How it all started
An idea to solve traffic
While living in The East Village in 2007, RideAmigos co-founder Jeffrey Chernick faced the daily decision of whether to take an expensive taxi or an hour-long trip on the subway to get to his job at Lehman Brothers in Midtown. Every morning at 6:50 a.m. most of the people he saw out on the streets were Wall Street suits like himself. And most of them, like him, were all getting into expensive taxis alone – to be driven the same direction, in traffic, to be dropped off around the same place.
He thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to share a taxi?” So he called up his childhood best friend and coding whiz, Evan Meyer, who was working at MySpace at the time. Together, they built a simple website that matched people commuting to the same place at the same time.
Changing transportation everywhere
In late 2007, they launched RideAmigos as a site to enable New York taxi sharing. They soon after brought Ben Dalton on to the team as third co-founder and CTO. Together with Jeffrey and Evan, Ben developed the first version of the professional commute management platform.
Since then, RideAmigos has grown into a global leader in commute management solutions, supporting thousands of organizations around the world from agencies like the State of Oregon, Denver Regional Council of Governments, and the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and well as leading employers like LinkedIn, Adobe, and Netflix.
