Collaborative Blog

Shareable: Trust is Currency For Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces

Excerpt:

"eBay has proved how the trust we typically form face-to-face can be built and assigned online by creating the grandfather of reputation systems, the Feedback Forum. After any transaction, buyers and sellers can rate each other using a simple points system (1,0,-1). Once users reach a certain number of points, they receive a star attached to their screen name, indicating their trustworthiness. The "silver shooting star" indicates the highest rating.

With around 98 to 99 percent of trades receiving positive rating the eBay approach seems to work and has been copied and adapted to a lot of other projects. One of the most common complaints with eBay is the use of nicknames instead of real names, and this is where the use of social network profiles can be a handy extra in the reputation system"

Link to full article

FastCo: Collaborative Consumption Leader And Unlikely VC Rachel Botsman Will Convince Us All To Share

Excerpt:

"Collaborative Fund has been operational for less than a year, but is investing in some of the hottest startups that use a collaborative consumption business model, including most recently, RentCycle. Companies come to Collaborative Fund, Botsman notes, because they want to be part of a community and portfolio that believes in the same business approach.

 A depth of market knowledge among the investors and advisers at Collaborative Fund--their advisers include founding team members of Kiva, Meetup, OpenTable, and YouTube--makes it distinct from traditional VC firms, she says. Entrepreneurs know they can rely on Collaborative Fund for help in understanding competition and market opportunities, but also feel that backing from this fund is a seal of approval in their industry."

Link to full Fast Company article

 

Welcome Tim and the Rentcycle Team

If you haven't heard of Rentcycle yet, it's a simple platform connecting consumers with small rental businesses to make renting online as easy as shopping online. We see Rentcycle as a game-changer for the rental industry, and by changing that game, it could be a game changer for the entire way we think about shopping and ownership.

Here's why we invested in Rentcycle: the mission, the team, and the founder. Rentcycle promotes sustainable commerce and reuse by making it easier for people to gain access to the experiences they want, without the burdens of ownership. If anyone's going to disrupt this industry, it's going to be this all-star team at Rentcycle whose passion for the business is only rivaled by an undying determination to be the ones to make it happen. It also doesn't hurt that they have Marc Randolph (cofounder of Netflix) and Chuck Templeton (founder of OpenTable) supporting them.

Here's how it works: Say you're throwing a kids birthday party and need one of those bouncy houses and a cotton candy machine. Unless your name is Bozo the Clown, it makes no sense to own these things. Rather than call around to different party shops checking if they rent out these products, you can now visit Rentcycle which shows the shops around you that carry what you're looking for on the date you need.  You can arrange delivery, pick-up and pay through the platform, all without leaving your couch.   

The idea for Rentcycle came to founder Tim Hyer while he was training for a triathlon. After learning it would cost $600 to ship his bike cross-country for his race, Tim turned to renting, finding a sweet road bike rental for 1/10 the cost. The only problem was, it took him 2 days to track down the right bike at the right store on the right date. The week following the race, Tim wrote the business plan for Rentcycle to solve this problem. 

Rentcycle wasn't Tim's first business idea. He had been thinking of collaborative consumption ideas for quite some time--only to sit back and watch others do something about it. In a recent interview, Tim offered a piece of advice to fellow entrepreneurs: "seize the moment." Taking this to heart, when the Rentcycle opportunity presented itself to Collaborative, we decided to stand behind Tim and his team 100%. We believe this is Rentcycle's moment and we're happy to be seizing it together.

So, we're excited to welcome Tim and the entire team at Rentcycle into Collaborative's portfolio of dynamic companies. Just as thrilling are the partners that accompany Rentcycle, including like-minded co-investors (Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Amicus Capital, Max Levchin, and Farhad Mohit). We're looking forward to working together and changing the way people consume.