From buses to boxes, these 5 entrepreneurs want to change your experience

SAN FRANCISCO—If there’s one neighborhood in one city that continues to have an outsized influence on the tech world as a whole, it’s the South of Market (SoMa) district of San Francisco. It’s the home of Twitter, Yelp, Airbnb, and many others. This zone, which sits south of the city’s main commercial thoroughfare on Market Street, was originally built as a warehouse district to serve the adjacent waterfront. However, by the early 1990s, it was cheap real estate that was turned into lofts and startup offices.

While the startup economy may have crashed in 2001, it’s clearly back with a bang. Modern glass high-rises are going up everywhere, and they’re competing for space with Square-enabled street food vendors. New bike-share stands have popped up in recent months. A major construction project, the Transbay Terminal, aims to be California’s answer to New York’s Grand Central Station when it’s completed in 2017.

Lots of San Francisco entrepreneurs are trying to catch a piece of the dotcom boom’s second wave, and as such, many have set up shop here. Out of all of them, Ars has selected five (in no order) SoMa CEOs that we think have the potential to shake up urban life well beyond their block.

Kristoph Matthews, Boxbee

Kristoph Matthews is the CEO of Boxbee, based in San Francisco and New York.

Credit: Deborah Svoboda

CEO Kristoph Matthews’ office is in a larger shared space. His office, in fact, it’s merely a desk inside Hatch Today, which describes itself as a “shared office experience.” Here, he gave Ars the pitch for his startup, which has already received an undisclosed amount in venture capital seed money.

“I grew up all over the world, I moved 22 times when I was a kid,” the 28-year-old told Ars. “I come from a family that can’t part with their stuff—ironically, I’m a minimalist. [And each time we moved] we had to figure out what to do with all the stuff. So I was familiar with the problem.”

That’s where his startup, Boxbee, comes in: it’s a company that aims to abstract away personal storage and make it on-demand from the convenience of a smartphone or Web browser.

“Boxbee is not a storage company—we’re in the business of making urban living convenient for people,” Matthews said. “If it’s something that one man can carry, we’ll do it.”

The bee-themed startup sends large plastic bins to your door. Once you fill them, they’ll send a worker to go pick them up and take them to a secured storage facility. If you need a box back, you simply request it online. The price? It starts at $6 a month per box with free boxes and free pickups—deliveries are $15 plus $2 per box. For now, the service is only available in San Francisco and New York City. A box can be delivered anywhere in SF in under two hours and in NYC in 24 hours. Boxbee is currently storing thousands of boxes.

Originally, Boxbee was described as “cloud storage for the physical world,” but there was a slight problem: outside of the tech industry, the term “cloud storage” is pretty meaningless. So Boxbee now describes itself as “simple urban storage.”

The inspiration for the company came when Matthews’ parents, who live in Thailand, had to return to the United States just to retrieve an item they’d kept in storage. Matthews said that because of his memories of moving hassles, friends who come to visit his New York apartment often wonder if he’s just moved in. Similarly, he says that he prefers to give “experiences” (food, for instance) as gifts rather than physical objects.

The young CEO was trained as a mechanical and electrical engineer and spent the previous eight years working for various tech firms around the world, including most recently at Group4 Labs, a Silicon Valley-based semiconductor firm. But while he was hired to do engineering, he spent most of his time working on improving how the company moved its component parts around and shipping out final products.

“I just naturally really like logistics,” Matthews said. “I’ve always been fascinated by urban phenomena, how cities live, how to make living better. We help businesses and people manage their stuff better. They’re accumulating more stuff no matter how the economy does. Something’s gotta give.”

Still, Matthews has honed his sales pitch since he first started. “At the beginning we had a WordPress site where we didn’t even take credit card information,” he said. “It was just me and a ZipVan, going in between work hours.” At first, Matthews would show up at U-Haul stores with this pitch: “I’ll buy those boxes for you if I can have 10 minutes of your time.” In turn, he would ask questions about what people were looking for in a moving or storage company. Of course, a random dude with a van isn’t the most trustworthy operation. But Matthews found the perfect audience: “Students are great early adopters, they’re a little more trusting and they’re moving a lot.”

In early 2014, Matthews said he’s ready to raise another investment round to help expand the company beyond its current nine employees. The goal is to further standardize the operation. “Taking things that are encased and shielded from the outside world, [to] stack things better—but also, minimizing the number of left turns,” he said. “Real time load-balancing, we’re implementing into physical form.”

