Lyft-Off: Zimride’s Long Road to Overnight Success

I have a little story of my own. :-)

I met Logan Green the day that he first launched Zimride, at a student-run conference on climate change at UC Berkeley, in March 2007.

At the time I was working on a very similar social carpooling website "GotALift", but it wasn't yet ready to launch. I had also planned to announce my website launch to the exact same group of college students, so when he beat me to it with an almost identical product, I was a bit disappointed.

When I met him and got the chance to speak with him, I wanted to see if we could work together. No sense both working on competing websites!

At one point I jokingly suggested that we could rename Zimride to GotALift.

Zimride was really rough and buggy at launch, as he was the sole person working on it, and it was clearly rushed to make in time for the conference. I offered to help fix it up. At one point he offered to split the company 50/50 with me, but then changed his mind. Something about talking it over with his friend, who was going to help him get some funding so that they could contract out the development work rather than have me on as a tech cofounder. I thought that was a bit silly, since he had no money at that point and sharing equity wouldn't have cost him anything! I could understand him being cautious, but I thought we could have worked something out. Sadly it didn't end up happening.

Zimride became rapidly more popular during that summer since it rode the wave of new applications on Facebook's new platform. I ended up scrapping my unfinished social carpooling website because I didn't want people thinking I was making a Zimride copycat (a mistake, looking back), and I ended up rewriting it into a search engine with the goal to searching multiple carpooling websites, the "Kayak of Carpooling". I figured there were all these rideshare websites popping up which could use a way to search them all. That project went nowhere, other than a contracting gig for a local transit agency.

Fast forward to 2012. Zimride finally releases a mobile app, then their Lyft app shortly thereafter.

Next year, Zimride renames their company to Lyft!

Real nice, guys. Would 6 extra weeks have really broken the back of things that bad?

... that said, I do like Lyft a lot.