Numlock Sunday: Alison Griswold on sustainable cities and the sharing economy The Numlock Podcast
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By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week I spoke to Alison Griswold, who just restarted one of my favorite newsletters, Oversharing, which is all about companies in the sharing economy.
Since pausing the newsletter, Griswold went to grad school with a concentration on sustainable cities, and is coming back with a renewed interest in the ways that tech companies are interacting, improving and undermining different cities. We spoke all about what’s changed, and how the sharing economy has an effect on the world.
Griswold can be found at Oversharing.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Thank you so much for coming on today. You have just relaunched Oversharing, one of my long favorite newsletters. Do you want to talk a little bit about you know, what drew you to the space to begin with? I know that the sharing economy has come to mean a lot of different things and that evolution has rolled with the times. What consistently fascinates you about this space?
Well, first of all, thank you. I love having you as an Oversharing fan. It means a lot.I fell into the sharing economy because I had various jobs as a business reporter and through that wound up covering some startups. I like to tell people I'm not really a tech reporter, I'm a business reporter who writes about tech companies from a business perspective. Then the ones I just thought were most interesting was the sharing economy, because this was when it was the early 2010s and Uber was just starting and Airbnb was starting and it was kind of clear they were going to be really big, but they were also completely chaotic, and that was so fun.That’s how I got into it, but it's just a really interesting space. I think we've talked about this before, but the sharing economy is this really fascinating intersection of what happens when you have a lot of money that's put into a particular area, and then you also have a fundamental rethinking of labor practices and employment practices. Then you also have disparities of wealth inequality and income inequality because more often than not, the consumers are sort of affluent educated individuals, and then the workers are often more working-class, trying to just top off their income for the week, so you have all these factors that go into the sharing economy and collide, and I think that's really interesting.Yeah, I love that note that you had about how you're not a tech reporter who covers business, you're a business reporter who covers these tech companies, because again, it is so interesting that oftentimes the innovation that these companies have is not necessarily a technological one, but rather some combination of cloud services and also just labor and interacting with their labor in unconventional ways. It’s been a little bit since you went on hiatus, so what have you seen in the interim on that?Yeah, before I went on hiatus, I wrote a piece for Oversharing. It was something like, "What even is a tech company anymore?" Because it was that time when Casper was going public and everyone kept covering it as "Casper, this tech company," and I was just like, "They sell mattresses online. They're not a tech company. They're a mattress company that sells online. When did everything that has a website become a tech company?"That's funny. They’re not even technologically-enabled mattresses, they're just a delivery company.Yeah, so I think at some point we started to conflate tech-enabled with tech company because a lot of things, especially now, right, we live in a digital economy, everyone is on their phones, everyone has the internet, most things that do well from a business perspective are tech-enabled in that they have a website, or an online ordering option, or there's some sort of software component, but that doesn't mean the product or the core business is tech.I imagine that one reason for that appeal is that it's probably a lot more intriguing to a future IPO to be a tech company, but the
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week I spoke to Alison Griswold, who just restarted one of my favorite newsletters, Oversharing, which is all about companies in the sharing economy.
Since pausing the newsletter, Griswold went to grad school with a concentration on sustainable cities, and is coming back with a renewed interest in the ways that tech companies are interacting, improving and undermining different cities. We spoke all about what’s changed, and how the sharing economy has an effect on the world.
Griswold can be found at Oversharing.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Thank you so much for coming on today. You have just relaunched Oversharing, one of my long favorite newsletters. Do you want to talk a little bit about you know, what drew you to the space to begin with? I know that the sharing economy has come to mean a lot of different things and that evolution has rolled with the times. What consistently fascinates you about this space?
Well, first of all, thank you. I love having you as an Oversharing fan. It means a lot.I fell into the sharing economy because I had various jobs as a business reporter and through that wound up covering some startups. I like to tell people I'm not really a tech reporter, I'm a business reporter who writes about tech companies from a business perspective. Then the ones I just thought were most interesting was the sharing economy, because this was when it was the early 2010s and Uber was just starting and Airbnb was starting and it was kind of clear they were going to be really big, but they were also completely chaotic, and that was so fun.That’s how I got into it, but it's just a really interesting space. I think we've talked about this before, but the sharing economy is this really fascinating intersection of what happens when you have a lot of money that's put into a particular area, and then you also have a fundamental rethinking of labor practices and employment practices. Then you also have disparities of wealth inequality and income inequality because more often than not, the consumers are sort of affluent educated individuals, and then the workers are often more working-class, trying to just top off their income for the week, so you have all these factors that go into the sharing economy and collide, and I think that's really interesting.Yeah, I love that note that you had about how you're not a tech reporter who covers business, you're a business reporter who covers these tech companies, because again, it is so interesting that oftentimes the innovation that these companies have is not necessarily a technological one, but rather some combination of cloud services and also just labor and interacting with their labor in unconventional ways. It’s been a little bit since you went on hiatus, so what have you seen in the interim on that?Yeah, before I went on hiatus, I wrote a piece for Oversharing. It was something like, "What even is a tech company anymore?" Because it was that time when Casper was going public and everyone kept covering it as "Casper, this tech company," and I was just like, "They sell mattresses online. They're not a tech company. They're a mattress company that sells online. When did everything that has a website become a tech company?"That's funny. They’re not even technologically-enabled mattresses, they're just a delivery company.Yeah, so I think at some point we started to conflate tech-enabled with tech company because a lot of things, especially now, right, we live in a digital economy, everyone is on their phones, everyone has the internet, most things that do well from a business perspective are tech-enabled in that they have a website, or an online ordering option, or there's some sort of software component, but that doesn't mean the product or the core business is tech.I imagine that one reason for that appeal is that it's probably a lot more intriguing to a future IPO to be a tech company, but the