's two, you know, when we talk about jobs and gigs and all that stuff, these are coin terms. They are not legal terms, right? In the US there's only two types of work. There's employment, which is defined by a form called W2. And there's independent contractors, which is defined by another tax form called 1099, right? And there are relatively clear laws, even though, you know, like in many cases, there's a grazing in between. There's relatively clear laws that says, you know, this specific engagement between these two parties should be classified as employment or should be classified as independent contracting. And I think the debate that's happening right now is are these laws just antiquated and should we just change them? I don't think there's much debate as to can we apply them? Do they, you know, are they sufficiently well explained that we can apply them as a company? Do you think they have to be changed? So let me just be clear, like right now our main goal is to comply with the law, right? So what we offer is we offer to mainly our enterprise customers because that's usually what it applies to. You know, we have a significant part of our business now that is Fortune 500 companies that are, you know, working with hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands of freelancers at any point in time. And the question for them is can you make sure that we comply with the law, right? And so we offer a classification service that, you know, in every country where they need to operate determines for every engagement whether the work should be classified as employment or classified as independent contracting and if it needs to be classified as employment we can put the freelancer on a payroll in companies. So you were talking about staffing companies earlier. Typically that's where those staffing companies come into play. They put the specific freelancer on payroll for that particular engagement. So to be clear, are you finding workarounds or are you being constrained by this? No, I mean it's not workarounds. We're complying with the law, right? So the law is very clear, you comply with the law. Now does it mean that the law is inconvenient in many cases it is and we'll definitely be extremely interested in working with regulators in every country to say hey, as this thing emerges maybe there's a way to change the system to make it. I mean ultimately at the end of the day we're creating jobs for people. Whether you call them employment, work, gigs, whatever. We're giving income to people. It is in the best interest of government to make those jobs be as frictionless as possible and to have laws that are clear and are comparing for everybody in the food shake. Cheng Wei, do you get any pushback here in China? Any restrictions? Is the law creating difficulties for you? Is the system creating difficulties for you? Doubtlessly, the rules today was established for business before. For example, the business status situation 50 years ago. But now we have seen the trend for example whether we call it shared economy or on-demand economy to enable it. The new business models appeared before the policies were made and I believe it is the same in every country. However, the consensus is formed. Everyone has noticed this so I believe the policy makers will catch up. They will catch up at the speed that you are developing business. In fact, Beijing traffic is actually very slow. So you will get to your destination. Be it slow or fast is not the core issue. The trend is more important. The business models development will show that the value that we demonstrate to the consumers, to the economies. Once the policy makers realize that they will catch up about three years ago when we first launched our app. It was illegal. People were confused and they were reluctant to use it. Thinking, is it going to be safe? How can we use a taxi or find a taxi using an app? How do we use it? Previous regulations were formulated to regulate taxis pulling aside the road. 80% of the consumers or taxi drivers two years later started to use, depend their business on the apps. So the new policies later on actually encouraged the apps and to replace the traditional model of calling a call center to cat a taxi. So I think China is definitely trying to embrace the world's trend. Comment and then I'm going to open it up. I mean frankly. Okay, listen. Just hang on. This is a non-demand session. Let's go right in first. All right. So I think what we're doing is really sort of rebuilding the trust and sort of protection infrastructure. Something that was created for an industrial economy and has to be reshaped for this new world of cloud based capitalism. I'm not surprised that Airbnb and DD and Uber and like all of these platforms have hit up against regulatory roadblocks, have hit up against labour law roadblocks because in some sense regulation is always sort of backward looking and innovation sort of goes forward. And so you're going to hit up against these barriers frequently. I think a threat that ties a lot of like what has been said over the last few minutes together is that we put in place this sort of system of trust that had brand as part of it, had government regulations as part of it, had particular sort of insurance structures as part of it for a world in which you went to a company to get your stuff. Now you're going to appear. You're going to someone operating through a platform and so the regulations have to be rebuilt. The balance between what does the brand provide, what does the government provide, what does insurance provide, what does sort of user feedback provide, that is being shaped now and a similar thing is happening on the worker protection side. All right, Nathan. Yeah, so the growth in our companies is driving the regulatory conversation which I think is the way it should be. You want the regulators not to be creating regulation in the abstract. You want them to be responding to what is happening in the real world and you wouldn't expect the regulators to be the