How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other

While facebook validation is possibly helpful in some cases, I'd imagine it's relatively trivial to create a fake facebook account. Lyft's success so far probably hasn't had much to do with the pre-verification (which is flimsy at best). Their success is probably driven by the fact that they've found a small subset of the US population who is comfortable with "ride sharing". Their branding; with pink mustaches, fist bumps, riding in the front seat and a sense of "community" (presumably going through that ritual with another makes you part of an exclusive community), has self-selected a group of people who is comfortable with giving up some level of trust, in return for the ability to participate in their transportation marketplace.

That said, I think we see taxis in most cities actively avoid areas that could cause trouble. From anecdotal reports, the same isn't true of Lyft. The implied trust (facebook verification and sense of community) likely puts those drivers in more dangerous situations more often (although it's a group who is either comfortable with that, or hasn't thought it through).

There's also an open question as to whether or not their trust system can scale. While initial marketing can help you pitch to a select group to start with, can that effectively reach a larger audience? Fun and quirky might be antithetical to the safety and reliability concerns most of the general public probably has for their preferred transportation system.

Lyft also has credit card info for each user and the transaction is typically cash-less. The kinds of people that would rob a taxi driver probably aren't going to have a smart phone and a credit card and are probably doing it to score cash to buy drugs or some similarly short term reward. In the case where they got their hands on a phone by stealing it it seems unlikely that they wouldn't just pawn the phone for cash vs concocting some elaborate scheme to hail a lyft and rob it's driver only to find out that since lyft is cash-less there isn't much worth stealing that they couldn't have gotten by mugging some random passerby on the street.

Agreed. I'd love to see demographic info from these companies. That said, they can still be pretty successful this way, I just feel it's disingenuous to claim otherwise.

I came here to say the same thing and reference an earlier article I saw on this site

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7226871

This seems like a more realistic theory. I've only ever known people to use these services to save money or in a few rare cases because their was no other supply for the service at the time.

Absolutely. Outside the tech echo chamber, the economy has never recovered from the "jobless recovery" of the 2000s.

I read a good point about this somewhere: renting out an apartment on Airbnb is a good way to make money now, but the free market being what it is, that extra value will be captured by rent eventually. Landlord knows you can make $500/month renting on Airbnb? Add $500 to the rent.

They'd probably have a lot in common.