written by Aashish Dalal co-founder of ParkWhiz
Today I’m thrilled to officially welcome Dan Roarty to the ParkWhiz team. Dan joins us to lead our efforts as President of Consumer Brands and Marketplace. We’re on a mission to make parking a seamless experience for every driver, everywhere. At the same time, we’re committed to providing real, sustainable value to our network of operators. With Dan on board, we’re better positioned today than ever before to deliver on these fronts.
Dan’s insight into fast-scaling marketplace businesses and proven record of growing consumer brands lets us take advantage of the considerable momentum we’re experiencing now. During his time leading Groupon’s marketplaces and in the leadership team at Orbitz, Dan’s shown tremendous strength in helping fast-growing companies scale. His experience and energy add a lot to the team as we’re on the cusp of enormous growth.
As Dan takes the helm of our consumer efforts, Tim Brennan transitions into the role of President of Platform. Tim was instrumental in launching our platform efforts when we kicked off this project nearly two years ago, including running point on major partnerships with Ford and other collaborators in the automotive space. He’s been a strong internal champion of this vision since. The platform division includes our R&D teams and works closely alongside automotive and software partners to build for the dashboards of smarter vehicles. This division also focuses on supporting our API partners to assure that the ParkWhiz experience remains frictionless – wherever the end-user experiences it.
We think about parking so much today so that no one will need to think about it tomorrow. Whether ParkWhiz is used on a smartphone or within the dashboard of a car, we want everything about parking – booking, payment, entry – to run in the background of drivers’ lives. Focusing dually on consumer and platform will get us there – and with Dan and Tim leading the charge on both fronts, we’ll get there sooner.
The past year has marked incredible momentum for us. Our acquisition of Best Parking positioned us as the most popular parking service in New York City and helped expand our network of locations to 12,000 across the U.S. – with more than a third of those bookable on demand. Our team has grown to 140 of the most talented people working within Chicago and beyond. We also hired Todd Tucker to run our sales and market development efforts. Todd’s considerable experience as a leader within the parking industry helped us build the infrastructure to provide real and sustainable value to the operators in our marketplace. In addition, we’ve signed on even more partners ranging from companies in the automotive space to major consumer brands like Ticketmaster. In short, the last year has been the busiest one yet for ParkWhiz.
When I remember where we began ten years ago, before smartphones, certainly before smart cars, it’s crazy to think of how far we’ve already come. We’ve parked more than 6 million cars – helping save countless moments of people’s lives from the frustrations of looking for a space (and saving them a lot of money at the same time). That’s an achievement that I’m very proud of – and it’s only the start.
