Robin Chase

Founder & CEO, Buzzcar; co-founder & former CEO, Zipcar; founder and CEO, GoLoco

Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur whose work focuses on ways in which technology can be used to maximize efficient use of expensive resources. We might think of her approach as high-tech sharing that creates a platform on which end-users can collectively build, finance, and enjoy the benefits of a new distributed and resource-efficient infrastructure.

Three examples of her work:

Shared cars: Robin is founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world. Zipcar’s use of the Internet and wireless technology enables rental cars to emulate personal cars. Zipcar’s disruptive technology gives its members on-demand access to cars by-the-hour, revolutionizing people’s relationship to their cars and improving the quality of urban life for all.

Shared car trips: Robin is founder and CEO of GoLoco, an online ridesharing community. GoLoco helps people quickly arrange to share car trips of all lengths between trusted friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and handles online payments from passengers to drivers for their share of the trip costs. GoLoco’s innovative combination of social networks and online payment systems recasts how we think about car travel, making it a time for socializing and with a new emphasis on trip efficiency, in order to reduce per passenger costs.

Shared wireless devices and networks: Robin leads Meadow Networks, a consulting firm that advises transportation and planning departments at city, state, and federal government agencies, and NGOs about wireless and mesh networking applications in the transportation sector, and impacts on innovation and economic development.

Robin served on the Boston Mayor’s Wireless Task Force, as well as the Massachusetts Governor-elect’s Transportation Transition Working Committee. She lectures widely and has been frequently featured in the major media. She has received many awards, including Start-up Woman of the Year, Business Week’s top 10 designers, Fast Company’s Fast 50 Champions of Innovation, technology and innovation awards from Fortune, CIO, and Info World Magazines, and numerous environmental awards from national, state, and local governments and organizations.

Robin graduated from Wellesley College and MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and was a Harvard University Loeb Fellow.