So Long, Karhoo
All of the outpouring of support has compelled me to do something I normally wouldn't do, and write a very public post on my very dusty LinkedIn profile. So, here it goes!
I have a lot of people to thank, so this might be a long post and you’ll have to excuse my indulgence. I have a reputation of talking too much to uphold. Edit: Actually, I’ll keep the mentions to team members to avoid tagging half the industry! And I’ll keep the praise to a minimum so anyone reading this will have to go to your profiles to see my recommendations ??.
K1
I want to start by thanking the original K1 NY tech team. Robert Imershein Christopher McCrae Eric Erazo Daniel Fish Junior Qureshi Mu Wang Paul Curry Michael Battista Stefanie Guarino Elizabeth Garzon Benjamin Salah Lola Han Luo Ziad Mallah Your faith in me provided the confidence I never knew I needed.
The idea that birthed Karhoo was an ambitious one, one that originally pushed me into this space; it was the belief that a connected community of Fleets could address the market needs of today’s consumer better than any single organization. I can't even mention everyone else in the NY office that influenced my views on how to build the right culture; so I'll tag a few ??: Greg Haroutunian Stephen Freeman Michael Someck Lieveke Peeters Patrick Cooke Terrell Hooper Heidi Byrne . K1 opened up this ambition in a way no other company had, and it expanded my experience to include meeting amazing people across the globe, especially the London and Tel Aviv tech teams, big thanks to Daniel Ishag Nethaniel Bar-on Anowar Hossain Asaf Anolik Jonathan Pentecost ★ Tolo Palmer Preveen Etienne Matteo Ruina Liad Itzhak Nir Fuchs Naor Rosenberg Frederik Mijnhardt Matt Jared Agne Serniute, ACCA Zain Hirani Darryl Supersad for all the early support!
The ambition of K1 was great, but the timing and lack of funding prevented us from fully exploring its potential. We were also competing against amazing apps like Uber, Gett, Didi, Grab, Lyft, and others that were just pushing the consumer product faster than we could. But we still had something to prove and an entire B2B market that was falling behind fast. K2 was born from those ashes thanks to Boris Pilichowski, CFA (I waited!) Nicolas Andine and Denery Fenouil .
K2
The early days of K2 were a whirlwind of excitement, infusing all the lessons from K1 into a new architecture, backend, and the latest in mobile technology that enabled us to offer solutions to accelerate time to market for businesses with customer needs in transportation. That early team was an amazing collection of talent, and in about seven months, we relaunched in a more focused B2B space. Ryan Popa Chris Hoolihan Chris Walker Aleksandr Skorodumov George C. Michael Bow Sean Keane ??Jeevan T. Mark deVilliers Ka Lee Gary Wong Michael Hoang Lova Raju Katari Kim Pettersen Kips Davenport Catalina I Munteanu Luca Panziera Matteo Ruina thanks for tolerating my 800+ LOC PRs that would cause havoc every Friday???? Trust me, there was no other way!!
A few months later, we surpassed the number of connected cars from K1. The glue behind all the technology, however, was the Sales, Operations and Integration teams at the front lines. Mohammed Radi Karl Lutzow Iyefa Bangura Nicole Abbott Psam Elyon Matt Ratcliffe Joanne May Andrew Winterton Wesley Bishop Thomas Schmidt Keith Doe Elliot Smith Niels Kaae Dan Terrett Maxime Assedo Davide Manganelli William Cornuault Caroline Simmerman I'm still not sure how you all put up with me yapping about integrations, APIs and testing; thank you for never complaining to me directly ??.
Amongst all this we had a smaller but just as effective satellite in NY Nikolaj Koester Greg Haroutunian John Berger Paul Murray Andy G. Raq H. Edgar Diaz Martinez thanks for being the sounding board and experimental lab for some of the most ambitious ideas I had at Karhoo.
Along the way we had amazing people who put together great systems to address the dozens of opportunities we found ourselves chasing. Brandable web bookers, open-source mobile SDKs, a global Supply API, and the simplest-to-use Quotes and Bookings API in the industry. We launched with the biggest rail operator in France and built the industry’s first earn-and-burn Loyalty platform to pay for trips in dozens of local currencies across the world.
Our ambition only grew larger, and we needed to address even more complex topics because we were not only aggregating taxi quotes and bookings but also addressing the complex task of settling locally compliant bookings globally for some of the largest travel companies in the world. It’s at this point I felt myself pulled towards Product Management (thanks, Amitabh Ghatak , for planting that seed). As an engineer and developer, I loved building things that others would benefit from, but I missed that interaction with customers from my early startup days.
