Description of Leveraged and Shared Assets

Historically, many businesses have made an asset available by embedding it into products and services. One example is car rental, where companies such as Hertz, Avis, and National purchase fleets of automobiles and then rent them by miles of use—in the interim, storing, servicing, and maintaining those vehicles as needed. Today, companies like Uber and Lyft leverage the assets of car-owning drivers to provide essentially the same service.

In recent years, the leveraging of assets has become much more sophisticated—and virtual. The latter is especially important because when you’ve turned an object into information, it not only typically becomes more valuable but also becomes easier to share, not to mention infinitely more scalable. Thus, Airbnb is using its platform to enable access to millions of bedrooms around the world—something that would have been impossible if it owned and serviced all of those bedrooms. 

Some key asset categories that can be leveraged include intellectual property/digital assets (e.g., Google Maps doesn’t own the land), Opensource, Metaverse, and Web3.

A key subset of leveraged assets is the sharing economy, which has its own set of categories. Here are some of the most important of these (and examples of well-known companies or services) that exemplify them:

• Peer-2-Peer (Blizzard Entertainment)

• Fashion (Rent the Runway)

• Cars (Turo, Getaround)

• Co-working (WeWork)

• Offices (the next WeWork: see below)

• Computation/Cloud (Amazon Cloud)

• Manufacturing plants (TSMC)

• Prototyping (Qualcomm)

• Sharing Economy (Uber & Airbnb)

• Open data sets

• Leveraging and sharing, leading to fractional ownership (IP, real estate)