The year was 2006. A young Logan Green had just graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara who had taken on the job of a sustainability coordinator at his alma matter saw an announcement that would change his life forever. The Facebook meteoric rise coincided with Logan's last couple of years in university, and with the ability to build on top of their Facebook Connect platform, Logan saw a window of opportunity to pursue a life mission: eliminate traffic. He was the youngest member ever to get elected to the local transportation municipality of Santa Barbra. He was still a student at the time. His idea: a carpool service for friends, powered by the Facebook social graph named.

When Facebook officially launched Facebook Connect, Logan and Zimride were featured in the first-ever Facebook F8 keynote event giving the young indie-maker much-needed credibility to sell his solution to one of the most bureaucratic institutions: Universities. John Zimmer and Logan met in New York City a couple of weeks later and decided to work together on nights and weekends to get this Zimride Facebook app off the ground!

The testing ground for Zimride was Cornell University, where John had gone to study Hospitality Management. For the first few months, John and Logan, and Zimride and a singular mission. To sign up as many Cornell students as possible to offer seats in their cars to trips back to New York City, Connecticut, and New Jersey ahead of the upcoming break. The business Model of Zimride was a licensing fee that the university paid for Zimride to operate these mini-carpooling networks on their campuses.

With the rise of Uber, Sidecar, Taxi Magic, et al., John and Logan began to wonder what might Zimride look like if it had been built mobile-first. What if instead of the days you currently had to plan ahead for a scheduled trip on the Zimride network, you could do that instantly using the phones in our pockets.

Lyft relied on its existing network, experience, and marketing stunts (again) to win the market, at least for a few months before Uber launched its own version of more affordable peer-to-peer ridesharing.

Ali Abouelatta • 🚕 Lyft