When Amazon.com was founded in 1994, and eBay the following year, they harnessed the connectivity of the Internet to create new, more efficient markets.
In the beginning, that meant new ways of buying and selling books and collectibles; but now e-commerce is everywhere, offering customers new goods and used goods — and becoming a global force in logistics and retail. Likewise, while today's sharing-economy companies may be just out of their infancy, their services will one day be ubiquitous.
By now, most people have heard of Airbnb, the online apartment-rental service. The company has just 600 employees but a million properties listed for rent, making it larger than the world's biggest hotel chains.