As the cofounder and the first CEO of Zipcar, Robin helped pioneer the Collaborative Economy. Today, Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark wrote for Time: Zipcar is the touchstone for the sharing economy. 

Recognized as both a thought leader and an in-the-trenches practitioner, Robin is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences, having given over 150 talks over the last two years, and is regularly profiled in the media. 

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Transcript:

 

Kevin: If you’re thinking about starting a marketplace, power it with Near Me. We’re here for you.

 

Hi. Welcome to The Crowd, a podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

 

In today’s podcast, we’re going to connect with Robin Chase. She is truly one of the big pioneers of the collaborative economy. Let’s jump in to the interview.

 

Kevin: Hello. I’m your host, Kevin Cohen. I’m super excited about today’s interview. Today, I’ll be joined by Robin Chase. Robin is the founder of Buzzcar. As a thought leader and entrepreneur, Robin is a frequent keynote speaker, adviser and board member.

 

Here are some rapid fire questions that I have for you. Where do you spend most of your time online when you’re not working?

 

Robin: Gmail.

 

Kevin: Gmail?

 

Robin: Gmail. I’m constantly – I have 33 tabs open simultaneously right now. So there’s no one place. I’m constantly jumping around and reading everything everywhere.

 

Kevin: Great. So what peer-to-peer marketplaces or services do you like to use?

 

Robin: I use Lyft.

 

Kevin: So, when you’re not working and you’re not out lecturing or advising, what do you like to do with you down time?

 

Robin: Take walks. So walks in the city if I’m in the city. Walks in the wild places if I’m in wild places but walk to be outside. Yup.

 

Kevin: Great. So give us your back story. What did you do before you started Zipcar and Buzzcar and all your different endeavors? How did you get in to this world of the collaborative economy, the sharing economy?

 

Robin: I have a co-founder for Zipcar and she’s German. And so she was on vacation in Berlin sitting in a café and she looked across the street and saw a shared car which is in the fall of 1999. And she came back and talked to me because I have a business background. I went to Sloan and I used, I had been working in public health for many years and I had recently been not working because I have three children. And I work sometimes full time, sometimes part time, sometimes no time when I was raising those children.

 

So I was ready to do something new. I was actually looking to do a startup when she came up with the idea. And really, it completely struck me as something that – so this was again in the fall of 1999. It struck me that this is what the internet is made. It’s for sharing very specific resources easily among lots of people. This is what wireless would make a snap because you could get that reservation directly to the each car. And this is what I personally wanted to have because I live in an urban area with these three kids. And then, I started doing Zipcar and paying attention and that I know transportation at the center of the universe. All of your opportunities and leisure time revolved around what you can access and how convenient it is. So once I started doing Zipcar, I really fell into this level or field of transportation.

 

Kevin: Wonderful, wonderful. So, what was it like being an early entrant into the collaborative economy? I mean, this was 15 years ago. Technology was obviously not where it was today and also consumer awareness wasn’t where it was today. What was that like?

 

Robin: As I was just describing to you this part about Zipcar, it’s really interesting to me that in fact the internet and wireless which we were very, very early into is the precursor to enabling sharing. And so smartphones obviously are the step up in convenience. When we started, only 50 percent of the people had access to the internet at all. It doesn’t sound like a Dark Age. That was back at their work. And something like 5 percent of the people had cell phones. Literally, there wasn’t a lot going on but we knew and believed that this was the trend forward. What I think that I did deeply understand which is what we’re seeing today everywhere is that people would tell me Americans have a love affair with their cars. Their egos are bound up with their cars. And I said no, you know what, those of us who live in the city, this is all about convenience and access. And I have no love affair with a car.

 

I think we started really early on that ownership was not the end all. Convenience and really easy access were. So we believe we’re on the front page of that. And I was a complete believer with all the upsides of what that would mean to you, that it was better to not own a car because now and with Zipcar today, now, I have my own personal fleet of 15,000 cars parked down the road. And I never have to maintain them and I can use the right car for the right trip. So all of that was apparent to me then and that’s what we’re seeing today increasingly when people talk about the sharing economy. Why in heck would you own something when you actually only want to use it a little tiny bit at a time?