innovators. It should be in response to what the innovators are doing and these things have to happen in tandem, in parallel. But one thing has to happen before the other and I must say when we were starting out back in 2009, 2010, even 2011, no regulators wanted to talk about this. We were eager to have a conversation but we hadn't had enough success to make it a priority to have the conversation. And so I think what's playing out is only natural and it's kind of the right order of events. Maybe just zooming out for a moment here. There has been a net increase in economic activity as a result of our businesses and that's because more consumers are spending money. More consumers are taking taxis and other kinds of rides as opposed to driving themselves. More consumers are travelling than they were before. This is fundamentally a good thing. This is increasing the economy. At the same time on the supply side there's been a huge increase in supply. There are now many more rooms available or there are now many more people who are drivers. This is a great thing and it's an opportunity because with this net increase of economic activity the question for the regulators and for all of us is how should that increase in incremental economic activity be distributed among society? And the good news is more of society is now participating on the supply side. And oftentimes the people participating are middle class citizens who need this. You're not seeing all the wealth generation being funneled to fewer entities. You're seeing it being funneled increasingly to more more peers in the economy. And it's really interesting that all of the research that I've done on measuring and projecting economic growth from the sharing economy from peer-to-peer platforms suggests that the fundamentals are clear. You've got increased efficiency. You've got increased capital impact. You've got increased labour impact. And so you will see an increase in productivity. You've got increased variety. So you will see an increase in consumption. But what's really interesting is that the growth is not just there but it's inclusive growth. A disproportionate fraction of the value creation that comes from companies like DD or Airbnb or Upwork flows to people who are below median income. These are the people who are renting rather than buying and saving money. These are the people who are finding work. These are the people who might sort of buy a better apartment or buy a better car because they can now sort of amortise some of their payments by sort of repurposing it not just as a personal use asset but as a commercial asset. All right. Let's. Can you just hold far because I'd like to get some views. How many people do you want to interview? One, two behind me. How many others? Three, four, five, six, eight. OK. Well, I'd like to get us three or four ideas now and then keep your ideas brief please. So our panellists can talk. This is another platform here. Right. I'm going to go to those behind me first of all. Do I have a microphone please? Could you bring it over here? And also over there as well. There are a couple of people including gentlemen at the front. Please. Be quite brief please. OK. I'm. Is that working? Yeah. I'm trying to correspond for Germany's business daily, Hanna's Buds, and I have a question for Chung Wei. You stated that you want to give the best experience to consumers but the market was originally divided to Didi and Qwydee as two big companies. Now there's only one controlling more than 90% of the market. So you have the monopoly not only for for a shared economy with cars but also for taxi hailing. How do you still want to give good service to consumers if there is no competition? Right. One more question please. OK. I'm from Bloomberg Business Week but I still want to ask a question in Chinese. OK. My question is for Nathan from Airbnb. Airbnb is entering China and here in China there's lack of trust when you're living others properties. So when Airbnb comes to China how would you adapt yourself to the unique culture and regulatory environment here? First, that first thing about the new monopoly that you've generated. OK. Oh, thank you. Let me talk about my view on the shared economy first and foremost before answering your question. Because there are a lot of other questions here. OK. Didis, by knowing the monopoly we are facing the fiercest competition. We are having lots of challenges we are growing out of competition and we're also in our starting stage and well, scale is the key for the tax economy. There used to be two platforms as you have rightly mentioned. I will try DD first but then a second time I will try QID but with the unified platform it's greater convenience for the passenger and for the driver there's also greater convenience. For example, they used to have to keep two applications running but now it's just one platform it's more convenient for the drivers as well. That's an economy of scale and greater efficiency with only one core center unifying the services. Yes, there's a lot of competition and we are becoming stronger out of competition. Thank you. Nathan, the question there about Airbnb in China. And the question of trust has been one since day one. I mean that was the first thing that came to mind in 2008 as we were building this business and it's something we tackled through our review system that allows individuals to accumulate reputation and that system has taken us quite far. It's led to our success in almost every country of the world. Will we have to do something in China? Perhaps. What we do to build reputation is no longer one thing. Certainly on the surface it is the review system but on the back end it's a team of 250 trust and safety specialists. It's machine learning and a lot of technology. So we'll continue to grow that and customize that as appropriate for the China market. Okay, right. Let's move down here please. Microphone at the front and there's another someone behind as well. I have- Where are you from please? Sorry. My name is