I'm so proud of Brian, Joe and Nate at Airbnb-- it was an incredible opportunity to get to know them when they came into YC in 2009, and they continue to change the world.
“We couldn’t have existed ten years ago, before Facebook, because people weren’t really into sharing,” says Nate Blecharczyk, one of Airbnb’s founders. Airbnb doesn’t require its users to connect their accounts to Facebook, but when people find they have friends in common with another user it sets their minds at ease.
The article really underscores how technology progresses through society. There's a layering process happening on the Internet. People began to feel comfortable with using their social graph for proof was what allowed the sharing economy to prosper online at all. A more connected world.
In the end, Yuri Milner's belief in “the emergence of the global brain, which consists of all the humans connected to each other and to the machine and interacting in a very unique and profound way, creating an intelligence that does not belong to any single human being or computer” is one of the underlying themes of the past 10 years of Internet services. No doubt, it is this insight that led Yuri Milner to invest in Facebook. The rest of the world is merely catching up.
Read the full cover story in The Economist and the sidebar, "The Rise of the Sharing Economy"