"I did work my regular hours at Harvard - my 35 hours a week - and then I worked an additional 30 hours or so per week doing Zipcar."Īccording to the majority of Zipcar staff interviewed for this story, Danielson’s strengths didn’t work in her favor.
"In some sense, I am not sure she ever joined, in the sense that she never left her other job at Harvard." But Danielson doesn’t see things that way. "She never took on a real strong operational role at the company, that I can remember," he says. "There were more conversations happening without her than with her." Roy Russell, Chase’s husband and Zipcar’s founding technology officer until 2006, says that happened because Danielson wasn’t fully committed to the company. "It looked like Antje was not being brought into the discussions," says Paul Covell, a product manager at Google who was Zipcar’s first engineer. The rift continued to deepen, and Danielson says she was rarely consulted on decisions, even though the company’s core was composed of only a handful of people at the time. "She wanted extra shares, and I said, ‘Look, you can get extra shares through employee stock options, but we started this together we are going to have it 50 / 50.’" According to Danielson, that push for more assets, and more power, was their primary source of conflict. "Robin and I didn’t get along very well," Danielson says. But as the company came together, its co-founders grew apart. Zipcar had its first vehicle on the road by May of 2000, and counted over 600 customers by September. Chase became Zipcar’s president, while Danielson took on the role of vice president. By the end of 1999, the women were shopping for investors, and secured $75,000 in startup financing before incorporating the company the following January. Chase, however, was able to work full time on the new business and threw herself into the company. But because Danielson’s family relied solely on her income, she needed to keep her job at Harvard. Danielson decided the same thing could succeed in the US.Ĭonscious consumers, both she and Chase agreed on wanting to drastically reduce reliance on single-owner cars, and thought that a company founded on that principle could be a lucrative one given America’s growing interest in environmentalism. The company had developed systems that allowed members to access cars without constant key-swapping. Mobility was already a large company, with 17,400 customers and over 700 vehicles. The European car-sharing company was different from those already operating in the US, like Car Sharing Portland (which later became Flexcar and merged with Zipcar in 2007). It was during her research that a study involving Switzerland’s Mobility Cooperative caught her eye. Unsure of what that might actually be, Danielson looked for ideas somewhere familiar: academic journals. Now 56, Danielson hasn’t spoken to Chase in more than a decade.Īntje Danielson, co-founder of Zipcar As the company came together, its co-founders grew apart But in fact, both founders left the company more than 10 years ago, as power struggles and disputes prevented both Chase and Danielson from seeing their shared vision through. And the company’s profile only grew when car-rental giant Avis bought Zipcar for $491 million in January 2013. Today, Zipcar - which is still headquartered in Boston - has offices in more than 26 American cities and 860,000 members across the US, Austria, Canada, Spain, and the UK. Within a few days Chase and Danielson had their first official Zipcar business meeting. That night she went home, talked to him, and decided to go ahead. Chase was enthusiastic, but she wanted to make sure her husband would be okay with her taking on such a big project. So, one afternoon in October of 1999, Danielson took a chance and told Chase about her car-sharing idea. “He said, ‘Well, why don’t you just ask her if she wants to start this company with you?’” “She said, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting, and I’ve been thinking of starting a company, too.’” Danielson’s husband was encouraging. “I was sitting in the playground after school, and there was this other mom who had a business degree and I was telling her about ,” Danielson recalls. Danielson spoke of wanting to branch out of academia, a desire that had her, too, mulling entrepreneurship. Chase started telling Danielson about wanting to put her business degree to good use, about her entrepreneurial ambitions. As Danielson, a Harvard geochemist, and Chase, an MIT business school graduate turned stay-at-home mom, kept chatting, their casual park encounters grew more profound. The two women had met at their kids’ kindergarten, but supervising the playground is how they got to know each other. In the late ’90s, Antje Danielson’s son Max and Robin Chase’s daughter Linnea often played together on a tire swing in Cambridge, Massachusetts' Dana Park.
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