Popular car-sharing start-up Lyft has raised $60 million in a major new round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, the influential Silicon Valley venture-capital firm started by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. The new funding comes as the ride-sharing market is exploding, with upstart firms like Lyft, Uber and SideCar leveraging smartphone technology to provide alternatives to traditional transportation options like taxicabs and rental cars. These services are examples of the emerging “peer to peer” economy — including Airbnb for lodging and TaskRabbit for everyday chores — in which people connect online to exchange services and get things done.
Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Lyft is a major boost for the fast-growing San Francisco–based start-up. “Andreessen Horowitz is ideal for us because they’ve built big businesses,” Lyft co-founder John Zimmer told TIME in an interview. “They’re very accomplished operators and they understand how to scale a business.” Founded in 2007, Andreessen Horowitz has quickly become a Silicon Valley powerhouse with $2.7 billion under management. The firm has invested in Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and Instagram, among dozens of other start-ups.
Since its launch last summer, Lyft has exploded in popularity. The company now facilitates over 30,000 rides per week in the four cities where it operates: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. The company has hundreds of drivers, and in San Francisco alone, it has doubled the number of drivers over the past few months to keep up with demand. Lyft says that in each new city, the service has grown faster than the previous launch. In other words, Lyft is poised for liftoff.
Lyft is a mobile-phone application — available on Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android devices — that allows riders to “order” a driver to their location in minutes. Lyft makes money by taking a cut of the “fare” (technically a donation). Lyft’s drivers are regular people with cars who want to make a few bucks by giving someone a ride. All drivers are subjected to DMV and criminal-background checks and are required to undergo in-person interviews, vehicle inspections and a two-hour training session.
Lyft is a quintessential example of Silicon Valley innovation: using smartphones and social networking, the company is attacking structural inefficiencies in the existing market for automobile transportation. Today, millions of people are driving around in cars with empty seats while millions of others lack affordable auto transportation options. Lyft aims to bridge that gap.
“We’re trying to make transportation more affordable, social and efficient,” Zimmer told TIME. “We really believe in the power of community, and we want to put drivers and passengers first.” He said the infusion of funds will help the company hire new employees and grow the business domestically and internationally, but he declined to say where the company will launch its service next.
As part of the investment, Andreessen Horowitz partner Scott Weiss will join Lyft’s board. “Lyft is a real community — with both the drivers and riders being inherently social — making real friendships and saving money,” Weiss wrote in a blog post. “I am honored to be joining the board of directors and excited to help the founders realize their dream of filling all of those empty seats!”
Prior to co-founding Lyft, Zimmer worked in New York for the now failed investment bank Lehman Brothers. By the summer of 2008, he had grown disillusioned with Wall Street, as he told TIME when we profiled his company last fall. Zimmer left Lehman three months before it went bankrupt as the financial crisis rocked the U.S. economy, triggering the worst recession in decades. He drove across the country to California and settled in Palo Alto, the center of Silicon Valley, to work on Lyft’s predecessor, Zimride. (Zimride’s name was inspired not by Zimmer’s name, but by an experience co-founder Logan Green had visiting Zimbabwe and learning about its transportation systems.)
The key to Lyft’s success thus far has been establishing trust among its users. After all, getting into a stranger’s car is one of the first things children learn not to do. Lyft requires all drivers and passengers to connect through Facebook, and drivers and passengers rate each other after each ride in order to establish their reputations throughout the network. In this way, unsafe, unreliable or downright sketchy drivers and riders are quickly pushed down in the system. Many of Lyft’s 55 employees started out as drivers or riders using the service, Zimmer told me.
Like many upstart peer-to-peer service companies, Lyft continues to face legal and regulatory headaches, driven in part by the entrenched commercial industries these start-ups are aiming to disrupt. Lyft, Uber and SideCar were each fined $20,000 last fall by California authorities for operating taxi services without the proper permit, as my colleague Brad Tuttle recently reported. And Uber, which unlike Lyft operates in New York, continues to tangle with Big Apple courts over its plan to extend its smartphone service from black livery cars to yellow taxicabs.
