Leah Busque: Ensuring Fair Prices

Great question. Something we think a lot about. So the question was, in the example of Amazon Mechanical Turk, the prices are so low, what sort of infrastructure has TaskRabbit built to ensure what I would call fairness in the marketplace and that people have agreed on pricing? So one of the interesting things about the model is that we don't claim to be the cheapest service. Like in many categories. We are not the cheapest service. Our TaskRabbits set their hourly rates per category. They say what they're good at, they say what their time is worth. And on the other side, the clients who book jobs, who need to find help, they can look through these profiles, they can look through ratings and reviews, they can see how experienced TaskRabbit is in a certain category and decide if they want to work with them or not. So we ensure that people are setting fair prices. One thing, we don't allow people to book TaskRabbits below minimum wage. Just flat out it's not going to happen on the service. And we encourage taskrabbits to set the prices that they're comfortable with. I think you see a lot of other companies right now, particularly in the peer to peer space, in the sharing economy, that it's almost becoming a race to the bottom because they're so competitive in nature. And I think frankly, this is happening in transportation. We see this with the competitors in the space. They're all undercutting each other. Undercutting, undercutting. And what's important to us at TaskRabbit is that we empower people to build out their businesses on the platform, that they feel good about finding work on the TaskRabbit community and that they feel like they're getting paid a fair wage. So super important.