Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase envisions a future beyond car dependency

**Pete Bigelow** (0:05)
Hi everyone, welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter at The Automotive News. I'm thinking a lot about transportation startups today. There were dozens showcasing their products and technology when I was at the Move America Mobility Conference in Austin late last month. And when I go to the Autotech Council Science Fair in the Bay Area later this week, there'll be dozens more in attendance. I can't promise that Zipcar was the very first mobility startup. Maybe that honor belongs to inventors from past centuries. But in this 21st century era of mobility, Zipcar might be the first startup that mattered. How the climate for transportation startups has changed over the past 20 years is just one of the topics I discussed with Robin Chase, the Zipcar co-founder and serial entrepreneur who is my guest on this week's episode. She's probably done more to open our collective eyes to transportation business models beyond automobiles and car ownership than anyone I can think of.
Robin and I talk about the early days of Zipcar, finding joy in transportation, how to build livable cities with climate change looming, and much more. Without further ado, I'm pleased to bring you this conversation with Robin Chase.
Robin, it's great to have you on the podcast today. Welcome.

**Robin Chase** (1:20)
It's my pleasure. I look forward to it.

**Pete Bigelow** (1:22)
Perhaps we can kick this off with a little bit of a history lesson.
You're a serial entrepreneur. I would think most people know you for Zipcar, which was founded more than 20 years ago at this point. So what was it that you saw at a time when mobility was not a buzzword and the mobility industry did not exist?

**Robin Chase** (1:47)
I think I saw a problem and a need that I personally had. And I saw that technology was at a place where we could solve it.
We could solve my problem. So I do have a co-founder who saw car sharing in a cafe in Berlin. She's German. She was at home on vacation.
And she came back to me and said, Robin, what do you think about this? And I just want to put you back to those 23 years ago for this event. The Internet was novel. 50% of the people had cell phones. 25% of the people had access to the Internet. Like we were talking a really long time ago.
And what I saw was this was using a car by day and by the hour, because I didn't want to own one, didn't want to own a second one, really spoke to me personally. And I saw in this flash of insight that wireless technology would make this a trivial thing, to unlock a door and enable a payment system, and that the Internet, it's how you share specific resources simply. And so it was really leveraging these technologies that made me think, wow, we could really make this happen in a simple, easy, straightforward way. And it would change the game of car rental and change my ability to interact with it. Like if you have zero transaction costs, I can now rent it for an hour. Otherwise, I'm not going to stand in a line for 15 minutes to do that.

**Pete Bigelow** (3:10)
You and your co-founder started Zipcar at a time when being a female founder, I can only imagine, meant that you faced even more of an uphill battle than you would today. And you were proposing something that didn't exist in America.
How were you treated? How were you received at that time?

**Robin Chase** (3:29)
You know, number one, I was very naive. So I would say that I didn't perceive what I think is absolutely true that as a female CEO, and it's even funny to call yourself a CEO when you've got one employee yourself or one or two employees. But absolutely, there weren't any women. Venture capitalists hardly knew any women that were doing things like this.
We were novel in a thousand ways, but because I had never tried to raise money before, because I'd never thought about the venture capital ecosystem, I did appreciate that transportation was a male-dominated system. But I went forth blithely and naively, and I think that's why we succeeded, that people who worked in car rental had all these belief systems about what worked and didn't work. And also, who would want to break your 24-hour bundle monopoly and say, oh, let's just sell it by the hour. So it was because I lacked insight into that industry and also, I will tell you, lacked insight into how very far reaching our technology was that I had kind of thought everyone's talking wireless. We'll just do this wirelessly. But in fact, the only wireless things there were were radios and the new cell phones. That was it. So I joked that we were consumer application number three of wireless technology.