Zipcar

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism

by Robin Chase  · 14 May 2015  · 330pp  · 91,805 words

1 To the heroes: the entrepreneurs, change makers, and nurturers building us all a sustainable world. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PART I THE BUILDING BLOCKS 1 “Hello, Zipcar. This Is Robin.” My Three Theses 2 Excess Capacity Abundance in a World of Scarcity 3 Platforms for Participation Simplify, Organize, Empower 4 Peer Power

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Peers Inc 11 What Happens Next? The Collaborative Economy ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX Introduction BACK IN 2000, sleepless at night during the early months of building Zipcar, I had a recurring nightmare. Lying in bed next to my husband, I imagined the mafia—the rental car mafia—bursting through the door, black

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going to break a hundred-year-old industry. What I failed to appreciate back then was the much larger movement made possible by the Internet. Zipcar was a trailblazer. When you can connect and share assets, people, and ideas, everything changes, not just how you rent a car. Google, eBay,

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naturally curious should all find novel, thought-provoking ideas within. The arc of the book runs like this: Part I: The Building Blocks Chapter 1: Zipcar start-up story, where it all started. Then the three components of Peers Inc: excess capacity (Chapter 2), platforms for participation (Chapter 3), peers (Chapter

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to see this statement as anything except condescending, it named pieces of my life experience that absolutely made me the most qualified person to run Zipcar—namely, being a mother of three. But let me start at the beginning. My father was an American diplomat. I lived in seven countries

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have simplified rather than complicated things. My self-reliant, resourceful, adventurous, and impatient attitude came into play in those early months of building Zipcar. Much later—post-Zipcar—I learned in conversation with a friend, Karim Lakhani, whose meticulously researched PhD thesis was on innovation platforms, that the best solutions and the

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hour and by the day, went against what they knew about people, status, lifestyle, technology, operational difficulty, financing, and women as founders of car companies. Zipcar started on a bright back-to-school day in September 1999. September has always felt like the month when, no matter my age, I think

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,000, from Jeannie Hammond, an MIT classmate. The bulk of that money went to one engineer, Jim Lerner, who worked closely with me to build Zipcar’s first website, the member application page, the car reservation and payment processes, the basic fleet management system, and the database integration that underpinned these

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. A significant but smaller amount went to logo and website design. Four months later, Zipcar had $68 in its bank account and three days before going live. The plan was to place four cars in four reserved parking spaces, one

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thinking about business, in which assumptions about trust, responsibility, and collaboration were changed. MY THREE THESES My three most fundamental beliefs, which gave me faith Zipcar would work, gave most investors and business reporters pause. Robin’s Thesis #1: People are willing to “share” cars instead of owning them because the

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result, I abandoned use of the word sharing, but not the idea. We believed that technology would transform sharing into a seamless and efficient transaction. Zipcar would provide a high-quality service, and our customers wouldn’t have to coordinate with other people or wait for a turn. As it turns

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choice—and we were cool, smart, fun, urban, convenient, and reliable as well. Upon its sale to Avis in 2013, thirteen years after its founding, Zipcar had 760,000 members sharing 10,000 cars across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Recent purchases of local car-sharing providers in

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Spain and Austria, and a launch in Paris in 2014 continue to extend Zipcar’s reach. Zipcar’s goal was to make renting a car as easy and convenient as getting cash from an ATM. We needed to deliver simple, convenient

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transaction cost zero, to make sharing effortless, we needed technology that had several parts: 1. Customer-facing software. Initially customers used the website to join Zipcar, reserve cars, pay their bills, and manage accounts (smartphones didn’t exist yet). 2. Back office: The web pages—that only we could see—allowed

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The more I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to understand that sharing is actually figuring out how to tap into existing excess capacity. Zipcar thrived by leveraging the opening provided by the wasteful economics of current car consumption models—the fact that personally owned cars sit idle 95 percent

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the iceberg. Significant sectors of the economy are transitioning to this new approach—building platforms to unlock excess capacity and welcoming outside collaboration. My three Zipcar theses are the kernels of the Peers Inc building blocks. The first is that excess capacity (sharing an asset) makes economic sense, the second is

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third is that peers are powerful collaborators. This book is about the platforms and the peers, the collaboration and the synergies I first uncovered at Zipcar. Enabled by new technology, a revolution is taking place inside capitalism as we reimagine the role of consumers, producers, and even ownership. I call this

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the time, it was possible to align usage and cost much more closely. And instead of one thousand urban residents owning four hundred cars, with Zipcar these same one thousand active drivers are satisfied with just thirty cars. I started noticing excess capacity all the time. I was obsessed. Even a

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or locations. It opened up the use of those maps, at first for a fee, to developers who wanted to make use of them. At Zipcar, we used Google Maps to show our members precisely where individual cars were located. Eventually, under pressure from the hacker community, Google broadened the access

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different route. By combining the two trips into one, we will be traveling about thirty-two miles in total and saving time, miles, CO2, and Zipcar rental time. Roy pulls out his smartphone and enters the Concord address using Waze. Starting with the excess capacity found in smartphones, apps, and Google

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array of skilled people who (if all goes right) turn complex challenges into simple, elegant solutions for end users. A company with a platform, like Zipcar, makes it easy and safe for friends (and even strangers) to use someone else’s cars. It establishes and enforces standards and contracts. It routinizes

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more efficiently. Or they can open it, enabling co-creators to generate entirely new ideas, processes, products, and services. Slicing and Aggregating: Right-Sizing Supply Zipcar slices. It takes big, lumpy options (owning a car or renting one in twenty-four-hour increments) and slices them into half-hour increments so

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just a subset of the new economy: “Thinking of renting house out on #Airbnb and then putting on my #Uber hat & chauffeuring guests around using #Zipcar.”15 Gretchen, the artist-therapist-mom, sums it up: “Etsy allows people to try out something new with minimal expense. Other new options (Airbnb, for

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investment capital thanks to angel investors who believed in me. GoLoco was going to do for ridesharing (short-distance carpooling and long-distance hitchhiking) what Zipcar had done for sharing cars. We were going to make sharing a car trip easy, fun, and financially rewarding. Technology, great marketing, and branding would

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engineers spent the next months undoing what we had just done—simplifying, simplifying, simplifying. Today we talk about building a minimum viable product. And with Zipcar, this is what we had effectively done because of our lack of money, time, and knowledge of the sector. With GoLoco, I was better financed

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potential. The amount of structure built within the platform determines the amount of variation you let in (see the figure below). BlaBlaCar, Airbnb, and especially Zipcar are very closed platforms. Peers can operate only within constrained and limited choices, resulting in relatively uniform collaboration (and products and services). With GoLoco, only

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car trips can be shared; with Airbnb, only beds. With Zipcar, people can choose the specific car and time they want; they can make suggestions about improvements and complain about problems, but little more. Certainly variation

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nothing prevents drivers from agreeing to drive for both companies or prospective passengers from having both apps on their smartphones. It is my experience with Zipcar and its competitors that customers choose based on a combination of convenience (the technology), price, and proximity. Both Uber and Lyft have business models and

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platform removes the advantage of the larger players by making dealing with small entities just as easy. The reason why the hourly rental strategy at Zipcar succeeded was that we designed the platform (and the pricing) to make sure that we—the company—were indifferent between eight hourly rentals and one

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. But some platforms for participation deliver infrastructure and significant network effects. In other words, the value of the service goes up the more people participate. Zipcar, for example, is useful if there is just one car parked near your house, but when people in another city make it possible for you

