You Hate Parking, Let’s Fix It

Driving around and looking for parking gives me an exorbitant amount of anxiety. Whether it’s rushing to a meeting and trying to find parking, navigating a multi-story garage or attempting to find parking within walking distance to an event venue, the parking experience is riddled with frustration. There are endless friction points, useless machines and disgruntled customer service people who love to deal with the old man who lost his ticket - creating a beautiful pileup of vehicles in a drive-out lane conveniently at 5pm when you’re trying to get home!

I’ve felt this way for the better part of the last decade and been perplexed why a company hadn’t disruptively broken through to king-make an industry dominated by entrenched incumbents. When I met the Metropolis leadership team in 2018, I knew they were onto something special. I liked their energy, their confidence and most of all, their business model! They believed that they could operate a parking garage at a lower cost, generate more revenue and create a remarkably better experience if they leveraged modern technology. Enter computer vision and artificial intelligence. Metropolis had the vision to eliminate the main friction and obscurities of parking. They saw a shadow industry fraught with mediocrity and deception, an underbelly to the primary real estate use, and knew they could do better. They wanted to take a product led approach to solving a labor intensive business.

The timing was perfect. Large language models are improving on an exponential curve and the ability to recognize and fingerprint the real world with visual data is a huge opportunity. Metropolis is artificial intelligence for the real world and while it starts with parking, there are so many more use cases to deploy the technology and make our journey throughout the built environment remarkable. Whether its fast-food drive throughs or car washes, Metropolis has the vision to Metropolize and eliminate the friction of our daily lives as we move between locations no matter our mode of transport.

In February of 2021 they raised $41mm in a Series A to perpetuate and grow the network of parking garages and welcome industry leaders like DivcoWest, Starwood, RXR and others under the tent to build up their credibility amongst real estate partners. The early adopters got it right.

In 2021, they raised a $167mm Series B to acquire Premier Parking, a formidable regional parking operator that had built best in class parking operations in Nashville and other secondary markets like Austin and Detroit. After proving the deal thesis that they could absorb a traditional parking operator and revolutionize the operations with technology, they set their heights to an even larger foray.

In May 2024, they raised a $1.8B Series C to acquire and take private the largest parking operator in the United States, SP+. The thesis of optimizing a traditional parking operator had proven successful in 2021 and now it was time to take the Metropolis technology and deploy it across the ubiquity of the SP+ network while expanding its addressable market to other mobility use cases. That’s when I was cast a role.

After years of tracking the Metropolis progress, which included partnering with them to manage a commercial asset to date in 2019 at Lincoln, investing in their Series B in 2021, and getting to know the leadership team on a personal level, I decided to join the company full time in June 2024 to help grow the business. I wanted to take the experience I’d generated over the last decade working with large commercial real estate owners and technology companies and marry it to the parking industry. I felt that this opportunity was the culmination of so many things settling into place.

As I had mentioned in previous posts, career decisions should be an amplifier on top of a logical chronology. I’d learned how to sell into the institutional real estate owner decision maker. I’d learned how to operate as a real estate owner. I’d learned how to build a sales and marketing organization at a venture backed technology company and I had built a network of real estate owners and developers throughout the country along the way. A chance to come run the national partner expansion (high touch real estate owners portfolio) effort at Metropolis just made logical sense.

As we enter the back half of 2024, Metropolis is now the largest parking operator in America. We have a meaningful percentage of US drivers in the membership base, thousands of parking lots and millions of parking spaces on the platform. We transport over 50MM passengers a year in our shuttle business, we operate some of the largest events in America from Taylor Swift concerts to the Super Bowl and we won’t stop until we’ve Metropolized every block.

As cliche as it sounds, we’re just getting started!