ED GLAESER: I thought we should start with the Zipcar story.
How did you come up with this idea?
How did all this happen?
ROBIN CHASE: Zipcar is today the largest car-sharing company in the world.
And this was back in the fall of '99 that we were founded.
What's interesting to reflect on is this was
an idea that came from someplace else.
This was an idea that was being executed in Europe since about the mid-'80s.
And my co-founder is German.
She was sitting in a cafe.
She looked across the street and saw a shared car.
And she came back to Cambridge and said, what do you think of this?
GLAESER: So she was in what city?
CHASE: Berlin.
GLAESER: She was in Berlin.
CHASE: In Berlin, sitting in a cafe.
And she asked me, because I had a business background.
And I'm a very honest person.
But I've told this story now so many times it feels apocryphal,
but I think it's true that really a light bulb went on over my head,
and I said, oh, my god.
This is what the internet is made for, sharing very specific resources easily
among lots of people.
This is what wireless is made for, getting that reservation from a server
directly to the car.
Remember, this is the fall of '99.
And this is what I personally want, because I
had three children and a husband.
And I lived in a dense metro area with one car.
And my husband would take that car, and there was no way in hell--
GLAESER: And sometimes you'd need to use a car, right?
CHASE: And I needed a car sometimes.
And I didn't want to park it, maintain it, snow shovel it, any of that.
But I needed a car sometimes.
And so it really did snap together that this is precisely what I want.
GLAESER: When you were rolling out Zipcar,
how did you think about which markets would be the most receptive
and which ones would be problematic?
CHASE: What's amusing about that question is I've also
been asked why did you start in Boston?
And I started in Boston because I lived here, right?
There's no fancy market analysis that went into that.
But as we rolled out, and even within the city--
GLAESER: Although, there was something inherent in it, right?
Because you thought of Zipcar because you lived there and because you knew
it would be a good match for your life.
CHASE: It's true.
And so I did--
absolutely correct in that I think I was the right person
to hear that story at the right time, because I was a user,
and I lived that environment.
So if we think about even expanding within Boston
and to the next cities, what we learned is
that Zipcar works in places where people don't need a car to get to work.
And it works best where the price of parking is very high per month.
GLAESER: Now, one side of Zipcar is, of course, cutting-edge technology
and totally now.
And the other sense is playing into something that
is as old as the oldest cities, right?
I mean, the sharing economy is not new to urban spaces, right?
I mean, what is an urban restaurant other than a shared kitchen, a shared
dining room, what is--
CHASE: I'm laughing because you are saying exactly what I tell people
all the time.
Because they keep saying to me, oh, no, sharing this cultural things,
you do it in your country.
You do it in your city.
But in our country, in our city--
and I say, you're crazy you've been sharing since time immemorial.
Exactly.
I'm completely in agreement with you.
GLAESER: So I thought about Zipcar when I was a kid in New York in the 1970s.
And could you have had it?
And one reason why you couldn't have had it
is the technological issues in terms of doing it.
But the other issue is the issue of safety
and would the car be OK when you got it?
So I've long had this sort of fantasy of going
to pick up a Zipcar in Times Square in 1977
and finding a dead body in the trunk.
And that would make the whole experience fairly negative.
Now, of course, with the technology, you now know who had the car beforehand.
It would all be fairly easy.
But in some sense, I tend to think of it as the technology has
enabled us to share more stuff.
CHASE: Completely.
So I wrote this book, Peers Inc. And when I was writing the book,
I had to come up with what were the specific things that
were enabling this kind of sharing.
And I would say precise that technology has
made the transaction of sharing, of dealing with small individual parts,
trivial.
So finding those individual things, paying for those individual things,
getting access like Zipcar, like a car just really fast.
And importantly, this ability to move from trusting friends and trusting
relatives to trusting the next circle out
of friends of friends and strangers.
And that is enabled by technology, totally
new today with the ability to do ratings and commentaries.
And that is something that has transformed
even since we started Zipcar.
And I think that's one of the things that
has made the sharing economy blossom.
People talk about the gig economy and the platform economy
and the sharing economy and the on-demand economy.
And for me, all of those names work.
But this book that I wrote was to call out the fact
that when we talk about those, we're actually
talking about this brand new collaboration, this partnership,
between a large entity that I'm calling the Inc that is doing all
the things that big companies do well.
So the gig economy is forgetting that it's only enabled by the platforms.
And the platform economy is nothing, zero,
if it didn't have this myriad of diversity around it.
So it's this brand new collaboration that
for me, is what is exciting and thrilling about the future
and enables us to get the best of these both worlds.
And if I think about what I love about this particular future vision
of the city is it's really celebrating, celebrating and getting
value out of people's individual uniqueness.
And so it's a delightful, amazing thing.
I feel like we each have our own side to play,
and that is enabled by the internet that now makes this possible.