Here, I’ll need a very special thanks to Bruno Suárez Laffargue for his mentorship and guidance turning an overly talkative engineer into a Product leader. To the early product team who formed my best views on what it means to be a product person; Xavier Buard Jon Burton Camila Heitz Phalene Gowling Joe Middleburgh Yauheniya Prakhina Thomas Haelsig
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And to Bill Wilkins , Mal Minhas Ryan Popa Eugene S. , and the tech team I abandoned when I joined the dark side, for tolerating my efforts to make every engineer a Product person. Dilshad Shawki Russell Ormes (????) Pearce Jarrett Alexis Perrier Robert Laszczak Tiziano Bruni Paulo Quintans Pereira Jérémy Auclert Pauline Beurier Cheryl Nagle ?? Filipe Azevedo ?? Cláudio Prates Johannes Scheibe N?rgaard (you were spot on with self-driving!!) Trine Scheibe N?rgaard Maria Le Roy Trevor Duong George C. George Antoniadis Yaco Palacios
K3
And that brings us to the last chapter of Karhoo, I'll need another post to thank everyone here because this has gone on long enough!
This was the first time I really stepped back into leadership since founding my first startup as a youngling. I had amazing champions in Fedra Ribeiro, Terry Coates, Jean-Christophe Labarre and the other members of the leadership team Ryan Popa David Marks Karolina Witek Neil Smith Mohammed Radi Cassandra Gillet Victor Minondo Lindsey Daley Moran and Catherine Newman.
K3 represented the biggest shift to fulfill our original mission in connecting global demand to local supply. For a large portion of Karhoo’s history, we viewed the ride hailers as our primary competitors. It was a long time coming, but the likes of Uber, FreeNow and others began to resemble the challenges we were already solving for the more traditional transportation industries, but at a much larger scale. This was the missing piece and formed a pivot in strategy not taken at Karhoo since reforming under Renault. By viewing ride hailers as potential partners, with Karhoo technology, we could showcase fleets at their best in their local market and enable them tap into that demand on their terms. On the demand side, we enabled our partners to best represent the interest of the passenger regardless of which local fleet ended servicing a trip using data insights.
Addressing these needs would take a level of automation beyond what we had already attempted. So that’s what we did for the last 2 years, supplementing the tech platforms of our partners with features like supply self-onboarding, demand communities, supply insights, support automation, as well as innovative, legal, and settlements principles so that we were better together than apart.
In the end we finally built a marketplace facilitated by a neutral, tax and regulatory compliant (this is so much harder than anyone thinks for ride hailing) platform situated between supply and demand. I wish we had spent more time telling the world what we were doing, time really does fly when you're having fun.
Big shoutout to Operations and Commercial teams, our best and most critical of stakeholders holding the line to give us enough time to build what the business needed. Caroline Santosham Karolina Witek Christophe Doye Oriana Volpe Christina Hill James Holt James W. Zilesh Patel Copin Déborah Rados?aw Sońta Grant Obens Gabriela Kniszner and so many others!
And now! The biggest of thanks is reserved for the those that closed this last chapter with me ??; in Product Mariola Gancarz Nadia F. Marina Anisimova Mariusz Zawistowicz Olivier Thomas (someone tag Mathieu, I can't find him!). You're the reason we were able to pull off so many of our most ambitious ideas, championing the customer and recruiting everyone and anyone who'd listen.
And to the engineers that supported our crazy ideas and humored the PR spam of a has-been-developer who left so much mess for you to clean up (but only the parts I wrote, the rest of the platform was perfect ??) Dan C. Marek Chmiel Rohil Sanghrajka Jaros?aw Górecki Anton Bedzir Rafa? Multan Aliaksandr Paliavy ?ukasz Rymko Alex Everitt Laura ?uchowska ?ukasz Wajdzik Diana Petrea Dmytro Boichenko Marek Mitis Bartosz Kosmala and all the others I now need to connect with on LinkedIn.
To anyone not mentioned: I definitely deserve some harsh words, maybe that'll compel me to write something in a longer format. For now this will have to do: your conversations, encouragement and willingness to help fellow Karhooligans is a big part of what I'll miss the most ??.
And this is where Karhoo’s story ends, right before we were about to launch all of these amazing things with the biggest partner we’ve had to date. What a cliffhanger!!????
I’m not sure how to stop writing, so I’ll say this; I still believe there is a massive need that has not been addressed by anything on the market today. Perhaps the timing is just a bit off, or the solution takes a more radical form in the future as the market consolidates. But if there is anything Karhoo has proven, there are fleets and drivers looking for a better way, the tech can be built and there are individuals out here that are passionate enough to keep at it.
For now, I have my towel and thanks for all the fish.
Product Design Leader
5 个月I have a very different idea of this company.…
Senior Business Development Manager
6 个月Thx forgetting me.
CTO
6 个月I loved my time at K1, it had the taste of something great. So long Karhoo!
Career & Job Search Advisory | Interview Coaching & Preparation | Job Search Strategy | Former Global Talent Acquisition Leader
6 个月John!! So lovely to see you on LinkedIn. Thanks for the mention. Great memories of those early Karhoo days and the team there. Let me know if I can help in anyway with what is next for you.