Last fall, Andreessen Horowitz hired former Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty as a special adviser to help start-ups with transportation-policy issues, so it’s likely that he’ll be involved with Lyft. “He’s uniquely qualified to help companies understand everything from striking effective city partnerships to navigating regulatory issues,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Margit Wennmachers wrote. “With more technology companies disrupting traditional businesses, they will benefit from leaning on someone who’s well-versed in how local governments operate.”
Source : TIME, by Sam Gustin, May 23, 2013
Car sharing didn't exist in Chicago a decade ago when a little known nonprofit called the Center for Neighborhood Technology launched I-GO as an alternative to car ownership.
Today, the idea of renting cars by the hour is commonplace, one reason the nonprofit decided to sell I-GO CarSharing to Enterprise Holdings, I-GO Chief Executive Sharon Feigon said Tuesday.
Terms of the deal, which was set to close Tuesday, were not disclosed.
Enterprise Holdings, based in St. Louis, owns the flagship Enterprise Rent-A-Car brand as well as National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car. Enterprise has been acquiring car-sharing concerns; I-GO was the last major independent remaining.
Feigon said that with Enterprise's backing I-GO will "grow bigger and stronger."
"I-GO's 10 years old," she said. "We've done very well. We brought car sharing to the market, we introduced the idea and we grew it.''
In an email, Enterprise said it plans to update about a quarter of I-GO's 250 cars within the next two weeks and to expand into new neighborhoods. The company also said a mid- to longer-term goal is to provide I-GO members automatic access to car sharing in other cities and that it hopes to continue I-GO's relationship with the Chicago Transit Authority. "We look forward to working with them for the long term,'' Enterprise said.
The deal was structured so that the Center for Neighborhood Technology, an original investor, would be paid back from proceeds of the sale by Bucktown-based Alternative Transportation for Chicagoland Inc., formerly I-GO. Alternative Transportation will continue to focus on other ways to live without a car in Chicago, Feigon said.
For example, it's working on a pilot project that would allow car owners to share their cars by the hour with people who don't have cars.
Car sharing has grown in popularity, seen as a simpler alternative to traditional car rentals in cities and on college campuses. It allows users to pick up a car from a nearby parking space rather than trudging out to an airport or rental car store for trips of an hour or two. Gas and insurance are included, unlike with traditional car rentals.
Avis earlier this year bought I-GO's far-larger rival Zipcar for about $500 million. Zipcar had 775,000 members as of March, and serves 20 cities, including Chicago, and 300 colleges. Avis Budget Group Inc. is the third-largest U.S. rental car company, behind Enterprise and Hertz Global Holdings Inc.
Hertz started its own car-sharing service in 2008 and in 2009 bought Eileo, a car-sharing service based in Paris.
Enterprise acquired PhillyCarShare, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, in 2011 and last year Mint Cars On-Demand, which serves more than 8,000 members in New York City and Boston.
I-GO, with 23 employees, serves 15,000 members in 40 neighborhoods. The goal was to have cars on every block of Chicago's 200-plus neighborhoods. Its mission was to provide affordable transportation to everyone regardless of neighborhood or income.
Kathy Tholin, chief executive of CNT, said, "We couldn't be more excited'' about Enterprise buying I-GO, which it backed from the outset. She said the concept was discovered in Europe by a CNT staffer, and that I-GO was among the first nonprofit car-sharing services in the United States. CNT, an innovations lab, will use its proceeds from the transaction to invest in other urban initiatives, Tholin said.
Feigon said I-GO was approached by several companies over the years, but it believed Enterprise was the best fit for serving neighborhoods. The company, she said, is interested in retaining all of I-GO's 23 employees as well as a local call center.
Mark Warner, who lives in Wicker Park, has been an I-GO user since the company's birth.
He said he uses the service for his business, MDW Consulting Inc., a fundraising consultancy where he is president. He said it is less expensive than owning a car and renting a neighborhood parking space.
"It sounds like a deal that could be very beneficial because it could bring new capital that they could invest in other businesses,'' Warner said. He said he hopes it means he will be able to tap Enterprise's network of vehicles when he leaves the Chicago area.
Gabe Sulkes, 23, moved to Chicago in August 2011 with no plans to buy an automobile, but last year found he needed one to haul things back to his Bucktown apartment.
"As a frugal hipster in Chicago, I decided to go without a car and just use my bike as a means of sustainable transportation," said Sulkes, policy adviser at the Illinois Department of Transportation's Office of Planning and Programming.
