Young entrepreneur Jessica Scorpio started by wondering how she could solve the problem of 250 million cars in the United States sitting idle 22 hours every day. Her solution was Getaround. This is a car service that connects people across the country who need cars with people who want to rent their cars. Getaround provides insurance to all its customers, so renters will not have to worry about their cars getting damaged. I think this is a great solution for families that only have one car, college students, and even people who just want to drive a nice car for a date.
What’s unique about Jessica is that her solution creates so many benefits. It can benefit having less access waste, it can benefit people who simply need some extra cash, and it can benefit people who have to share cars with family members or don’t have one. It is innovative because it takes an issue people have struggled with for decades and provides a practical solution. Customers were wary at first of having strangers use their cars, but her website does a great job of explaining all the information in a way that can make them feel safe and comforted. Providing insurance for all those who participate was a stroke of genius on their part. This was exactly the sort of thing that was missing from the valet service some students presented in class.
Things we can take away from Jessica would be that sometimes problems that have impossible solutions, like letting a stranger use your car, can become a reality. She is a great inspiration to all entrepreneurs to not give up until you are successful. It took a lot of tries to get Getaround up and running, but now it is a very successful company. She has helped me to think about maybe going back to problems I thought were previously impossible to solve and trying to approach them in another way. She is a master at pivoting her problem until she reaches the prime solution. In conclusion, there is much we as entrepreneurs can learn from Jessica. Her innovation and determination can give us the confidence we need to begin our own projects.
What Jessica came up with is a brilliant idea! This would be so helpful for a family like mine because there are six people and of those six people five of us can drive. This leads to it being hard for when two different daughters have two different sporting events that so happen to be at the same time. You would think it would work out, however, dad has a car at work, the two oldest girls have the other car at college, which means there is only one car to take two people to two different places at the same time. Jessica knew the struggle that was going on in the Kimpel family.
This is a very interesting and unique business idea. It is definitely something that I wouldn’t have thought of. The insurance is most definitely a brilliant idea, and sounds like to me the only thing that would keep this business alive, because I would struggle with letting random strangers use my car. Rachel, you made a good point about how sometimes it might not be a bad idea to go back and check out old ideas that you thought would be useless, and try to breathe some life and new creativity back into these old ideas.