In Episode 18, we connect with James Slezak. James is the co-founder of Peers, an organization that helps make it "easier for workers to find, compare and manage work in the sharing economy." Currently, James is the Director of Strategy for the New York Times.

For more information on James Slezak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jslezak

Subscribe to The Crowd with these links:

• iTunes
• Stitcher

---

 Transcript:

Kevin:            This episode of The Crowd is brought to you by Near Me. Power your marketplace with Near Me.

 

Hi. Welcome to The Crowd, a podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking about collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

 

                        I’m super excited about today’s interview. I will be joined by James Slezak, the Director of Strategy of the New York Times. James was the founding partner at purpose.com, co-founder and chairman at the New Economy Lab and co-founder of Peers.org. James, welcome to the show.

 

James:            Thanks, Kevin. It’s really great to be involved.

 

Kevin:            Wonderful. Well, you have a little bit of history with Near Me. I know you got to hang out with Angela at a couple of different events. We’re super excited to get you on the show today. Before we jump into our discussion on the sharing economy, let’s do some rapid fire questions. What book do you recommend most often?

 

James:            Well, look, for the sharing economy, I think as biased as I am, my good friend Rachel Botsman and one of the key members of peers.org I think sort of wrote the seminal book Collaborative Consumption. So you can’t go wrong starting with that one.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. Where do you spend most of your time online?

 

James:            On the New York Times of course. Although to be honest, I think like most people, social media takes a big chunk of the pie graph of my online time. I think I’m hopelessly addicted to reading my friends’ wall posts on Facebook and Twitter. It’s kind of suck me in well these days. I’m less of an Instagram user. TechCrunch as someone who’s involved in technology, Mashable, I try to stay away from Valleywag but I get caught by that occasionally and of course peers.org.

 

Kevin:            Awesome. What peer-to-peer marketplaces do you use on a personal level?

 

James:            Yes. So I’m an Airbnb host and I’ve been an incredibly enthusiastic member of that community since I can remember it. I’m a guest and a host in different capacities. I’ve used TaskRabbit from time to time. I’m never as a Rabbit yet but I guess a Tasker they’re now called, but from the consumer side. I love Lyft and Sidecar. I’ve used both of those although here in New York City it’s only been recently available. I think the other ones that I use from time to time when there’s a need for them are the more specialized peer-to-peer service and expertise sites, the Freelancers and Gurus and Skillshares. So that’s pretty much the major one.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. When you’re not working for the New York Times, what do you like to do?

 

James:            I hang out. I have long branches. So if I get a few days off work, you’d probably find me on an airplane going somewhere nearby to get, maybe south at this time of the year. It’s freezing cold in New York City. So the further south you get usually the better.

 

Kevin:            Wonderful, wonderful. So before we jump in to your experience in the collaborative economy, give us your back story. What did you do before you got to the New York Times? An interesting thing that I saw on LinkedIn is that you have a background in Mathematics and Physics. So give us that whole story. I’d love to hear it.

 

James:            Yeah. Look, in short, that’s right, I was a scientist for a long time and thought maybe that might be ultimately the career that I’d pursue. And I love Science and the rigor and just the fact that there’s some sense of ultimate truth there. It’s really to me like occasionally if you need answers, there’s a lot of unsolved questions. But I’ve also been very passionate about community organizing. And so writing in parallel with my Science work, I was quite heavily involved in the Climate Change Movement and various forms of Social Justice Movement around the world, back in Australia where I grew up and here in the United States. And so, both of those treads of my background really led me to get more heavily involved in organizing online. And some friends of mine and I ended up being the founding team of Purpose.

 

We’re part of some of the very early experiments back in around 2004 on how you can use the internet and sort of a technical understanding of how that works and how to create online apps and find some communities to start to get people to change the world in new ways and to come together. So that kind of thinking led to purpose.com. And Purpose I think really tapped a current, a strong current of interest. And frankly, its success is in bringing together two trains of thought, technology and online entrepreneurship with community organizing and social justice and environmental movement that go along with that.

 

So what we realized is as we looked around the landscape of important movements that were evolving that the sharing economy movement and the collaborative and peer-to-peer expressions of it really represented something quite unique and interesting in the sense that it both had a potential growth engine behind it economically in the sense that it involved changing the way that we conduct commerce in economy. But it also solved or at least addressed a number of really important social justice and environmental questions specifically, who owns the assets that we use in our everyday lives? And how much production do we have? Do we produce endless quantities of stuff that get used and thrown away or sits idle and is overproduced unnecessarily?

