{"id":15858,"date":"2013-09-30T08:06:56","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T15:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/?p=15858"},"modified":"2014-04-02T10:48:55","modified_gmt":"2014-04-02T17:48:55","slug":"the-money-flows-in-the-collaborative-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/30\/the-money-flows-in-the-collaborative-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Money Flows in the Collaborative Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Exchange Money Conversion to Foreign Currency by epSos.de, on Flickr\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/epsos\/8474532085\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" alt=\"Exchange Money Conversion to Foreign Currency\" src=\"http:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8515\/8474532085_6d010ee8d0.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"280\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>A series of significant monetary events have\u00a0occurred.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In prior posts, I&#8217;ve covered the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/11\/meet-the-investors-of-the-collaborative-economy\/\">investment leaders by frequency<\/a> and looked at funding in a category of 200 startups. \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/04\/report-corporations-must-join-the-collaborative-economy\/\">I found<\/a>\u00a0that 37% had been funded, with some receiving very large cash injections. \u00a0In the recent past, there have been some significant material events in the Collaborative Economy, including the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>VCs inject capital into startups.<\/strong>\u00a0 Lyft raised\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/allthingsd.com\/20130523\/lyft-raises-60m-funding-from-andreessen-horowitz-to-expand-ride-sharing-internationally\/\">$60m in March<\/a>, and Airbnb has raised $<a href=\"http:\/\/www.crunchbase.com\/company\/airbnb\">120m<\/a>.\u00a0 Airbnb has made at least six acquisitions, and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/technology\/dotcommentary\/article\/Exclusive-Airbnb-signs-giant-SoMa-office-lease-3526054.php\">opened a large HQ at 888 Brannan in San F<\/a>rancisco\u00a0 this quarter.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Google bets big on Uber to take down Amazon.<\/strong>\u00a0 Google\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2013\/08\/22\/google-ventures-puts-258m-into-uber-its-largest-deal-ever\/\">funded Uber with $258 million in September 2013<\/a>, which is the largest investment ever by Google Ventures.\u00a0 This money will be used to link Uber to Google Shopping Express, self-driving cars, mobile apps and more, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/tomiogeron\/2013\/08\/07\/is-airbnb-the-next-ebay-uber-the-next-amazon\/\">to compete directly with Amazon<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Avis secures a place in the ecosystem by buying Zipcar.<\/strong>\u00a0 Zipcar to Avis for\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/dealbook.nytimes.com\/2013\/01\/02\/avis-to-buy-zipcar-for-500-million\/?_r=0\">$491 million, January 2013<\/a>.\u00a0 To expand and defend mobility-as-a-service, Avis snaps up Zipcar.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>PayPal spends $800 million on mobile payments player.<\/strong>\u00a0 On Friday, <a href=\"http:\/\/skift.com\/2013\/09\/26\/ebay-buys-mobile-payment-platform-used-by-airbnb-uber-and-hoteltonight\/\">PayPal bought Braintree for $800 million<\/a>. This startup provides the mobile payments power for Uber, Airbnb, and other sharing startups.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Enterprise software investments on the rise.<\/strong>\u00a0 There are B2B examples too, as software solutions company\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2013\/09\/17\/appirio-buys-topcoder-to-add-more-crowdsourcing-and-500k-developers-and-designers-to-its-cloudspokes-network\/\">Appirio (funded, and closely tied to Salesforce) acquired TopCoder<\/a>, and new investment just went into Localmotion, an enterprise version of Uber, for big corporations.<\/li>\n<li>Update: April 2nd 2014, <a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2014\/04\/02\/lyft-250m\/\">Lyft has raised $250m<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A quick tally shows that funding-wise, that&#8217;s $444m (not including other startups, and additional Uber funding) and acquisition-wise, that&#8217;s $1.291b, not including the unknown Topcoder purchase. So why are big companies like Google, eBay and top investors like Andreessen and Menlo Ventures putting into this market?\u00a0 Here&#8217;s a simple logic flow that helps to understand why this market matters to them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Logic flow on why investors and tech companies are betting big on this market:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>They have ample technology<\/strong>. \u00a0These well-funded sharing startups, like Airbnb and Uber, leverage cheap, but powerful, technologies like Facebook Connect and Apple and Google hardware and mobile apps platforms.<\/li>\n<li><strong>They&#8217;re efficient.<\/strong>\u00a0 Using these startups, people are getting what they need from each other, often at a local level   rather than getting those things from corporations.<\/li>\n<li><strong>They&#8217;re scalable.<\/strong>\u00a0 Since these startups match idle inventory to buyers and renters at a local level, it means their operating costs are lower than traditional corporations, as there&#8217;s no overhead or inventory to manage. \u00a0These are scalable, two-sided marketplaces with low operating margins<\/li>\n<li><strong>They shift power.<\/strong>\u00a0 This, of course, spells disruption to inefficient institutions like corporations who pay no attention to this growing trend by which individuals are getting products, services, time and space from each other.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><strong>This means, the crowd is becoming like a company.<\/strong>\u00a0 Airbnb is a hotel, Uber is transportation, Lending Club is a bank, Cookening is a restaurant, Yerdle is a retailer, Lockitron is a warehouse,\u00a0Postmates is supply chain, and social networks are marketing. \u00a0Savvy investors and big tech companies are paying close attention to this market, injecting resources and acquiring <em>en masse<\/em>.\u00a0 Corporations <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">must<\/span> pay attention, as many of these startups are directly aimed at better serving market needs   often unintentionally disrupting corporations.\u00a0 The more successful they are at meeting market needs, the wider the disruption of corporate businesses will become.<\/p>\n<p><em>Photo used with creative commons attribution by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/36495803@N05\/8474532085\/\">Epsos<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A series of significant monetary events have&nbsp;occurred. In prior posts, I&rsquo;ve covered the&nbsp;investment leaders by frequency and looked at funding in a category of 200 startups. &nbsp;I found&nbsp;that 37% had been funded, with some receiving very large cash injections. &nbsp;In the recent past, there have &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/30\/the-money-flows-in-the-collaborative-economy\/\" class=\"more-link\"><span>Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Money Flows in the Collaborative Economy<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[198,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaborative-economy","category-vcs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}