Leah Busque, TaskRabbit

Leah Busque, founder of Task Rabbit, at the bar her husband built for company happy hour (located in the Task Rabbit office in San Francisco).

Credit: Deborah Svoboda

Like Matthews, TaskRabbit CEO Leah Busque wants to do nothing less than shake up the way people work. Her startup lets people hire others for short-term gigs online. So what’s next for the get-it-done crowd’s darling?

“Our vision is to really revolutionize the way people work on a global scale,” Busque said. “There’s so much opportunity and potential that we can realize: we are 20,000 in the US, can we empower one million people on the TaskRabbit platform to build out their own businesses? I think the uniqueness and the value-add is the in-person experience, particularly in an on-demand way. But that’s really the challenge that I want to solve: delivering in-person, on-demand. I think [our goal is] becoming a global company and expanding our categories and building out more categories across the platform and going deeper on those categories. For example: we have a certain number of handymen, can we [multiply them] 10 times for handymen in [a given] area?”

I’ve used TaskRabbit both personally and professionally, for tasks ranging from taking a package to the post office to hiring someone to pick up court documents and scan them for Ars. It’s worked out great each time, although sometimes I do wonder if it only exacerbates the problem of underemployed people, working as uninsured freelancers. The company takes an additional 20 percent after whatever the customer actually pays.

But Busque doesn’t have an issue with that: “I think the beauty of the site is that our rabbits get to decide how much their time is worth for different jobs.”

TaskRabbit is an older startup by local standards: it was first founded in 2008 and has raised nearly $40 million in venture capital. By now, the company is growing fast: in November 2013, TaskRabbit finally left the comfortable confines of the US, expanding into London.

“We have over 20,000 taskrabbits as part of our community across the US,” Busque said. “75 percent of them rely on [TaskRabbit] to pay their monthly bills. 10 percent do it as their full-time job, making up to $5,000 to $6,000 a month.”

TaskRabbit is similar to Boxbee, except that instead of just moving boxes, taskrabbits can be hired to do just about anything. You can hire someone to come mow your lawn, pick up your dry cleaning, or scuba dive to the bottom of a lake to find someone’s keys. Seriously.

“A taskrabbit is right now in Philadelphia driving to Sacramento for a company—one of their shipments was not going to make it on time, and they’re paying $2,000 for it,” Busque told Ars. “Where else would you go to get that done? This woman lost her keys in a lake and posted, and a scuba diver taskrabbit found her keys. She paid $150. This is what’s so exciting, when you are able to harness the skills and the power of people, anything can get done.”

In contrast to its successes, the company had some struggles. Just last year, it had to let go possibly as many as 20 percent of its workforce in the summer.

“We realigned the company to support our key business opportunities, namely mobile, geographic expansion, business services, and our marketplace operations,” Busque told TechCrunch at the time. “We’re getting leaner in certain areas and expanding in others. I want to emphasize that TaskRabbit’s business is healthy and our growth remains strong. Since May of 2011, we have 11x’ed our monthly revenue and task posting volume, and several of our markets are consistently experiencing thirty percent month-over-month growth.”

One thing that most customers may not realize is that someone from the corporate headquarters in San Francisco may actually be fulfilling their task. The company encourages employees at all levels to go out into the field at least twice per quarter. And after six years, the company has learned a lot about its customer base both from offline and online analytics.

“IKEA furniture assembly is more popular here in San Francisco than in New York City, while Austin has more gardening—the East Coast has seen a lot of shoveling lately.” Busque said.

Hany Rashwan, Ribbon

Hany Rashwan is the CEO of Ribbon.

Credit: Deborah Svoboda

While anyone can pay for TaskRabbit services via credit card, it’s not always easy for someone to accept payment online. Whether it’s a new company or an individual, moving money remains shockingly difficult. After all, until recently it’s been pretty tough for one American bank customer to send an electronic payment to someone else who uses a different bank. And paper checks haven’t really changed much in the United States in around two centuries. That’s why companies like PayPal—and more recent arrivals like Google Wallet, Venmo, and Square Cash—have come in.

But Ribbon, led by founder Hany Rashwan, is trying to make this process even easier.

In late January 2014, Ribbon launched its first consumer product—a way to send money to pay back your half of that lunch check your buddy paid for last week. It lets people send payments to anyone with a US debit or credit card even if they don’t have a Ribbon account. The money simply shows up as a credit on the account, just as if money had been refunded from a merchant.

