Silicon Valley Trends 2015, Part 4: Everyone Wants to Remake Everything on the Uber and Airbnb Model

崔绮雯 · 2015-06-12 · English translation

"Silicon Valley Trends 2015" is QDaily's special reporting series from Silicon Valley. Over the past few decades, hundreds of technology companies have been born here, and their technology has touched almost every industry in the world. What are Silicon Valley's tech founders and investors watching and talking about today? Drawing on what we saw and heard at dozens of in-person tech events in Silicon Valley this summer, and on our reading of industry figures such as investment and fundraising data, we bring you this series of trend reports.

In San Francisco, apart from email and maps, the two services I use most are probably Uber and Airbnb. Here, hailing a taxi has become something of a rarity. Open UberPOOL, Uber's carpooling service, and US$7 will take you clear across the city; the same trip by taxi costs about three times as much.

Here, US$100 a night gets you a large room in a Victorian-style loft near Golden Gate Park, complete with Wi-Fi, a washing machine, a dryer, a 60-inch smart TV, Sonos speakers and a Nest thermostat.

I have tried living without Uber and Airbnb, and life suddenly got much harder.

These two companies, which have done so much to improve life in the Silicon Valley area, are already darlings of investors. Uber raised money twice last year and is now valued at more than US$40 billion; Airbnb is currently raising money at a US$20 billion valuation.

In their first three years, few people thought much of either Uber or Airbnb, and both struggled to raise money. Their success has started a new trend: Uber and Airbnb are becoming the models for a new wave of startups. Using technology to break into a traditional field and reorganize an industry is now a hot area for tech startups. Before this, a startup won favor mainly by building a purely digital product in the mold of Facebook or Twitter.

Becoming a Startup Template

"Our company is called Roost. It's 'Airbnb for closets and garages,'" Roost CEO Jonathan Gillon told me, introducing his new company at a demo day for startups in the incubator 500 Startups.

"Our company is called misterbnb: 'Mr' as a pun, plus 'bnb.' We offer house and hotel rentals like Airbnb, just for gay people, so they don't have to feel discriminated against or uneasy," said Matthieu JOST, co-founder and CEO of misterbnb. This rental service for the gay community not only "borrowed" its name from Airbnb; even its logo looks a bit like Airbnb's old one.

misterbnb at a 500 Startups event

Wherever startups gather to show themselves off, comparing yourself to Uber or Airbnb is now routine. The companies that put themselves under the Airbnb or Uber model also share a label: "Airbnb for X" or "Uber for X."

"Uber for X" and "Airbnb for X" have become standard categories for American startups. The "X" can stand for anything. In Chinese, the two phrases come out as "a fast service like Uber" or "a space-sharing service like Airbnb," whether what the company brings to your door is a masseur or a barber, or whether it lets you share your cupboard or your toilet.

How hot are these companies right now? On Product Hunt, a site for discovering new products, the editors have even set up collections called Uber for X and Airbnb for X. Product Hunt has featured 50 Uber for X companies and 18 Airbnb for X companies. And that is just one website.

A Motley Crowd of Uber/Airbnb for X Companies

Since Uber and Airbnb took off, startups doing business along similar lines have multiplied in every direction, and some of the ideas are wild enough to make you laugh:

Roost, mentioned above, lets you rent storage space in other people's homes the way you rent an Airbnb. You can rent out a spare closet or garage space as storage for others; and if you need somewhere to put things for a while, you can find a suitable space by location, just as you would book an Airbnb.

Airpnp is a service for sharing spare restrooms. Some of its toilets are free; others are said to have been used by Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage and Walt Disney. Those cost a bit more, US$10, but give you the wonderful experience of "sharing a toilet with a superstar."

Breather is the "rent a place to be quiet" service we reported on earlier. Its interface also looks a lot like Airbnb's, except that its spaces are for staying quietly for a while: read a book, eat a candy, do some yoga, get some work done, hold an interview, or just zone out. Breather rents by the half hour at minimum, for about US$25 an hour.

A real photo of a Breather space

Doblet is "Uber for portable chargers." When your phone battery runs low, it sends you a notification about power banks available nearby, at US$3 per loan. The power banks, along with charging cables, are usually kept at a nearby Starbucks, restaurant or cafe. In San Francisco, 1,000 partner businesses currently stock Doblet power banks.

