Sharing

An empty room, a car sitting still — wire them into a marketplace and they become goods. Airbnb began in October 2007 with three air mattresses on the floor of a San Francisco apartment, at eighty dollars a night, for people who could not get a hotel room during a design conference. The name started as the unwieldy AirBedAndBreakfast.com, and became the one we know more than six months after launch. Uber, too, took three years from the idea — a taxi that would not come in Paris in 2008 — to incorporation in 2009 and to cars actually moving in 2010. This model has taken its shape by colliding with national rules. In Japan, home-sharing entered the law in 2018 with a cap of 180 nights a year, and ride-hailing was partially permitted in 2024 under the management of taxi companies. Note that Airbnb's founding anecdote is also the company's own telling, and third-party corroboration is limited.

The myth, corrected

~~The phrase «sharing economy» was born alongside Airbnb and Uber~~

The phrase has an academic lineage. Lawrence Lessig used it early, in Remix (2008), though his context was the sharing of culture and creative work. For the lending of physical things, Rachel Botsman and others popularised «collaborative consumption» first, in 2010. «Sharing economy» came into general use after that.