Dru Collie lives in a neighbourhood of 500 homes. Every single one of them owns a lawnmower. Most own a leaf blowerand a pressure washer. Shelves of tools used twice a year, gathering dust in between.
Nobody shares. Nobody expects to. It’s just how things work.
Collie wrote about this on LinkedIn recently, with a memory from eastern Uganda, “I watched a village share everything. Not because they were noble. Not because they read the right books. Because the alternative was unthinkable. You had something your neighbour needed. Of course you gave it.”
He ends by asking, “What would it look like if we actually knew each other well enough to share? What would have to be true about trust, about proximity, about relationship? I don’t have a clean answer. I just know I’ve never looked at my garage the same way.”
The scale of the idle asset problem
Private vehicles sit unused for 95% of their lifetime. The average power drill is used for between 12 and 15 minutes across its entire ownership. A pressure washer, a tile cutter, a ladder tall enough to reach the guttering: most households own things they use so rarely that the per-use cost, if you added it up, would be absurd.
The sharing economy exists to solve exactly this. Match underused assets to the people who need them, at the moment they need them, without anyone having to own them outright. The global sharing economy was valued at $344 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $1.4 trillion by 2030. That is a significant amount of value flowing from a deceptively simple idea: you have something, someone else needs it, and there is a way to connect the two.
Almost none of that value is coming from the garages in Dru Collie’s neighbourhood. It is coming from strangers sharing with strangers, mediated by platforms and algorithms. The people who live 40 yards apart still own 500 separate lawnmowers.
Empty seats and an INSEAD MBA
In December 2003, Frédéric Mazzella needed to get from Paris to his family home in the French countryside for Christmas. Every train was full. His sister eventually drove the 90 miles to collect him, and as they made their journey together, Mazzella noticed something he couldn’t stop thinking about: car after car on the motorway, each with a single driver and empty seats. A train’s worth of capacity, travelling in the same direction, invisible to each other.
The observation became an idea. The idea became a website. . “I saw an incredible opportunity to avoid wasting fossil fuels and reduce associated pollution while allowing users to reduce their transportation costs,” he says.
But before it could become a company, Mazzella decided he needed to understand business well enough to build one. In 2006, he enrolled in the MBA programme at INSEAD in Fontainebleau.
He used the MBA to develop his idea. He spoke about the platform to anyone who would listen, used it as a case study in classes, and had it built into the school’s intranet so that students could share rides between campus and home. In the library, he pitched the idea to a classmate named Nicolas Brusson, who had spent seven years in Silicon Valley. Brusson was immediate won over. They entered BlaBlaCar’s business plan into the annual INSEAD Business Venture Competition and won.
Shortly after finishing their studies, they officially launched BlaBlaCar, which now operates across 22 countries with over 100 million members, and has an estimated $2 billion valuation. Brusson serves as CEO.
“INSEAD is where I learned how to structure and manage our young venture,” Mazzella explains. “With BlaBlaCar, I quickly understood that there was no technological obstacle. The only obstacle is the change in mentality, culture and usage. I think we can change society by making it want to do good, not by moralising and lecturing it.”
Time to think again about all those lawnmowers.
A sister’s dress and a Harvard dorm room
Five years after Mazzella had his motorway insight, Jennifer Hyman was starting the second year of her MBA at Harvard Business School. She watched her sister spend thousands of dollars on a designer dress for a wedding, wear it once, and hang it in a wardrobe.
Hyman saw the same thing Mazzella had seen on the motorway: an asset sitting idle almost all of its life, accessed once and then stored. In November 2008, she and her co-founder and HBS classmate Jennifer Fleiss borrowed 130 designer dresses, rented a room on Harvard’s campus, and invited female students to try them on. The experiment confirmed the idea.
Rent the Runway launched in 2009. It grew to 11 million members and a $1 billion valuation by giving women access to designer wardrobes without ownership. The insight was identical to BlaBlaCar’s: the value was in access, not possession. The fashion industry produces roughly 100 billion garments a year for a global population of 8 billion people. Most clothes are worn far fewer times than their production cost justifies.
Hyman’s time at Harvard Business School gave her the environment and the network to act on it.
Why we share with strangers but not with neighbours
The paradox at the heart of Collie’s observation is that the sharing economy has worked well between strangers and made little headway between people who already know each other.
Airbnb connects you with someone’s home in a city you’ve never visited. BlaBlaCar puts you in a car with someone you’ve never met. Both have scaled to hundreds of millions of users. The neighbour three doors down, whose pressure washer you could borrow in ten minutes, remains a different proposition entirely.
Research on this gap points consistently to trust, but trust of a specific and counterintuitive kind. The barrier is less about whether people are trustworthy and more about the social weight of asking. Borrowing a tool from a stranger on a platform involves no ongoing relationship, no obligation to reciprocate, and no risk of awkwardness at the school gate on Monday. Borrowing from a neighbour involves all three.
Platforms solved the stranger problem by building trust infrastructure: ratings, reviews, verified profiles, financial guarantees. The neighbour problem is social rather than technological, and it requires different thinking.
The motivations that drive local sharing
Research from the Journal of Buildings and Cities examining neighbourhood sharing across seven cities in Austria, France, Germany, Sweden and the UK identified two motivations that drive local sharing when it works: community (people sharing to build relationships) and convenience (people sharing because it makes tasks easier). The research found these require different conditions to activate, and that most neighbourhood sharing platforms fail by trying to serve both at once.
The convenience model, when it is designed for rather than assumed, is already working. Tool libraries in Indianapolis and other US cities have grown significantly since 2023. Amsterdam has a network of neighbourhood tool depots. Seoul’s public tool-sharing programme, launched in 2012 and now operating from dozens of city-run locations, has logged millions of loans and saved residents an estimated $4 million a year in avoided purchases.
These are not startups generating unicorn valuations. They are institutional solutions to a consumption problem: modest in ambition, effective in practice, and replicable at scale. The lawnmower in Dru Collie’s garage is a product of a system that defaults to ownership because sharing has historically required either deep social trust or careful platform design. Both are being built.
Incubating ideas at business school
Mazzella saw empty car seats and asked who could fill them. Hyman saw a dress worn once and asked who else could wear it. Both answers started on a business school campus with a question about idle assets and a problem worth solving.
Dru Collie says he doesn’t have a clean answer for the lawnmower. The evidence suggests the answer is coming, probably from someone currently in an MBA classroom, noticing something that everyone else has learned not to see.
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