ManServants is, as the name suggests, a service that sends a manservant to your door, billed by the hour at as much as US$100 an hour. The manservants are not for sexual services, but they can serve as bodyguards, bartenders or personal assistants, or even help with the housework. The founders are three women in San Francisco who believe that, at parties or in everyday life, female clients want men who are healthy, polite and respectful.

A promotional image on the ManServants homepage

Magic: text a phone number and someone quickly shows up to do anything for you: run errands, ship packages, deliver documents, clean the house, do math problems...

Beyond these unusual ideas, most Uber/Airbnb for X companies look like this: Lugg brings movers to your door with one tap; Push for Pizza delivers pizza to wherever you are with one tap; Eaze delivers cannabis within an hour; SpoonRocket, WunWun, Sprig, Instacart, Munchery... bring food to your door fast, in anywhere from 7 to 20 minutes.

So when people talk about Uber/Airbnb for X, what are they actually talking about?

Shervin Pishevar, who has invested in several on-demand services including DoorDash, Munchery, SpoonRocket and Order Ahead, says these services are like real-life "magic wands": wave one, and the user's needs are met at once, while the service makes money too. In wider media coverage, the term that comes up more often is the "sharing economy": these internet services put idle real-world resources to efficient use, whether cars, homes, wardrobes, garages or labor.

But They Won't Necessarily Be the Next Airbnb or Uber

But the strength of the Uber and Airbnb model does not come merely from being "a bit faster" or from the "sharing economy" as such.

Uber reorganized the traditional taxi supply chain. The traditional chain for hailing a ride has four links: the passenger, the booking app or phone line, the taxi company, and the taxi driver.

What Uber did was cut out one link in the middle. There is no taxi company, and no employment tie binding drivers to cabs. Uber, having taken over the middleman's role, uses algorithms to match each rider with the driver who can arrive fastest, and by eliminating the taxi company it saves a considerable amount in operating costs.

Airbnb, for its part, uses sound "community rules" to verify the real identities of guests and hosts and to keep them talking to each other. With photo listings and identity verification, it eliminated the agents of traditional renting, and it has no need to buy large amounts of property or pay for expensive renovations as hotel groups do.

At bottom, both services improve market efficiency at every link, one in transportation and one in lodging. Look at most of today's Uber/Airbnb for X services, though, and many of them simply make a process a bit faster. Lugg, the one-tap mover service, is just a moving company put online. Breather, which handles even the fit-out and furnishings itself to guarantee the experience, will find it quite hard to expand. Put simply, most Uber/Airbnb for X companies just use the internet to do business faster.

A New Way of Working

Still, these Uber/Airbnb for X companies do represent the freelance wave of our time. Thanks to the spread of the internet and the mobile internet, and to the growing number of Uber/Airbnb for X companies, people can choose to work at different places and times instead of under a traditional employment contract signed for years at a stretch.

This year's internet trends report from KPCB says 34% of the American workforce are already freelancers. Among younger workers aged 21 to 33, 38% would rather freelance.

That does not mean they don't work; they simply prefer short-term contract work with flexible hours and locations. Right now, 44% of "on-demand workers," such as the drivers and hosts who earn money on Uber and Airbnb, are young people aged 21 to 33. They want freer lives, they welcome change and creativity, and their attachment to the "team player" ideal that traditional employment prizes is falling sharply.

Set beside traditional office "white-collar" workers and skilled "blue-collar" workers, people who do "on-demand work" now have a name of their own: "no-collar workers." The Uber/Airbnb for X companies never stop telling us how happy the no-collar workers on their platforms are and how much more they earn, yet doubts about this "temp" way of working have never gone away.

Satya Patel, a partner at the investment firm Homebrew, believes most startups do not yet treat their "no-collar" workers well enough. After all, driving for Uber or delivering for DoorDash over the long term is probably not much of a career path.

"These companies haven't done well enough: they haven't treated their workers the way they treat their customers. That means not only providing benefits, uniforms and pay, but also giving them a real chance to grow along a career path. All of us do the work we do now because we like it, and that's the same for white-collar and no-collar workers alike."

Some investors even question how much "freedom" this arrangement really offers. Patricia Nakache, a partner at the investment firm Trinity Ventures, says: "I think the danger is that, to some extent, these workers get locked into their jobs. Take Uber: when you become a contract driver, you take out a car loan and have to drive to pay it off. Then they're locked into that situation, and the freedom and flexibility that were the selling point in the first place are gone."

For now, freedom at work belongs to the freelancers who were first to ride this "on-demand" wave.