Getaround founder Jessica Scorpio explains how cars sitting idle most of the day sparked her idea for a car-sharing marketplace. She was challenged by Larry Page at Singularity University to impact a billion people, and realized billions of cars could be used more efficiently to reduce congestion and emissions.
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I wanted to start out with a quick story. Not officially part of the talk. But I think in terms of having inspiration for your startup idea is really important. And really solving a big problem is also really important. So as you guys know, the thing I'm gonna talk to you today is how to turn a big— how to turn an oh shit moment into a profitable, growing, ideally billion-dollar or more business. And so Getaround's well on our way to that. And I'm excited to share my personal journey and some of the lessons we've learned in order to help you guys get there. So it's going to be pretty actionable, but it's going to tell kind of our story and what we've learned. But today, to share a little bit about my day. So I drove here from San Francisco. And I had meetings this morning, grabbed a Getaround car. And that part of the experience was extremely seamless. I enjoyed it. It happens to be my car today, so I just unlocked my own car with my phone basically. Walked up. It was actually in front of the Sightglass Coffee Shop. Some of you probably know it. And so I came down and it was a great, great experience. Basically how you want it to be. No traffic jams. Drove down. Then I got to San Mateo and I could not find parking for my life. I apologize. We're starting a few minutes late here. Just, I used to live in Mountain View and my brain when I think South Bay. I think I'm pulling up to just some big parking lot or something somewhere, but I'm pleasantly surprised by the downtown. San Mateo's a super cute little spot. But then I've been circling for 20 minutes for parking, and I'm going, I think I'm gonna have to abandon my car somewhere and just run in. But luckily I found a spot, and now I'm here. But that's kind of a good foreshadowing for Our business idea, which is basically that there's way too many cars in the world. There's all this congestion. There's parking problems. Basically, that's part of the inspiration for Getaround. We thought there were too many cars, and we thought we could do something about that. So our whole idea is taking an inefficient asset and making it more accessible, basically. And so when you share an asset, you take cars off the road. So it's kind of a long-term mission. But as you get shared cars, you take cars off the road. So— So basically, once we're in San Mateo, I'll have an easier time getting parking. So that's the happy ending there. You all know a little bit about what Getaround is now. We're basically a marketplace for sharing cars. If you haven't tried it, we'd be happy to provide some driving credit to all you guys to try it out. You can rent anything from a Tesla to a pickup truck, Mini Cooper. And part of the story I'm gonna tell you is how— That's awesome. how we came up with the idea, and then how we worked to get product-market fit. Because I can't stress the importance of product-market fit enough. You know, you're all brainstorming your ideas, putting your business plans together. Obviously, research is a key component. Getting good mentors and advisors is a key component. But then once you start building, actually get something that people want to use and that it works. So at some stage in the company, we had something that worked. But we weren't happy with the growth rate. But we weren't happy with the success rate. And so we worked really hard to get where we are today. I'm excited to share that story. So let's take it back. It's really cool to be here because Getaround started in a similar environment. We basically were invited to be in the inaugural class of Singularity University, which is a really interesting and very credible program which takes young leaders and educates them about accelerating technology. And then you get challenged to apply those learnings to humanity's greatest challenges. So basically, myself and my co-founder, we applied to Singularity, and we both got accepted. And so we knew coming out here that we were going to get big challenges, and we hoped that we would be on to something big. So this was about 5 years ago now. The idea for Getaround came out of a challenge which Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, basically gave us. He and the founders of Singularity said, Jessica and class, come up with an idea that can positively impact a billion people in 10 years. So we really took that challenge to heart. We were the first class ever, which I think you guys are also the first class at Draper U? No? No. Oh, all right. Well, then you have to one-up the previous class, in case they ever told you. But we were the first class. And so what they told us was, this is kind of the Wild West. Make it whatever you want. Get that experience to the fullest. And so we kind of took that to heart. Very quickly, we started researching big global challenges. And we wanted to find a sector that we thought we could make a really big impact. We looked at health. We looked at medical startup ideas. And we quickly decided to focus on the global transportation sector. We felt that there was a big opportunity, that there hadn't been that much innovation since cars. themselves were invented, and that we were somehow on this loop where you have cars and you have highways and you have highway tolling systems, and that's the most creative we're getting in terms of changing the way people see and use cars. This is kind of pre-Airbnb, pre-Uber, but they were getting started, but it definitely wasn't a thing. So when we started coming up with the idea, people The latter is pretty crazy. I'll get into that in a second. But basically, the problem we decided to tackle was car overpopulation, which is what we came to call it. There's a billion cars on the planet that sit idle 22 hours a day. So if you do the math, that's 22 billion daily unutilized car hours. Some interesting stats about cars. It's kind of a necessity for most people. It's the second biggest household expense. So it's where a lot of money goes. It's a very expensive asset. You know, up to $10,000 a year per personal vehicle go into that in terms of insurance, maintenance, parking, you know, all of your expenses to have this nice asset. And then you have basically each shared car can take 10 cars off the road and can save people thousands of dollars a year. So we thought, wow, there's this synergistic opportunity where you have people who own these cars that sit idle a lot that could be doing something good for the environment. So with a number as small as 1,000 shared cars, you can take millions of pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere. You can take tens of thousands of cars off the road. And so that just seemed like an amazing thing to work on. Why not do something that could positively impact people's lives and that is really a global solution to a global problem? So that was kind of our oh shit moment. So what are you working on now?
