By Xenios Thrasyvoulou, founder/CEO, PeoplePerHour.
People assume I am being sarcastic when I say that driving a taxi instead of working in a bank is a profound and revolutionary opportunity for a worker to take control of his life. In a world where we still value status and brand recognition over independence and quality of life, becoming a taxi driver seems like a desperate retreat. Yet when I heard the story of a Nigerian immigrant who went from a seemingly plum bank job to driving a car for Uber and then expanding his business to include a roster of drivers, I was sincere in my belief that stories like this indicate a revolutionary shift: thanks to the collaborative economy, workers can now control their own destinies.
For some, it’s as simple as a desirable zip code for an Airbnb renter. For others, it is three generations’ worth of culinary knowledge that can be transformed into a successful cooking business on KitchenSurf. While some places experience scarcity in a particular skill or knowledge base, others experience abundance and are better-equipped than ever to share that abundance. As a result, the collaborative economy is already bridging gaps across time zones, generations, and socioeconomic statuses, and it is doing so at an incredible pace.
The potential of the collaborative economy is unlimited and will one day -- a day very soon, in my opinion--- come to include everyone from high school students with coding skills to grandmothers capitalizing on knowledge of handicrafts and cooking gained in generations past.
Thus far, the technologically connected creative class has reaped most of the benefits; the average Etsy seller is a college-educated woman in her 30s. And the homepages of freelance marketplaces like Elance and Odesk feature pictures of almost exclusively young people in stylish clothes, despite the huge diversity in age and sartorial sophistication represented on such sites.
To be clear, my own freelance platform, PeoplePerHour, loves our stylish young freelancers, and we wouldn’t be where we are today without them. But I believe that, with the collaborative economic revolution at our doorstep, we will all need to make room for more at the table.
With every single working person as a potential member of this new economy, there are tremendous opportunities for independent financial empowerment by using skills that are often left to lay dormant doing work for corporations. But the social and personal benefits are only beginning to be explored -- there are thousands of articles about how freelance workers improve their quality of life by setting their own hours and client protocols (my own site is home to many such articles), for example, but few have tapped into the dynamic relationships that are developed by sharing a couch, a car, or a well-prepared meal.
In highly stratified working cultures, few engage with people outside of their industry and sometimes, even their age group. The sense of community and connectedness that emerges around the collaborative economy should not be underestimated in an environment where younger workers care less about salary than they do about the meaning of their work.
Which is why, in my view, the next stage of the collaborative economy is not a simple matter of a higher volume of workers setting up shop from home offices and setting their own hours. Nor is it a simple matter of families earning a bit of extra cash renting out their spare bedroom.
The next stage is the great widening of the circle of independent workers making an entire living in areas that were once considered the purview of hobbyists and moonlighters. The rapidly increasing access across generations and classes to mobile devices that put these platforms within reach are putting this stage of the revolution in motion. As the categories of services and goods offered expand, more people are recognizing themselves as assets in the collaborative economy. And the human success stories emerging from these new platforms are having a ripple effect on those that might have felt out of place in it before.
An immigrant grandmother hears the story of a woman her age having a second career preparing authentic Jamaican meals for families around town. The retired science teacher Googles "online biology tutoring." A high school student reads a blog by a peer making a killing coding for small businesses in another state.
Craftsmen and cooks; designers and drivers -- the collaborative economy is welcoming new professions and skills every day, meaning there has never been a better time to move up and out of the rigid confines of the corporation. The secret is out, and it is only a matter of time before everyone will want in. And the good news is, there is plenty of room for them all.
Xenios Thrasyvoulou is the founder and CEO of freelance marketplace PeoplePerHour, where independent workers from around the globe win work from small and medium-sized businesses.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
