Sam Zaid, Getaround's founder and CEO, explains how the company switched from professional photographers to a smartphone workflow with local valets to scale vehicle photos. Before launching, Getaround changed California's car-sharing insurance laws by securing a legislative sponsor. Zaid notes the U.S. has 250 million cars but needs only 25 million, and sharing lets owners like Dan Irish upgrade to BMWs because the income makes it affordable.
Chapters
And certainly Airbnb helped in that.
Cool. So also another thing I noticed on your platform is that all of the photos are extremely high quality. And that was something I personally struggled with myself, is trying to get listings up and just scale quickly. And people aren't always the best at making their listing the most attractive. How are you able to do that while still scaling at a great pace?
So originally we did what Airbnb did, is we used photographers. And then we had our— then as smartphones became much more capable, some of my friends who are very much into photography now keep saying, people ask me what camera to buy, and I tell them iPhone X. And so, but that's now. But basically as smartphones became more capable, we just came up with essentially like a guided way of taking photos from a—
A check.
smartphone that anybody could do. And we have a workforce of valets in every market. Small workforce, but they do it.
Awesome. So, kind of change the subject. So you've mentioned before one of your greatest achievements is changing some transportation laws in some states. What—
I said that was my greatest achievement? Damn.
What laws exactly did you change, and how did you convince them to allow you to even get in their office?
So it was a long time ago. So the first law we changed was actually before we even launched anything. And it was At the time, there was a lot of very positive momentum around car sharing, and Zipcar, and the benefits to cities. And so you had the sharing economy starting to get a little bit of momentum. And so we're like, hey, we're doing this thing. We're going to make it so that more people can share cars. And we want to make sure that the— insurance laws and consumer protections are in place. And so we essentially found a sponsor, like, first in California, a senator to essentially sponsor the bill. And then the reason we did that is it allowed us to engage in a professional manner with the insurance lobbies and any constituencies. And they didn't put that much effort into it, because they were like, this is a cuckoo idea anyway, so let the law go through. But it did protect the car owner, and that was important. And then we passed that in a few more states. And then we haven't passed it everywhere. We've attempted a couple times to do something in New York State.
But— Has that played a big role in your scaling plan, or your rollout plan, or not so much?
With the exception of New York, not so much. But it did help us clarify things, and educate the market, and engage with insurance companies and respective lobby groups. And now we're— I learned way too much about insurance through that process, by the way.
Insurance is the toughest part about this. I learned personally through my experiences without the insurance, pretty much.
Insurance is tricky. That was another one that was really hard for us at the start. And then the big brokers weren't really interested in taking on clients back then. So it was different.
So let's look forward a few years or into the future. Many people believe autonomous cars are the future of transportation. Does that affect you guys? Or is it a concern of yours moving forward? Or how do you guys attack that?
It's not really a concern, because it's— I mean, the question becomes, what is the ownership fabric around autonomous cars? And do individuals still buy cars? Is there one company that owns all the cars in the world? Or do OEMs own cars? And the reality is there's probably a combination of all of those things. I mean, not the one company, but individual ownership will still happen. Corporate ownership will still happen. Group ownership will still happen, maybe not in the exact same ratios as today. And so we just need to be able to support all of that on Getaround. And that's the way we think about it. So we think of autonomous cars making our model more fluid, that more people will share when cars are autonomous, that fewer people will own, and therefore you'll have even higher utilization per car. And we still need to empower the individual who might want to buy an autonomous BMW, but has 80% of the time where they could be monetizing it, as well as the microentrepreneur that maybe has a small fleet of these things.
What about the supply side? So I think millennials are starting to buy less and less cars and are actually getting on more apps like Getaround, does that affect the supply side, where it's sort of limited and there's less cars for people to rent out?
Well, we're so vastly oversupplied today. Like, we're at 250 million cars. We probably need 25 million cars. So it's a long-term problem, number one. Number two, I think it changes the dynamic. So if you think of what Getaround does is not only does it change sort of the demand profile, It also is affecting, the fact that you can monetize an asset changes the supply side of the equation.
Right.
So you're moving both sides of a supply-demand equation. So if I say that car ownership is free, you could say, okay, well, if car ownership remains the same as it is today and millennials buy fewer cars, okay, now if car ownership is free, do millennials still buy fewer cars? Because now all of a sudden you've shifted the supply-demand relationship. So it's sort of a nonlinear thing. And so the way we think, that's how we think about it. And it also changes what cars people buy. Like, we have a lot of people who end up buying upgraded vehicles because they can share them. So for example, the car I rented here, it's owned by this guy, Dan Irish, who's an owner on Getaround. And he's got a number of cars. And he basically buys a new one every 2 years. And he always buys— like, the one I have is a BMW M3 Euro import. So he picked it up in Nuremberg, drove the track, imported it here, used it as his personal car for a couple years. Then he's bought another one, different— I don't know, it's an M4 or something. And now this is like he rents this permanently, and then he uses his other car. And he's got a few of these. He's done this a couple times. And so—
Not an issue.
That's different. I wouldn't say it's not an issue. It's certainly— it's just not a straightforward issue.
