Founder Profile: Uber For The Long Haul

I’ve spent my entire career in transportation and the automotive industry. Growing up in Detroit, it’s a pretty natural fit to enter automotive. I started my career in product development, working in an engineering function at an engineering services company. I then attended Harvard Business School and my career transitioned to more corporate functions.

I worked for GM Finance, in their product development group, and learned the cost structure of automotive production. Then I worked at Roland Berger, a leading management consultancy, in their automotive group based in Chicago. At the firm, my focus was exclusively on the future of transportation and the impact on the industry from autonomous driving, shared mobility, and vehicle electrification. Finally, I spent two years helping build the EV startup Rivian.

At Rivian, I worked directly for the CEO & Chief Strategy Officer and held a wide variety of responsibilities including investor relations, fundrasing, corporate strategy, business development, and human resources.

The founding of Priva is a culmination of my professional experiences, coupled with my own regional transportation travel pain points. On the professional side, I’ve become convinced that autonomous driving and ride sharing will not only impact the way we move around our cities, they will also alter the way we move around our regions. This is because they will dramatically lower the cost of transportation.

Simultaneously on the personal side, I was spending a lot of time traveling flying between Detroit & Chicago. It’s a trip that takes roughly the same amount of time to fly as to drive once you factor in cabs and security lines. It was the combination of expertise with my personal travel experiences that made the concept of Priva resonate with me when my co-founder Dagan first proposed the idea.

After Dagan proposed the idea, I could not stop thinking about a modern ground-based regional transportation solution. From there the two of us started iterating on business models that would allow us to launch a service with today’s technology. We prototyped our ideas with SUVs and kept iterating until we arrived at Priva. We then pitched at Techstars Mobility and went full time into the business once we were accepted to the accelerator program.

Priva is the modern expectation for regional transportation. It is private, connected and door-to-door. We differentiate from Uber and Lyft by our consistency of experience and onboard amenities. We use a consistent fleet of mobile offices equipped with WiFi, TVs, comfortable seats, and a barrier to the driver for privacy. We also focus exclusively on regional trips, so our drivers are prepared to drive passengers 4-5 hours for a trip.  

This is different from Uber/Lyft’s crowdsourced model where passengers do not know the vehicle they will receive and if the driver will be willing to provide a long distance trip. Plus, few (if any) vehicle’s on these platforms provide in-vehicle privacy to the passengers with a barrier to the driver.

Priva focuses on providing a better experience than current commercial regional transportation options through door-to-door service. There is no need to head to an airport or train station and lose time shuffling in/out of cabs, and through security or boarding lines. This focus on door-to-door provides our customers more time to be productive or to rest while in transit.

From a cost perspective, Priva is a more affordable option than flying. A group of four travelers can save 50% on their travel expenses by traveling with Priva while gaining the benefits of door-to-door service. We are not competitive with train travel yet, but I believe this is a market we can address in the future as we reduce costs through scale and adoption of technology.

Our customers come from a variety of professions. They are consultants, lawyers, business executives, and startup CEOs. The one unifying theme amongst them is they are busy and they value their time. This insight altered the way we promote and message our service. When we first launched, we assumed the cost savings versus flying would be the primary motivation for purchasing. However, through feedback, we quickly learned our service was more about providing our customers time to be productive. Based on this insight, we are currently working to shift our sales motion from exclusively B2C to include B2B offerings since it is companies that see the most value from the increases in productivity.

We charge for rides by the mile. Our current price point is $2/mile so a typical ride is between $400-$600 for a private vehicle with all four seats.

Last month we achieved a 10% gross margin. We are forecasting these margins to improve dramatically as we gain scale and fill vehicles going both ways on these regional routes (similar to the way airlines operate). Right now we are achieving fill rates of ~15% on our return trips, and each filled return provides additional revenue without a negligible increase in cost. Commercial airlines achieve roughly 85% fill rates on their transportation networks, so if we achieve the same performance the gross margin would expand to over 40%.

We operate on a chartered trip model. We always have customers for a route before the trip is scheduled and staffed. Our pricing also assumes the customer is chartering the full vehicle (e.g. all 4 seats) and that the vehicle will be returning without passengers. This shifts the fill rate and deadhead risks to the customer. Since each trip generates cash, it simply becomes a question of monthly volume to cover the overhead of vehicle payments and monthly insurance. We need to run sixteen trips per vehicle each month to cover these costs, and finding the demand for regional trips has not been a problem to date.

The idea is to make the service tech-enabled and move toward dynamic pricing. I think this is the best way to create value for our customers because it delivers on our brand promise of flexibility in routes and departure times. At the same time, it allows us as a company to appropriately price our service and capture more of the market by lowering our price on trips where there is a high probability of having a return customer. For example, we can charge less on a major city pair on a Monday morning than we can for a weekend trip to a more remote town.

The business is certainly capital intensive, but I think it’s important to recognize that transportation is a capital-intensive space. Airplanes, buses, and trains are all expensive pieces of equipment. Furthermore, even Uber/Lyft use capital equipment in the form of the driver’s car.

In terms of pricing, the trick to keeping costs low in a capital-intensive business is to avoid oversupply. The worst scenario is to have too much equipment and not enough demand to utilize that equipment. At Priva, this would look like having too many vehicles without customer demand to keep them on the road. This requires the vehicles in operation to generate enough revenue to pay for themselves and the underutilized vehicles. Often this means raising prices because the volume is lacking.

While I do worry about this oversupply scenario, we are managing it in a few different ways. First, we allow demand to lead supply. We only expand our fleet once we cannot keep up with the number of ride requests and start selling out. Second, we are exploring B2B sales contracts that I mentioned earlier. This would give us a stable source of contracted revenue that we could then build our fleet size to meet. Third, we can reposition our underutilized assets to new markets. If we end up oversupplied right now, there are a lot of new routes and cities we can grow into to use the equipment.

A recent report I read from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics stated that Americans make more than 405 million long-distance business trips per year. Furthermore, nearly 75% of these trips are under 250 miles – so this is a very sizable market. We also conducted our own market analysis at Priva where we focused exclusively on US commuter flights, which is a subset of the business travel market. Our analysis uncovered that the top 60 routes alone are $10 B market annually.

A number of commuter services using commercial vans have popped up around the US, including Bridj in Boston. Our model is quite different from these providers. It all starts with the problem we are addressing — we focus on an entirely on travel between cities, instead of commuting around them.   

This problem lends itself to very different customer demographics and willingness to pay. Priva customers use our service instead of purchasing airfare, plus they typically expense it to their companies. Additionally, there is a real lack of viable alternatives in regional transportation in most of the US. Most customers only have two options: fly or drive themselves. The combination of favorable customer demographics and a lack of competition provide Priva with a lot of pricing power and really differentiate our model from commuter shuttle services.

I fully expect the exit to be an acquisition, rather than an IPO. I’ve seen a strong appetite for mobility services companies, especially from the automotive OEMs that are looking to reinvent themselves as transportation services companies. Daimler’s recent reorganization into three major business units and transportation investments, including into Blacklane, are indicative of this trend, as is Ford’s acquisition of Chariot in 2016.