 

Kevin: Right, right. And in other cultures throughout the world, many families don’t have cars or they share one car and it’s very common. A lot of cities in Europe especially there’s a lot better public transportation infrastructure but in the major cities back East and also in San Francisco out West, we have great public transportation. So it really works.

 

Robin: I think people in cities who are living this more dense life in small apartments they really don’t want to own stuff. And we live on the very beginning of the technology edge. And today, we have this on-demand world for all sorts of things. The other piece that I think has really accelerated this movement and I think that has to be invented was the idea of ratings and commentaries for the peer-to-peer stuff. And I look at eBay as the people who figured out early on that peer production needed to be rated so that we could keep the bad stuff out and just keep the good stuff. So that’s an innovation for this to happen.

 

Kevin: Right. So in the ratings and reviews, you’re talking about kind of trust elements and transparency. Is that correct?

 

Robin: Trust and transparency. And I don’t want to go beyond the trust because I know everyone talks a lot about trust and I think it’s important. But I think it’s less that I don’t trust you because you’re a stranger than you’re never going to show up which is what they had originally feared, that actually people don’t respond. So we really need to have an ability to say keep the person who actually does what they say they’re going to do, not because they didn’t rate but they actually showed up. And so that for me is a key piece of that. A lot of peer production is very sloppy because we aren’t used to being as professional as businesses are. And so when we look at all the peer production sites, if a very small subset of people are actually providing services, a lot of people will find that they don’t go any further.

 

Kevin: Right. So, you’ve been in the sharing economy for 15 years. You alluded to some of the elements that created the tipping point where we are today where adoption is occurring in a much more rapid rate. One of the things you talked about before was ratings and reviews. The other thing that you talked about also was the advent of mobile devices which are essentially mobile computers in your hand.

 

Robin: And it gives you the geolocation, the geolocation page. We all know that technology is moving at a very fast pace but in the 15 years, that’s when we launched Zipcar to today, today, you can make a website in 20 minutes. You can do online payments quickly, instantly. Whereas, for Zipcar, it was, no kidding, four months for me to be able to accept online payments, to work with the banks to get that done. And I was able to get that done. And today, it’s just like a snap of the fingers with something. Zipcar was one of the very first companies that worked with Google Maps. So when you type in Zipcar, it would show you a Zipcar location. And I’m actually one of the first people to ever do that because Google Maps hadn’t even become an API yet.

 

So today, we’re seeing this burgeoning because it’s so simple to try things out, to experiment and then it’s really, really fast to make an app that can accept payment, that can do ratings, that can connect people up, that can show beautiful pictures, that have a social network. Social networking, that is something that wasn’t invented then. But one of my sad, sad parts is that whenever you’re a startup, you have a long list of technology to-do’s that you have and this kind of prioritize list that you’re kind of shuffling. You wish you have more and you wish you could do more.

 

And I left Zipcar in February 2003. It was a long time ago. And creating a social network with number 1 on the list and this was many years ago with Facebook but he didn’t care about social networks and so he ditched it. But we had already at that time Q&A that people would do among themselves. I wanted to do joint calendars and joint groups and have people profiles. But in any case, that’s another thing that has also been created. So we expect to have some surround around people’s faces now.

 

Kevin: Great. So what role do you think sustainability has in the sharing economy? Is it a primary driver or a secondary driver for most consumers?

 

Robin: I think it’s a secondary driver and I would say that was precisely how – it’s not even further down the stack. For Zipcar, I would market Zipcar as the financially smart, cool, urban thing to do and convenient. And I used to say that the environment was your little halo number 4. I’m wishing and yearning that people would make decisions based on sustainability but they do not. And we see them not do that again and again and again. We’re all incredible hypocrite. We all buy things that have terrible supply chains. We all discard things that shouldn’t be discarded. We really have to sell things based on their other values, their price value, convenience, coolness factors. With that said, one of the reasons I’m so enamored with the sharing economy is because of its resource efficiency. And so if we can persuade people through marketing and convenience that this is the right choice, best and tested because I don’t see we’re going to get going in that way.

