It all started with Adam and Aurimas
CocoRide started in October 2010. The founder, Adam Kirk, was living in Scotland. He met a Lithuanian man, Aurimas, who told Adam that ridesharing was very popular in Lithuania because petrol is expensive and public transport is not available between cities. They sensed an opportunity and started a facebook page, Pavesiu (which means “Let’s go!”), where people could post rides. Pavesiu quickly attracted 30,000 members who were sharing rides via facebook posts. Adam then designed and wrote software that extracted the rides from the facebook page and stored them in a database to make them easy to search.
An epiphany while running
In August 2011, Jeremy joined the CocoRide team as a co-founder. Jeremy’s interest in ridesharing began when he was on a run with a friend who was feeling guilty about having recently purchased a car and driving in to work by himself. In a state of running induced enlightenment, Jeremy yelled out “I have an idea!”. He ran home and researched all the ridesharing websites on the internet looking for someone to partner with in Melbourne. He couldn’t find anyone to work with and decided to start his own site.
When Jeremy met Adam
A few weeks later, Jeremy was at a gamification meetup and met Albert Jou, a friend of Adam’s. Albert did what good networkers do and connected Jeremy up with Adam. Adam and Jeremy met for lunch, immediately clicked and decided to start working together.
Partnerships
Jeremy took responsibility for marketing CocoRide in Australia. He began developing partnerships with as many organisations as possible. Before long, he’d found a group of developers in Malaysia who were working on a gamified ridesharing app. They were interested in partnering, so Jeremy aligned CocoRide with them. He used a contact in Dept Sustainability and Environment (DSE) to set up a potential partnership with DSE. He talked to IBM intelligent transport systems. He talked to Access Melbourne. He talked to everyone!
PhD
It was getting to be a lot of work and Jeremy was struggling financially, so he applied for a PhD with Professor Margot Brereton at Queensland Uni of Technology (QUT) and got in! Professor Brereton's research group is focused on improving participation in ridesharing system, so Jeremy will be getting insights for CocoRide from the top ridesharing researchers in Australia.
Summer Internship
In November 2011, Jeremy decided to expand the CocoRide team. He put out an ad for summer interns and before long had found an all-star team of university students who loved the idea of CocoRide and wanted to help grow ridesharing while growing their own skills. From December 2011 to March 2011, Jeremy and the interns worked hard and achieved some incredible results including…(to be continued).
