#PeersINC

[solarpunk-gnome]

By Cat Johnson

As “death star platforms” such as Airbnb and Uber continue their pursuit of global domination, an alternative is rising in its wake.

Platform cooperatives, which share the value they create with the users they depend on, are on the rise. As Shareable co-founder Neal Gorenflo writes in How Platform Co-ops Can Beat Death Stars Like Uber to Create a Real Sharing Economy, “Platform coops combine a cooperative business structure with an online platform to deliver a real-world service.”

Gorenflo asks, “What if Uber was owned and governed by its drivers? What if Airbnb was owned and governed by its hosts?” We don’t have to wait to find out. A growing number of platform cooperatives are making their presence known on a global scale. Below are just 11 platform co-ops that are changing the way people organize, run businesses, create value, and share the wealth. There are many more.

1. Fairmondo

Fairmondo is a digital, co-operative version of eBay, where sellers on the platform are also its owners. Launched by Felix Weth in Germany in 2013, the platform is, as Chelsea Rustrum writes, “rooted in an ethos of open source, open innovation, and a commons-based society. It has funded itself through a series of successful crowdfunding campaigns that have raised hundreds of thousands of Euros in member equity.”

To scale globally, the Fairmondo team plans to create an international network of country-based co-ops feeding into the Fairmondo platform.

2. Stocksy

Stocksy is a stock photo site where contributing photographers are also owners. A “highly curated collection” of royalty-free stock photos, the platform is a cooperative that believes in creative integrity, fair profit sharing, co-ownership, and every voice being heard. It’s a new twist on traditional co-ops. As they state on the website, “Think more artist respect and support, and less patchouli.”

Contributing Stocksy photographers receive 50% of a Standard License Purchase and 75% of an Extended License Purchase. Every Stocksy contributor receives a share of the company.

3. Backfeed

Backfeed is a platform to create platform cooperatives, all powered by the blockchain. Backfeed bills itself as, “a social operating system for decentralized organizations.” It enables massive, open-source collaboration without central coordination. Using a blockchain-based operating system, the Israeli company’s infrastructure comprises decentralized management tools, equity-sharing schemes, crowdsourcing mechanisms, and instruments for the collaborative evaluation and curation of content.

With a goal to enable the bootstrapping of decentralized organizations on top of the blockchain as easily as deploying a website, Backfeed can fuel a variety of ventures, including “decentralized journalism, insurance, ride-sharing applications and any other enterprise that would benefit from the decentralized, indirect coordination of large groups of individuals.”

4. Juno

Photo: Nancy Xu (CC-BY)

A ridesharing company that is taking on Uber, Juno has reserved 50% of its equity for platform drivers. The company is being built by an experienced team of startup veterans, including founder Talmon Marco, who sold his messaging app Viber to Rakuten for $900 million, and is well-funded with backing coming from Viber founders rather than outside VCs.

The New York City-based startup, which recently launched service in the Big Apple, is reportedly only taking a 10% commission of each ride (Uber takes 20-35%), and is giving drivers the option to be contractors or employees (if they want to be exclusive to Juno).

5. Union Taxi

Union Taxi in Denver, Colorado, a driver-owned taxi cooperative, represents a growing trend. Drivers are increasingly organizing taxi cooperatives for better pay and working conditions than what traditional taxi companies and Uber can offer. They also must compete successfully. Union Taxi appears to be doing both. They offer a convenient service with e-hailing (like Uber) and driver ownership and control of the business.

CWA (Communications Workers of America) Local 7777 helped the drivers form the cooperative and plays an ongoing support role. By driving for Union, cab drivers cut their car lease rate by two-thirds. As Lisa Bolton, president of the union told Shareable, “By far, the biggest advantage was the lease rate.” This enabled drivers to work less, “which gives them more time at home. They were taking home a lot more of their money that they were making, and everybody was contributing the same amount to the business.”

PDX Yellow Cab is a similar taxi cooperative in Portland, Oregon, where Somali cab drivers broke away from traditional cab companies to form their own—the first major Somali-owned business in Portland. Union Cab Cooperative in Portland is also fairly new (pictured above), though neither cooperative offer e-hailing yet.

6. VTC Cab

After Uber cut fares across Paris, some of its drivers created a competing service, VTC Cab. Modeled after Uber, the ride-sharing platform aims to give drivers more control over their business and provide passengers an opportunity to support a French company.

As the app’s founder, Mohammed Radi, told the Verge, “We want to re-establish and regain our rights over Uber. Uber is not representative of our community… They are a technology company which has no connection with the world of transportation. So they treat human beings like a number — you know, like a figure on a computer. And being a number, as a driver, it’s a very bad feeling.”

7. Modo

Modo is a Vancouver-based consumer car sharing co-op. Launched in 1997, with just two cars and 16 members, Modo has grown to 16,000 members and a fleet of over 500 sports cars, sedans, trucks, SUVs, vans and hybrids—all available to share at $4/hour through a smartphone app and website. Member-owners are shareholding members of the co-op which means they get a vote as well as the best rates for carsharing.

8. Timefounder

Timefounder is a “fair and elegant equity split system where you will love to wake up and work on projects you will end up owning with the rest of the team members.” The app allows founders to be fair with the people who invest time in a project and allows experts to invest time in projects and get future shares or others benefits. Based in Barcelona, the Timefounder team aims to “enable collaboration with fair equity split.”

