Robin Chase: Excuse me, may I rent your car?

67,800 views ・ 2012-12-17

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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Twelve years ago, I founded Zipcar.
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Zipcar buys cars and parks them
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throughout dense metropolitan areas
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for people to use, by the hour and by the day,
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instead of owning their own cars.
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Each Zipcar replaces 15 personal cars,
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and each driver drives about 80 percent less
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because they're now paying the full cost,
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all at once, in real time.
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But what Zipcar really did was make sharing the norm.
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Now, a decade later, it's really time to push the envelope a little bit,
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and so a couple years ago I moved to Paris
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with my husband and youngest child,
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and we launched Buzzcar a year ago.
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Buzzcar lets people rent out their own cars
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to their friends and neighbors.
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Instead of investing in a car, we invest in a community.
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We bring the power of a corporation
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to individuals who add their cars to the network.
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Some people call this peer-to-peer.
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This does express the humanity of what's going on,
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and the personal relationships,
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but that is also like saying that it's the same thing
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as a yard sale or a bake sale or babysitting.
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That's peer-to-peer.
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It's like saying yard sales are the same thing as eBay,
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or craft fairs are the same thing as Etsy.
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But what's really happening is that we've got the power
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of a free and open Internet,
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and on top of that we're putting a platform for participation,
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and the peers are now in partnership with the company,
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creating shared value on shared values,
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and each strengthening the other, and doing what the other can't do.
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I call this Peers, Inc.
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The incorporated side, the company,
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is doing things that it does really well.
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What does it do really well? It creates economies of scale,
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significant and long-term resource investment,
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the expertise of many different kinds of people
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and different kinds of minds, and for individuals,
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consumers, it's bringing the standards, rules and recourse
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that we really want as consumers,
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and this is kind of bound up in a brand promise,
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and the companies are providing this on a platform for participation.
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Peers are giving and doing things
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that are incredibly expensive for companies to do.
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What do they bring? They bring this fabulous diversity,
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expensive for companies. And what does that deliver?
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It delivers localization and customization,
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specialization, and all of this aspect about social networks
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and how companies are yearning and eager to get inside there?
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It's natural for me. Me and my friends, I can connect to them easily.
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And it also delivers really fabulous innovation,
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and I'll talk about that later.
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So we have the peers that are providing the services and the product,
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and the company that's doing the stuff that companies do.
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The two of these are delivering the best of both worlds.
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Some of my favorite examples:
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in transportation, Carpooling.com. Ten years old,
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three and a half million people have joined up,
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and a million rides are shared every day.
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It's a phenomenal thing. It's the equivalent
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of 2,500 TGV trains,
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and just think, they didn't have to lay a track or buy a car.
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This is all happening with excess capacity.
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And it's not just with transportation, my love,
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but of course in other realms. Here's Fiverr.com.
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I met these founders just weeks after they had launched,
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and now, in two years, what would you do for five dollars?
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Seven hundred and fifty thousand gigs are now posted after two years,
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what people would do for five dollars.
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And not just easy things that anyone can do.
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This Peers, Inc. concept is in a very difficult and complex realm.
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TopCoder has 400,000 engineers who are delivering
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complex design and engineering services.
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When I talked to their CEO, he had this great line.
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He said, "We have a community that owns its own company."
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And then my all-time favorite, Etsy.
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Etsy is providing goods that people make themselves
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and they're selling it in a marketplace.
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It just celebrated its seventh anniversary,
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and after seven years, last year it delivered
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530 million dollars' worth of sales to all those individuals
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who have been making those objects.
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I know you guys out there who are businesspeople,
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are thinking, "Oh my God, I want to build one of those.
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I see this incredible speed and scale.
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You mean all I have to do is build a platform and all these people are going
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to put their stuff on top and I sit back and roll it in?"
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Building these platforms for participation are so nontrivial to do.
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I think of the difference of Google Video versus YouTube.
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Who would have thought that two young guys and a start-up
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would beat out Google Video? Why?
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I actually have no idea why. I didn't talk to them.
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But I'm thinking, you know, they probably had
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the "share" button a little bit brighter and to the right,
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and so it was easier and more convenient for the two sides
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that are always participating on these networks.
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So I actually know a lot about building a peer platform now,
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and a Peers, Inc. company, because I've spent
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the last two years doing that in Paris.
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So let me take you back how it's so incredibly different
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building Buzzcar than it was building Zipcar,
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because now every single thing we do has these two
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different bodies that I have to be thinking about:
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the owners who are going to provide the cars
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and the drivers who are going to rent them.
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Every single decision, I have to think about what is right for both sides.
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There are many, many examples and I'll give you one
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that is not my favorite example: insurance.