Austin O'Kerry. I work with Computer Warehouse Group Headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. I'm an entrepreneur in residence at Columbia Business School, New York. I have a question for Sandra Jan and Kastriel. The issue with this sharing economy or whether it's work is that if someone is going to work for a company they are going to go to a school to satisfy themselves to qualify to be employed by that company and they've gone to some rigour. Now with this one these are freelancers so is it likely that this we just stay at a low level economy like drivers and hotel attendants and so on? Is it going to also have top level people like doctors and so on in there? All right, that's a really important question. Okay, the level of skill what's your view on- Thank you Austin. Can we move the microphone back to whoever- Yeah, the gentleman behind who wants it please. So I can probably give you a few numbers. About 80% of our users have a college degree on the freelance side and about 20% have a graduate or postgraduate degree you know master's PhD. That is in just about any country in the world way way way high end compared to the average in the country. In terms of you know like what does it mean for education I think that's the key issue right is the education system the way it was in the 19th and 20th century. You know like the stuff you learn when you're in school when you're 20 years old is to prepare you for jobs that you're going to have 10 years from now and in most you know especially the STEM you know the science and technology fields most of the stuff you learn at school the computer languages you learn the math that you learn will no longer exist by the time you're in the workplace and so there's a need for the schools to prepare you to learn learn about learning as opposed to learning a very specific skill and you need to be prepared as I think the younger generation to learn on an ongoing basis for the rest of your life and you'll see a lot of synergies I think between work platforms like Upwork and online learning platforms you know all of the MOOCs of the world you may have seen as an example LinkedIn acquired a company called linda.com a few months ago and it's that you know ongoing cycle of people learn something they do some work they realize that they to go their career they need to learn something else then they do more work and that's how they grow their career moving forward and just just to add two quick points to that this is like offshoring it's not going to be just low skill it's going to span the skill spectrum this transition from traditional jobs to on demand what you're going to see happen is that you know education or like like the the kind of education that is delivered from a university like mine is going to play less of a credentialing role and going to start to sort of like you know emphasize more sort of like you know entrepreneurship and design and things that prepare you for a world of micro entrepreneurs I think that your online portfolio the set of things that you have done if it becomes portable especially is also going to be an increasingly important part of your credentialing so you will sort of seek work with not just like you know here's where I qualified from but here is the portfolio of work that I've done and this won't just apply to photographers or movie makers who already have portfolios but to consultants and to sort of computer programmers as well Che Wei what's your view about the effect on skilling and qualifications undoubtedly it's very important but it depends it depends on the demand in terms of mobility there is a uniform credentialing system for the drivers driver license in contrast to a house truck service provider there are no standards whereby there are no standards on our platform credentialing is not a problem we have some basic credentialing such as obtaining a driver's license but for a higher level of service it depends on the review system like Airbnb has offered so with baseline credentialing we can differentiate amongst different service providers in terms of their capabilities of service and level of service Nathan and Airbnb about qualifications and that particularly important point well you know I think I think we should always cite that what all of our businesses do is first and foremost give people the option to have a supplemental income right it's not like first and foremost it's saying this is a full-time opportunity it's not necessarily a replacement for the job but it does offer everybody a source of supplemental income and that's really powerful Airbnb for example was was founded during the start of the recession and many of our first users came to Airbnb because they had just lost their job or they needed to make extra money to pay the bills and I think that's a powerful economic enabler that applies to everybody including those who have invested in a college education who have skills whether it be a medical doctor or not everybody is looking for extra income even Arun said he's got side gigs that he does as a professor and this has been true for decades that's nothing new I think there's a separate issue here that has nothing to do with on-demand or sharing economy which is just truly just not enough jobs in the world it's just not and so when there's not enough jobs people come to services like ours trying to make a full paycheck using something that is primarily designed first and foremost as a source of supplementary income and it's true many people are able to get by and are able to piece it together and it's a big help to them but I shouldn't think anyone should be mistaken that this is something that's meant to replace traditional jobs traditional jobs are important they play a role that our services are not meant to fulfill but I also think our services add tremendous incremental value on top of the traditional job it's almost like we're shifting the a larger fraction of the population to being capital owners people who sort of make a living not just by