Across the country, a recent graduate of Cornell saw the app and was fascinated. A student at Cornell University’s school of hotel administration, John Zimmer had learned that the key to running a profitable hotel business was high occupancy and great hospitality. The transportation status quo offered neither. ‘If you take public transit and taxi and think of that as a hotel, those would be hotels you would not want to stay in,’ he told me later. ‘They would be failing businesses.’ Inspired by Zimride’s Carpool app, Zimmer (the similarity of the company’s name to his own was coincidental) got
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