9. Enspiral

Enspiral is a collective of social enterprises and freelancers that makes, uses, and distributes free apps for decision making and budgeting. Based in New Zealand, the platform, which is self-described as a “sort of a ‘DIY’ social enterprise support network,” has a goal to help their organization, as well as other organizations and movements, run democratically. As the website states, “If you’re an independent, entrepreneurial person with a deep commitment to service and social change and want to discover your own way to have an impact alongside like-minded people, Enspiral is fertile ground.”

10. Tapazz

Tapazz is a peer to peer carsharing co-op in Belgium. A recognized cooperative company, it enables shareholders who believe in the company’s social mission (to ensure a sustainable mobility society) to participate in its growth. Shareholders can invest, produce and create a transparent structure to ensure sustainable mobility. As an added bonus, Tapazz “offers space for co-creating and collaboration, so it really is a business of everyone.”

11. Peerby

Peerby is a Dutch neighbor-to-neighbor goods sharing platform. The company recently raised $2.2 million from users in a recent crowdfunding campaign, which makes users the majority shareholder class.

A certified B corp, Peerby plans to use the funds, which surpasses the total venture capital dollars the startup raised previously and makes it one of the most successful international crowdfunding campaigns ever, for product development and international expansion of a new business model named Peerby Go, with a specific focus on the UK and North America.

What are your favorite platform co-ops? Please share in the comments.

Cross-posted from Shareable.net and authored by Cat Johnson

[asymobi]

Zipcar Founder Robin Chase on the power of Peers Inc transportation

This latest Linkedin post from Robin Chase, Founder of Zipcar and Buzzcar, shows why she is so spot on the money for future innovations in mobility. The Peers Inc model is a perfect example of ‘asymmetric innovation’ in mobility - taxi services simply can’t compete with millions of currently unused passenger seats. 

"Lyft, a service just a year and a half old, announced yesterday that it had raised $250 million at an undeclared valuation, but likely at least double its previous valuation of $700 million. Uber, their competitor, has been valued at $3.5 billion. Both startups use smartphones to let passengers request and pay to be driven places in other people’s cars. Given that these companies are basically a twist on the old “radio-dispatched” taxi services we are familiar with, how can these two young companies possibly together be worth around $5 billion?

Let’s set aside the hype and investor speculation that probably accounts for much of their value. Even half of $5 billion dollars is still a huge value to place on some fraction of the global taxi industry. As I see it, the valuations come from the potential embedded is a new organizational paradigm that I call Peers Inc.

These companies are leveraging excess capacity – both cars and labor in this case. Neither Lyft nor Uber hire people or buy cars. All of Lyft’s “taxis” are personal cars driven by their owners. This implies two things: 1) Lyft didn’t have to buy the cars or hire drivers; 2) but neither did the vehicle owner/driver. The owners bought their cars for their own personal use. If they get any additional income, it is all an unanticipated bonus. Additionally, none of the driver/owners are quitting their jobs to do this. They start driving in their own free time, a few hours here and there, and have the flexibility to increase or decrease their hours in response to demand and their personal availability. Relying on excess capacity makes the enterprise very low financial risk for both drivers (the Peers) and for company (the Inc.)

Platforms for participation deliver economies of scale, the ability to grow quickly, and the power of aggregation. The Inc. side of the partnership – Uber and Lyft – are doing only the parts of the transaction that the Peers can’t do. Its costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time to build the technology behind these apps, to hone them for the best and simplest user interface, to do the marketing, to get the right insurance, and to navigate the regulatory requirements. But once you get it right, which is very hard to do, these companies can scale very fast, and the marginal cost of each new transaction is very low. By collaborating with the peers who will push the growth, both sides benefit from these scale economies and the size of the network created.

Individual people, and small local companies as partners, around the world, do the localizing and customizing. Lyft went from 2 to 30 cities across the U.S. in a year. People who lived in those cities provided not only local cars, but also local street knowledge, and – once Lyft goes international – local languages and local culture. Finding, evaluating, and selecting employees in all of these cities would normally be an expensive, long, and daunting effort. Instead, drivers and their cars opt-in. The companies claim to verify driving skills and the passenger’s quickly weed out rudeness and ineptitude through ratings and comments.

These companies are riding the wave of the new collaboration economy. There is a beautiful efficiency in this setup. By relying on excess capacity, we are getting a high return on investment for existing assets. And the new Peers Inc. collaboration between the two partners is a very efficient way of structuring a business, each side is sticking to its best talents.

Some people think that these companies are skirting expensive regulation in the taxi and livery industries. And I’m one of them. But the underlying question is whether these regulations make sense and protect the public good. More than a hundred years in the making, some of these laws are antiquated (in New York, until recently, you couldn’t used GPS to measure fare distance), some exist to protect existing interests (in Miami, you can’t order a limo for immediate pickup, there has to be a 30 minute delay to protect street taxis), and some exist to generate tax revenues (many kinds of fees are applied to car-for-hire). Taxi Medallions in many cities shelter the incumbent taxi businesses.

With a new organizational structure we’ll need new regulations. How do we do we make sure that cars are appropriately insured? How do workers who are doing many part-time jobs get full-time health coverage and retirement benefits? And while we are changing things, let’s get rid of any regulations that don’t make sense and are holding back existing players in the industry from providing a quality service.

Uber, Lyft and other transportation startups are shaking things up. They are going to force local governments to re-evaluate old rules. I’m hoping that we establish a new set that take into account the opportunity and new realities being afforded by technology in a new Peers Inc. world of possibility. Our transportation delivery system is broken: expensive, slow, underfunded, frustrating, and totally inadequate to meet the demand of our entire population in all of its travel needs. Yay innovation, and the power of collaboration to solve big problems fast!”