Last year, Rashwan’s Ribbon launched an online platform for any website to integrate a payment option and accept credit cards easily and cheaply, charging just 2.9 percent of the transaction total plus $0.30. (By comparison: that’s exactly what PayPal charges too.)

Rashwan isn’t satisfied with just these products: he wants Ribbon to be the “global name space that is your payments profile.” In other words, as simple and authoritative as a Twitter handle, but instead ribbon.co/yourname.

“I want to be your identity for payments,” he trumpeted, showing off his own as an example.

Rashwan hopes Ribbon will eventually allow individuals or companies to accept and transfer payment in nearly any currency or payment system imaginable, from US dollars to M-Pesa to bitcoins and beyond. This is the company’s secret sauce: abstracting away the complexities of accepting and processing payments around the globe.

“By way of analogy, I think a lot of the pipes have been built but the faucet hasn’t been built,” he says. Rashwan wouldn’t reveal the precise details.

The Egyptian-born, American-educated Rashwan first came to the United States to attend Ohio State University in 2008. Within a few years, he was accepted into the AngelPad accelerator program. As one of many accelerators, AngelPad is a program that attempts to fund very early-stage startups and help them get to a working prototype in exchange for equity shares. A small percentage of these startups end up drawing huge amounts of investment and becoming household names (Dropbox for example), while most others fizzle out.

“I got a three-day notice to move to San Francisco,” Rashwan said. “I went back to take my college finals, and that was it. The accelerator taught us the names and definitions of everything in venture capital, and they taught us how to pitch [investors]. Ultimately for the first round, we raised $2 million. I spoke to 187 investors: 18 said yes, which is actually a higher ratio than is expected. You learn by having epic failures, and I have epically failed and [was] emotionally damaged on Sand Hill Road [in San Mateo, CA]. My first VC meeting ever, I walked in with an 89-slide deck. The poor man tried to get up in the middle of it and I told him to sit back down, I wasn’t done yet.”

Ribbon is still in its early stages of development, and it remains to be seen how well it can execute on its promises of being a global payments address. For now, the company has raised about $1.75 million, including from Draper Associates, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

Joel Yarmon, who helped get Draper behind Ribbon, added that he has been impressed so far with Rashwan’s vision of bringing his product to the entire world and incorporating new payment options like bitcoins.

“Mobile is going to be big,” Yarmon said. “This was interesting enough. I look for huge markets, great teams of people going after big ideas. I met with Hany… for a prior business and these investments, I characterize them—it’s the next closest thing to a marriage. It’s not like I’m investing in Ford and say: ‘See you later. Let me know when you’re ready to pay a dividend.’ I invest in great teams of people. I’d rather invest in a great team with a middling idea than the other way around. [Hany’s] old business failed before it even got off the ground—but now they have a similar idea, one cofounder left. But I was comfortable enough with Hany and his understanding of the market and the dream and this is something.”

Jeff Powers, Occipital

Jeff Powers, CEO of Occipital, sits holding an iPad with a 3D image of himself that was scanned earlier.

Credit: Deborah Svoboda

Just a short block away from the AT&T baseball stadium, sits a company in a converted warehouse space. Based in his industrial-chic, live-work office, CEO Jeff Powers wants to make 3D scanning as commonplace as cellphone cameras. He’s convinced it will be just as revolutionary.

Late last year, Occipital launched a Kickstarter campaign for its Structure Sensor, an iPad add-on that transforms the ubiquitous mobile device into a portable LiDAR (light detection and ranging) scanner that shoots out a near-infrared beam to measure a given distance. Similar (albeit larger) devices have been commonplace for years on an industrial scale. If successful, the new Structure Sensor could have a notable impact across gaming, fashion design, interior design, and other industries.

“It’s got an infrared projector that is laser based, takes 70,000 points, and blasts them out to hit objects. Based on how far away they are, they’re shifted spatially,” CEO Jeff Powers explains. “The camera picks up this image and observes how much that has been shifted, does a triangulation, and calculates the distance.”

The slick scanner and mounting bracket clip securely to the back of the iPad and are made in a matching brushed metal. The device can scan a distance of up to five meters (16.4 feet) and only works indoors for the time being. Its Kickstarter campaign went gangbusters: plowing through a goal of $100,000 to reach nearly $1.3 million.

“We’re going through the process of scaling up our manufacturing,” Powers added. “Right now in the world, about 100 to 200 of these exist and a month from now about 600 of them will exist. Two months from now, that will be closer to 3,500, and we’ll be scaling as much as 35,000 later.”

