It was a slushy February morning in 2003, and Scott Griffith was on his way to his new job as CEO of Zipcar. But first, he had an early errand to run. He drove up Coolidge Hill, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and parked outside the appointed address, a brick Georgian house. Inside, Peter Aldrich, a member of Zipcar's board of directors, was waiting. With Aldrich's standard-poodle puppy, Yogi, tumbling around his legs, Griffith signed the terms letter for his new post, gratefully received a good-luck bottle of 1966 Calon-Ségur Bordeaux from Aldrich, and headed out. Then Aldrich, standing at the door, shouted some last-minute advice. Go forth, he told Griffith, and turn this political movement into a company.
Griffith nodded and smiled, then sank into the Prius he had rented from Zipcar. "It kept ringing in my head: 'Turn a political movement into a company,'" he says. "I started thinking, Did my due diligence miss something?" Zipcar was a hip, three-year-old riff on a car-rental company. Its vehicles were kept in parking lots and at gas stations. Customers--who became Zipcar members by paying an annual fee--could rent by the hour or the day and make all the arrangements online, without having to deal with rental counters and agency personnel. It had been founded, in 1999, by two women who strongly believed in car-sharing as a way to help protect the environment, and its employees tended to be true believers as well.
When Zipcar's board first contacted Griffith two months earlier, at the beginning of 2003, he was uncertain. "The key question I worried about was how big this could be," he says. "Was it a small niche, a one-hit wonder in Cambridge, Mass.? Or was this something that could really go large scale?" As he pored over demographic data on car-ownership rates in ...