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to be corrected and for the rehabilitation of reputation over time. This is something we were only just beginning to understand while I was at Zipcar. Members whose actions put the safety or welfare of the whole community at risk would be warned, monitored, and ultimately barred from driving if

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in a wide range of industries: mainstream media (Economist.com, FoxNews.com, MSNBC.com), business (GE.com, Pfizer.com, JnJ.com, TeslaMotors.com, Timex.com, Zipcar.com), technology (RedHat.com, Box.com), entertainment (Grammys.com, Zynga.com), banking (ING.com), museums (Louvre.fr), sports (NBA.com), education (Columbia.edu, TeachForAmerica.org

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companies themselves. Anyone can create a Twitter or Facebook account. Anyone can recommend code changes on Drupal. Some platforms do offer some well-defined constraints (Zipcar requires a clean driving record without any moving violations in the last three years, for example). Regulators who seek to regulate at the individual peer

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. In the United States, Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar do a real-time background driving check on their drivers, excluding those with bad records (just as Zipcar does), and run criminal background checks as well. • Third, and perhaps most significant, these platforms have a new policing mechanism to tap: the rating and

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. Today, these companies have all scrambled to get adequate insurance from recalcitrant insurers. Maybe the better adjective, ironically, is “risk-averse” insurers. My experience with Zipcar, GoLoco, and Buzzcar is that insurance companies don’t like to insure things with which they have no experience. It took me months (and sometimes

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: Product → Service → Marketplace → Platform. Jeremiah has documented how many large companies are already making the transition. The first transition, from product to service, is what Zipcar did: making durable goods available as a service. In the second transition, companies create marketplaces, which enable buyers and sellers to transact around their brand

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for democratic control of big asset bases. The implications of the Peers Inc transition on companies play out differently than for people. When I left Zipcar in 2003, I started educating myself more about urban transportation. I realized that in cities, where 50 percent of the world lives now and most

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-budget international public health projects. As an entrepreneur, I found that these early experiences constantly focused my inquiry. Would I have been able to start Zipcar in Africa or the Middle East where I had grown up? What were the roots of the differences in economic infrastructure? What caused some companies

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—the founders and investors—are unfairly benefiting off the backs of the hardworking peers. Building a solid, elegant platform is a prerequisite to peer collaboration. Zipcar ended up needing to raise about $67 million before it broke even. BlaBlaCar had spent $13 million, wasn’t yet profitable when it raised its

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t be evil” is only as good as Larry Page’s interpretation of it. And even benevolent dictators are still dictators. A few companies—including Zipcar, in my opinion, but also BlaBlaCar and Etsy—will always deliver significant social and environmental benefits no matter how they are financed or who runs

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them, because they necessarily deliver positive externalities. No matter who owns or runs Zipcar, it delivers more car happiness with dramatically fewer cars, fewer parking spaces occupied, and fewer overall vehicle miles traveled than if people owned their own

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can build big things without the involvement of private capital. Building a start-up today costs a tenth of what it did when I founded Zipcar, thanks in large part to the assembled Web and its platforms, which make billing, customer management, electronic payment, website development and support, content management, mapping

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limit to this process, but it is far above our current standard of living, and will rely on vastly fewer material resources! This is Airbnb + Zipcar + Lyft + G-Auto + La Ruche + LinkedIn + Facebook + OKCupid + SoundCloud + Spotify + Twitter + openData + eLance-oDesk + Peerby + Yerdle + Etsy + Fiverr + mesh networks +GPS + smartphone apps + YouTube + Tumblr

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–22 Car ownership, downsides, 9 Carbon emissions, and new energy models, 93–95. See also Climate change Carbon tax, 95, 192, 247 Car sharing. See Zipcar Castor, Emily, 124 Castorama, 180–181 Cerf, Vint, 200 Challenge platforms, 66–67 Apps for Democracy 39–40 Barcelona, 172–174 Ebola Grand Challenge, 85

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, zero, 13–14 Transparency, 129–133. See also Openness Transportation and CO2 emissions, 93–94 innovation. See BlaBlaCar; G-Auto; GoLoco; LaZooz; Lyft; Ridesharing; Uber; Zipcar urban, 7–9, 188–189 Trip chaining, 30 Trulia, 41 Tunisia, mesh network, 246–247 “Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World

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change report, 90–91 World Resource Institute. See Global Forest Watch YouTube power of diversity, 61–62 success through iterations, 105–107 Zien, Jake, 64 Zipcar, 257 and excess capacity, 21–23, 30 financing, 197–198 launching, 8–10, 12–17 platform, 36, 105 prototype for slicing and aggregating, 37–38

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social and environmental benefits, 201 theses underpinning, 11–12 transparency around process, 130 Credit: Andrew Elliott ROBIN CHASE is co-founder of Zipcar, Veniam, and founder of Buzzcar and GoLoco, all businesses that have disrupted and innovated the transportation sector. She was named one of Time’s 100

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live

by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers  · 2 Jan 2010  · 411pp  · 80,925 words

of bragging about their new Prius, friends boasted how they had given up their cars altogether by becoming “Zipsters” (members of the car-sharing service Zipcar). More and more friends were selling stuff on craigslist and eBay; swapping books, DVDs, and games on sites such as Swaptree and OurSwaps; and giving

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, it is estimated that 4.4 million people in North America and 5.5 million in Europe will belong to services like the one from Zipcar, whose membership alone more than tripled in 2009.9 We could go on. Collaborative Consumption is a snowball idea, one with enough heft to keep

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are already profitable or have growing revenue models. The more established companies are making hundreds of millions in revenue (Netflix made $359.6 million and Zipcar $130 million in 2009), while others like SolarCity and SwapTree are just starting to turn a profit. Specific sectors of Collaborative Consumption are predicted to

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behavior and for that behavior to stick is illustrated by the “Low-Car Diet Challenge” experiment, a marketing campaign conducted by Zipcar, the world’s largest car-sharing service. Zipcar members can reserve a car twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on the Internet, by using an iPhone app

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not using their own vehicle for a month. Instead, they utilized public transportation, walked and biked, and resorted to a car (they were given a Zipcar membership) only when necessary.6 The survey conducted after the challenge showed that living without a car had a positive impact on participants’ wallets, bodies

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the productivity and usage of a product and mop up the surplus created by hyper-consumption without creating costs or inconveniences. Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and the ride-sharing service GoLoco, and one of the pioneering thinkers on maximizing idling capacity via technology, says, “This was what the Internet was

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rent it for, and when you need to return it. But the Internet and GPS technologies eliminate these hassles, enabling car-sharing services such as Zipcar and Streetcar to be almost 100 percent self-service. Plus, car sharing is often far more convenient simply because the cars are located in residential

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product itself (the Bag Borrow or Steal logo is never visible on the outside of the bag) or building common ownership quirks into the brand. Zipcar gives its cars affectionate names such as “Simpson” the Volvo or “Munselle” the Mazda. Technologies such as RFID (radio-frequency identification) membership cards that open

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, through companies such as Mobility in Switzerland, Streetcar in the UK, and ORIX Auto in Japan.21 And if the growth of U.S.-based Zipcar—membership is growing by more than 100 percent per year—is anything to go by, it’s clear that consumers will embrace alternatives to leasing

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or private car ownership if the service is delivered and branded in the right way. Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, says, “It’s the car your mother said you could never have. When you are not using it, it is someone else’s problem, and

