Have a car that sits around a lot without being used? You can rent it out to a startup to make a little money on the side.
What about an extra dress you only wore that one time? Or maybe you want to rent out your weekends doing odd jobs for people. All are possible with a startup looking to use existing assets to create extra value.
"This phenomenon, of being able to disrupt ... is going to grow," El-Erian said. "And its going to change the demand and supply dynamics of many industries."
Hotel rooms are pretty standard. Across brands and locations, they often look the same.
But with Airbnb, you can book a studio apartment in a hip area of Brooklyn, or a penthouse multi-bedroom apartment in the middle of Manhattan. If you are tired of the same boring hotel rooms that are nearly always located near a highway or an airport, then Airbnb can offer an attractive alternative.
"Whats amazing about Airbnb, is that the disrupters never built a hotel," El-Erian said.
Airbnb, and other disrupters, cater to "a generation that wants better control over their destiny."
A lot of disruptive technology these days are apps. They have servers, customer support staff, and developers helping to make that app work, but it's ultimately the technology living in your pocket that makes these companies possible.
Uber was able to disrupt the competitive taxi industry, Airbnb disrupted hospitality, Seamless disrupted food delivery, and all of them were made possible by the advances in smartphone technology.
"This phenomenon, of being able to disrupt from another world, is going to grow. And its going to change the demand and supply dynamics of many industries," El-Erian said.
"Machine learning and artificial intelligence allows you to power up in a way that you thought unimaginable."
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