This is the conundrum that the sharing economy never really solved and then lead to its death, right? VCs can’t be asked to to turn non-profit: they saw the opportunity (somewhere at the heels of the last recession) and jumped on it. And they simply applied the paradigms of their businesses: profitability and scale, both of which are at the exact opposite of the idea of sharing. I am not opposed to sharing become remunerated lending; what I am opposed to is doing this in a scalable way, because the distance the need for scale creates is at odds with the idea of community. So, for once, there should not be vilification of VCs.. It is not because VCs entered the market of sharing that the latter went down. It is because the people who originated the idea became greedy — in terms of money and ‘fame’ — and could not resist the sirens of the millions of dollars that VCs were offering to them (because they had plenty). Nor they had the decency and humility to see how scalability and sharing are oxymorons and settle with what they could effectively change: a neighbourhood, not the world.