Robin Chase | Driving Transportation Into the Future

Sometimes being green means charging ahead even when everyone else is applying the brakes. Robin Chase is a serial transportation entrepreneur, but she had no idea what she was getting into with her first project — and that’s how she pushed the market forward.

Robin is the co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the car sharing service that connects members to available cars nearby, which they can use for an hourly or daily fee. It’s a recognizable model today, but being first came with unseen obstacles.

First, Robin hadn’t realized that the software that would link the internet to the car for the customer didn’t exist. “We had to build that and it was incredibly challenging,” she says. 

In the meantime, everything was done manually. In addition to being time-consuming, this led to a potentially disastrous mistake. 

While closing Zipcar’s Series A round, Robin suddenly realized her original revenue calculations were way off. According to her new calculations, Zipcar needed to raise the fee for daily rentals.

Because she believes that honesty and empathy are integral to customer service, Robin personally dealt with angry customer phone calls to explain the situation.

“If you've built yourself to be a responsive and thoughtful and consumer-centric company, then missteps or errors get put into a larger track record of how you address issues,” she says.

The Zipcar sharing model is commonplace today, whether you’re renting an ebike or scooter, or using a rideshare app. But Robin thinks that some new companies in this space are unstable.

“Investors that have way too much money and no knowledge are throwing gigantic sums of money at companies that are too young and have not yet figured out the business model or the operating model,” she says.

That said, Robin is a fan of modes of transport that replace personally owned cars, which have long been prioritized even though not everyone can afford them. On that note, she also wants to see local governments set legislation that makes it easier for these companies to operate safely and responsibly. 

“I would love us to build what I'm calling a freedom network: a network for pedestrians and unlicensed vehicles that enable all of us to regain the freedom of mobility that we once had so that for the 50% of your trips that are less than three miles, you could go without a car without putting your life in danger.”

👩‍🦳 Name: Robin Chase

⚙️ What she does: Robin is an experienced transportation entrepreneur who founded and served as CEO of both Zipcar and Buzzcar. She now serves as executive chairman and founder of the vehicle networking company Veniam, and also wrote the book “Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism.”

🚗 Company: Veniam / NUMO

💎 Words of wisdom: “I used to talk about luck but then a fellow CEO came up to me and said, ‘It's not luck. Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.’ And that is completely true. It was because of the groundwork we had laid that when a good thing happened, we could run on it, or when a bad thing happened, we could catch it quickly.”

🔍 Where to find her: Twitter | LinkedIn | Website

💡 Car sharing 2.0: The idea for Zipcar’s easy-to-rent fleet of cars already existed, but Robin and co-founder Antje Danielson updated it with tech and internet connectivity.

💡 21st century: The tech behind Zipcar — connecting the internet to the car — was brand new in 2000. For the first few months, Robin entered everything manually while her team built the system from scratch.

💡 Blissful ignorance: Robin says that being brand new to the car sharing industry was a benefit. She didn’t know enough to understand what a huge undertaking the idea for Zipcar was.

💡 Long game: Robin took on high expenses on the gamble that they would decrease later. For example, insuring a fleet of cars for non-employees was very expensive but slowly went down.

💡 Personal touch: When a mistake in her calculations meant raising fees by 25%, Robin dealt with backlash by personally calling customers and explaining the situation. 

💡 Honesty policy: Being honest and straightforward with customers earned Zipcar a reputation as a trustworthy company and made customers more understanding.

💡 Faulty models: Vehicle-sharing companies are more popular than ever (e.g., scooters, bikes and carpools) but Robin says that many are operating without a clear business model.

💡 Rewrite the rules of the road: Local governments need to introduce policies that deprioritize cars, since not everyone can afford one, and help make these alternatives viable.

Top quotes from the episode:

“When we launched Zipcar in June 2000, only 25% of people had a cell phone — and they were definitely not smartphones back then. Only 50% of people had access to the internet, and it was primarily through their workspaces. So we were building on the front end of a huge trend and relying on those technologies to come. It was a different world.”

“Some of my investors wanted me to hire a CEO from the car sharing industry … but I really wanted to get away from the prejudices around car sharing. To this day, they're still relying on their old rental model. They don't want to enable a transaction where you don't have to talk to someone and you just get things yourself.”

“I found that the most irate people would get referred to me, and I could convert every single one of them. With authenticity and honesty, I would say, ‘Yeah, I recognize that totally sucked. That had to be incredibly irritating. Here's what we're going to do to correct that.’ And then we would correct it.”

“I feel that we've seen this huge boom and bust of lots of ideas and business models that weren't ready yet — that expanded gigantically and quickly before they even understood what was going on.”

“We need to be moving from a car-centric transportation model to a multimodal model, meaning that when I walk out my front door in a city, I have choices to make. Am I going to walk? Am I going to bike? Am I going to take the subway? Cities are putting their fingers on the scale as to which of those choices I take.”