Every week the White House recognizes members of different initiatives and their work toward making America a better place. In the past they've honored tech leaders making America a better place for the young and less fortunate, as well as immigrant innovators and crowdfunding pioneers. Yesterday, the White House recognized 12 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are now doing private sector work, moving America toward cleaner energy and environmentally-friendly practices. One of those 12 was Joseph Kopser, the founder of RideScout.
Kopser believes he was selected for two reasons. “For the last 10 years, since my first trip to Iraq in 2004, I've been carrying on a one-person campaign to help senior leaders of government see what we're doing right and wrong with energy policy, because I witnessed firsthand on the ground in Iraq the impact energy has on our soldiers," he said. "The other part, quite frankly, is because of our efforts with RideScout."
RideScout is a transportation-based mobile app that accounts for every form of transportation in a given city and provides the different options in a cost-effective and time-effective, all-in-one platform. Kopser said the byproducts for RideScout are threefold: "You help people, you help the planet and along the way we make a profit – and there's nothing wrong with that. That's how free enterprise works and we spent 20 years in the Army protecting the American Dream of free enterprise – now it's our turn to participate in the system."
A few months ago, RideScout moved to D.C. from Austin to solve a problem Kopser used to encounter daily when he worked at the Pentagon years back. "When I was living in Arlington and still in the Army, I could ride my bike to work, could drive my car, I could run, I could bus, I could metro, I could ride with a friend, even once I took a cab," he said. "I could do any one of those combinations, but I could never find one website or one app that combined them all." Admittedly, Kopser said it's no completely unique concept – in fact thousands of people come up with the idea every night when they try to figure out the best way to get home from work, from a bar, from a ballgame, etc. "So I went out and built the company, trying to find a way to do it."
Launching the app in Washington was a no-brainer. "We chose D.C., even though I was living in Austin, Texas, because it's this unique combination of all these great transit infrastructures," Kopser said. And RideScout is taking advantage of that, adding almost any transit type you can think of to the app: the metro, the multiple bus systems, several car-share companies like Car2Go and Sidecar, Capital Bikeshare and more. "There's a really fertile environment of transportation supply, but there's also the demand from the millennial market, the 18 to 34 year olds who live in this town," he explained. "They're the new generation, and they don't want to necessarily own cars unless they have to. They care about their smartphone data plan, but not necessarily whether they have money to put money in their gas tank."
In the months since launching in here, the response to RideScout has been phenomenal, Kopser said. As an added bonus for coming to D.C., Kopser and his team have been able to develop a tremendous amount of valuable connections through 1776 – where they call home – and the local government. "Since we've been here, city officials have noticed what we're doing, and we've already had meetings with the D.C. taxi commissioner, the deputy CTO for the city and the former VDOT director," Kopser said. RideScout was also chosen last week as finalists of the Challenge Cup during the D.C. regional event. They will compete in May against 15 other smart city companies from around the world.
For now, RideScout's plan is to focus on the D.C. region, before expanding out to other cities. And Kopser and crew used the event at the White House as a chance to show off just how well the app works here. "Even a busy person – someone like us – trying to go to a breakfast event, an event at the White House, an event at the Pentagon, and then a reception this evening – even with all four of those events, you can get around this city very easily without a car with an app like RideScout." Kopser used RideShare in the morning from Arlington, Car2Go to get to the White House, Capital Bikeshare from there, rode the Metro to the Pentagon and then SideCar to get home.
While RideScout is his main focus, Kopser still devotes his time to many of the issues he's passionate about. For starters, he's established an energy summit in Austin to start a dialogue on defense energy use, and Kopser believes he's the first to widely address the issue. "When I went looking to buy the domain DefenseEnergy.com, it existed so I bought it," he said. "And when I went looking for the Twitter handle @DefenseEnergy, it existed, so I grabbed it. So I'm real thrilled to be on the cutting edge of a national issue." Furthermore, he was in Austin today to testify before the Economic Opportunity Subcommittee of the House Veteran Affairs Committee on to share his story and help find a solution for finding veterans work when they leave the military.
No doubt, he's a busy guy. But then again, he has RideScout to get him from point A to point B.
