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\u201cFor the most part, people thought it was a really stupid idea,\u201d Sam Zaid told me over the phone last week. \u201cNobody would want to share their car and we’d never get insurance.\u201d But they did<\/em> get insurance and, as it turns out, car owners are more than willing to share. Getaround only launched last year, but they\u2019ve already expanded to five US cities (San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, Austin, and Portland) and accumulated over 200,000 members. I sat down with Sam to find out how he did the impossible.<\/p>\n We were passionate about the idea from the get-go, but we also knew it could totally blow up in our faces. Why would you do something where you have all these immediate hurdles? And we had to build hardware, and that’s hard to do.<\/p>\n The thing that really helped us was when we first managed to get our first insurance contract, which was a three-month insurance proof-of-concept. We had three months to prove the business model could work. That was probably the thing that catalyzed things, but it took us 12 months to get to that point.<\/p>\n In the space that we were in at the time, there wasn’t really a lot we could do to validate other than put it out on the market and see what happened. We didn’t know if we could get insurance because no one’s going to give you insurance if you’re just a couple of guys with a PowerPoint.<\/p>\n Startups don’t seem real when you come up with an idea. You’re like, “Oh, this is a great idea,” but the thing just doesn’t feel like there’s any substance to it, and then, as you start working on it, it feels more and more legitimate, more and more real. With Getaround, it was really just going out there and starting to work on different parts: build hardware, build the initial prototypes, figure out the user experience, start building a team, and start working on the insurance.<\/p>\n I think, a lot of the time, you might just want to change the tactic you’re employing, not your strategy. Change the plan, but adhere to your beliefs. I’m not saying don’t ever modify those as well, but I think you have to modify those a little bit more carefully than your day-to-day or month-to-month plan. If, for example, you believe that cars are shared more and more frequently and that access is a better model than ownership, that’s a tenant you adhere to. I don’t think those are things you want to be changing rapidly.<\/p>\n In a non-marketplace business, you have one metric that drives everything. If you’re Twitter: it’s users. The more users you have, the more servers you have, the more data you have. So as long as you’re moving users up, the rest of the business follows in concert. That’s the metric that really matters.<\/p>\n For marketplace businesses, the challenge is you have two metrics that really matter because you have two sides to the business, and so essentially everything you do is twice as complicated. You always have to think of two different customers and two different sets of metrics that have to move in concert together. I think that’s the hardest part of a marketplace. It’s going to be hard enough just dealing with one customer base, but to have to deal with two makes everything even more complicated.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nWhen you were still forming the idea for Getaround, was there a distinct moment when you committed to it, when you decided you were all-in?<\/em><\/h3>\n
How did you go about validating the idea for Getaround?<\/em><\/h3>\n
<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nIn previous interviews you\u2019ve said tenacity is important for a founder. But I’d imagine it’s also important to react quickly and be flexible when one tactic or strategy isn’t working; How do you know when you should stay the course and when it’s time to try something else?<\/em><\/h3>\n
What’s the most challenging part of starting a marketplace business?<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/h3>\n