That combination works well 90 percent of the time, he said. But the Cornell University graduate added, "Every time I found an object on Craigslist and couldn't balance it on my bike, I would take out a car," he said.
Sulkes said he opted for membership in I-GO to support a local company, and he liked being able to use one card to access cars and ride the CTA.
Source : The Chicago Tribune Business, by Julie Wernau, May 28, 2013
When car sharing meets the parking and driving practices of Memphians on the streets of Downtown, the encounter could go so many ways between bad and good.
So when Zipcar parked four cars in four on-street parking spaces Downtown last month, there were a lot of questions first about how car sharing works but also about whether the national trend would apply to a city with a unique driving culture.
“I don’t know if this will work or not,” said Downtown Memphis Commission President Paul Morris. “But I think it’s worth giving it a look. We’re not risking anything. I’m not predicting success, but I’m optimistic.”
Downtown is relatively denser than other parts of the city with residents and office workers walking and bicycling a lot. But it’s not nearly as dense as other cities where Zipcar and other car-sharing companies have been for some time. And those other cities have more developed public transportation systems.
In some of the other cities, car-sharing has evolved into exchanges where a car owner makes their car available for car-sharing during times they know they won’t need it.
In Washington, there are 900 Zipcars and competition among car-sharing companies for parking spaces that do not come cheap.
The New York Times reported earlier this year that Car2go paid $2,890 per vehicle in Washington for use of a metered space.
The four Downtown parking spaces are free to Zipcar as part of the three-year trial run in Memphis. The Downtown Memphis Commission reached out to Zipcar and Morris went to the Memphis City Council earlier this year to secure the spaces.
The car-sharing service has had a Memphis presence since the summer of 2010 when Rhodes College got a Zipcar on campus. The company markets the service to universities as a solution to limited on-campus parking. In the case of Rhodes, most of the students on campus live on campus too.
Two of the four Downtown spots are on the north side of Gayoso Avenue on the block between South Main Street and Nov. 6th Street by the Park & Play Garage.
The other two are on the east side of South Main between Huling and Talbot avenues.
All four spaces are existing on-street parking spaces that do not have parking meters. They are not in front of any ground-floor businesses, which means they don’t take parking that could be used by customers.
If the Memphis experiment works, an expansion of car sharing could mean the cars would be parked in reserved spaces in garages.
Some on the council are still upset over the city’s agreement to turn over street parking space on Court Avenue between Front Street and Riverside Drive to the nearby University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphries School of Law.
The concern didn’t translate into serious opposition, although council member Lee Harris wanted to know why the city didn’t charge the vendor at the outset. At that point, Zipcar had not agreed and Morris’ agency was still searching for someone to accept the offer.
Harris’s argument is that car sharing is big business and the rental car companies that have added the sector can afford to pay for parking spots.
Avis Budget group bought Zipcar in January for $491 million, six years after Zipcar grew in a merger with rival Flexcar.
The company touts not only its fleet of cars but the technology that allows subscribers to reserve cars in minutes from mobile applications at any time.
Run zipcards given to those who subscribe to the service over a decal on the driver’s side windshield and the car unlocks if you are booked to use it. The keys are permanently attached to a retractable chain by the steering wheel.
Zipcard doesn’t talk about security measures but says it has measures in place for those who might be tempted to keep driving. There are fines for being late in returning the car that could get you bounced from the service if it happens enough. Insurance is included in the membership fee and there is a gas card in the vehicles.
“They won’t go away,” council member Myron Lowery emphasized as he talked about the keys tethered to the dash.
Lowery was the council member who backed the trial run.
“You may not need a car for a whole day. You may not be able to get down to Avis or to Hertz but you can get Downtown riding on the trolley line,” he said. “You can pick it up and bring it back. It’s an amenity for our citizens.”
Morris used the example of a Downtown couple.
“In Memphis, of course, we are so car-centric that we each have our own car. They almost never use these cars but they keep them parked in the garage. They pay $80 a month for the garage,” he said. “That couple can maybe sell one of their two cars, keep one car and then when they need two cars on that rare occasion, they’ll have access to the extra vehicle.”
Source : TimesFreePress, by Associated Press, May 12, 2013
