I first met Logan when he was working on ZimRide. He is a great example of a passionate, mission-focused entrepreneur. It's neat to watch Lyft get back to their roots with the recent launch of Lyft Line.
Happy to accept downvotes for making the minor comment of saying I'm happy to see Lfyt's years of efforts in improving transportation paying off. This is so much better to hear than Uber's tale of one-upmanship.
Curious - why did you feel the need to start your comment like that rather than just saying 'I'm happy to see Lfyt's years of efforts in improving transportation paying off. This is so much better to hear than Uber's tale of one-upmanship.'?
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.
> They asked lead engineer Sebastian Brannstrom how long it would take to spec out the new product. “About two months,” he replied. They told him to have it finished in two weeks.
Real nice, guys. Would 6 extra weeks have really broken the back of things that bad?
2 months is generally an unacceptable amount of time to spec out an experiment at a startup. Things move faster than that. It's amazing what you can build in two weeks with the right motivation.