providing labour but by providing sort of access to their capital okay right how many more people one two three four five six okay i'm just trying to time we've got 20 minutes to run please microphone please name is Eric Montero work for AMIA we're a loyalty marketing company global based in Canada question I have is about the nature competition in the sharing of the on-demand economy you know these businesses are by definition intrinsically network based unlike the industrial economy so are we likely to see a one horse race in every space that gets claimed and if we are what do you think I'm just going to ask you to can you repeat that can we have a little more sound in here please yeah the question is about the nature competition in in the sharing economy given that the businesses are intrinsically network based so are we likely to see a one horse race in every space that gets claimed and if and if we are what are the implications of that that's a really important question I mean are you a one horse in your business I think like everybody else here probably we track our competitors I haven't looked at the list recently but last time I checked we had about 250 you know there's thousands of ways you can you've done well could they do well and there's a ton of them that do very well we have a competitor based in Australia that is publicly listed there's a company here in China that's doing really well I think the premiere yesterday actually mentioned that company during his speech you know there's all sorts of businesses that are striving I mean the underlying sizes of the markets that we serve are so gigantic you know so we're going to do a billion dollars you know like this year roughly let's say contingent work globally is a trillion dollars right total work globally is about 25 trillion dollars right so if you want to take your market share I know I can't even do the math in my head but it's on the order of 0.05% or something like that you can't really say that you don't have competition when you have 0. something percent market share or something Nathan do you think you're riding a wave at the moment it could all come crashing maybe you may be faced by a competitor who's better than you so you know I think the interesting thing here is that scale and our businesses bring efficiency and that benefits not just the marketplace but all the participants in the marketplace so both the guests and the hosts in our case benefit by our global scale the hosts are able to better sell out their calendar and find guests and guests are better able to find what they're looking for but are you aware of those who are pressing you who could actually be better than you in the end sure so so even though scale is bringing efficiency the market still starts to segment in interesting ways so there are certainly domestic players in China that are gaining scale there are players that focus on luxury that are gaining scale so even despite our success in our huge scale others are finding they're niches too and those those businesses are growing quite quickly Chey Gweig you've had a great success very quickly could you be marginalised by someone who's as successful as you or many who are as successful as you in other words competitors you see coming who could actually be a real threat to you well as a man of fact the internet-based competition is fiercer than traditional industries in terms of competition if internet is just a channel then ultimately the bigger the scale the bigger the platform the greater the odds for winning but in China that's not the case we're going to have lots of differentiation it's not just the channel it's penetrating the industries like e-commerce in China we have had many different platforms around e-commerce so at the very beginning it was competition around channel but later on it focuses on the specifics of the services like the types of properties you can offer as a hotel service provider it's a different stage of competition in this market I mean businesses been long on history of companies who didn't see what was coming until it was too late I think there was complacency a couple of years ago I think that any industry that might be threatened in some way by a sharing economy platform has sort of sat up and taken notice I think many of these businesses realize that you know they can comfortably co-exist and maybe co-opt some of the aspects of the new business so the hotels know that they can coexist with Airbnb the automobile companies are looking at companies like DD and Uber and saying is this the future of my industry and just to add to sort of the point on network effects from earlier I think that what DD or Uber sort of faces in terms of it being a one-horse race is very different from Airbnb there will be geographic winners definitely like you know sort of in the ride sharing or point-to-point urban transportation market whereas with Airbnb the segmentation is going to be more like you know there'll be luxury there'll be like you know sort of sort of full service and then there'll be sort of casual I should check with Nathan are you thinking of going into the hotel business no okay right please can I just add one last thing you know I think the thing that's also really interesting about platforms is the value chain doesn't need to be pure competition or pure we we co-opied with a lot of companies a lot of our competitors source their talent on our platform we partner really closely in the enterprise space with traditional staffing firms so it's not necessarily like a zero sum game where you know somebody goes and destroys us or we go destroy somebody else there's a lot of value that is created by you know taking the best of two worlds and creating something new out of it okay good right let I what I'm going to do is I'm going to take three or four interventions now in the last 15 minutes so we at least know the kind of things that are on your mind please keep them brief I'm the founder of the WeChat platform and we have the biggest community