Thank you for downloading this programme. In this edition of the bottom line, Evan Davis and guests discuss the sharing economy.

Hello and welcome to the programme. Now consumers in the developed world have all got rather used to owning things, homes, cars, clothes, you name it, they buy it.

And even if they don't buy it, they might rent it from a big company in the business of

renting. Today, though, we're going to look at an alternative model, collaborative consumption.

It's sometimes called or sharing. Often in reality, it's about us renting our possessions out

to each other. Well, some people think it's really beginning to take off. We'll be discussing it

with three enthusiasts and we'll see why some people are perhaps fighting against it. But let's start

by spending a few minutes, meeting each of my three guests, all representing companies in the area of

facilitating sharing. Now, the oldest of the three companies is Lyft Share.

Ali Klobben, you founded that company right back in 1997.

So that's before we even had an internet virtually.

It was pretty much, yes.

Yeah.

So what do you do?

We very simply match people who are travelling in the same direction

so they can share a car.

Whether it's sharing a car to get to work or going to a festival or going to an event, we very simply match people who are going the same way. But you've got two business models in your business, so I think you need to tell us. Okay. Okay, what the difference between the MIS and which one makes money and which one doesn't? Okay, so when we set Livshire up, any member of the public could go on there and say they're travelling from London to Bristol or wherever they were going and you could find a match.

The challenge was we couldn't run a business that way. Why couldn't you run a business that way? That's quite simple. Because we were matching people together but there was no financial transaction for us. They were paying each other. They were paying them. But you just weren't able to get your hands on the cash.

So when I set it up, it was for student sharing cars to go to university. And then we had a stroke of fortune one year when Glastonbury contacted us saying that they're having a bit of trouble getting so many people down to Glastonbury without annoying the council because they had such bad congestion. and so we set them up with a branded version of the Lyft Show site that we had

to help people sharecastings at Glastonbury

and it was a great success.

So it was a Glastonbury lift share scheme, but you were doing the back office. We were basically running the lift sharing scheme for them. And they were promoting out to their 100,000 people going to the festival. So for us, it was a great way to properly promote the service. and we soon started getting phone calls from people who had gone to Glassomery saying, could you run this, run something similar for our company? And we had approaches from companies in London and Bristol and Norfolk saying, could you run a caution scheme for our company? And that's where the money comes from. And that's the model. So basically, employers come to you and say we want a lift share scheme, ride share, as others would say, and then you can organise it for them. And why wouldn't the employer just do it themselves? I mean, you know, we're talking big employers here. If you're a huge company, you don't need to widen out, but if you're a small company, then you do. And so we run just under a thousand schemes across the UK for some of the as the UK's biggest corporates, but also down to very small companies who are just who either got a parking issue or are struggling to get people into their place of work. Okay, so just give us an idea of the scale. How many rides a year are shared via lift share? Okay, so in a year we probably have about 10 million rides. Okay, so that's non-negligible. A year. In fact, no, no, that's incorrect. In a month we have... This isn't Dragon to 10, but I'm expecting to know the figures better than this. I'm trying to think in a typical month we have over a million shares. So's about 12 million a year so we've probably since

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