Peers Inc

Peers Inc Plot Summary

Introduction

In the early hours of a June evening in 2000, Robin Chase stood anxiously outside a parking garage in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Alongside her colleague from Hertz, they watched as a young professional approached a parked car, held a membership card to the windshield, and within seconds drove away—all while continuing his phone conversation without interruption. The rental car executive who had flown in to observe this technology in action uttered just one word: "Wow." This simple transaction represented a radical departure from traditional business models, demonstrating how technology could transform our relationship with assets we once thought had to be owned to be useful. This moment marked the beginning of a revolution that would eventually reshape entire industries and challenge our fundamental assumptions about capitalism itself. By combining excess capacity (cars sitting idle 95% of the time) with a technology platform that made sharing effortless, Chase had unlocked a new model of value creation—one that would soon be replicated across sectors from hospitality to transportation, education to healthcare. What makes this approach so powerful isn't just its efficiency but its ability to create abundance where we once saw scarcity, to enable innovation at unprecedented speed and scale, and to distribute opportunity more widely than traditional business models allow. As we'll discover, this collaborative approach offers not just a new way of doing business, but perhaps our best hope for addressing the most pressing challenges of our time.

Chapter 1: The Birth of Zipcar: A Revolution in Sharing

In the early hours of a June evening in 2000, Robin Chase stood anxiously outside a parking garage in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Alongside her colleague Mark Heminway, a veteran from Hertz with fifteen years of experience, they waited to witness what would become a pivotal moment for the sharing economy. A young professional approached a parked Zipcar, held his membership card to the windshield, and within seconds was driving away—all while continuing his phone conversation without interruption. Mark's friend from Dollar/Thrifty, who had flown in to observe this technology in action, uttered just one word: "Wow." This simple transaction represented a radical departure from traditional business models. Chase had founded Zipcar with a revolutionary premise: people would happily share cars rather than own them if the economics made sense. Despite skepticism from investors who believed Americans had a special relationship with car ownership, Chase persisted. She built a technology platform that made sharing effortless, and perhaps most controversially, trusted that people would pick up and return cars without supervision, fill them with gas, and take their trash when they left. What Chase discovered through Zipcar was that sharing is actually about tapping into excess capacity—the fact that personally owned cars sit idle 95% of the time. This insight became the first building block of what she would later call the "Peers Inc" model: combining excess capacity with platforms for participation and peer power. The model leverages resources we already have—physical assets, skills, networks, data—allowing organizations to grow efficiently and sometimes exponentially. As Chase reflected on Zipcar's success, she realized it was part of a much larger movement. Companies like Google, eBay, Facebook, Airbnb, and WhatsApp were all using the same fundamental structure—excess capacity + platforms + diverse peers—to transform how we work, build businesses, and shape economies. This collaborative approach was fundamentally changing capitalism itself, creating abundance where there once was scarcity, and rewriting the rules for value creation: shared resources unlock the greatest efficiencies, shared minds the greatest innovation.

Chapter 2: Finding Abundance in Scarcity: The Excess Capacity Miracle

On Christmas weekend in 2003, Frédéric Mazzella was trying to get from Paris to his small rural hometown. Train tickets were expensive and didn't even get him all the way there. He knew there had to be people making that same trip who would happily share their driving costs—if only he could find them. Years later, his company BlaBlaCar had more than 10 million active users, with over 2 million people monthly traveling across Europe by getting rides in strangers' cars. That's more people than ride the Eurostar train between Paris and London, for which the $21 billion Channel Tunnel was built. What Frédéric's company achieved was making available an unused asset that we see and ignore every day: the three or more empty passenger seats that accompany every car driver traveling alone. This perfect example of excess capacity was invisible until viewed differently—then suddenly impossible not to see everywhere. The smartphone revolution provides another striking example. When Apple opened the iPhone to third-party applications, they unlocked the excess capacity in our devices. The phone that might have sat idle for twenty-three hours a day was transformed into a tool constantly evolving to bring more convenience, information, and yes, entertainment. The twenty-five apps downloaded by the average smartphone user represent everything from productivity tools to games like "Hold the Button," where players compete to see who can hold a button on their screen the longest. Excess capacity appears in surprising places. Luis von Ahn's reCAPTCHA turns the effort of typing distorted letters (to prove you're human) into a tool for digitizing old books and newspapers. Those annoying security tests actually help transcribe text that computers can't read, with 99.1% accuracy. Meanwhile, Google Maps opened its API to developers, unleashing thousands of creative applications from tracking European migrant deaths to powering online games. The world is full of physical stuff already; we just need to think about and organize it differently. We can share assets we already have, leverage networks we didn't know existed, and share talents and expertise previously unvalued. In a world of perceived scarcity, the collaborative model creates abundance by making more efficient use of what we already have and uncovering entirely new value that was hiding in plain sight all along.