Occipital wants its new Structure Sensor to become analogous to the iPhone and the App Store: develop a hardware product that everyone wants, then let others build apps for it.

“I think the interesting challenge for us over the next year is going to be providing enough of a software substrate for people who don’t have a vision that can take advantage of these data streams,” Powers added. “We want to go from a small number of developers to the mass developer audience. There are several companies working on apps right now that are going to further 3D scanning. We produced this demo app, but that was never intended to be a full solution.”

Occipital wants to make a relatively low-cost consumer device that can easily recognize and map and act on its unique surroundings. In short, a device that can solve the “kidnapped robot problem,” where, when a robot boots up in unfamiliar surroundings, it may not be able to recognize where it is or what to do.

While there are some obvious applications, like video game design and interior design, Powers points out that there may be uses in a law enforcement or military scenario.

“Like crime scene mapping!” Powers said. “It’s not that unrealistic, where the beginning of that is happening today. What if instead of a photograph, [forensic scientists] could get an immersive view of something that just happened? And what if instead of a $100,000 camera, they could just have these in their bag? Maybe it doesn’t get the fidelity of a $100,000 scanner, but what if you had 10 of them?”

For now, the Structure Scanner costs $350, but Powers hopes to soon be able to reduce the price and increase the quality. Eventually, he’d like to see this sensor become part of any portable computing device, rather than a third-party add-on like webcams of yesteryear.

“Once we and others prove what the value of having this new sense is, it will get sucked up inside the device, the 3D sensor will be baked into your device, we’ll have [massive] growth,” he said.

Kyle Kirchhoff, Leap Transit

Kyle Kirchhoff, CEO of Leap Transit, sitting on a bench in the Presidio, San Francisco.

Credit: Deborah Svoboda

In recent months, San Francisco has been wracked with people protesting large, Wi-Fi-enabled private buses that shuttle workers for Google, Facebook, Apple, and others to points south of the city in Silicon Valley. Many view these buses as a decadent symbol of an increasingly rich class of people whose high salaries are causing exponential gentrification in the city.

But one entrepreneur, Kyle Kirchhoff, thinks that these buses should exist for everyone. In May 2013, Leap Transit launched its own private bus line, “in beta,” mirroring the 30X local line from the Marina district in the north end of the city to downtown. Unlike the local buses, which cost $2, Leap Transit charged $6.

Leap Transit’s experiment lasted for just a short while before it pulled its sole bus off the road. Now, the company is in a rebuilding mode, trying to figure out where it should launch its newest line, which is expected to arrive by Summer 2014.

“We’re building a privately run bus system for the public,” Kirchhoff told Ars. “Our goal is to help lubricate the process of intracity transit to help people get around the city better. Our real goal is not to compete with the current system but to help provide alternatives for people who are driving or taking cars.”

Sitting over a warm pot of tea at the Samovar Tea Lounge in the Yerba Buena Gardens, Kirchhoff oozed an almost relaxed calm behind his Ray-Bans. But he’s keeping mum about what exactly would be different on a Leap Transit bus, beyond comfortable seats, digital tickets, and Wi-Fi.

“Think about it in terms of restaurants—we’re at this amazing terrace, drinking tea, looking at San Francisco in the sun. That’s an experience! You step on mass transit and it’s all the same. We’re not trying to exclude anybody by any means. I’d love to be much more like Apple. I think it’s so amazing that the most cutting edge technology can be in the hands of more people.”

Like Uber and other private quasi-taxi firms that have recently been legitimized in San Francisco, riders would pay entirely online using credit cards and Bluetooth. No cash payments are accepted.

“We’re not trying to steal customers; we’re trying to create a different kind of experience,” he continued. “Nor are we trying to duplicate [city] lines. We’re trying to complement the current system. The city has an advantage to charge $2 that we don’t have given that we have to be profitable. Price is a way to walk the demand back. If we were to launch with $2 fares we would have more capacity than we would know what to do with, and we don’t want to create that type of experience for our riders. We’re not trying to divide the city, we’re not trying to take people out of the city, we’re trying to make it better. We’re coming at this as we love San Francisco. The reason we’re doing this in the first place is that we’re passionate about technology and how things work. And we’re coming at this from, if we were to build a transit city, how would we build it?”

Kirchhoff grew up in Silicon Valley, and his father worked for Hewlett-Packard, a stalwart tech giant. Later, Kirchhoff himself went corporate, doing marketing for McAfee and Symantec.