Renuka Jain

Roughly a decade ago two new “platform” companies burst out of California. The one that dominated the headlines was called Uber, which created a platform where with one touch of your phone you could summon a cab, direct the driver, pay the driver and rate the driver. It grew like a weed — as all kinds of people became taxi drivers in their spare time. But Uber made clear that its ultimate goal was self-driving cars. The other was called Airbnb. It created a trust platform so efficient that people all over the world were ready to use it to rent out their spare bedrooms to total strangers. Airbnb is growing so fast that it’s now adding the equivalent of one entire Hilton hotel chain’s worth of rooms for rent each year. But while Uber aspires to self-driving cars, Airbnb has a different goal: enabling what I call self-driving people. And that’s why I won’t be surprised if  in five years  Airbnb is not only still the world’s biggest home rental service, but also one of the world’...