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.24 Can you imagine the cumulative environmental savings if even a quarter of the 600 million vehicles on the road were switched to car sharing? Zipcar is getting people to change their car ownership habits by using the same psychological and sociological pulls of brand that got us to want to

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buy and own to get us to want to share. The white-and-green bus billboards for Zipcar with the messages “350 hours a year having sex. 420 looking for parking” and “Today’s a BMW day. Or is it a Volvo day

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brand. With car sharing, drivers can pick whatever brand fits their mood that day. The service delivers not just “wheels when you want them” (the Zipcar tagline) but the choice of “wheels you really want.” And just like cult car and motorcycle brands such as Mini and Harley-Davidson

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, Zipcar embraces the need to create communities of members who feel connected to one another through some shared purpose or principle. Indeed, for some people, proclaiming

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and swapping between a Prius, a Mini Cooper, a Toyota Station Wagon, and an eight-person People Mover appealing. As Paul Boutin wrote in Slate, “Zipcar makes car sharing sexy not sorry,” and “Car sharing turns members into automotive swingers, free from having to commit to one model.” If one product

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usage rather than the amounts of units sold, eco-efficiency and business efficiency align. Business can generate new revenue streams from membership charges and micropayments. Zipcar charges $75 to become a member and then $8 per hour. In 2009, this fee schedule added up to a profitable year, with revenues of

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, automobile giant Ford’s executive chairman, admitted in an interview with CNN in 2009, “The future of transportation will be a blend of things like Zipcar, public transportation, and private car ownership. Not only do I not fear that, but I think it’s a great opportunity for us to participate

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disruption occurred in the music industry: iTunes did not change music per se but transformed the way we buy and experience music. Services such as Zipcar, Bag Borrow and Steal, SolarCity, and DenimTherapy are not reinventing their industry’s product but reimagining the larger system within which their product operates. Redistribution

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has facilitated their replicability. And the continual design innovation to improve these systems and integrate more user benefits only increases their appeal. In October 2009, Zipcar launched an iPhone app that lets users unlock their rental cars direct from their iPhone. No swipe card is even needed. And when drivers can

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local governments or councils gathered ideas from citizens on how to better use underutilized assets (empty buses, churches, playgrounds)? What would the design of the “Zipcar of laundry services” look like? Diversified access, the third critical design component for Manzini, is another way in which designers can contribute to the rise

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years later, it remains the strongest model for understanding what is meaningful to consumers and explaining what they do and why. Brands such as craigslist, Zipcar, Zopa, or WeCommune satisfy many of the basic needs in the lower parts of Maslow’s pyramid (they help feed us, house us, transport us

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team wins, members of strongly branded collaborative communities have even held self-organized parties when the product or service they love hits a milestone. Take Zipcar, a poster child of a Collaborative Consumption brand built from the bottom up. On May 17, 2007, “Zipsters” organized a party for

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Zipcar’s seventh birthday at City Hall Plaza in downtown Manhattan. The invitation on Yelp declared, “Zipcar was born right here in your own backyard. And what was once just a cool idea now has

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and the organization. This is particularly important because the relationship with users is often decentralized and peer-to-peer, so it cannot be directly controlled. Zipcar can’t control the way someone leaves a car. Bartercard can’t control the quality of goods and services exchanged. Airbnb needs to maintain a

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the way risk rating is done, getting away from traditional credit ratings banks use, a system “that denied their own CEO a mobile phone account!” Zipcar observed that users wanted to modify or extend an existing reservation by texting, and so they added it as a service. Vélib’ riders gave feedback

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oriented, but its benefits are shared across businesses. Thousands of new opportunities have already emerged under Collaborative Consumption, with successful revenue models based on memberships (Zipcar, Bag Borrow or Steal), service fees (Airbnb, Zopa), and micropayments for usage (BIXI, BabyPlays) being established. Also, as companies start to redefine themselves as acting

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their own gardens. Even in a specific sector such as car sharing, there has been rapid progress in how we are cooperating. Companies such as Zipcar and Streetcar, where there is a trusted intermediary to orchestrate the sharing of cars we don’t own, have been thriving. Over the past three

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of Freecycle Yves Behar—Designer Nathan Blecharczyk—Cofounder of Airbnb Greg Boesel—Cofounder of SwapTree Piers Brown—Founder of Fractional Life Robin Chase—Cofounder of Zipcar and CEO of GoLoco Perrry Chen—Cofounder of Kickstarter Brian Chesky—Cofounder of Airbnb Shelby Clark—Founder of RelayRides Casey Fenton—Founder of CouchSurfing Cindy

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book expressed a desire for us to help people see the similarities between different examples of Collaborative Consumption: in other words, to show how Netflix, Zipcar, eBay, and Zopa are all connected. We hope we have risen to the challenge! More and more examples of Collaborative Consumption are popping up every

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) Life magazine Linux LiveWork local exchange trading schemes (LETS) local food movement local markets, return to Long Tail marketing Low-Car Diet Challenge see also Zipcar Lowe, Mitch Lowenstein, George Lubin, Oliver Luellen, Lawrence Lyttelton TimeBank McCallum, Doug McDonough, William McKibben, Bill McLellan, Liz McNamara, Frank Madoff, Bernie Maguire, Chris Makower

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Williamson, Oliver E. Wilson, Fred Wired Wisdom of Crowds, The (Surowiecki) Woolard, Caroline World Economic Forum Xerox YouTube Zalles, Jeffrey Zeckhauser, Richard Zilok Zinman, Jonathan Zipcar Zittrain, Jonathan Zopa Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerman, Dustin Acknowledgments First and foremost we would like to thank Gillian Blake. We are enormously indebted to her for

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Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago University Press, 2006). 6. “Zipcar Rolls Out National Low-Car Diet.” Zipcar press release (July 21, 200), http://green.autoblog.com/2009/08/25/zipcars-low-car-diet-results-save-money-lose-weight 7. Ibid. 8. Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How

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/thetechnium/archives/2009/01/better_than_own.php. 2. We discussed the ideas of “use by association” in an interview with Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, in May 2009. 3. Chris Arkenberg, “Dematerialize: Change the Ways We Relate to Product & Ownership,” posted on his blog urbeingrecorded (March 27, 2009), www.urbeingrecorded

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/07/reinventing-mobility-its-not-just-cars-stupid. 23. Driving costs retrieved from AAA, www.aaanewsroom.net/Assets/Files/200844921220.DrivingCosts2008.pdf. 24. Paul Keegan, “Zipcar: The Best New Idea in Business,” CNNMoney.com (August 27, 2009), http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/26/news/companies

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/zipcar_car_rentals.fortune/. 25. Reid J. Lifset, “Moving from Products to Services,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 4, no. 1 (February 13, 2002), www.greenbiz.com/

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research/report/2002/02/14/moving-products-services. 26. Keegan, “Zipcar: The Best New Idea in Business.” 27. Mark Levine discussed a similar idea in “Share My Ride,” New York Times (March 5, 2009), http://www

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy

by Tom Slee  · 18 Nov 2015  · 265pp  · 69,310 words

partners from the world of food co-ops, worker co-ops, lending libraries, allotment groups, or other groups involved in non-digital community-sharing initiatives. Zipcar is included (shared access to a vehicle), but the Youth Hostel Association is not (shared access to accommodation). There are many organizations that seem to

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,” inaccurate as it may be, is still more widely used and I will use it, without the scare quotes. But let’s start with carsharing. ZIPCAR Carsharing co-operatives have been around for a long time, some run as non-profits and some as commercial companies. There is a continuous history

