Jessica Scorpio built Getaround as a mobile app but realized hardware was critical for safety and tracking. The company developed Connect, a device that turns any car into a smart car with real-time location and driving data. Hardware requires different engineers and higher costs, but gave Getaround a competitive edge ride-hail services couldn't match.
Chapters
So beyond insurance and legislation, I mentioned a little bit the hardware technology. Now, definitely a rule of thumb when you're starting your company is if you can either be an app, a web business, or a hardware business, or some sort of service, pick one of those. No reason to try to be everything. It's actually a bad idea. With Getaround, we sought out to be an app. But with the team we had, we ended up creating a website. And we're very mobile first, but we— it took us a while to get the whole package. But from day one, we really felt that the hardware piece was crucial. So one big question along the lines of, what about insurance, is, how do you know this is safe? How do I know how people are driving my cars and where my car is? And what if an accident happens? So— We basically built this hardware technology called Getaround Connect. And it is pretty simple. It's the size of a smartphone. It gets installed under the car dash. And it works to locate the car and also see how the car is being driven. So we very much respect privacy and everyone's right to that. However, in our sort of business, we need to— we can actually ensure people's safety and we can ensure that their cars are really safe. by the backend knowing how the cars are, where they are. So through that technology, that's what would let a renter pick— find the car. You know, let's say there's a car on the street here. You'd find the exact location of the car. So it's really easy. It's basically— what it does is it turns any regular everyday car into a smart car. And that's actually one of the trends that inspired us to work on Getaround. You know, the future of self-driving cars and smart cars and— Safer cars. And as all of these things come down the line, less— well, cars will be smarter and safer, but less people will have to own cars because they'll be a lot more shareable. And so I think where the transportation landscape is today, it's at a really amazing point in time where you have Lyft and Uber providing these great point A to point B rideshare options, and then Getaround providing a real alternative to car ownership. So basically, between the two of those, which have only really become very mainstream in the past 3 years, you have no need to necessarily own a car. But if you do want to own one, for the first time ever, it's a profitable— it's an income center for passive income rather than just a depreciating asset. So obviously, we knew that. We felt that the safety and convenience feature was really important. It took us a few years to actually develop this tech. And the interesting thing— the reason I was saying that you kind of should pick and focus, because focus is extremely important, it's— you need different engineers to do different things, right? Kind of obvious, but mobile developers don't do websites, and hardware developers can't build websites, and hardware needs software and hardware. So basically, it's just, at the end of the day, it costs you a lot more in terms of how much money you're going to have to raise, all your expenses you're going to have. But we invested early on with the hardware, and we felt like it's really paid off because no other player has those. Our investors and our partners, I don't think they'd be interested— they're not interested in the key exchange car-sharing model. And we— I'll get into this later, but— Early on, we had one model, and then we had to rethink it all from scratch, and we switched to a different model. And that's actually what has got us the growth we needed to be successful.
