This summer I joined Dollaride, an early-stage startup and portfolio company of the Tamer Fund for Social Ventures. Dollaride is a mobility company striving to transform urban transit. By introducing technology solutions to an old transportation model — dollar vans — Dollaride enables residents of marginalized, outer-borough communities to have faster, more convenient commutes.
 
I was tasked with exploring whether last-mile delivery services could be a viable new business vertical for Dollaride. In this capacity, I was responsible for the service’s end-to-end design and execution. I conducted market analysis, qualified sales leads, defined pricing, and developed an implementation strategy. In partnership with product and operations leads, I explored how to best leverage Dollaride’s proprietary rideshare technology and existing driver network to enable a foray into delivery. Designing a last-mile delivery service supported a key pillar of Dollarides mission: to enable dollar van drivers to grow their own business by expanding to new territory and routes. This was particularly salient during the summer of 2020, when heritage dollar van routes saw limited commuter passenger demand as a result of COVID-19.

Working with the Dollaride team served as a platform for me to apply a range of academic and leadership skills I developed during my Columbia MBA. Most poignantly, the fellowship was a practical application of the topics I explored through Bridging the American Divide, an MBA course facilitated in partnership with the Tamer Center. The class was designed to empower students with a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the American divide — and what we might do to help bridge it. Though the course materials often explored sweeping national themes, and immersive travel took us to Decatur, Alabama, there was certainly an emphasis that many divides manifest much closer to home. My time at Dollaride brought into focus that here in New York City, economic inequality is exacerbated by disparate accessibility to public transit. By working with Dollaride I helped address this by advancing a technology-based two-sided marketplace – enabling dollar-van drivers to grow their businesses and empowering passengers with greater transparency and efficiency in their commutes.

Joining Dollaride during COVID-19 proved to be a challenging experience. In mid-March, society abruptly undertook not just remote school and work, but remote socialization. One of the more practical of our new challenges became how to join and integrate into a new company in such an environment. How do you make meaningful connections with new colleagues with whom you’ll only ever converse with through a computer screen? Lucky for me, I joined Dollaride, a company with a welcoming team and inclusive culture. From the engineers based in Nigeria, to domestic leadership spanning both coasts, the people who make Dollaride’s engine run worked to ensure limited physical proximity did not inhibit our successful collaboration.
 
The most meaningful takeaways from my summer with Dollaride reach far beyond how best to bring mobility solutions for transit deserts — they are translatable learnings about the formula for success in early-stage ventures. Specifically, the imperative for a startup to simultaneously sell forward to prospective investors while diligently executing technology builds to deliver near-term gains. This summer, Dollaride was actively pursuing a seed round through which it looked to raise from a variety of investor types. I contributed to our pitch materials for venture funds, accelerators, and crowdfunding platforms. This required not only a robust understanding of the problem statement we were looking to address, but a visionary solution for how we would redefine the transportation landscape. It was necessary to couple this long-term view with concrete day-to-day execution on operational field work, marketing campaigns, and the product roadmap. I saw first hand that a two-to-three year vision can only come to life by the team rolling up their sleeves and putting in work today.