 

Or do we find clever ways of being a little bit less wasteful in production of things like cars, apartments, ordinary objects of everyday life. So the excitement about those two potential contributions to solving some of the biggest problems that we have as a species was what really got me excited about working on this space. Then when I got together with friends of ours from the sharing platforms, in particular friends who were working at that time at Airbnb, we saw immediately how there could be a real win-win there both for the people who are the entrepreneurs building these business but also for the community of people who want to get together both to use them but also because they care about the underlying issues that we were just talking about, equity and sustainability.

 

Kevin:            Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. After you were at purpose.com, you got involved with Peers as a co-founder. Tell us about that.

 

James:            Absolutely. Yeah. Well at Purpose, we were trying to use this model of online community organizing to address a whole bunch of different issues. And it’s really a whole new frontier of potential there in terms of applying this new tool that has been developed to different challenges around the world. The sharing economy movement was very right for doing that. So we had a bunch of very productive working sessions with friends of ours, not just at Airbnb but also Sidecar, Lyft, viable.com and others who were right in the middle of this.

 

Those guys who have founded those organizations were clearly driven by the sense of the impact on the world that they could have through the models that they were developing and were very keen and very generous with their time in helping us think through how to build this movement out, how to describe what motivates people to get involved and what kinds of actions we could get people involved with. So we had a series of working sessions with both of the founders of those organizations as well as some of the key early members and participants or users. Right from the beginning, we wanted to place the emphasis on the people actually who make up this community, not just the businesses themselves and the people who run those businesses.

 

Kevin:            Right.

 

James:            And so we circled around and understood what was motivating them, what their needs were, what was really holding together this sense of belonging to these communities. And we started to think about how the tools of online organizing could potentially help them in coming together. What we realized was that there potentially will be a gap there. And Peers was motivated certainly in the beginning in particular by this sense that really nobody was representing the members. No one was representing the users or the participants and thinking directly about their needs.

 

Obviously, the platforms and the businesses are serving those needs to some degree. But sometimes the need for an independent group of people that come together that isn’t necessarily about getting more users on a particular platform but is rather about addressing the broader questions and things, anything from tax to regulation, to just getting to know each other, to finding new ways to generate more income, to solving problems with the ups and downs of income as you take work in the sharing economy and replace potentially with more stable forms of income.

 

All these questions are things that were essential for the community but not necessarily right at the top of the agenda if you’re just building a platform. And so Peers was an attempt to address those core questions for the participants and to really represent them and represent their voice in the conversations that will ultimately lead to the evolution of this sector.

 

Kevin:            So being a co-founder and then you recently left the company and gave up your board seat, what was the journey like between those two points? Give us some examples potentially.

 

James:            Yeah. Well, the challenge probably right at the beginning was to understand really how these movements sees itself. What’s its story? Why is people part of it? What really motivates them? Certainly to some extent the self-interest. If you have a spare room in your apartment, then you have a self-interested reason. Nothing wrong with that to rent that out. But is there more than that? Do you stop to meet new people and enjoy their company as friends? Do you build your social network out? Do you enjoy playing the role of host? It’s the same kind of questions that people driving cars or renting or borrowing or sharing any forms of assets that they’re part of.

 

And so when I finally talked to these people, the first question they’re answering is, what’s really fanning this movement? And we got a good sense of that. We got a sense that it’s the narrative of this part of the change in the world that these people wanted to be part of. Then we thought a little bit about, how would the organization work? What could we do with and for those people? And so like any .org or .com, that itself is a bit of a journey. In the earlier stages, I think we placed a real emphasis on advocacy and on representing the participants in this movement in terms of their interest, in particular debates that are going on in the community.

 

So a lot of the stuff that the community got involved in very early on was for example to turn up at those council meetings when debates were being held about whether or not to ban platform like the ride-sharing platforms or apartment-sharing platforms to represent the voice of the participants in those debates. And then also I think where the organization is being pivoting to more recently is recognizing that the people at the top of the pyramid if you like, the people that are most involved to a generally what you would call the producer tier, the people who are either owning the apartment or renting it out to guests or the people that are driving cars or are doing tasks that are pure producers had some of the most acute needs and were the most invested in the movement.

