“We thought, ‘Okay, we can’t just do this on a peer-to-peer platform. We really got to jump out of this business-to-consumer aspect and focus on an enterprise platform that can restandardize, reregulate, [and] create compliance that, in this really kind of cowboy Western world of an industry, was really lacking.”
What if the parking process was better so there would be less traffic congestion? Gianni Strul Maxemin, the Founder and CEO of Pied Parker asked that question and then came up with a solution. Gianni explains how his company is building out a system that can help individual drivers, parking management customers, and even entire cities manage their parking needs and increase transportation efficiency.
Key Insights
Can Being Stuck in Traffic Lead to Innovation? (16:28)
Gianni tells a story where he was driving in San Francisco and was in a congested traffic area. He points to this experience as what started him on the path of working on the parking and congestion problem. How can we all turn our daily trevails into innovations?
“And I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to use people’s driveways, right? Wouldn’t it be great if we can just redistribute traffic instantly and give the rewards to those people that live there that get impacted by the traffic and get some value out of it…’”
As More Data is Collected, What is the Balance Between Data Accumulation for Ease of Process and Personal Privacy? (34:51)
“… I firmly believe there’s going to be basically a match between what’s happening in the crossroads of property technology and vehicle technology.”
Gianni predicts that more helpful data provided in vehicles will push the parking industry forward in kind to take in and use more data to increase ease. But he explains that the intake of data for Pied Piper is directed at recognizing the car and not the person and that people are blurred in the Pied Parker approach. He sees this method as also protecting the parking management companies because then they are not holding this type of personal data in terms of people’s images. It’s interesting to ponder how much personal data people are willing to share in order to achieve a better outcome for something tangible like parking.
How Can a Barrier Become an Opportunity? (18:58)
Gianni discusses how it was difficult to get parking management companies to let Pied Parker “plug in” to their systems. This initial difficulty ended up being a creative opportunity.
“And so we came to the mindset of we’re going to go ahead and do it ourself. We’re going to create web relays and bypass switches to then plug into anything no matter what they say. And that’s what really changed the game. We started to kind of augment, overlay, [and] do exactly what the landlords would want and then still work them on the side and say, ‘Hey. look, we want to work together regardless of what their decision is of working with us a hundred percent exclusively.’ And that started to create this really decentralized platform of what we’re trying to do here, which is get our edge computers [so that] we can save, encrypt, and petrify before it goes to our cloud.”
What Could Be the Broader Applications for Pied Parker? (06:01)
“I’ve gone through exercises where you kind of see cities and the interesting aspect of it all is everything’s there [and] everything’s placed from A-list city to B-list city; from major metro populations with high densities, with large skyscrapers [to smaller cities]. We can’t shift these things around like SIM city. We’ve got to really kind of put our eyes on and say, ‘Okay, well, it would take trillions to move a city around like San Francisco, Chicago, New York, [or] even Austin. And so [we need] to say, ‘Okay, it’s laid out, but let’s make it more useful.’ That’s where we believe the technology that we created was here to shine…”
About the Guest:
BiO: Gianni Maxemin is a growth hacker and business builder. He has built almost a dozen apps with over 13 years of technology experience across property tech, fin tech, gaming, smart cities, and parking. He has a thorough understanding of growth and UX design. For the Hearst Corporation, one of the largest media companies in the US, he helped with marketing technology buyouts as well as marketing strategy for sales teams.
Gianni founded multiple successful online marketing companies and expanded companies globally, from Southeast Asia to the US. Although his sales and marketing has been his bread and butter, he has been leveraged by Google and several VC’s to advise some of the most prominent startups around the world. With awards from Malaysia to Silicon Valley – he has been a panelist on highly coveted conference panels, such as the SXSW and Connected Vehicle Experts (working side-by-side with founders of Oauth, founders of LUXE, and founders of Getaround). His current dream is to solve the current problems hindering the performance of wasting time.
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