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Kitchener-Waterloo where I live, Community CarShare was founded in 1998 and is still running. But in 2000 when Antje Danielson and Robin Chase started ZipCar, they brought a new ambition to the space. Just as the story of Airbnb is featured in Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ What’s Mine

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the pole position in Lisa Gansky’s 2010 book The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing.2 Zipcar was never a peer-to-peer company, as the cars were all owned by the company, but it was a form of shared or collaborative

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, “A lightbulb went off in my head. I thought: This was what the Internet was made for.” Perhaps even more than Airbnb, Zipcar became the original Sharing Economy company. And Zipcar did grow: from its beginnings in Boston (2001) to New York (2003), and then to San Francisco in 2005, Toronto in

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2006, and London later that same year, reaching about a quarter of a million members by 2008. Zipcar continued to expand. It provided an iPhone app to help you book a car, it took investments from Benchmark Capital and General Electric’s Commercial

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turned out to be more hope than reality. In 2012, researchers Fleura Bardhi and Giana Eckhardt interviewed a set of Zipcar users in Boston, rode with them, and found that Zipcar users are motivated by self-interest and utilitarianism rather than by any altruistic community motives.3 The researchers expected a community

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to emerge around the Zipcar brand, but found that users resisted the company’s efforts to create a community beyond the straightforward

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fact of market exchange. Zipcar users were prepared to “look out for their own interests at the expense of the object [the car] as well as the other users,” so

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that “surveillance and command controls are welcomed” to stop other users from treating the shared cars badly. In an interview the authors say, “Zipcar uses a strict style of governance to maintain compliance with the rules of car sharing to make sure cars aren’t brought back late, the

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the only way the system can work effectively, since they don’t trust each other to obey the rules without Zipcar’s heavy handed enforcement.”4 Bardhi and Eckhardt also expected Zipcar users to be motivated by political consumerism, especially as it relates to anti-car, environmental concerns, but they found no

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evidence of these motivations either. The Zipcar experience was clearly a lot more of a normal, mainstream consumer exchange than advocates were claiming, so perhaps it should have been no surprise when

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, in January 2013, Zipcar was bought by rental company Avis.5 With that purchase there is no longer a suggestion that the relationship between Zipcar users and the company is anything other than a straightforward commercial exchange (with the usual

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company brand promotion), and there is no suggestion of any relationship at all between Zipcar users and each other. The brand continues to promote its environmental message, saying on one of its university pages that: “Every day we are working

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towards a place with less dependence on personally-owned vehicles. Why? Because it matters . . . Each and every Zipcar takes 15 personally-owned vehicles off the road.” 6 But there is little substance behind the claim. Sociologist Jathan Sadowski traced it to a report

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from the Transportation Research Board dated 2005 (the early days of Zipcar), which covered all kinds of car-sharing (profit and non-profit), and the main cause of the result is families foregoing the purchase of a

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is nothing to suggest that the total number of car-miles driven decreases after all, just that car ownership decreases). Zipcar’s claim of an environmental benefit depends on the baseline comparison. It is plausible that a Zipcar has less environmental impact than fifteen personal cars. It is equally plausible that a

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more environmental impact than more widespread use of public transit. So it is cheeky, to say the least, that Zipcar is using the “15-car” figure as part of an effort to encourage university students to take up car-sharing: efforts that are likely to

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add to the number of cars on the road rather than reduce it. Zipcar’s universities page promises “a different degree of freedom . . . the convenience of car ownership without the hassles of having a car on campus”; the freedom

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Meanwhile, less ambitious car-sharing initiatives such as my local car-sharing co-op continue to operate much as they did a decade ago. The Zipcar story is similar to that of Airbnb: an original motivation based around community and around an interaction that is not primarily economic, the hunger for

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ideals. Despite the anti-consumerist talk of the advocates, these scaled-up Sharing Economy companies are just as consumerist as those they have disrupted. LYFT Zipcar and Airbnb are not alone. Lyft is another company that has traded on the goodwill generated by its founding ideals of community and sharing, before

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from 2.5 million rides per month to over 12 million, and is expecting to provide more than 205 million rides in 2016.15 Like Zipcar and Airbnb, any sharing aspects of its business were shed as the company’s finances moved to new heights. The oddly named French company BlaBlaCar

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injection of millions of dollars from venture capitalists would be a whole different order of magnitude. Couchsurfing is far from unique. Chapter 5 showed how Zipcar failed to sustain a community feel once it scaled up its commercial efforts, and how Lyft’s community-focused model also collapsed as it looked

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part of our story” (Airbnb); “Welcome to the TaskRabbit community, a marketplace dedicated to empowering people to do what they love.” For the owners of Zipcar, the company “isn’t just about the concept of car sharing; it’s about the people who make it a reality: a team that works

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signed up 20,000 North American hosts. The site may look to build a community feel but researcher Giana Eckhardt, building on her experience researching Zipcar (see Chapter 4) suggests that its success is more likely to rely on another mechanism for establishing trust, saying that “In the sharing economy, consumers

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Youtube?” Accessed May 17, 2015. http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/108898194009/what-should-i-do-about-youtube. Kell, John. “Avis to Buy Car-Sharing Service Zipcar,” January 22013. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324374004578217121433322386. Kiva. “Kiva—Lift Above Poverty Organization (LAPO).” Kiva, April 17, 2012. http://www.kiva.org/partners/20

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-R-0380.htm. Sadowski, Jathan. “Hey, Ride-Sharing Services. Stop Greenwashing!,” July 292013. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/29/lyft_and_zipcar_climate_change_environmental_greenwashing.html. Said, Carolyn. “Airbnb Profits Prompted S.F. Eviction, Ex-Tenant Says.” San Francisco Chronicle. Accessed May 9, 2015. http://www

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.html. University of Chicago Press Journals. “Sharing Isn’t Always Caring: Why Don’t Consumers Take Care of Their Zipcars?” Accessed May 22, 2015. http://press.uchicago.edu/pressReleases/2012/July/JCR_1207_Zipcars.html. UNWTO. “Annual Report 2013.” World Tourism Organization UNWTO, 2014. User “silentstorm2008.” “My Reply to Uber’s ‘Low

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Stay Is Above Average.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, January 28, 2015. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2554500. Zipcar. “Green Benefits,” n.d. http://www.zipcar.com/universities/how/greenbenefits. Endnotes Chapter 1 1 Tanz, “How Airbnb and Lyft Finally Got Americans to Trust Each Other.” 2 In

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Consumption: The Case of Car Sharing.” 4 University of Chicago Press Journals, “Sharing Isn’t Always Caring.” 5 Kell, “Avis to Buy Car-Sharing Service Zipcar.” 6 Zipcar, “Green Benefits.” 7 Sadowski, “Hey, Ride-Sharing Services. Stop Greenwashing!” 8 Schor, “Debating the Sharing Economy.” 9 Gannes, “Zimride Turns Regular Cars Into Taxis

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams  · 28 Sep 2010  · 552pp  · 168,518 words

we’ll get the scoop on what über- entrepreneurs like Shai Agassi (former SAP exec and founder of Better Place) and Robin Chase (founder of Zipcar) are doing to usher in radical new models for personal transport. There are no “magic bullets” among the solutions we present, and many actions will

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analysis of what times of day and night I use my hot water heater, and to turn it down accordingly, it will never happen,” say Zipcar founder Robin Chase. “If you ask the gas company to do an analysis of people’s water heaters and then to ask me, ‘Robin, do

