Zipcar founders4/6/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() It might not have come with all the apps, plugins, bells and whistles of today-nor was the process ever as easy as Chase initially hoped-but it was the start of a company that would play a large part in opening up a wealth of possibilities for would-be entrepreneurs.Īs Chase recalls, the initial process for collecting the car was, by today’s standards, somewhat relaxed. The company proudly boasted one vehicle, Betsy, which helped them reel in 22 customers in the first six weeks. ![]() Zipcar launched several months later, in June 2000, having raised just $75,000 in seed funding. Three times bigger, in fact, when it came to the scope of their operation, the proposed timeline, and the target amount for investment funding. One of Chase and Danielson’s first stops was the then dean of Sloan School at MIT, who encouraged the pair to think much bigger than the plan they described. On reflection, Chase believes it was a mixture of her professional background and personal experiences that made her the “right person at the right time to hear the idea.” Her busy household had an occasional need for a second vehicle, but not to the extent that she and her husband were prepared to buy one. The concept of car sharing also struck a chord with Chase on a practical level. The conversation was a major lightbulb moment for Chase, who saw how easily the internet might facilitate resource sharing among a large group of people. At the time, Chase, an MIT Sloan School of Management alum, and Danielson, and Harvard geochemist, had a shared interest in starting a business, and found themselves discussing the virtues of car sharing in Europe following a German vacation Danielson had taken. The idea for Zipcar arose following a playground conversation between Chase and the mother of her daughter’s playmate, Antje Danielson, in 1999. It begins on a park bench in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Only instead of a bus, it was a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle named Betsy, and you picked the keys up from her house when you wanted to rent it.Īs one of the first entrepreneurs to see the potential for online resource sharing on a grand scale, effectively paving the way for the “collaborative consumption” model to explode, Chase has an fascinating story. Chase, co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar-aka one of the largest car sharing service on the planet-wasn’t just one of the first people on the sharing economy bus, she was driving it. Visionary entrepreneurs like Robin Chase put shared services on the map way back in the early noughties, when the web was still a collection of shoddy graphics, hyperlinks, and Times New Roman. But it wasn’t always so, and to understand how we got here, you have to look a lot further back than companies like Airbnb and Uber. Just another aspect of our modern, connected lives. The sharing of resources using the internet is commonplace in 2017. How Zipcar’s Robin Chase changed the way we look at transportation, and pioneered the sharing economy Subscribe to The Podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and Spotify Robin Chase, Founder and CEO of ZipcarĬlick here to Skip to the podcast Transcription
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