Transcript: What is Sharegrid & how it got started?

Host: So you decided you want to be in tech, then how did uh your uh company start, uh Sharedgrid?

Guest: Yeah, so Sharedgrid started, um actually the idea was kind of originated while I was, I was working at Groupon. Both my co-founder and I, Arash, he was, he was, he went to film, well, he went to a photography school.

I I believe it was more of like a media communication uh background, but he ended up in tech as well. He was a designer and front-end developer.

And um he was a long-time photographer and we would take walks all the time and kind of, he, he sold his previous company to Groupon.

So he's been very entrepreneurial himself and we were always kicking around ideas of potential startups that we could start and one of the ideas was, uh, it derived from him trying to sell some of his equipment.

He was like, I really want this new lens, but I already have so many lenses. How do I justify kind of investing more money into more equipment when I'm not even using the equipment I already have.

So that was kind of the thread that we started to talk about the idea and essentially the idea was a lot of filmmakers, photographers invest quite a bit of capital into uh equipment, into into different uh cameras, lenses, audio equipment, lighting equipment and it's very, very expensive.

I mean, we're talking thousands of dollars for a camera or lens. Sometimes for film equipment, you're looking at $40, $50,000 for a cinema camera and that doesn't count all the additional accessories and and everything else you need.

So I knew about this from my prior film years and I had a lot of friends who after school, their, their thinking was, if I invest a bit of money into equipment, the chances of me being hired uh will increase because the film world is actually a very much a gig economy freelance type of world.

So they were thinking if we invest in this equipment, uh I will stand amongst the rest and like be hired more frequently. That doesn't always happen.

So you invest all this money, your monthly payments are coming in every day, every month, but you're not always getting hired, the equipment's always being used. So Arash and I saw the opportunity of like, there's all this idle equipment.

What if you were to rent that equipment out similar to other peer-to-peer economies like uh like, you know, like Airbnb. Um so we had the idea and we essentially wanted to validate if this is something that other people would be interested in.

First I spoke to a lot of my friends from film school and everybody said, it's a great idea, but what about if somebody steals my equipment while they're renting it and they don't come back with the equipment?

So that was always kind of the big challenge that we had to face. But but that's how the idea, just to answer your question. That's how the idea kind of derived. It's just from a personal need and also just a brainstorm of ideas.

Host: So it was essentially a marketplace for renting uh camera and other high-end equipment for production.

Guest: Exactly, exactly.