John Zimmer
| John Zimmer | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | March 14, 1984 |
| Occupation |
Co-founder and President of Lyft formerly co-founder and COO of Zimride |
| Website | www.zimride.com |
Co-founder and President of Lyft
John Zimmer is the co-founder and president of Lyft Inc., which he founded with Logan Green in 2012. Lyft operates in more than 60 cities in the U.S. with more than 10 million shared rides taken to date.
Zimmer grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 2006, Zimmer graduated first in his class at Cornell University School of Hotel Administration and was a member of the Quill and Dagger society, as well as a member of Sigma Pi Fraternity. After graduation, Zimmer worked as an analyst in real estate finance at Lehman Brothers in New York City. While at Lehman Brothers, Zimmer spent most of his time creating real estate models in Microsoft Excel. Zimmer left Lehman Brothers three months before it declared bankruptcy. In 2007, alongside Logan Green, Zimmer founded Zimride, a ridesharing platform that coordinated carpools, especially across college campuses.
While at Cornell, Zimmer was inspired to develop a rideshare program by filling the empty seats he had during his rides home over school breaks: “I was driving from Upstate New York to New York City and all around me were these empty seats.” As a student at Cornell, Zimmer took a City and Regional Planning Class, called Green Cities (taught by Dr. Robert Young, now at the University of Texas at Austin). The class discussed the principles of simple design changes to large infrastructure, which would later influence the development of Zimride. He states, "If you look back at other forms of transportation … there’s always that idea of networks and the idea of routes. We feel that this is the natural way to move toward a ubiquitous form of transportation." Noting that 80% of the seats on American highways are empty, Zimmer says that ridesharing, "is a huge opportunity to create efficiency to save a lot of money and to reduce our environmental footprint."
Zimmer and Green were introduced through a mutual friend on Facebook. Green had posted details about his new company called “Zimride,” which interested Zimmer, who had been keeping a journal about carpooling ideas.
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Wikipedia