#StartupsEverywhere profile: Charles Knuth, Senior Director, Strategic Research Initiative, and Lizzie Ryan, Communications Manager, Scoop Technologies
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Streamlining Commuting to Improve Company Health
Founded in San Francisco in 2015, mobility startup Scoop Technologies has grown into the nation’s largest carpooling provider. Scoop works with employers and commuters to find carpooling solutions that take the stress and pressure out of commuting to and from work. We recently spoke with Charles Knuth, Scoop’s head of strategic research initiatives, and Lizzie Ryan, Scoop’s communications manager, to learn more about the company’s carpooling efforts, the San Francisco startup ecosystem, and their mobility-related policy concerns.
Tell us a little about yourself. What is your background?
Charles Knuth: As the head of research, I lead a team that primarily investigates the short- and long-term impact the commute is having on us as individuals, the organizations we work for, and the communities we live in. Before joining Scoop in 2018, I spent more than a decade with CEB/The Corporate Executive Board’s Human Resources Practice, which was subsequently acquired by Gartner in 2017. While there, I consulted F100 CHROs and their teams on designing and measuring employee programs to support key business initiatives such as revenue growth, performance improvement, cost optimization.
Lizzie Ryan: I’m the Communications Manager at Scoop Technologies. Since joining the team last year, my focus has been on bringing the Scoop brand to employers and commuters. I previously worked in corporate communications for a variety of technology startups and publicly-traded companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tell us more about Scoop Technologies. What is the work that you’re doing, and how are you using technology to connect commuters together in a way that hasn't been done before?
Charlie Knuth: We’re the largest carpool solution in the United States, partnering with some of the world's most forward-thinking organizations like LinkedIn, T-Mobile, and Workday to offer convenient and enjoyable carpooling to their workforces. We offer the technology and the commuter engagement tools needed to match up employees into carpools and work across the country to create more carpools than anybody else in the U.S. has done historically. We do this in a unique way by going directly to the employers instead of just trying to capture anyone that is commuting.
From the commuters’ perspective, it’s done through a mobile application. They can download it onto their phones, tie it to their company email addresses, and then we match them in two- or three-person carpools based on schedules, routes, and other similar factors. Their employers may also add additional elements into the algorithm to ensure that it is a quality carpool experience, and then it matches what the reality of that commute experience is for that city or geography.
The algorithm works a little differently somewhere like suburban Reno than it does in downtown Atlanta because the commuting experience is so different from city to city. So while the app experience is exactly the same for all of our commuters, behind the scenes factors—such as geography, their employer, and their HOV access—changes things a bit.
Do you see the app becoming a work tool like other work tools?
Charles Knuth: To make carpooling work at this scale, you need the right amount of density to make trips happen that are user-friendly and occur within a reasonable commuting distance. It’s hard, but we try to make the process as smooth as possible.
But it does become a work tool, and I’ll say the primary reason employers partner with us is because we help them solve some of their employee experience challenges. Maybe a company finds out the commute is making people quit their jobs, or they’re not able to attract enough workers from their area because it would take them so long—like two buses or a train, or 45 minutes by car—to get to work. These have become much bigger employer problems.
The ADP Research Institute conducted a study using predictive analytics which found that commute is the number three reason for why someone will quit their job. The first two reasons are employees being underpaid or being forced to work too much overtime. Companies have a good amount of control over those two issues, but commuting concerns are often difficult for them to rectify. So getting people to work in a reliable, cost-effective way through carpooling helps them be healthy and productive without having a major financial impact on the company.
Can you tell us about some of the steps you’re taking to protect consumers’ data privacy in the new era of CCPA?
Charles Knuth: As a company we’re committed—and we have been for a really long time even before CCPA came into place—with protecting our users' privacy and data. In addition to complying with local laws, we always try and follow the strictest law across the country, regardless of where it pops up across the country. That’s become our general policy.
