TaskRabbit’s Stalled Revolution

TaskRabbit was founded in 2008 with a big idea. On the company's website and app, people make money by assembling strangers’ Ikea furniture or cleaning their bathrooms.

There’s nothing particularly exciting about other people’s chores, but Leah Busque, a former IBM engineer who started the company, had grand ambitions. “Our mission is to revolutionize how people work,” she told Bloomberg TV last year.

TaskRabbit showed up on the heels of the iPhone, when a generation of online platforms were emerging to allow people to sell access to their cars, apartments, and power drills. Their creators said this had the potential to be better for customers, but also for workers, because it gave them more flexibility. TaskRabbit quickly grabbed a place alongside Uber, Airbnb, and Lyft as a symbol of what was being called the sharing economy—and would later be known as the on-demand economy, gig economy, or, simply, the Uber economy. Its peers have grown into the biggest startups in existence.