past couple of years. Meanwhile, the granddaddy of instant carpooling is the “slugging” system around Washington DC, whereby commuters line up to hitch rides with strangers who need extra people to use the three-person carpool lanes. That system, which is free, has been in full swing since the 1980s.
The competing online carpooling services “haven’t really addressed the real-time nature of the problem,” Russell says. Some need a larger critical mass of riders and drivers to make it work, he says, as compared to Zebigo, which is optimized so that “with fewer numbers of people in the system, we can intelligently match them together.” Other competitors depend on riders having Facebook friends who are going their way.
Of course, the social barrier of riding with strangers is probably greater than the technological problem that Zebigo solves. How will the company deal with privacy, security, and safety issues? For starters, there is an eBay-style rating system for riders and drivers, and each member has a searchable profile. Members can choose to include a background check done by LexisNexis. Women can request that they ride only with other women. In terms of privacy, only the matched-up rider and driver can see each other’s pictures, so they can recognize one another. Once they meet, either party can cancel the ride at any time, with no fee.
At the end of the day, drivers get paid a little bit, but mostly the service is about convenience and speeding up the commute. “It’s a lot about time savings,” Russell says. “Money legitimizes the transaction.”
Zebigo has been privately funded to this point, mostly through Russell and his friends and family. His team has built its first product on about $750,000, and is currently looking for more funding as it hopes to wend its way to break-even. “If you want to do well in green [tech] and time savings, you’ve got to make it profitable or it’s not sustainable,” Russell says. “I learned well from Jeff Bezos—you don’t bet the farm on one thing, you build a platform.”
By the end of the summer, Russell hopes to have 3,000 to 5,000 members signed up in the Seattle area. On any given day, he’d like to see hundreds of transactions. His plan is to prove the business model in Seattle, and eventually roll out the service in other cities on the West Coast and in the Southwest.
Russell says he takes pride in “bringing a small team of highly skilled, intelligent folks together and making something fly.” His standard procedure, born of the aerospace industry, is “We research, we build, we test, we fly.” We’ll be watching to see if Zebigo flies in Seattle, and beyond.
