The errand-running service TaskRabbit, for example, was conceived by Leah Busque, a then twenty-eight-year-old IBM engineer living in Massachusetts. On a wintry night in 2008, she needed food for her dog (a yellow lab named Kobe) and thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place online you could go. . . . A site where you could name the price you were willing to pay for any task. There had to be someone in my neighborhood who was willing to get that dog food for what I was willing to pay.”
