Building a Peer-to-Peer Car Sharing Network at Age 27

As members of the inaugural class of Silicon Valley's Singularity University in 2009, Jessica Scorpio and Sam Zaid received a challenge from Google's Larry Page: Identify a business concept that could benefit 1 billion people in 10 years. While brainstorming, Scorpio and Zaid kept coming back to transportation.

"There are a billion cars that sit idle 23 hours a day, every day. In the U.S. alone there are actually 6 billion car hours being underutilized," says Scorpio, 27. She and Zaid were inspired by car-sharing service Zipcar but aimed to improve on that model--rather than maintaining and renting its own fleet of cars, their company would connect individual car owners with renters. The idea for Getaround, a peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace, was born.