 

Kevin: Right, right. Robin, so there have been a lot of critics in the sharing economy recently around the areas of trust and employment. What are your thoughts on this?

 

Robin: I think the sharing economy is kind of misnamed and it bothers me that those problems around employment and trust are attributed to the sharing economy when I think we’ve been seeing them in the private sector since forever. So, the criticism is that the peer to peer or people participating as freelancers on these platforms will now have no benefits and the wages will drop to the lowest possible area. I think, yes, that is true but it’s not something that I will attribute to the sharing economy. I was seeing this, it happens in our current capitalist model here in the US. Walmart is well known for trying to keep workers under a certain number of hours per week so they wouldn’t have to pay benefits. And there was this big lawsuit with FedEx in California where they had – I can’t remember. They had 15,000 drivers that were outsourced so that FedEx wouldn’t have to pay employment benefits.

 

What I see is that everything that can become a platform is definitely going to become a platform. And we’re going to see increasing numbers of workers working freelance. And we need to address this. We need to address it today and we need to address it tomorrow. And it’s something that America has been willing to live with. But we don’t have national health care. We don’t have worker protection and safety nets associated with people who are autonomous workers. And I think that’s a huge problem that we need to address but it’s something that’s much larger than the sharing economy.

 

As to trust, I guess – what kind of angle are you getting at?

 

Kevin: Well, there are a couple of issues. I mean obviously you addressed ratings and reviews helping to alleviate trust for the actual user. If someone is going to go in to a Lyft car or an Uber car, ratings and reviews help to provide that protection. Also, screening of contractors within a marketplace also helps quite a bit. But in terms of trust around personal information, that’s kind of the big one that we’ve seen. A lot of the apps that are used have a lot of information at their disposal inside these mobile devices. And that’s a big issue that we hear about quite often.

 

Robin: Right. So again, so if we talk about privacy issue, I think that is also a problem that we need to address and it is pervasive in every element of our online economy and we need to address this everywhere. It’s definitely not something specific to the sharing economy. And I’ve been advising it or I’ve been recommending it every chance I get when I’m in Washington. I’m saying you have to address these privacy issues and that would be NSA. So that’s the largest entity that has been taking away my privacy, let alone what’s going on in my app.

 

So from my perspective, what I’d like to see is that the person who creates the data owns the data and that if you’re going to be using it on any act or on any website that it needs to be very overt. And so when I go to a site that is very explicitly not given from terms and conditions, this is what we’re doing with your data. And then you can choose or not choose to participate. But I think the person who generates the data is the one who should be owning it.

 

Kevin: Great, great. So many of our listeners on this podcast are sharing economy entrepreneurs, collaborative economy entrepreneurs, what kind of advice would you give them if they’re thinking about starting a marketplace or starting a venture in the collaborative economy?

 

Robin: I’ve just written a book on this topic that isn’t even out yet called Peers, Inc. And when I think about this, I feel there are these four stages to building out one of these companies. And in the very first earliest stage as an entrepreneur, we should be really focused on where there is excess capacity because it transforms the economics of what we have to pay to do it because you’re leveraging something that already exists, that’s already had been paid for. And it also makes the ability to experiment much lower cost for people who are participating. So we want to create a platform that’s the smallest, leanest, minimum viable product. It’s something so standard advice there.

 

And just kind of a funny story to think how minimally Zipcar started. We had our first beta car parked on my street. People were making reservations online. They walked up to my house. They walked at my backyard, at my porch steps and on to my porch and lifted up a pillow on the glider to get the car keys and go back to the car. And in the car, there’s a piece of paper that you will put your start time, stop time, start odometer and stop odometer. And so people drove around at the back for the first six weeks. And then, we added three more cars, a total of four cars. All that would happen is that you could unlock the door of the box by putting your card against the box but it still was not talking to the server. You still have to fill out the form for the first three months while we continued building our technology, which is to say, you really want to start as small as you possibly can.

