I remember vividly when I first grasped, more than a decade ago, how much the ‘sharing economy’ was going to change how society operated. I was in the Netherlands, visiting a business that was transforming itself via the same ideas that later made Airbnb and Uber so successful.

Seats2Meet was a business that rented meeting rooms to businesses and provided services related to that work. But in thinking about the future, they had realized that their business model would have to change, and that a very large proportion of young Dutch people were working independently, outside of traditional business, often from their homes or from coffee shops.