 

And so where the team has taken it to more recently is about, how can we create products and services that are particularly attuned to their need? And so for me personally, that’s the next in my wheelhouse as more of a community organizer and less as a creator of products that are constantly served here. It’s sort of a natural point to me to focus more on my work in the New York Times.

 

Kevin:            Right. So what were some of the – as a community organizer, what were some of the core needs that you had identified for these producers? I mean, what were they really looking for?

 

James:            Yeah.

 

Kevin:            Was it more regulatory support? Was it emotional support? What were the things that they were really looking for?

 

James:            Yeah. Look, I mean at the very centerI think it was just a recognition that without something like Peers existing that there are a bunch of big debates happening in the community. And those debates effectively are just going to take place between the lobbyists of a set of businesses and the lobbyists for a set of businesses that are getting disrupted. And you see this most clearly in taxis and in apartments. You’ve got the very actively organized hotels lobby on one side. You got a newer set of organizations on the other side, Airbnb, CouchSurfing, etc. It’s the same thing with Uber and Lyft and Sidecar versus taxi interest. And so nobody in those debates was representing the people actually driving the Lyft and hosting the Airbnb guests and doing tasks on TaskRabbit. And we felt that those were important voices to have in the room.

 

And a lot of our work early on was just simply about giving a platform for those people to express their voices. And that really did have a lot of impact. You saw a bunch of debates all around the country and in fact around the world actually being heavily influenced by simply having a voice that wasn’t previously there. But specific issues that came up a lot, I mean certainly regulation is at the top of the list. I think it’s very stressful for people that are involved in sharing and peer-to-peer platforms when they hear very conflicting messages like we do here in New York about whether what they’re doing is legitimate or not. And especially for well-meaning people that are just trying to supplement their income or find a new way to get the freedom to pursue other projects. They need answers on that kind of question.

 

But related to that, probably other top issues had to do with sort of the nuts and bolts of how to get this together. So taxation was another very common one. Again people wanting to do the right thing but just find it very difficult to figure out what that is. I’ve gone through this recently as  I catch up on a few of my own tax returns, which form to use, how do you classify the income. None the boxes on the forms actually correspond to the things that you’re supposed to be reporting. It’s very hard.

 

Kevin:            Right.

 

James:            And that creates a lot of transaction costs for people and those are real inefficiencies and they’re real stresses for people who are really just trying to get by and to do the right thing.

 

Kevin:            That makes sense.

 

James:            That’s like probably the third one, maybe the last one I would just highlight is just simply discovery. So for me especially in the early days of founding Peers, one of the eye-opening things and the things that convinced me personally that there was something big potentially here was when you would meet someone from one platform who wasn’t aware of the other one – and for me, the classic example was I was in a Lyft car. I remember I was on my way from San Francisco Airport to the old Airbnb offices to meet with the team there and chatting with the driver as you do. Back in those days, you just pound people and get in the front seat. I think that’s evolved a little bit especially here in New York. People really don’t do that anymore. And the driver asked, “Where are you going?” I said Airbnb and she said, “What’s that?”

 

And I remember being struck by the fact that this was somebody who’s at the very apex of the sharing economy pyramid. This is an engaged producer spending hours of her day involved in the sharing economy and she hadn’t even heard of the largest platform in the sector. And it made merealize well, of course, she hadn’t because nobody at Lyft had the job of letting her know that other platform in other ways that she could supplement her Lyft income with income from other forms of sharing. And I really saw that as our job. She’s part of that community because she needed the extra money. She lost her job and sort of her eyes opened up and said, “You know what, I have a spare apartment in my room. Do you mean I could just be renting that out on another sharing platform?” And that’s when I realized there’s a real opportunity here to help people to bring them into a community and to basically build something of value I think to the whole community.

 

Kevin:            Very, very cool. So in terms of the collaborative economy and the sharing economy, what kind of macro-level trends and issues are on your radar today besides some of the ones you mentioned before? What are some of the big ones that you’re seeing out there?