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car ownership, our choices for pursuing new transportation options are more constrained, if not determined, by the choices we have made in the past. As Zipcar founder Robin Chase put it, “Infrastructure is destiny,” referring to how U.S. transportation policy over the years has favored the automobile over investments in

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countries in hopes that such infrastructure could eventually power a worldwide electric car fleet and end our dependence on oil. Innovative car sharing services like Zipcar are beginning to reshape car ownership, while a ubiquitous transportation data network, should it be built, could help optimize our roads and unleash a large

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goods around the planet with zero noise, zero fuss, and zero emissions. But is any of this practical now? For a perspective we spoke to Zipcar founder Robin Chase, one of a handful of visionaries who understands the far-reaching potential that the car-as-an-open-platform presents. “The only

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there, from the convenience of their GPS-enabled phone. Wikit’s matching software would do the rest, while taking a small cut of every transaction. Zipcar takes the proposition even further. Rather than just share rides, why not share cars too. A Personal Journey to a New Model of Personal Transportation

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about $645 per month to own and run a small car in downtown Toronto. Then Aaron considered Zipcar—something he had seen all over Toronto but knew little about. (Toronto residents have embraced the Zipcar with considerable enthusiasm. One cannot walk more than a few blocks in Toronto’s inner city without

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sighting several Zipcar parking spots.) He learned that he could join the service for a $35 membership fee, on an “Occasional Use” plan. He calculated that if he

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month, at an average of 2 hours each, for about $13 per hour, he would spend about $156 monthly. Aaron decided the economics of the Zipcar model looked pretty sharp at first glance, so he decided to give the service a try. This decision was not only cost-effective (indeed, months

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went by when Aaron did not use a Zipcar at all), but completely transformed Aaron’s approach to personal transportation. Since Aaron could, quite literally, see the dollars adding up by the minute each

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time he used a Zipcar, he began to combine trips. For example, a single trip to the grocery store began to turn into grocery-getting, visiting the dry cleaner, picking

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billion VMT are saved annually, as of 2009.) Aaron also began to understand that the hourly rate system penalizes him for longer trips—likely what Zipcar intends. Indeed, an overnight visit to a friend’s nearby cottage proved expensive. In these cases, he saw how using traditional car rental services made

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’s case, he took several yearly trips to neighboring Montréal using VIA Rail, Canada’s national train service, instead of a rental car. In short, Zipcar has provided Aaron with transparency in the cost of personal transportation, which now allows him to optimize the economics—and the energy consumption—of his

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different costs, on a monthly basis, to determine that he pays around $600 monthly just to own a car he had access to in the Zipcar lot across the street. Aaron remains a passionate Zipster as of 2009—as do his Zipster pals, 63 percent of whom delayed or halted the

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purchase of a car, thanks to the service.22 Putting the Car in the Commons The concept of “sharing” is central to Zipcar’s business model. Robin Chase, Zipcar’s founder, has made it her personal crusade to “find and make use of excess capacity.” The idea is that we get

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yet, on average our cars sit idle about twenty-two out of every twenty-four hours! To make much more efficient use of those cars, Zipcar offers them up to consumers as a pay-only-for-what-you-use model that strips away some hassles of ownership while taking away some

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of its conveniences. Chase likes to say that Zipcar is the car your mother always said you couldn’t have—all the fun and none of the responsibilities. For a significant demographic, the trade

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-off makes a whole a lot of sense. At the time of writing, Zipcar was serving sixty-seven cities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, using a fleet of 6,500 vehicles.23 As the largest

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car-sharing company in the world, Zipcar has cultivated a roster of 300,000 faithful and enthusiastic members, called “Zipsters,” who have shared access to this trendy, useful, and generally fuel-efficient

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fleet. Zipcar estimates that for every vehicle added to its fleet, fifteen to twenty single-user automobiles are removed from the road.24 The claim may be

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from their crumbling, overburdened roadways. One can surmise that drivers—of cars, buses, and transport trucks—would be fairly happy with this development, too. Notably, Zipcar not only allows its members to optimize vehicles and traffic—it crowdsources maintenance too. Members are communally responsible for reporting returning vehicles on time, reporting

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dirty cars, recording their own and others’ damage and accidents, tattling on low-fuel returnees, and even rescheduling with Zipcar’s central reservation line—via phone or text—if travel itineraries change (as they often do, when dictated by the vagaries of our public road

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systems). Zipcar goes even further with routine tasks; for example, if Zipsters decide to take a car through the wash, they can submit the receipt and receive

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. The auto industry is increasingly realizing it has little choice but to play ball. Toyota and Ford have already begun exploring ways to work with Zipcar, from using its members to test electric cars to designing vehicles specifically for the sharing market. “The future of transportation will be a blend of

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things like Zipcar, public transportation, and private car ownership,” says Bill Ford, Ford’s executive chairman. “Not only do I not fear that, but I think it’s

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tired debates and reach beyond the parameters of a failing framework. CEOs like Local Motors’ Jay Rogers, VenCorps’ Sean Wise, Better Place’s Shai Agassi, Zipcar’s Robin Chase, and Ushahidi’s Ory Okolloh intrinsically get this and are now in positions of influence with next-generation enterprises. Other fields have

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, CoreMedia; Tony Burgess, U.S. Army; Kay Carson, MassRIDES; Fred Carter, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario; Joel Cawley, IBM; Robin Chase, Zipcar; Bob Chen, Columbia University; Calvin Chin, Qifang; Aneesh Chopra, federal chief technology officer, U.S. government; Jacob Colker, The Extraordinaries; Peter Corbett, iStrategy Labs; Marilyn

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/Orteig_Prize. 19. Jeremy Korzeniewski, “Chevy Volt will cost GM $750 million,” autobloggreen (December 9, 2008). 20. See Zipcar Press Release: http://zipcar.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=8. 21. “Case Study: Zipcar,” District of Columbia—Department of the Environment. See: http://ddoe.dc.gov/ddoe/cwp/view,a,1210,q

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,499698.asp. 22. Ibid. 23. See Zipcar Corporate Overview: http://zipcar.mediaroom.com/file.php/61/corporate_overview.pdf. 24. Paul Keegan, “Zipcar: The best new idea in business,” Fortune (August 27, 2009). 25. Bill Ford, quoted in ibid. Chapter 8

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing

by Lisa Gansky  · 14 Oct 2010  · 215pp  · 55,212 words

, who created the first premier brand of international hotels. Now, a new era of sharing-based businesses is beginning. Businesses as big as Netflix or Zipcar, and as small as a guy who rents Christmas trees, have figured out there is gold in giving people convenient access to shared goods. These

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for much of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, far from the national spotlight, a different kind of car company was quietly breaking business records. That company, Zipcar, had established itself in less than nine years throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. From its inception in 2001

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, Zipcar had one of the decade’s fastest growth rates. Revenues doubled and tripled in the second and third years. In 2009 it generated over $130

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million in revenue, up over 30 percent from the previous year. Zipcar is a near perfect example of a successful Mesh business. It doesn’t make, sell, or repair cars. It shares them. The Boston-based company

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.” From that conversation, the two made plans to launch what was to become the largest car-sharing service in the world. learning to conjugate Zip. Zipcar’s founding wasn’t always a smooth ride. First, the pair had to face down the doubters. When they pointed to the runaway success of

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years later she would hear from a business group in Paris: “Sure, that works fine in America, but it will never take off in France.” Zipcar’s first car was a brand-new VW Beetle, a model that had just reentered the market. The company founders deliberately picked brands different from

