We let drivers offer rides to places they're already heading to, and we cap pricing at the IRS reimbursement rate of about 50c/mile. This is very different from services like Sidecar and Lyft that compete with taxis, which in SF are around $3/mile and hire drivers to pick up passengers.
We didn't receive a C&D from CA, and I doubt we will :)
1) Ridesharing has been around for decades. There were high-tech phone-based ridesharing programs in the 90s. I don't think anyone claims the idea of sharing rides itself is new.
2) There are many ridesharing services including us (http://www.ridejoy.com), Zimride, and Carpooling.com, where drivers give passengers a ride to someplace the driver is already going.
Lyft (a new offshoot of Zimride) and Sidecar have appropriated/redefined "rideshare" because it sounds friendlier and less commercial than "car service". Uber doesn't use the word rideshare.
3) Having used both Lyft and Sidecar extensively, the fact that it's a commercial transaction doesn't change the fact that the experience with either one is generally as good as, sometimes much better than, actual taxicabs in SF. It's also a bit cheaper and you're more likely to actually get one. Hopefully the state just requires adequate protections instead of killing these very useful services.
Funny, we considered flyering the entire auditorium during Startup School last year, but decided that was too annoying and ended up flyering just the bathrooms instead. No one got the fake grimlock references, sadly...
We do show matching rides from Craigslist as a service to our users. Using an iframe means we don't need to scrape/copy the content to show it, but it still looks good/works well. CL seems fine with it, we haven't had issues with them. And we send lots of our traffic to them, not that they need it :)
Ridejoy has hundreds of active rides in Canada (especially around Vancouver, but also Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa) and three Canadian cities are in the Popular Destinations section of our iPhone app.
Would love any comments/suggestions you have-- this was our first iPhone app for those involved (mainly one designer and one engineer), so it was quite the learning experience. We're expecting a lot of, um, good feedback :) Thanks!
Interesting, we've read a lot of untrue things about us in comment threads before, but this is a first :) we've never created dummy accounts/posts before (though we know it worked well for Reddit! <3 Alexis).
Can you reply here or email us at team at ridejoy and let us know what posts you're talking about? Much appreciated!
(We currently don't even let users post rides without a photo, so I'm racking my brain to figure out what you're thinking are dummy accounts...)
Thanks! I wouldn't worry about our investors, the food is 2-3% of our total burn. Everyone loves food (see Pinterest) and it's a fun and occasionally enlightening way to find out more about a startup from the outside.
We always had an "unlimited food from Costco" benefit, and now Camille's taking it one step farther by actually making home-cooked dinners. It's been an awesome experiment!
Success story: I met someone recently who found her new job at OKCupid Labs from last last month's HN Who's Hiring thread. (She'd also met her husband on OKCupid, so that helped.)
As a comparison, between Dribbble's (a design-specific community) job board and HN, all of the best designer candidates so far have come from HN.
Ridejoy is a community marketplace for rides (YC S11)
We love well-designed experiences, we have a rapidly growing community that loves us back (and loves telling us so), and we're building a marketplace for everyone who's ever needed to get somewhere.
We've all been employees at early-stage, venture-backed startups. We know what it's like, so we're generous with the benefits and your equity. (Plus full salaries, of course.) We're well-funded by top-tier investors, and we do things like all-you-can-eat free food, and free tickets and transportation to Burning Man.
We have a tight-knit team and we're looking for people who we can develop a deep mutual trust with. This is not code for "the same as us"; we want to build a team that's more diverse than your typical startup. We understand that a great company and a great culture depends on far more than technical aptitude.
Details: Located in SF. We will happily pay for and help with relocation for the right candidate.
For designers: As the lead designer, you'll be working closely with two engineers who care deeply about the user experience of our product, and want to let you focus on what you do best.
The product is very early, so you'd be shaping it from the ground floor; we want someone to help us build a design culture from the very beginning. Like everyone else we work with, we want you to teach, and to be teachable.
For engineers: Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, Postgres, Coffeescript, Sass, and jQuery, and we're looking to expand into iOS and Android. It's not mandatory to know these coming in; passionate generalists who can learn quickly work too.
PSA: Refer someone we hire, and get a thousand bucks of collaborative consumption credit! You can pick from among Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Grubwithus, Getaround, RelayRides, Tutorspree, Skillshare, and Vayable.
Link: http://www.ridejoy.com/jobs/
By awkward address, you mean "International Terminal G (EMB), 275 S Airport Blvd, San Francisco, CA 94080, USA"? Just checking. We'll add support for place names at some point. Thanks!
We didn't receive a C&D from CA, and I doubt we will :)