The other thing that makes us really different in the mobility space is that, since our core customer base is actually the employers themselves, we take additional precautions to protect data. We’ve never been in the business of selling data and we’ve never been in the business of advertisements. Since Scoop works with employers directly, we follow their cues, which are usually “don’t sell advertisements or sell our employees’ data.” So even before CCPA went into effect, we were very careful to make sure that data was only being used for matching carpools and for no other purposes.
What makes San Francisco’s startup ecosystem so unique?
Charles Knuth: For the last decade or so, San Francisco has been the epicenter for a lot of the hot talk around innovation technology. It’s a community of like-minded folks that are looking for innovative solutions to existing problems. It’s also really nice that there are so many mobility experts and technology companies based here that we can build partnerships and relationships with. We can reach out and have conversations with them about the future of the industry, and how we can help them with some of their problem-solving when it comes to technology, people, and public policy.
But the flip-side is that it’s really hard to get noticed in a hyper-competitive environment. There are thousands of companies based in San Francisco, so what makes us worth talking to? We’re competing against the biggest companies with the biggest pocketbooks in the world, so we really have to work very consistently and tirelessly on our employment branding aspect.
Lizzie Ryan: One thing that’s really important for every startup in San Francisco is to keep in mind that much of America works very differently from how we do here. This is an area where Scoop excels: taking a unique approach to each employer’s needs to create a strong employee experience for all different types of workers across the United States.
For a period of time, startup culture was synonymous with San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The companies that are successful in scaling and expanding beyond San Francisco realize that our work here, and the way that we work here, is not something that can just be replicated across the country. As innovation becomes more diversified and not limited to Silicon Valley, it's really exciting that other startups are expanding outside of San Francisco and doing really well. With burgeoning tech scenes, deepening talent pools, and more affordable real estate across the country, it’s great to see that there are other places, like Denver, Utah, and beyond, where startups can thrive.
What are some of the startup-related policy concerns that you believe should receive more attention from state and federal lawmakers?
Charles Knuth: We are spending a lot of effort on the national level looking at how we can redefine what mobility is so that proper funding and research can be allocated to it. This year, we worked with the Association for Commuter Transportation on the Mobility Options Resiliency and Efficiency through TDM (MORE through TDM Act). Transportation Demand Management (TDM), which is what all these mobility players are working on, isn’t defined at the federal level. That means that there’s no budgeting or allocation or impact analysis when it comes to mobility and infrastructure investments. That’s something that is really near and dear to our hearts, and we hope that more mobility startups pay attention to the issue so we can influence it on the federal level.
Commuter benefits in America are really narrowly defined. Even with the current COVID-19 crisis going on, TDM and some of these tools are still not defined so they can’t be earmarked for some of these relief efforts. You can pay or allocate money for public transit, van pools, or actually parking, which kind of defeats the purpose of TDM. So we believe there’s an opportunity to increase the amount that people can allocate to their commuter benefits, and then expand it out to things like carpooling and smaller van pools.
We’re taking a national approach because so much work needs to be done to streamline mobility issues across the country, particularly because a lot of state and local governments are looking to the federal definitions as well.
What is your goal for Scoop moving forward?
Charles Knuth: We’re looking to continue the expansion of our partnerships with employers across the country. In the last two years alone, we’ve more than quadrupled the number of cities in which we have a presence. We want to maintain that effort moving forward.
We’re also looking at what “the new normal” will be in the future, particularly after Americans return to work following the pandemic. How do we use what has been a very unfortunate period as a turning point for how people get to work? Will people start relying on smarter, more sustainable modes of transportation and mobility? Can we convince more Americans that driving from one place to another by themselves is less sustainable? So that’s the two fronts: how do we continue to work with employers, and how do we use this inflection point to change the hearts and minds of American commuters once things start to become a little bit more normal?
Lizzie Ryan: One of the important things we do when we partner with employers is demonstrate just how meaningful the time we spend commuting each day is—not just for individuals and their health, but also for the health of the company.
The more we can show employers that time spent commuting is really beneficial for their employees’ experience—as well as their bottom line—the more we can demonstrate how time spent commuting can improve the health of companies. So we really want to further educate people on the powerful impact of positive commuting.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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