consultants in China so my question will be actually I see a lot of lifestyle or daily life business a share economy like BD and Airbnb but my question is about the work the professional service is there any possibility that a share of economy can up to the difficult or complex professional service like lawyer even consultants can they have a platform to do that is there any possibility or timeline or your plan it's a professor all right we'll come back to that in a moment can you pick it up on the consultant please pass it back and then we'll go to here thank you thank you for a very interesting conversation I'm Maria Rancar from the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce in Sweden I would like the panel to elaborate a little bit on trust and the peer-to-peer economy two questions do you know if there is an increased level of trust in general in societies where the peer-to-peer economy is growing and then an Airbnb specific question is it easier for you to access an enter a market in a country such as Sweden for example where the general level of trust is considered rather high beforehand Nathan note that will you can you move the microphone forward to the lady on the end and then to the gentleman there so anar Simpson from Mozilla and I'm interested from the learning perspective you touched on the educational bit where you know credentialing will be sort of different but what I'm interested in is the idea of literacy because you know your business relies on taxi drivers who can use and write apps like they can actually work with apps as well as yours right on a web platform and so is there something about web literacy like just basic web literacy that wouldn't give somebody who lives say at the foothills of a mountain that has a gorgeous space but because they don't know about Airbnb or can't do it now literacy being a constraint behind you please thank you my name is Kumar I'm in a tech services company question of course three questions one of course is about data security privacy my personal phone cell phone I didn't want to give the information somebody I know the taxi driver has my number he knows well people we know where I'm staying security issues are there any incidences which are you know which come up like that which has been you know threatened to your business you know because of this whole thing around data security and privacy the second question was around the model of the you talked about the shift to the new capitalism model is this model sustainable as a business itself or is it just only valuations that's just driving it and just getting funded but how sustainable is this economic model by but say at the core of it so that's the second question I had third one also about regulatory thing around this part-time job so you talked about so what exactly is the is the sustainability of that of your economic model because people can then go on employ those people in the future so you will not be in business afterwards all right three questions that'll be enough right we've got a lot of questions there which have been put on the agenda can you pick the ones which you are there are several for you Nathan specifically on Airbnb first of all about data security Ashley Madison are not represented here and after all what they've done online has been question but it's been rather revealing and it's caused a lot of problems but I use that not in a facetious way but simply to highlight the problem of data security I think there's two aspects to this question I think one is a general one around IT data security in general and that's something that any IT firm has to have top of mind increasingly and every day you hear about this in the news so for that reason it's top of mind for us and it's an area of extreme investment you invest on engineering on that oh incredible yeah it's it's the biggest concern in the engineering organization is understanding that every every month the number of attacks on the internet are going up people are getting more sophisticated and you've got to be upping your game and that should be true of any organization now having this top of mind the second part of this question now I think is around with our scale we are trusted custodians of user data and I think with government there is a temptation when they see a lot of data in one place to kind of dip into that and and say shouldn't you be giving that data to us and I think this brings up some sticky questions you know where do you draw the line for reasonable data sharing with government and where do you say you know this goes beyond what users would want their data to be used for and I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question but I think it's something everybody needs to figure are you under pressure from tax authorities for example in some cases I mean there was a high profile case a year ago in New York where the Attorney General was demanding user data and we pushed back very aggressively on that and eventually we used to compromise where they narrowed the scope of the data they were requesting and I think it was a win for everybody but I think the lesson there was this had to be a conversation and a negotiation and that's the way it should be as opposed to it's very also easy for government to demand and for companies to give up data without having that negotiation given the nature of the power Chuck Wei that fascinating question about literacy about how much that is a limiter to this developing and you were talking about I think the developing nations as much as anything else and also communities where literacy is not as widely available in other words people are not as literate so therefore they cannot use your services and cannot participate in them as a matter of fact literacy rate in China is actually very high but to be able to use DD app you don't necessarily have to be able to read for a driver you don't have to necessarily read the screen because everything will have an audio broadcast and there is a very big button to actually