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-looking, wallet-size plastic card. They made sure the cars were clean, well maintained, well located, and in every way reliable. And from early on, Zipcar grew at a brisk pace, and acquired competitors. It invested in Avancar in Spain, and took over Streetcar in the U.K., to become the

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fastest-growing car-sharing network in Europe. Zipcar based this success on a simple formula: Create an easy and efficient way for people to share cars rather than own them. The service is

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would find reasonable, and honor. The robust information platform and focus on building the brand distinguished Zipcar from early car-sharing companies that were merely long on good intentions, many of which failed. In fact, Zipcar is primarily an information business that happens to share cars. The company collects information about who

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when, how, and where it’s being used. That data makes the business work and generates the greatest value. As the number of people using Zipcar grows, the collected data enables the company to better know specific groups of customers, defined by demographics or location. That in turn creates opportunities to

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extend the brand to, say, bikes or clothes. Other services can be offered directly by the car-sharing company or its partners. Over time, Zipcar has developed partnerships with food and wine, hotel, fitness, and even ink cartridge recycling companies. Ancillary services might include traffic and transit advice, restaurant reservations

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, suggested local events, or help in finding gear for your journey. In Portland, Zipcar has outfitted a couple dozen of their cars with bike racks, and partnered with state and national parks to offer free passes. Each new service

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. As this “ecosystem” of businesses grows, the network delivers better, more personalized services to customers. And when customers appreciate the service, they tell their friends. Zipcar has built a brand, challenged formerly entrenched business models, and helped create a new category in personal transportation. A measure of its success is that

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Hertz, Enterprise, and Daimler have all launched car-sharing services. But Zipcar remains the largest car-sharing company, and recently filed an initial public offering for raising additional funds to scale the service. my date with mini

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mucho. Although Zipcar appealed to me as an entrepreneur, I always want to understand a business from the perspective of a customer. What will it take to win

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Mesh, to work, can’t just be for “somebody else.” It has to be for me, and people like me. So I tried my first Zipcar, on a trip to Vancouver, where I fell in love with a little two-door number named Mini Mucho. Before I left the Bay Area

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, I signed up for a membership on the Zipcar Web site. They have several different flavors for joining, including what I call the “tapas” version—trial choices like “I’m not really sure if

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’m going to try it first.” In a few days I received my member’s Zipcard in the mail. Today, you can also download the Zipcar app on your mobile phone. Your Zipcard or app-enabled phone unlocks the car by wirelessly connecting to a box under the windshield that contains

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. When you make a reservation, your card or app is authorized for that specific car, using AT&T’s wireless network. The same network allows Zipcar to remotely monitor the vehicle. Once I knew when and where I’d be staying in Vancouver, I could see which cars were available close

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where you get a big payoff for a family, for a community, for a business, and for the planet by reducing the friction of sharing. Zipcar succeeds, for example, because the value proposition of car sharing is compelling. Cars sit unused twenty-three hours a day, on average, and many families

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result, the car-share service saves 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions each day. That’s a big payoff. yours sometimes. own-to-mesh. Zipcar is what I call a Full Mesh model, meaning that the company owns and maintains the vehicles. By participating, I get the benefits associated with

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products to market. Hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding have already flowed into the Mesh. Thriving Mesh companies like Zopa, Prosper, Lending Club, Zipcar, Kickstarter, thredUP, SmartyPig, Etsy, Instructables, and smava were all funded by well-respected, big-name venture funds. Early in my research, I talked with Chris

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lenders. I spoke with Lucy Shea of U.K.-based Futerra, creators of Swishing and founders of the fashion exchange concept; Robin Chase, cofounder of Zipcar; Shelby Clark, founder of RelayRides; Sunil Paul, creator of Spride Share services; Perry Chen, the founder of Kickstarter, a community of artists and funders; James

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, and no late-night activity near their room. 5. Pay special attention to people in the network (aka your customers). When people are members of Zipcar or a food co-op, they are inside a network. They’ve already bought into the vision of the service and are part of a

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it had animal crackers all over the back seat, I would have considered it a bad first experience. I would have called Zipcar, and considered it a serious inconvenience. With Zipcar and other Mesh services, how members treat the cars, tools, bikes, or homes in circulation will inevitably affect other users. I

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program is a partnership with a taxi-sharing service. Kimpton Hotels and Six Flags are just two of the many companies that have partnered with Zipcar to reach common markets. A good example of a distribution partnership is World of Good (textiles, bags, and jewelry made in developing countries), which uses

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.” SustainableBusiness.com, March 17, 2010, http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/19952 (accessed March 17, 2010). Graham, Jefferson. “An iPhone Gets Zipcar Drivers on Their Way.” USA Today, September 29, 2009, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/ products/2009-09-29-unlock-iphone

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-zipcar-tech _N.htm (accessed March 17, 2010). Grant, John. Co-opportunity: Join Up for a Sustainable, Resilient, Prosperous World. Padstow, Cornwall, England: TJ International, 2010.

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old method Braungart, Michael Brill, Michael Bronson, Po Buckman, John Capital, for Mesh startup Carbonneutral.com Car sharing Mesh companies Own-to-Mesh model partnerships Zipcar Chase, Robin Chen, Perry Children’s clothing and goods, Mesh companies Cities, Mesh companies, opportunities for Citizen Space CitySourced Clark, Shelby Climate change business risks

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, Ronald Wilhelm, Eric Williamson, Oliver Wine cooperatives, Mesh companies Word of mouth, power of Work-space sharing, Mesh companies World of Goods Yelp Yield management Zipcar customer experience with Mesh model for partners Zopa Zynga Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction Chapter 1 - Getting to Know the Mesh

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

by John Warrillow  · 5 Feb 2015  · 186pp  · 49,251 words

stuff itself, but technology allows sharing to scale: websites like Airbnb match buyer and seller; your GPS-enabled iPhone allows you to find the closest Zipcar; Facebook and LinkedIn enable you to vet anyone you’re thinking of doing business with; and sites like PayPal allow you to safely pay for

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time it was acquired, WhatsApp did not employ a single marketing executive.2 Driven by Density Like WhatsApp, Zipcar has a base of passionate subscribers who actively promote the service to their friends. Zipcar’s road to becoming a successful network model subscription company, however, was a little rockier. The company was

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cars to North America. The model was simple. You paid an annual membership fee of $50 a month, which granted you access to one of Zipcar’s fleets. You were then charged for your part-time wheels by the hour or the day. By June 2000, Chase and Danielson had raised

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angel investor and leased their first 12 cars in Boston.3 The partners quickly expanded and brought on more investors; by the end of 2002, Zipcar was up to 6,000 subscribers in Boston, New York City, and Washington, DC. But not all was happy in Zipland

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. Zipcar was hemorrhaging cash. When Chase failed to deliver on an expected round of financing, the board replaced her as CEO with technology entrepreneur Scott Griffith.

