In a time when we need to save money, reduce our ecological footprint, and band together to make change, Divvy may be just what the doctor ordered. Divvy.com helps people and communities to divide up use of various physical assets through a unique billing and asset scheduling system. So for instance, you can use Divvy to schedule the use of conference rooms, desks in a co-working space, a car, a snow blower, in fact, almost anything. And if you want to charge for use, there’s a built in payment system. The whole thing is pretty much self-service, so it doesn’t consume much time except at set up.
I had the good fortune to do some work for founder Aaron Freed on the launch of Divvy.com (disclosure: I earned a small number of options for my work). I got involved because I think that sharing our stuff will solve many problems at once. And I see a new economy and culture emerging based on sharing that can help us enjoy life more and avert societal collapse.
Here’s my perspective. And let me use the example of cars to illustrate.
While there’s a lot of hype around hybrids, the savings and footprint reductions offered by car sharing and ride sharing far outstrip the benefit of hybrids. Consider this, if you replace your existing car with a hybrid, you’ve just contributed the equivalent of five years worth of car emissions to the atmosphere due to the resource intensive process of manufacturing a car, not to mention having invested heavily in a rapidly depreciating asset, a rookie wealth-building mistake. If done right, car sharing communities get by with a 20-1 ratio of people to cars. Read a short post about the advantages of ride sharing versus a hybrid by Zipcar (car sharing) and GoLoco (ride sharing) founder Robin Chase here.
Also, hybrids keep us locked in the same destructive environmental and economic system we’re suffering from now. Even if they only made hybrids, car companies would still have to sell more and more cars to keep shareholders happy same as they do now. That’s obviously not working. It can’t work long term. We will not survive a world where everyone owns a car. And greater fuel efficiency will lead to more use of fossil fuels, cars, and roads. Better fuel efficiency only extends the life of a system that is stealing our wealth, health, and time. To really make change, we need an new economic model that rewards use of less resources. Kevin Jones writes about this on Stanford’s Social Innovation blog here.
So let’s imagine this world for a second. Imagine a world where cars are built to be shared. Where they are embedded in a web of community use. And where car companies thrive because they help the world use less cars, less car trips, and have more passengers per trip. They do this by changing their model from manufacturing to service. And they move from a unit sales model to a subscription model with predictable recurring revenues, which investors love by the way. In this model, they’re incented to build cars that last, that are highly reliable, that get great mileage, and to increase the number of shared trips. They’d do this because it would lower their costs, thus increasing their profit. This is similar to the business models of cell phone carriers and managed health care providers.
The problem is that I doubt that existing car companies will do this. They’re locked into a trajectory that might just kill them, and us. But you and I are not locked in. We don’t have to go along for this ride. We can start down this path to a sharing economy and culture by doing it ourselves with services like Divvy, ZipCar, and GoLoco.
If you want to learn more about Divvy, check out this interview of the founder Aaron Freed with a video of how Divvy works.
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