 

One of the issues when we think about the sharing economy is that network effects are often key parts of it. I would say for Zipcar, network effects were not necessary because people joined if there was a car near them. So they were satisfied from the outset. But with ideas that have to deal with network effects, you want to start with the smallest thing that you can succeed at. So it’s not sharing all things but sharing camera equipments, not sharing all things in all places but sharing it in some particular geography. But you really have to narrow it down so that you can get that network really force in every way that you can to make it succeed in this specific area and then grow organically from those edges.

 

And let’s take a minute more on this idea of excess capacity. Things like, when Zipcar first designating parking spots was with MIT and with Harvard. So yes, it was interesting for me to get a parking spot from MIT and Harvard and not have to pay $200 a month on some other private parking. But more important to me was the idea that I would be able to partner with MIT to send them an email to all of their faculty staff and students and showed this new service called Zipcar helped spectacularly. And for me, that was worth an enormous amount of money. Whereas, for Harvard and MIT, it cost them nothing to send that email. So I would say I was leveraging their excess capacity.

 

So constantly, you should be looking out for how you can get partners to come up with physical space, mailing lists, things that they do easily that wouldn’t cost them anything that means an enormous amount to you. And I think that’s kind of how startups scrabble their way in the beginning by leveraging what is important to them and not pretty much matters to others.

 

Kevin: Wonderful. Well, this book sounds like a wonderful resource. When do you expect your book to launch?

 

Robin: So I want people to preorder right now. And they can get it online at Amazon or Barnes and Nobel. It’s called Peers, Inc. and it would be – if you bought it, you will get it shipped, I think, in the middle of May and then we’ll launch it on June 9. I’d say the under thread, this is a business book and this is how people and platforms are inventing the collaborative economy and reinventing capitalism. I’d say the underlying heartbeat to this is, how can we address climate change in time? And while we’re out rebuilding economies, how to address income and equality. So I’m really excited about it.

 

Kevin: Very exciting. We’ll make sure to have all the details in the show notes for your book so that all of our listeners can get a hold of a copy. One last thing is, what are the projects that you are working on right now besides your book?

 

Robin: I am launching an NGO called DOable.org. That’s an idea book for solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. I’m on the board of a number of entities, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. I’m really excited. My most recent startup is called Veniam and it’s a vehicle network connectivity company that is really going to be changing how we think about wireless networks. It’s kind of enabling us to have access to heterogeneous network. So it’s helping you switch from cellular to Wi-Fi to a Wi-Fi mesh to vehicle to vehicle so that we get the lowest cost and the most reliable way of sending data wirelessly.

 

Kevin: Wow. It sounds very exciting.

 

Robin: I’m really excited about it. Yup.

 

Kevin: And what stage is that venture at?

 

Robin: We had our A round and we currently have the largest connected vehicle network in the world in Porto, Portugal which is about 600 vehicles. Everyone on the public buses in Porto have free Wi-Fi access. You can do video Skype calls while you’re riding the bus which is pretty phenomenal. And we’re hoping to launch in the US sometime in the next, say, three to six months.

 

Kevin: Wonderful. Well, we wish you the best of luck on that. Well Robin, thank you for being on our show today. We’re really excited to share this information with our listeners. And of course, check out her book. Preorder it. It sounds like it’s an amazing resource for budding collaborative economy entrepreneurs. And in addition to that, we’ll have links to your LinkedIn profile and also to your blog as well.

 

Robin: Great. Thank you.

 

Kevin: So that’s it for today’s show everybody. I’d like to thank Robin Chase for joining us here today. She has done amazing stuff in the past and she’ll continue to be an influencer going forward. If you want to learn more about Robin, we’ve got all of her information in the show notes at www.near-me.com. Click on the blog and then go to the podcast listing. Also, if you like today’s show, we’d really appreciate it if you could go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review. Also, make sure to subscribe while you’re there. Make it a great day and thanks.