Building a Peer-to-Peer Car Sharing Network at Age 27 With her startup Getaround, Jessica Scorpio is connecting individual car owners with renters.

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.

The pair teamed with former Googler Elliot Kroo to create prototypes of an iPhone app and in-car hardware, Getaround Connect, which provides renters with access to cars and compiles diagnostics and tracking information.