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4 One of Griffith’s first moves as CEO was to commission a series of focus groups among people who had considered using Zipcar but had chosen not to subscribe. The focus groups revealed that the main reason interested people didn’t become subscribers was that they were worried

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about not being able to have access to a Zipcar when they wanted one. At the time, Zipcar was spread too thin, with subscribers all over the cities it operated in. Griffith realized that, like any network model subscription

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needed 150 to 200 cars per city. He also calculated that to be profitable, he needed a 40:1 ratio of members to cars. Since Zipcar was operating in three cities, he estimated it needed between 18,000 and 24,000 subscribers to become viable. Instead of focusing on the big

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,000 to 24,000 members, Griffiths decided to break each city down into smaller zones and build density one zone at a time. For example, Zipcar divided Boston up into 12 geographic sections and then leveraged the demographics of each area to design its fleet. In Boston’s well-to-do

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Beacon Hill neighborhood, Zipcar provided Volvos and BMWs.5 In the left-leaning area of Cambridge, the fleet was made up mostly of Toyota’s Prius hybrids

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. Zipcar also matched the fleet in each zone with the usage pattern of subscribers in the area. Boston’s Back Bay users often took their cars

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to Cape Cod for the weekend, so Zipcar made sure its vehicles were larger and more comfortable. Harvard Square subscribers were mostly students who wanted small cars for quick trips. Once the fleet

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matched the demographics of a zone, Zipcar blitzed the neighborhood with advertising to sign up subscribers and build density. The immediate experience of users in the zone was positive, and they told

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their friends. Zipcar used this density model to scale up the company. Once it achieved success in its original founding markets, it was able to expand, which further

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increased the value proposition for Zipcar members. Today, a Boston-based subscriber can not only find a car in her neighborhood, she can just as easily hop out of a train

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in Baltimore or a plane in Bristol, UK, and find a Zipcar. Thanks to leveraging the network model, Griffiths had built the company up to more than $100 million in revenue and 760,000 subscribers when Avis

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. The network model is best for companies that have a lot of capital or entrepreneurs who are good at raising it. In the case of Zipcar’s first decade, the business was always hungry for cash. To begin, Chase and Danielson started off with an angel investment, then raised $4.7

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million in a second round of financing two years later. With Griffiths in the driver’s seat, Zipcar raised $25 million in 2006 and another $21 million in 2010.8 At WhatsApp, founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton started out with a $250

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a little purchasing freedom when they subscribe, but there are a lot of benefits to subscribing rather than purchasing on a one-shot basis. A Zipcar subscriber, for example, can access an expensive car for a few dollars a month. A Mosquito Squad subscriber can invite his boss over for a

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-numbers-that-explain-why-facebook-acquired. 3. Hart, Myra M., Michael J. Roberts, and Julia D. Stevens, “Zipcar: Refining the Business Model,” Harvard Business School, May 9, 2005. newentrepreneurship.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/zipcar-refining-the-business-model.pdf. 4. Clifford, Stephanie, “How Fast Can This Thing Go, Anyway?” Inc., March

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1, 2008. inc.com/magazine/20080301/how-fast-can-this-thing-go-anyway.html. 5. Ibid. 6. Naughton, Keith, “Avis Budget Embraces Car Sharing with Zipcar Acquisition,” Bloomberg News, January 2, 2013. bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-02/avis-budget-makes-491-million-offer-to-acquire

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-zipcar.html. 7. “Number of World of Warcraft Subscribers from 1st Quarter 2005 to 3rd Quarter 2014 (in millions),” Statista. statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-

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world-of-warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter. 8. Patrick, Brian, “Zipcar Timeline: From Business Idea to IPO to $500 Million B1uyout,” Entrepreneur, January 2013. entrepreneur.com/blog/225399. 9. WhatsApp company overview, CrunchBase. crunchbase.com/company

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) companies, 55, 69, 158 Buterin, Dmitry, 29, 184–85, 190 cancellations, see churn rate Capital Factory, 142, 173 Carsanaro, Joseph A., 147 car sharing, 109 Zipcar, 19, 109–11, 113, 153 car theft, 116 Case, Steve, 69 cash, 138, 139–43 cash sources, 143–51 charging up front, 148–51 outside

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Whisperer Guild, 47 Workday, 135 World of Warcraft, 111–12 WP Engine, 177 Wunderlist, 100 Yoga Journal, 179 Zendesk, 77, 79, 163 Zide, Scott, 32 Zipcar, 19, 109–11, 113, 153 * The “first mover advantage” concept is severely overhyped. Before there was FreshBooks, there was QuickBooks, before we had Basecamp we

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck  · 13 Nov 2012  · 342pp  · 86,256 words

rarely the most convenient choice. And the parking lot beneath my apartment building charged a small fortune in fees. Add to that the availability of Zipcar car sharing in my neighborhood and it soon became apparent that going car-free was the most convenient option. Back in my Miami days, the

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created a circumstance where a personal vehicle will contribute to our quality of life. Moving a pair of car seats in and out of the Zipcar is just becoming too big a chore for two parents with sore backs. Disappointing? Perhaps, but perfectly in keeping with the idea of the car

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, and can serve as an effective gateway drug to more hard-core rail transit in the future. ZIP IT IF YOU CAN Every city wants Zipcar. Does Zipcar want them back? Probably not. By all means, invite them to dinner, give them the key to your city, and offer them all of

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: Go downtown. Stick out your hand. Does a taxi stop? If so, you are probably ready for Zipcar. And then go for it, as the benefits are tremendous. After a year of service, Zipcar Baltimore polled its members and found that they were walking 21 percent more, biking 14 percent more, and

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percent of members had taken more than five driving trips in the previous month, compared to 38 percent before joining Zipcar. About a fifth of members had sold their cars, and almost half claimed that Zipcar had saved them from having to buy a car.36 There is only one challenge to

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Zipcar, which is that they are too smart to locate in unwalkable cities. THE SAFE WALK STEP 5: PROTECT THE PEDESTRIAN STEP

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Jahne, “Local Officials Find Fault with Proposed Hartford–New Britain Busway.” 35. U.S. Government Accounting Office, “Bus Rapid Transit Shows Promise.” 36. Morgan Clendaniel, “Zipcar’s Impact on How People Use Cars Is Enormous.” STEP 5: PROTECT THE PEDESTRIAN 1. Wesley Marshall and Norman Garrick, “Street Network Types and Road

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Transportation Policy Project Progress VII: 2 (March 1998): 1, 4. Children’s Safety Network. “Promoting Bicycle Safety for Children,” 2. childrenssafetynetwork.org, 2011. Clendaniel, Morgan. “Zipcar’s Impact on How People Use Cars Is Enormous.” fastcompany.com, July 19, 2011. Coder, Rim D. “Identified Benefits of Community Trees and Forests.” University

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, William Williams, Robin Wilson, Charles Erwin Wolverine World Wide World War I Wynkoop Brewing Company Yale University Yamasaki, Minoru Yelp website Young, Brigham Zeilinski, Susan Zipcar zoning; inclusionary Zynga ALSO BY JEFF SPECK Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (coauthor with Andres Duany and

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it.” ●AAA: “Your Driving Costs,” 2010 edition, 7. The marginal operating cost of most vehicles is well below twenty cents per mile. This explains why Zipcar and the other urban car-share programs are so effective at reducing auto use. According to the company website, each

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“Zipcar takes at least 15 personally-owned vehicles off the road.” For a Zipcar member, the fixed costs—a twenty-five-dollar application fee and a sixty-dollar annual membership fee—are negligible

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World

by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt  · 20 Apr 2015  · 294pp  · 82,438 words

impossible for their individual members to achieve on their own. Bee colonies, for example, use simple rules to find a new nest, and members of Zipcar relied on simple rules to share cars across thousands of users. In the next chapter, we’ll expand on why simple rules are so powerful

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to pursue their own objectives. To see how simple rules balance coordination with individual interests, consider the case of Zipcar, which was founded in 2000 by Antje Danielson and Robin Chase. Zipcar emerged as the world’s leading car-sharing network, with approximately 810,000 members and over ten thousand vehicles in

