You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. Why do we trust some digital companies and distrust others?

How did we come to count on services provided by Airbnb, Uber, or Lyft, but not other platforms that perform similar services?

Digital trust advisor Marcos Aguilar says it's about designing ecosystems for building and

sustaining trust.

He explains in his talk from TED at BCG in 2021.

I'm talking to you today from my home in Brazil, where I live with my wife and two kids.

Let me start by asking a question to the other parents out of there. Would you consider asking a total stranger,

someone you've never met before, never even seen before, to meet your kids after school,

put your kids in their car, which, by the way, you haven't seen either, and drive them halfway across town.

Even just asking that hypothetical question freaks me out.

Let me ask you another question. Would you invest in a business that does that have strangers driving kids around town?

It seems like an absurdly and trustworthy value proposition.

An impossible business plan. Doom to fail, doesn't it? Well, this may come as a surprise to you,

but back in 2014, three months started a company called Hopskip Drive with this exact model. It served one million customers and in February 2020 raised $22 million and expanded to several

cities in the US.

Is the business foolproof?

Well, no business is, but it's good enough to keep growing. How did they do that?

How did they create trust in what many of us believe is one of the most inherently untrustworthy

situations possible? The short answer, they build trust in the overall system.

Customers don't necessarily trust hopskip drivers.

That will be relational trust.

But they do trust the hopskip drive system, what we call systemic trust.

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