Chapter 3: Building Platforms: The Architecture of Participation

Nick Grossman, a technology expert living in New York City, owns a car that sits idle for days or even weeks in its Brooklyn parking space. Despite his technical skills and desire to share his car's excess capacity, he couldn't rally enough friends to make a cooperative work. He lacked the expertise and resources to make his car accessible to others, and potential renters found the hassle of dealing directly with him outweighed the benefits. What Nick couldn't do, platform-based companies like Zipcar could. It takes significant resources to build robust platforms that make peer participation simple. Consider what's required for car sharing: acquiring appropriate group insurance (a year-long effort at minimum), building mobile apps that enable quick car reservations, creating hardware that unlocks doors and enables ignition, and handling back-office billing. Institutions bring together diverse skilled people who turn complex challenges into simple, elegant solutions for end users. Platforms organize, standardize, and simplify participation. While they require serious investment of time, skill, and money—key assets of large organized entities—they make excess capacity accessible in three powerful ways. First, they can slice it, taking big assets like cars and dividing them into half-hour increments so people pay only for what they use. Second, they can aggregate excess capacity that was individually too small to bother with, like spare bedrooms through Airbnb. Third, they can open it up entirely, enabling creation of new value, as Google Maps did by allowing developers to build countless applications on its foundation. The open data movement exemplifies this third approach. When Vivek Kundra, then chief technology officer for Washington, DC, shared the city's data catalog with local tech community organizer Peter Corbett in 2008, it sparked an innovation revolution. Within thirty days of launching the "Apps for Democracy" contest, forty-seven applications had been created—work the city estimated would have cost $2.2 million if contracted traditionally. The contest format itself became a platform, inspiring more than fifty similar competitions worldwide and eventually leading to data.gov, which now hosts over 100,000 federal datasets used by companies from Trulia to The Weather Channel. These platforms have impressive properties based on their purpose: simplifying, standardizing, and easing participation. Once the elements are exactly right, they grow quickly because barriers to entry are minimized. With growth come economies of scale—platforms can be expensive to build, but each additional peer costs very little to add. The true power of platforms lies not just in their technological sophistication but in how they transform complex systems into accessible experiences, allowing ordinary people to participate in creating extraordinary value.

Chapter 4: Peer Power: Diversity as Innovation's Engine

If there is one thing we know about people, it is that we are all different. We live in different places and have different habits, interests, talents, life experiences, and social networks. Industrialization and globalization were all about standardization until the Internet made it simple to find, organize, rate, connect, and pay for small individual things. Platforms take the individuality of peers and, through organizing and resourcing, turn it into society's greatest asset. Carsten in Copenhagen had been an accountant for nearly two decades when he heard about Airbnb. He decided to rent out his spare bedroom to tourists and was so successful that within seven months, he had quit his accounting job and bought a five-bedroom apartment to rent out. Two years later, he owned two apartments in the same building with twelve rooms to rent and one full-time employee. He had found a new way of earning income that he much preferred over his previous career—a transition that happened by chance and completely under his own control. Mohammed in New York City had supported his family for years as a garment wholesaler until megastores made his business unviable. Through Uber, he purchased a new sedan with commercial plates and appropriate insurance. As an independent driver, he could control his income—if he needed $400 to cover rent, he'd work the necessary hours to earn it. Mohammed told Chase that if you were smart and hardworking, working for yourself was the only way to go. These stories highlight the benefits of engaging as a peer in this new organizational paradigm. People opt in; no employer chooses them, no certificate sanctions them, and their right to participate doesn't depend on experience. Fourteen-year-old Ethan can earn thousands of dollars monthly creating custom Minecraft games, while an accountant becomes a hotelier. As Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, put it: "In the 21st century, it matters less and less where you live, how old you are, what school you went to, or where you've worked. All that matters is what you can do." The implications extend beyond individual opportunity. Institutions benefit enormously from enabling peer collaboration because there are always more smart people outside your organization than inside. When Apple and Google opened their smartphone platforms to outside developers, they unleashed one of history's most innovative periods. Within six years, peers had created more than 2 million apps, transforming how we communicate, navigate, shop, and entertain ourselves. This diversity of perspectives is precisely what makes peer collaboration so powerful—it brings together ideas and approaches that would never emerge from a single organization, no matter how talented its employees.

