The "sharing economy" refers to peer-to-peer technology companies that enable people to rent out unused assets, spare rooms and parked cars. "Sharing" sounds touchier-feelier than "renting" or "brokering". Its beauty is that the companies doing the enabling don't own what they sell. Airbnb, the world's largest lodging company, is valued at $24bn, but owns no hotels; Uber, at $50bn, doesn't own a single car. Brilliant!
The explosive growth of the sharing economy has been driven by the networking effect of the internet. Now, a gold-rush mentality is at hand. Homestay enables you to rent out your spare room. Hovelstay brings garages and potting sheds into the fold. There are dozens of others. Vrumi turns your spare bedroom into someone else's office. Where next for "space-recycling"? That luggage box atop your car, those empty rubbish bins ... monetise them!
These disruptors are discovering whole strata of consumers who previously couldn't afford to travel and lodge. Can space-recycling go upmarket? Onefinestay has shown that it can. The Stockholm Syndrome that held travellers captive in outmoded and expensive hotels and taxis is melting in the heat of creative destruction. No doubt Uber and Airbnb will evolve into sinister yet hackable personal databases, but that's another story.
Is private aviation next for Uberisation? Rise is an American start-up aspiring to add "dead legs" and jet downtime to the sharing bucket list. Monetising idle jets is the Holy Grail, but I confidently predict Rise's fall. However, Nick Kennedy, Rise's messianic founder, deserves credit for fusing a subscription model to the sharing model.
"Revenue solves most problems in business," he explains. "Recurring revenue fixes almost every problem. With the subscription model, you do the hard sell upfront, you create the relationship, and then you get a long-term recurring revenue, the lifeblood of the business." Kennedy's eureka moment was realising that people love buying things but hate being sold to. Subscriptions solve this classic dilemma.
I'll pass. Private aviation is the un-Uberisable last bastion of I'm-all-right-Jack pseudo-Darwinian selfishness and a cemetery of business models. People who fly privately hate sharing. Until personal jet-packs take off, the likelier route to private-aviation-for-all is by taxi services using small aircraft like the Cessna Citation Mustang.
"Various would-be disruptors hyped this idea before the recession," says Patrick Margetson-Rushmore at London Executive Aviation. "Principal survivors are Blink and GlobeAir. They might yet achieve their original vision, if they can build larger fleets." Anyone for a subscription-based air taxi model?
Uncommon Knowledge
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