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the United States, Canada, the U.K., and Europe. Unlike car rental firms like Hertz or Enterprise, Zipcar has no drop-off centers or staff to clean, check, and refuel the cars. Instead, Zipcar relies on its members to ensure that the vehicles they used are fit for the next driver’s

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member’s car-sharing experience depends critically on the behavior of the complete stranger who drove the car just before them. To ensure smooth coordination, Zipcar could have employed a thick contract that few would read and even fewer would remember. It could have asked members to contact each other to

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vast majority of disputes among members, so by following the rules members could avoid most problems. As long as they obeyed these simple rules, moreover, Zipcar members were free to use the cars however they liked: students might use them to load up on groceries, film crews could use them to

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on getting something done when multiple actors—people, organizations, or nations—have to work together. These rules orchestrate the behaviors of, for example, schooling fish, Zipcar members, and content contributors at Wikipedia. In contrast, timing rules center on getting things done in situations where temporal factors such as rhythms, sequences, and

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Cross Inhibition in Collective Decision-Making by Honeybee Swarms,” Science 6 (January 2012), 108–11. [>] Instead, for its first: Since its acquisition by Avis Budget, Zipcar’s six simple rules have been incorporated into fifty-one frequently asked questions, which were themselves organized into ten categories, including “driving rates, billing and

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, and “return on time” to a 142-word statement of policy. Accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.zipcar.com/how#faqs. [>] Students might use them: Examples of how people use Zipcars from company website, http://www.zipcar.com/?redirect_p=0, accessed August 4, 2014. [>] A study of dozens: Emmanuelle Fauchart and Eric

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, Francis, [>] Y Combinator/dinners, [>]–[>], [>] Yahoo, [>] Yankey, David, [>] Yellen, Janet/rules, [>], [>] YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization) descriptions, [>]–[>], [>] n members/simple rules program, [>], [>]–[>] Zaidi, Farhan, [>], [>], [>]–[>] n Zatisi Group, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] Zipcar overview, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] rules, [>], [>]–[>] n About the Authors DONALD SULL is a global expert on strategy and execution in turbulent markets. He is a senior lecturer at

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy

by Daniel Gross  · 7 May 2012  · 391pp  · 97,018 words

aftermath of the bust, new businesses that aimed to cash in on the growing market for efficient vehicle use were launched. Chief among them is Zipcar. Founded in 2000, it grew by focusing on cities and college campuses. It uses information technology to manage the fleet and control access; members get

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per hour on weekends; they do not pay for gas or insurance, and there is no charge per mile. As the U.S. economy contracted, Zipcar went into hypergrowth: 225,000 members in 2008 to 350,000 members in January 2010 to 650,000 members and 9,500 cars in November

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2011. Zipcar has had predictable success in the big cities of Boston, New York, and San Francisco, but its vehicles can also be found on 350 college

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to provide memberships to college students for as little as $25 and with rates as low as $7 per hour. As it has gained scale, Zipcar has moved from exclusively serving efficient consumers to providing solutions to efficiency-seeking businesses and institutions. It has signed deals with the New York City

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Department of Transportation, the city of Chicago, and the General Services Administration to offer cars to employees.6 Zipcar, which went public in April 2011, is making money; it scraped out a small profit in the third quarter of 2011. But the profit is

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, utility of ownership without the enormous associated costs, and how it benefits the economy at large. Zipcar saves people money, and then encourages its customers to drive less or more strategically. On its website, Zipcar touts a study that shows “each car shared takes 15 privately owned vehicles off the road, and

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that vehicle miles traveled per driver is reduced almost 50 percent when car owners switch to car sharing.” Zipcar’s financial success has also spurred competition and innovation from other components of the auto sector, the nation’s largest retail market. Large rental agencies

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of homeowners. The company says the average booking generates $80. Five million times $80 per night is $400 million.8 Even taken together, companies like Zipcar, Chegg.com, Rent the Runway, and Airbnb won’t transform the U.S. economy. Many of today’s consumer inefficiencies are habits acquired over decades

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, logic tends to trump emotion in economic affairs. It just makes more sense to rent textbooks than to own them, and to sign up for Zipcar rather than own a car in New York City. There will come a day when nobody needlessly pays AOL $25 per month for online access

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/nrc/. 5. AAA “Your Driving Costs 2011” can be seen at http://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/YourDrivingCosts2011.pdf. 6. Data on Zipcar’s membership growth, membership, and business development was taken from press releases at the company’s media site: http

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://zipcar.mediaroom.com. 7. Data on student debt come from The Project on Student Debt, http://project onstudentdebt.org. 8. Data on Airbnb’s growth, size,

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–77 Yanai, Tadashi, 93 Yergin, Daniel, 106 Yessbuts, 217 Yoplait, 89 Yum Brands, 138–39 Zakaria, Fareed, 19 Zandi, Mark, 31, 207 Zions Bank, 38 Zipcar, 192–93, 195 Zuckerberg, Mark and Randi, 197 Zynga, 18, 84, 201 About the Author Daniel Gross, economics editor and columnist at Yahoo! Finance, is

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today's youth apparently prefer to spend their disposable income on the latest internet-connected gadget (unlike older generations?), according to a 2012 survey by Zipcar.51 The degree to which this is making a virtue of necessity — perhaps Millennials cannot afford cars and fuel as easily as older, more well

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days, so cars may be less expensive to rent for a short trip. In the US the first break-out company in this sector was Zipcar,179 which adopted a model widely used in Europe180 and went public in 2011,181 but still contained some inconveniences.182 Car2Go (and others) all

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: Within-Urban Variability in Physical Inactivity, Air Pollution, and Ischemic Heart Disease Mortality. Environ Health Perspectives 120(2): 247–253. 51 Zipcar (2013) Millennials and Technology http://www.slideshare.net/Zipcar_Inc/millennial-slide-share-final-16812323 52 According to Noreen McDonald "Among young adults, lifestyle-related demographic shifts, including decreased employment

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age. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 39(2), 257-276. 173 This currently exists to some extent with the current carsharing companies (Car2go, Zipcar, etc.) which compete with rental cars. But again the cost is too high for most people to use on a daily basis for a primary

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it at different times. 178 This varies by city, so in Minneapolis, cars are on-street, in other cities like Boston, restriction affect this. 179 Zipcar was originally founded by Robin Chase and Antje Danielson in 2000; Danielson was forced out in 2001, Chase in 2003. 180 For more on carsharing

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-avis-carsharing.html?page=all http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/1/5553910/driven-how-zipcars-founders-built-and-lost-a-car-sharing-empire 181 Zipcar went public with 8,000 cars, 500,000 members and $186 million in revenue. Never profitable, it was acquired by Avis in 2013 at about

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price of a new NFL stadium (about one-half a giga-dollar)). 182 As a member of a two-driver, one-car family, David used Zipcar for about a year, but stopped due its inconvenience and cost. While his experience was limited (he used it for only a handful of trips

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, more than a mile from home. Second he had to know exactly how long was the trip, since overage charges were some $50. From the Zipcar perspective, with such a thin fleet of vehicles, the overage charge was essential to guarantee the car would be available for the next renter, but

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car. Once you enter the car, find the key, turn the ignition, fill out a brief survey on car quality, and off you go. Unlike Zipcar, Car2Go bills by the minute. When you are done, you check out from the car. Car2Go uses Smart Fortwo vehicles, which are the smallest and

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