enable you to turn on the mic or not so a good app or good product would be enable a certain community or group to be able to learn how to use the app at extremely low cost you don't have to teach them or send them into the training course to learn to how to use it in urban China we haven't certainly encountered similar restraints but in the future when we map out we will certainly look into how to cut the cost for example for the senior citizens for people who struggle to use apps we will focus on them and try to develop more tailored program for them so particularly on that point about consultants and also security please as well picking up what Nathan's already talked about sure so you know the question about consultants you know our job market as I mentioned it's you know 3000 skills 75 different categories and it spans from jobs that charge $3 an hour you know like data entry work for doctors in the US done by you know relatively low-skilled workers in emerging markets all the way to you know you mentioned data science we do a huge amount of data science because you know all of our companies are trying to hire data scientists based in Silicon Valley and there's only a handful of them meanwhile you've got incredibly talented data scientists in Eastern Europe and so it's a huge range right I mean we have people making $3 an hour we have people making $300 an hour you know we have people that do this as a completely part-time gig and they're happy to make $100 in the year and we have people that make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a year and you know one of the things that makes you know like this marketplace interesting and exciting is that you're trying to build you know an experience that is as good as possible for these you know dramatically different types of engagement where level of literacy is completely different the expectations in terms of skills and output are completely different and we're trying to support all of this stuff and ultimately you know it looks like the overall labor market in the world right I mean it's a pyramid there's a very small number of highly skilled work in the world and then there's a huge number of lower skilled work in the world and there's no particular reason why we'd want to focus on one subset more than the other Data security I've got to ask you about that because you know I've come back to what happened to Ashley Madison within a few days the chief executive had to resign quite apart from the business he was in the fact is confidence had been breached privacy had been breached it affected the brand and reputation yeah so I think somebody asked the question about trust I mean marketplaces are built on trust and the trust is you know essentially there's two types of trust right there's do users have confidence in the other users you know like it's a peer to peer platform so how do we create that sense of trust and then separately do users have trust in the company itself right and information security is definitely a key part of that you know you know you you mentioned Ashley Madison a couple of times but they're not exactly the only company that has had issues including very large well-known publicly traded marketplaces not to give any names but it's a high profile platform that's why I mentioned this and these are extremely important things so just like Nathan I used to be the CTO of my company and so we've spent a huge amount of money and we still do on keeping the platform secure you know doing penetration testing et cetera et cetera some of which is mandated to us you know we handle credit card numbers in a number of countries and different regulators in different countries mandate you know different levels of testing but some of it is I would say it's quote unquote self-inflicted meaning like it's in our own best interest to make sure that the data that we have about users the work that's getting done the earnings the financial details and all that stuff stay secure Aaron this business of trust again it's coming through in many of these questions absolutely Ashley Madison is actually an interesting example here because it's sort of a leading indicator of a platform that facilitates peer-to-peer interaction in the real world right based on confidentiality and secrecy and so you know I think some of the things that Airbnb some of the innovations from Airbnb are certainly sort of setting the standard for what the trust infrastructure is going to look like for sort of a successful peer-to-peer platform I think the fact that we are sort of you know providing commercial services by interacting with another person who is a quasi friend actually is raising the level of trust in society to sort of go back to the question we often take a leap of faith and trust when we meet a stranger this is something that human beings do whether you're on a date or whether you're sort of meeting someone for the first time and so as we facilitate that kind of behaviour in our everyday activities finding a place to stay getting a ride overall this will raise trust in society I also just wanted to say something real quick about complex let me ask are all these models durable enough to survive even if there were breaches of security absolutely see this is this is just the culmination of a bunch of changes that digital technology has been causing to the way that we organise economic activity over the last 30 years offshore ring was like you know an outsourcing was like you know one sign of it flexible forms of work but another sign of it and this is just the culmination of a new model of organising economic activity so it's certainly resilient certain professions like you know sort of lawyers doctors consultants we'll realise that they are naturally freelance and that they were sort of stuffed into this institutional framework and now that we have powerful peer to peer platforms for them that they will make the transition more easily than some other professions all right Aaron thank you I've got two minutes I'm going