In December of 2006, Zimride’s first app, called Carpool, allowed university students to post on Facebook, specifying where they were traveling to and looking for rides with others going in the same direction. 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
...more
