Peers Inc summary

You may have heard about the 16-year-old girl who accidentally invited every Facebook user to her birthday party with over 1,000 showing up. You don’t want to make this kind of mistake by inviting everyone to participate on your platform on day one when you’re not prepared to deal with the masses.

Platforms need to be organized, standardized and simple to use, and finding the perfect balance often happens through trial and error. To make this process as painless as possible, while still maintaining a certain level of quality, you need to slowly expand the number of users over time.

If you’ve ever left your wallet at home, you know that borrowing a couple dollars for a cup of coffee can be painfully embarrassing. Borrowing on a large scale can be even more daunting, and launching a Kickstarter campaign to ask millions of strangers to fund your peer platform can seem like a downright scary proposition.

Be that as it may, crowdfunding is one of the three major ways to get your project off the ground, with the other options being private-sector and public funding. So which one is right for you?

As we saw in the previous blink, public funding can help you develop your platform. But in what other ways has the US government helped create peer platforms?

Let’s look at the history of the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

You’ve probably heard the saying “adapt or die” applied to the business world? Well, large companies too are trying to adapt to the sharing economy trend.

The UK supermarket behemoth Sainsbury's embarked on a bold collaboration experiment when it opened its doors to 155 external corporate sustainability experts, asking them to review its sustainability strategy. The group even included one of their direct competitors. Thanks to this independent peer review, Sainsbury's was able to objectively pinpoint both the areas it excelled in as well as those that needed improvement.

In the previous blinks, we’ve seen how sharing platforms can address a wide variety of needs. But only when we consider the current global situation can we see just how useful this model really is.  

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing the planet today. If we’re going to avoid the catastrophic effects of rising temperatures, emissions need to be lowered immediately so that they might reach net zero by 2050 – meaning that the amount of emissions released roughly equals the amount of renewable energy created.