to have to stop on that one but what I'd like to think about security I'm just going to give you advance notice and I'll let you intervene in a moment but I'd just like to ask all four of you where you think your businesses or the market and the businesses will be in say a year or two from now given the explosive a way in which your projections are moving and the reality is moving not just in valuation but take up so I'll give you that advance warning but first Stefan so just yeah just to add to what Aaron just said in many cases we're not creating the demand right I mean people wanted to work with each other anyway and whatever system they would have used to engage with each other before was definitely quite insecure right so one of the benefits in using a platform like you know any of our platform is that we're adding this layer of security and trust that would otherwise make that relationship a lot more risky for people all right 30 seconds each Nathan share with us confidentially your business projections of where you think you're going to be no one's going to report it sure no problem okay your security is safe with us the thing that's probably most obvious is that the growth will continue so that should be no surprise I think what might be surprising to people though is I think there's a lot more to be done to building bridges with the other stakeholders and I say that as an opportunity remember that everything that we've done has been accomplished over the span of about seven years I mean a relatively short period of time a lot of progress is made so I'd say in a couple of years from now a lot more progress can be made specifically building some of the bridges that have yet to be built and you brought up the example of insurance right at the beginning you posed that as a problem but I think that's a huge opportunity challenge challenge challenge yes but it is a huge opportunity and I think our companies can partner with industry with broader society cities neighbors different stakeholders to create new kinds of value and make a more inclusive economy Cheng Wei what is the direction of where things are going what's in your what's it what do your instincts tell you at the moment two changes one Chinese as well as people from the world don't necessarily have to buy an automobile where cities won't allow them to own a vehicle so they will devote themselves into the share company people will start to use the third party vehicles to lower their cost to ensure better experiences without having to drive you new to accomplish more on the journey so that will be one thing so to own the economy to share an economy the second change the internet is only starting to integrate with or influence the mobility the platforms in the future will integrate all forms of transportation not only part some of the vehicles but all of the vehicles will the internet in the future will be able to give you a overall coordinator so that will be the second change buy a car Stefan quickly and then Aaron so let me give you this is really disruptive I'm going to give you a five-year projection and then I'm going to 15 seconds take a 20-year projection and you have more than 50 seconds you'll brave you'll brave so the five-year projection confidentially because we've announced it already is it took us 10 years to go from zero to a billion dollars we're going to go from one to 10 in the next five years and how this is going to happen is because we've just passed the innovator you know early adopter phase and we've become mainstream I'm willing to bet that there are people in this room here including people on this panel who are our customers right now and more of you are going to be our customers and I think one of the key questions for you guys frankly coming out of that meeting is you know what should my organization be thinking about in the next five years in terms of how I employ and particularly how I fight the war for talent because if you're not doing it and your competitors are doing it something else going to happen to you right so that's the next five years the next 20 years and this is obviously my personal opinion but I think there are some huge challenges profound changes that are going to happen to society and let me give you just a couple one is people have been in the last 100 years flocking to big cities the cost of living in san francisco has gotten to a point where even though we pay engineers you know two three times more than anywhere else in the world the cost of living is so high that they still you know struggle to live in san francisco people don't necessarily want to live in san francisco it's just where the jobs are right so project that you know 10 15 20 years out you'll see people moving back to you know second tier cities you'll see people using you know the idea and other services to commute from time to time to work but that's a pretty major change to society all right Aaron your last word please is there a danger of over confidence not in this sector I certainly sort of think that the confidence is sort of based on reality you know I see a huge expansion of the hospitality industry over the coming years as a greater a greater fraction of the world is able to enjoy some of the things that like you know used to be reserved for the privileged few I see a massive disruption of the automobile industry that is underway that is going to play out they understand it but you know I think it's going to shift market power away from the manufacturers and to the channels and I see a redefinition of like you know what we think of as a job and a need to sort of construct a new social safety net that recognises that a significant fraction of the world is going to be making a living sort of through gigs rather than through a full-time job and just one final point which is that by far China is the biggest market for the sharing economy right thanks Aaron thanks you thank you all you've been at a kind of gig session so thank you all very much indeed we look forward to next year