Former Uber CTO launches Ride, a carpool-organizing service for co-workers, backed by Uber investor TPG
‘Ride’ averages area gas prices + parking/tolls, riders pay 40% of cost http://blogs.wsj.com/... Doug MacMillan / @dmac1 : One of the 1st people to build Uber just launched Ride, a carpooling app for sharing your commute w/ your co-workers http://blogs.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Ride arrives in the middle of a crowded 2015 race to own the commute: days earlier, Via raised $27M for its flat-rate $5 urban carpool service, and Uber had already partnered with Carpooling.com in Germany on first-and-last-mile pooling. The twist here is provenance and price — a founder who helped build Uber, backed by Uber investor TPG, pricing rides as pure cost-sharing (gas plus parking and tolls, riders covering 40%), well below any ride-hail fare.
That cost-sharing framing puts Ride closer to an organized carpool than to Uber itself, and it targets a channel none of the rivals had claimed: the workplace, where co-workers already share origin and destination.
First-order effects
- Co-workers get a commute-splitting app whose price is mechanically capped at a share of actual driving costs, undercutting both Via's flat-rate pool and conventional ride-hailing for daily trips.
- TPG doubles down on the same market it backed through Uber, now funding a cheaper substitute aimed at Uber's own highest-frequency use case.
Second-order effects
- Uber answers within months by testing UberCommute in China, conceding that driver-owned commute pooling threatens its core marketplace rather than complementing it.
- Google follows the same logic by opening its Waze-based pilot — charging at most 54¢/mile — to all SF-area commuters, turning consumer navigation apps into carpool dispatchers.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds across the decade: what started as startup experiments ends with Uber launching its own Route Share bus-like pooled product at up to 50% below UberX, confirming pooled commuting as a permanent product tier rather than a niche experiment.
- Cost-per-seat commuting also invites non-corporate ownership models, as The Drivers Cooperative's worker-owned NYC app shows — the question of who captures the margin shifts from platforms back toward participants.
The trend: The daily commute became ride-hailing's structural battleground, as cost-shared pooling moved from 2015-era startups to the majors' own product lines.