Rachel Botsman is a world-renowned expert on an explosive new era of trust and technology and what this means for life, work and how we do business. She was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People, a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and one of the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world by Thinkers50.
She is the author of two highly acclaimed books. Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart explains a huge shift in trust from institutions to individuals. Through stories that are both surprising and entertaining, she explores what this ‘trust shift’ means for different areas of our lives from banking to dating, politics to consumerism, and even how we raise our kids. It was named one of the best books of 2017 by Wired, book of the month by the Financial Times, a bestseller on 800 CEO Read and a finalist for The Business Book Awards 2018.
Botsman is also widely regarded as the guru on the sharing economy. Her first book, What’s Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live, predicted the rise of platforms such as Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Uber, long before they became popular and which now make up more than ten percent of the global gross national product. The concept was named by TIME as one of the “Ten Ideas That Will Change the World”.
Botsman is a lecturer at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, where she designed and teaches the world’s first MBA course on the ‘Collaborative Economy’. She is currently designing a new course on ‘Trust in the Digital Age.’
A thoughtful and humorous storyteller, Botsman specializes in simplifying big complex ideas to make them meaningful for a wide range of audiences. Her TED talks have been viewed more than 4 million times and subtitled in 29 languages. Speaking clients including Xero, Google, Accenture, Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, PwC, World Business Forum, World Economic Forum, Drucker Forum, and various government agencies describe her as “standout favorite for audiences”, with a “rare and visionary intellect.” Monocle selected Rachel as one of twenty top speakers to have at your conference and she is consistently ranked in the top 1% of all speakers at events.
Botsman features regularly in the media – including widely-read pieces for The New York Times, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review and more. She’s a dynamic and thoughtful panel member or interviewee, having featured in broadcasts on the CNN, BBC, NPR and more. Rachel will appear as a presenter on the upcoming documentary series for PBS ‘First Civilizations’, on the history of trade.
She was a former director at the William J. Clinton Foundation and former partner in the Collaborative Fund, which offers seed capital and strategic support for creative entrepreneurs.
Rachel has worked on every continent (except for Antarctica).