Conor Maguire introduced me to an interesting site today called Airbnb vs. Berlin. The site does a deep dive into Berlin’s Airbnb market with the hope of answering the question: Is Airbnb contributing to a shortage in affordable housing?

The site is very well done. It’s filled with lots of great market stats and diagrams such as this one here: 

Of course, the impetus for a site like this is that cities all around the world, from San Francisco to Berlin, are grappling with rising home prices. If you happen to live in a successful, growing city, that’s probably what is happening.

But when this happens, we seem to want to look for something or someone to blame. In San Francisco it’s the tech workers. They’re the ones driving up homes prices. In Vancouver, it’s the foreign Chinese buyers. And in Berlin, it’s those Airbnb users who are just out to make a profit. In all of these cases, we like to tell ourselves that if we could just get rid of “X”, everything would be much better. 

But I think sometimes we forget that this is also the result of doing many things right.

If Berlin wasn’t a brilliantly cool place to visit, then tourists wouldn’t come. And if tourists didn’t come, then Berlin wouldn’t have, by far, the largest Airbnb market in Germany. If Vancouver wasn’t one of the most enjoyable places in the world to live, you wouldn’t have the same attention from overseas buyers looking to snatch up properties. 

So in a way, we should be asking ourselves: How do we, as a city, manage our own awesomeness?

The other thing that Airbnb vs. Berlin reminded me of is the viewpoint that profits are some dirty little secret. I hear it all the time in the real estate development business. People will say: “That developer is just out to make money.” Of course she/he is! They operate a business. And like all for-profit businesses, one of the objectives – it may not be the only one – is to make money.

I say all this not as a direct response to the website. They remained fairly neutral in their analysis. Instead, I raise it as an alternate viewpoint in the seemingly universal battle against “X.”

In case you’re wondering about Berlin’s Airbnb market, the site estimates that there are roughly 11,701 Airbnb listings in the city out of a total of about 1.9 million flats. Of these listings, it is estimated that somewhere around 30% are by “professional users” who are only out to make a profit and are not participating in the “sharing economy” in its purest sense. That equates to about 0.18% of all Berlin flats.

Based on this number, I’d say that Berlin’s cool factor probably has a lot more to do with the city’s rising rents than do the profit seeking Airbnb users.

Airbnb is a platform that connects people who have extra space with people who need space. It’s a peer-to-peer hospitality company.

Yeloha, which is a startup I just discovered today, is a peer-to-peer solar company based out of Boston. 

In the same vein as Airbnb, it connect people who have extra roof space (that’s suitable for solar collection) with people who want to buy solar energy (but may not have a solar friendly roof).

Here’s an image from their website that explains how it works:

Basically, if you have a solar friendly roof, Yeloha will come and install solar panels on top of your place for free. You get to keep some of the energy that’s generated (about 1/3 apparently) which becomes a credit to your electricity bill. You are then known as a “Sun Host.”

The remaining energy gets fed back into the grid and, if you don’t have a solar friendly roof, you can purchase this excess energy, which also results in a credit to your electricity bill. The solar electricity is less expensive than the regular grid electricity. In this case, you are known as a “Sun Partner.”

I think this is a pretty neat idea. Neither party has to pay anything upfront. Both parties save money. And the result is more solar through a distributed and virtual net metering setup.

Yesterday afternoon Sam Altman of Y Combinator published a blog post talking about a new YC Fellowship program for even earlier stage companies. 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Y Combinator, they are a super successful funding platform for early stage startups. They are located in Mountain View, California.

What’s unique about their approach is that they invest a relatively small amount of money ($120,000 for 7% of your company) in a relatively large number of companies. Their most recent cohort was around 85 companies and they do that twice a year.

The rationale behind this approach is that it can be incredibly hard to predict which people and ideas will produce the next great company. Oftentimes the best ideas appear really shitty at first. (Here’s a post by one of the cofounders of Airbnb talking about the company’s early rejections.)

So instead of putting all of their eggs in one basket, YC invests smaller amounts in more companies.

But beyond this being beneficial to them, it’s also a model that I think helps to reduce the barriers to people starting a company. It gives more people the chance to prove that their company has the potential to be something great. 

And that’s precisely what makes this new YC Fellow program/experiment so interesting to me.

Instead of $120,000, YC fellows will receive $12,000 and they won’t have to move to the Bay Area (although it’ll be encouraged). They’ll still get mentorship and advice like the regular YC program, but it’ll be a kind of light version. 

Though this is almost certainly just the beginning. Here’s how Sam ended his announcement post:

“Someday if it works, we’d love to fund 1,000 companies per year like this.”

Now all of a sudden that’s some scale.

What’s exciting about this is that I believe our cities have the potential to be far more innovative than they are today. Every city is trying to be the next Silicon Valley, but every city is not the next Silicon Valley.

I saw a great tweet the other day that went something like this (I wish I could remember who the author was):

“Entrepreneurs aren’t risk takers. They’re just rich kids with big safety nets.”

It’s a bit of a tongue-in-cheek generalization. But to unlock the full potential of our cities, we should be figuring out how to get everyone participating and building their ideas, not just those with a head start. 

I think there are a lot of people around the world who could be doing great things, but they just haven’t been able to take that first step for one reason or another.

Hopefully organizations like Y Combinator will be able to help them take it.