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It took me a year and a half to get the insurance just right.
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Hours and hours of sitting with insurers and many companies
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and their thoughts about risk and how this is totally innovative,
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they'd never thought of it before.
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Way too much money, I just can't even go there, with lawyers,
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trying to figure out how this is different, who's responsible to whom,
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and the result was that we were able to provide owners
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protection for their own driving records and their own history.
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The cars are completely insured during the rental,
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and it gives drivers what they need, and what do they need?
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They need a low deductible,
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and 24-hour roadside assistance.
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So this was a trick to get these two sides.
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So now I want to take you to the moment of --
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When you're an entrepreneur, and you've started a new company,
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there's the, here's all the stuff we do beforehand,
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and then the service launches. What happens?
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So all those months of work, they come into play.
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Last June 1, we launched. It was an exciting moment.
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And all the owners are adding their cars. It's really exciting.
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All the drivers are becoming members. It's excellent.
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The reservations start coming in, and here,
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owners who were getting text messages and emails
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that said, "Hey, Joe wants to rent your car for the weekend.
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You can earn 60 euros. Isn't that great? Yes or no?"
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No reply. Like, a huge proportion of them
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couldn't be bothered after they had just started, they just signed up, to reply.
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So I thought, "Duh, Robin, this is the difference between
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industrial production and peer production."
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Industrial production, the whole point of industrial production
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is to provide a standardized, exact service model
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that is consistent every single time,
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and I'm really thankful that my smartphone is made
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using industrial production.
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And Zipcar provides a very nice, consistent service
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that works fabulously.
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But what does peer production do? Peer production
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is this completely different way of doing things,
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and you have a big quality range, and so eBay, cleverly,
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the first peer production, Peer, Inc. company, I'd say,
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they figured out early on, we need to have ratings
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and commentaries and all that yucky side stuff.
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We can flag that and we can put it to the side, and people
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who are buyers and consumers don't have to deal with it.
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So going back, this is my look of excitement and joy,
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because all this stuff that I'd also been hoping for
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actually really did happen, and what's that?
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That is the diversity of what's going on.
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You have these different fabulous owners
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and their different cars, different prices,
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different locations. (Laughter)
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They dress differently, and they look different,
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and, really, I love these photos every time I look at them.
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Cool guys, excited guys,
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and here is Selma, who -- I love this driver.
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And after a year, we have 1,000 cars
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that are parked across France and 6,000 people
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who are members and eager to drive them.
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This would not be possible to do that in economic fashion
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for a traditional company.
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Back to this spectrum.
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So what's happening is, we had the yuck side,
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but we actually had this real wow side.
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And I can tell you two great stories.
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A driver was telling me that they went to rent a car
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to go up the coast of France and the owner gave it to them,
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and said, "You know what, here's where the cliffs are,
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and here's all the beaches, and this is my best beach,
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and this is where the best fish restaurant is."
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And the peers also become,
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peers and owners create relationships,
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and so at the last minute people can --
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a driver can say, "Hey, you know what, I really need the car,
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is it available?" And that person will say,
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"Sure, my wife's at home. Go pick up the keys. Go do it."
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So you can have these really nice things that can't happen,
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and it's a kind of "Wow!" and I want to say "Wow!"
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type of thing that's happening here, because individuals,
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if you're a company, what happens is you might have
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10 people who are in charge of innovation,
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or 100 people who are in charge of innovation.
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What happens in Peer, Inc. companies is that you have
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tens and hundreds and thousands and even millions
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of people who are creating experiments on this model,
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and so out of all that influence and that effort,
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you are having this exceptional amount of innovation
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that is coming out.
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So one of the reasons, if we come back to why did I
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call it Buzzcar? I wanted to remind all of us
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about the power of the hive,
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and its incredible facility to create this platform
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that individuals want to participate and innovate on.
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And for me, when I think about our future,
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and all of those problems that seem incredibly large,
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the scale is impossible, the urgency is there,
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Peers, Inc. provides the speed and scale
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and the innovation and the creativity that is going to answer these problems.
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All we have to do is create a fabulous platform for participation -- nontrivial.
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So I continue to think that
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transportation is the center of the hard universe.
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All problems come back to transportation for me.
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But there are all these other areas that are these profound,
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big problems that I know that we can work on,
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and people are working on them in many different sectors,
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but there's this really fabulous group of things
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with the power of this Peers, Inc. model.
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So over the last decade, we've been reveling in
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the power of the Internet and how it's empowered individuals,
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and for me, what Peers, Inc. does
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is it takes it up a notch. We're now bringing the power
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of the company and the corporation
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and supercharging individuals.
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So for me, it's a collaboration.
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Together, we can. (Applause)
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Thank you. (Applause)
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