Chapter 5: Three Miracles: How Collaboration Defies Physics

In 1937, the largest hotel chain in the world, the Intercontinental Hotel Group, had 645,000 rooms in 4,400 hotels across more than 100 countries—an empire that took 65 years to build. It would seem physically impossible to rival them in just a few years. Yet Airbnb did it in just four years. By business standards, this is a miracle—a completely new game. The collaborative model allowed Airbnb's platform to unlock excess capacity (rooms that already existed), build a compelling platform, and engage peers to provide service almost everywhere people live. This pace of growth represents the first miracle of collaborative business: excess capacity lets us defy the laws of physics. Because platforms allow peers to quickly transform existing untapped resources into accessible products and services, the model can spark exponential growth without physically building many assets. WhatsApp, BlaBlaCar, and countless others demonstrate this pattern—leveraging smartphones people already bought and internet connections they already paid for to deliver services that grow at unprecedented rates. The second miracle is exponential learning. Luis von Ahn's language-learning platform Duolingo demonstrates this perfectly. Within just 20 months of launch, Duolingo had reduced the time needed to learn a semester's worth of language from 130 hours (traditional classroom) to just 34 hours. How? With millions of learners, von Ahn could conduct a hundred experiments simultaneously, each tried by 150,000 people, and know within 48 hours which teaching method worked best. This pace of learning is possible only through collaboration between peers and platform. The third miracle is instant access to the right mind. Networked peers let us quickly find help or advice in unique situations when we need a different perspective. HelpAround, a platform for diabetics, demonstrates this power. When Annie Hemmesch faced a crisis because her health insurance wouldn't cover enough sensors for her pregnancy, the platform connected her with others who had extras to share. "One woman, whose daughter had switched to a different brand, said she no longer needs them. Another woman, who was my age, said, 'I never use them, here you go.'" These three miracles—defying physics through excess capacity, exponential learning through platforms, and instant access to the right expertise—demonstrate why the collaborative model is so powerful for addressing our biggest challenges. As Chase observes, "With the right platform, change can be nearly instantaneous." This gives her deep hope for tackling problems like climate change, where collaborative structures offer the innovation, speed, and scale such huge challenges require. When we harness the collective intelligence of diverse minds working on shared problems, we unlock possibilities that seemed impossible under traditional models.