 

James:            Yeah. I think the biggest trend that’s probably going to influence the evolution of the space is the evolution in user expectations and behaviors. I think there’s always this interplay between new online technologies and platforms and the things that they’re enabling users to do and the things that they’re training users to do differently. And I think part of what the early pioneers of the sharing economy platforms have really started to do is just to get people comfortable with the idea that a stranger might get into your car or you might get into a stranger’s car or they might stay in your apartment or vice versa. And part of what was so eye opening I think about doing the community building work with peers was how much people would draw that analogy.

 

They weren’t necessarily doing car sharing. Maybe they’re doing apartment sharing. But when you say to them, hey, you know, it’s exactly kind of like what you’re doing but just with a different asset. You’re doing it with your apartment. You can be doing it with your car. You can be doing it with your skills. You can be doing it with your tools. The training of people to trust each other I think is actually really profound evolution in the way that people behave. And I think people recognizing that the peer-to-peer mechanism for rating other’s behaviors starts incentive that they can really trust that people need to behave well because other people are going to rate them and that if they had been rated and they have interacted with other people that you can really trust them in a way that you trust a friend of a friend that they’re really not a stranger. They’re part of the community that you’re joining.

 

Kevin:            Right. Well, the trust issue is so important in the sharing economy on so many different levels. You’re trusting that the service will be performed in the way that it’s marketed. You’re trusting them with safety. You’re trusting the site that the transaction will be handled cleanly. You’re trusting that the regulatory issues are all there that there’s insurance and all these different things. So it’s a big issue and we’re seeing and hearing about it all over the place right now.

 

James:            Yeah. It’s huge. And look, I think in terms of crystal ball predictions, I think increasingly that trust mechanic is going to have to evolve a little bit. I think this sort of one- to five-star ratings I think originally eBay sort of pioneered that in most people’s imaginations. The classic effects are starting to happen I think that happen in any rating system. You get things like rate inflation. You get things like concerns over discrepant rating. Drivers are worried that one or two negative interactions can cause them their jobs. Equally, customers who’ve had a bad experience but don’t necessarily want to penalize somebody for fear that they will have a disproportionate effect on this.

 

So I think increasingly some subtlety is going to have to be worked into the system. I don’t think anybody has all the answers right now but you can see the platform start to struggle with it. To give you an example, on Airbnb now, they will give you a field to communicate something privately to Airbnb which is very interesting. They’ve recognized that there are some things that you might not want write on the public rating and review one of your hosts but you really might want to let Airbnb know. You’re letting them off but actually they kind of scuffed your wall a little bit and they were difficult in ways that you might not want to penalize them for but it might be worth just keeping an eye on.

 

Kevin:            Right. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. In terms of your ongoing participation in the collaborative economy and the sharing economy, obviously you’re the Head of Strategy at New York Times, are you following it from a journalistic standpoint in addition to a personal level? Or has your job taken you a little bit away from that?

 

James:            Yeah. I mean. I don’t have a journalistic role here. So I’m on the business side meaning that we’re kind of part of the management side of things. I think there are commonalities between the peer-to-peer sharing space and the media that are going to become increasingly important. I think first and foremost patient and peer discovery is really driving the growth of both of these kinds of organizations. So whereas in the olden days not that long we go, people would discover articles and media content through picking up an issue of the newspaper or the publication looking at the first few pages flipping through it as the mode of discovery.

 

The importance of that channel is really decreasing and the channel that is increasing is exactly the same peer-to-peer channels that drive the growth of these other platforms. So I see something on my social media, wall or friends tell me about it. So that’s exactly the same dynamic that you see in these other platforms although organizations are struggling with how do you support that, how do you make it easy, how do you display the value of what you’re doing to people who might be engaging in a lot of way than back in the day when they’re sort of picking up a copy of the whole paper. So I think we’re going to solve that problem.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. Well, James, it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show today. We’ll load this recording. We’ll have in our show notes a link to your LinkedIn profile so people can connect with you if they have any questions or they want to get in touch with you. So thank you for joining us.

 

James:            Thank you.

 

Kevin:            So that’s it for today’s show everybody. I’d like to thank James Slezak for joining us here today. He’s doing great stuff. If you want to learn more about James, we’ve got all his information in our show notes. Just go to www.near-me.com. Click on the blog and then go to the podcast listing. Also, if you like today’s show, we’d really appreciate it if you could go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review. It really helps us out. Thanks and take care.