Driven to succeed

India’s first car sharing scheme, set up by a St John’s College student and widely considered to be “an extreme long shot” even by its founders, is set to expand its empire after becoming one of the country’s most successful start-ups.

David Back, President and co-founder of ZoomCar, launched the company 16 months ago with just seven cars and barely enough capital to sustain it for another two months. The company is now expanding into a second city, Pune, the latest chapter in a success story that has seen it transform into one of the country’s fastest-growing businesses. ZoomCar now has about 200 vehicles in its fleet, overwhelming levels of demand, and a list of high-profile investors.

Modelled on the American and UK company Zipcar, ZoomCar enables users to hire a vehicle for a few hours to several days. Cars can be booked online or via a mobile app, and the phones can be used to unlock the car. As many people in India do not own smartphones, the company also offers an SMS method to start the reservation.

David Back, originally from Colorado, was studying at Harvard Law School when he first started to develop his proposal for a car sharing scheme, arguing that it would extend car ownership in India by appealing to people who do not need, or cannot afford, to own a car permanently. Despite reservations from Harvard Law professors who argued that cars were seen as a status symbol in India and people would not want to share, Back pushed ahead with his “totally crazy” idea, and at the end of 2012 the chance to set up ZoomCar finally emerged when he and co-founder Greg Moran received seed funding to enable them to run the company for just 10 weeks.

Back was a Browne Scholar at St John’s College at this point, and he was uncertain whether or not to pause his studies at Cambridge to try to make the company successful. Moran had already taken a leave of absence from the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business several months before to prepare for launch in Bangalore. “The business pilot was extremely precarious, while studying at Cambridge was a life-long dream and I was having a phenomenal time,” said Back. “Making a decision was very hard. But I thought that I would try my absolute hardest in India, that the company probably wouldn't take off, and I would be back at John's the next year."

Encouraged by his peers and professors at Cambridge, Back decided to put his studies on hold at St John’s, and went to India. A month later ZoomCar was launched in Bangalore, and in their first week the pair had to turn customers away as the business proved so popular.

Despite increasing their fleet several times over, ZoomCar has, for an unbroken 72 weeks since, never had enough vehicles to meet demand. The company grew at a rapid rate, making big headlines when former Secretary to the Treasury of the United States, Larry Summers, invested. It was also named one of the country’s most promising start-ups for 2014 by the Indian media.

ZoomCar now operates from more than 25 different locations around Bangalore, as well as new sites in Pune, and employs almost 100 local workers. With the exception of Back and Moran, all of its employees are Indian, from engineers, designers, and accountants to call centre staff, cleaners, and mechanics.

Meanwhile Back remains on ‘indefinite leave’ from St John’s, but also argues that the connections he made at the College, and in Cambridge as a whole, ultimately enabled the initiative. “I came to Cambridge because it is the largest centre of entrepreneurship in Europe,” he said. “I learned lessons there that I apply here in India, and I made many connections there which have helped me both professionally and personally. When I felt discouraged by the challenge of starting a company isolated in India, my close circle of Cambridge friends provided me with encouragement and support. " 

“It was very high-risk, high-reward. In retrospect, the whole thing was totally crazy. Very few people thought that it would actually work.  Even I had plenty of doubts. If, when I first started thinking about this, someone had told me that I would be where I am today, I simply wouldn’t have believed them.”

Further information about ZoomCar can be found at www.zoomcar.com