Chapter 6: Government's Dual Role in the Collaborative Economy

One of the best examples of a government unlocking excess capacity is when the United States opened up the Global Positioning System, originally built for military use during the Cold War. After a Korean Airlines passenger plane was shot down by the USSR in 1983 when it strayed into prohibited airspace, President Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use as a common good. The U.S. government initially configured GPS with limited resolution, but gradually improved it. By 2000, when signal degradations were removed, there were 4 million GPS users worldwide. The government predicted the market would double in three years from $8 billion to $16 billion. In fact, by 2013, there were more than 2 billion global navigation systems installed and $200 billion in revenue directly related to the technology. This transformation was only possible because of the collaborative paradigm—leveraging excess capacity (the satellites), creating a platform for participation (the Standard Positioning Service), and engaging innovating peers to produce practical results. While it took a government-sized institution to create GPS, coming up with the myriad ways this free location information might be applied was best left to the world's peers: individuals, universities, startups, and even other countries. Barbara van Schewick, a Stanford professor who studies innovation platforms, identified four key factors underlying the Internet's success, which apply equally to GPS and other successful government platforms: users choose which applications they want without interference; innovation doesn't require permission; the network is blind to how it's used; and innovation costs are low. These principles should guide government platform creation, especially for resources that are non-rivalrous and don't have negative externalities. As the collaborative economy grows, government's second crucial role emerges: protecting and championing the people participating as peers. With 34% of the U.S. workforce—53 million Americans—now working as freelancers, the collaborative model is accelerating the transition to an independent workforce. This raises important questions about regulation, worker protections, and rights that governments must address thoughtfully to ensure the benefits of this new economy are widely shared rather than concentrated in the hands of platform owners.

Chapter 7: Legacy Companies: Adapting to the Platform Revolution

The Standard & Poor's 500 lists America's most valuable companies based on market capitalization. Their average lifespan has declined dramatically—from 75 years in 1937 to just 15 years today. Innovate and adapt, or disappear. Meanwhile, research shows that "Network Orchestrators" (similar to the collaborative model) receive valuations two to four times higher than companies with traditional business models and outperform them on both growth rate and profit margin. Legacy institutions face significant challenges adapting to this new paradigm. They've internalized lessons that no longer apply and continue to rely on strategies that no longer make sense. Industrialization taught them to value conformity and tight control, while the collaborative framework demonstrates that distributed structures scale best. Most big companies believe deeply in command-and-control management and are extremely risk-averse, making it difficult to embrace openness and peer collaboration. Yet some forward-thinking organizations are finding ways to evolve. Dan Doney, chief innovation officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, established a platform for innovation that surfaces ideas from those closest to the agency's "mission edge"—the workforce responsible for delivery of intelligence products. His approach: "Start small. Scale fast. Fail cheap." By creating a formal path to convert original ideas into broader impacts through crowd refinement, DIA produced quick wins that built momentum for more fundamental changes. Other institutions are embracing openness in targeted ways. GlaxoSmithKline opened up some of its patents and expertise for diseases of the developing world, where commercial returns are limited. The city of Barcelona created an Open Challenge that combined problem statements with procurement guarantees, attracting 130 submissions from twenty countries. And Tesla Motors shocked the business world when Elon Musk announced they were opening all their patents "in the spirit of the open source movement." As Véronique Laury, CEO of home improvement retailer Castorama, explained: "In business, we used to talk about being either a business-to-business company or being business-to-consumer. These words aren't meaningful anymore. I think the company has to become an H2H company—human to human." Her strategy included creating wikis of home improvement solutions, skill bartering systems, and moving toward 3D printing for tool repair rather than discarding items. The most successful legacy companies recognize that adaptation isn't about superficial digital initiatives but fundamentally reimagining their relationship with customers as collaborators in creating value together.

Summary

The collaborative economy represents a fundamental shift in how we create and distribute value. By combining excess capacity, platforms for participation, and peer power, this model transforms traditional business approaches. It finds abundance where there was scarcity, enables rapid learning and innovation, and connects people with exactly the right expertise when needed. This isn't just a new business model—it's a new economic paradigm that's reshaping capitalism itself. The stories throughout this exploration reveal a consistent pattern: when we open up resources rather than hoard them, when we trust peers rather than control them, and when we build platforms that empower rather than restrict, we unlock extraordinary potential. From Zipcar's transformation of urban transportation to Duolingo's reinvention of language learning, from government's role in creating GPS to Tesla's bold move to open its patents—these examples demonstrate how collaboration creates more value than competition alone ever could. As we face unprecedented global challenges from climate change to resource scarcity, the collaborative model offers hope. It provides the speed, scale, and adaptability needed to address complex problems while creating economic opportunity for millions. The future belongs not to those who cling to outdated models of ownership and control, but to those who embrace the power of working together in new, more open ways.

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Robin Chase

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