Legit

A question of trust

It’s Friday night and you really want to go that concert, but you don’t have tickets. Okay Craigslist, let’s see what you can do for me. A quick search reveals some great seats. Nice! The post says, “Text me, let’s meet at Market and 6th.” But then comes the question…

“Can I trust this person I have never met? How can they trust me?”

We are building Legit to solve this problem.

We’re witnessing an economic sea change. Beyond concert tickets, people are circumventing traditional markets and using the internet to go straight to peers for necessities like accommodations (on Airbnb you can rent a stranger’s apartment) and car travel (you can now rent a stranger’s car).

Things clicked when we saw this trend captured in a TED talk by Rachel Botsman. She describes the shift as Collaborative Consumption. It has the potential to rewrite the 21st century economy and reduce our impact on the planet. We want to help fuel the growth of this movement.

For this sharing economy to truly succeed, people have to trust each other. We see an unmet need for an overarching system designed specifically to answer the questions of trust.

Legit aims to be the credit system of the 21st century economy, an economy based on sharing.

We realize these are enormous shoes to fill. Yet, large-scale systems of trust have been built before. In 1956 Bill Fair and Earl Isaac founded the Fair Isaac Company, FICO, on “the principle that data, used intelligently, can improve business decisions.”

However, the FICO score is designed to aid decisions about ownership, not sharing. The 21st century credit system needs to measure a person’s reputation. Trustworthiness is a broader concept than just the likelihood of repaying a debt.

Our goal is simple: we want to work with you to present your reputation in a respectful and elegant fashion.

We believe that by consolidating all of your sources of reputation in one place, you will have a tool that can be extremely effective at building trust with a stranger. Next time you’re questioning whether to pick up those tickets on Market and 6th, we want the answer to be easy.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Barton