All Over Albany

My Ride Board

Who: Sam Wechsler and Sean Lyons

Project: MyRideBoard.com enables its members (college students, alumni, faculty, and staff) to post or share a ride in 30 seconds or less. By posting and sharing rides, they can coordinate with other riders and travel together.

Applicants: Sam Wechsler and Sean Lyons

Sam Wechsler: I am a control systems engineer who writes software for industrial machinery. In the past I have worked with entrepreneurs at Originate Ventures in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, helping them to pitch their businesses to venture capitalists.

Sean Lyons: I am a current student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I am majoring in Information Technology and Web Science and Computer Science as a dual major. I have built various websites for personal and business use. I joined Sam on the MyRideBoard.com business to design and develop the website.

Description: MyRideBoard.com enables its members (college students, alumni, faculty, and staff) to post or share a ride in 30 seconds or less. By posting and sharing rides, they can coordinate with other riders and travel together. This saves them from boredom, long public transit trips, and paying too much for gas. The inspiration came from bad experiences on public and private transit.

Vision: We want to provide millions of students with a transportation network, allowing them to share rides, and travel together.

Purpose: We want to build this company because we believe it is a unique solution to the existing transportation problem in the United States. It is unique because it focuses on college networks, similar to how facebook started. We can make this work because there are thousands of already existing college networks. This service may be particularly useful for students traveling to or from semester breaks. We have not seen a similar ride share like this. We want to do this because it will ease the pain of millions of people, pain we have experienced first hand.

Funding: MyRideBoard.com should be funded to grow the company, build momentum, and get recognized. Funding shall be used to:
+ Host user feedback parties with pizza. User feedback is crucial. We need this to grow the user base and expand our features.
+ Print flyers and post them around campuses in the capitol region.
+ Pay students to further develop the website.
+ Purchase server space.
+ Use to grant funding to write more grants.

Video and Images: Please see our website, MyRideBoard.com to see the video and get the full experience. A screen capture of the home page can be viewed below.