Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Zurell.
Sarah, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
What drew me to the world of tech was that I wanted to help change and shape the world. When I was younger, like many girls, I hoped to do this by being an actress. But after moving to LA, diving into the world of acting, and eventually getting a steady job as Zooey Deschanel’s stand-in on New Girl, I realized that being an actress didn’t make me feel like I was fulfilling my dreams. From there, my life and my goals began to change.
Through my contacts in the entertainment industry, I began working for a marketing company. Initially, they hired me to help them on a social media campaign for the CWTV show, Breaking Pointe, ghostwriting Tweets targeted at ballet dancers and ballet fans. At the time, I was NOT a writer, and I didn’t even have a Twitter account. However, I had danced all my life, so I decided to fake try my best, even hiring a tutor on my own dime to brush up on my grammar skills!
In the end, the campaign was a huge success, and the show was picked up for a second season. After it took off, the company asked me to stay on for additional work. From there, I became a brand manager in 2013 and took on my first campaign for Pacific World Cosmetics’ Sensationail and Fingrs & Fuse digital campaigns, coordinating over 30,000 pieces of cross-branded social content, managing organic outreach that resulted in over 80,000,000 impressions, and allowing PWC to shift their entire strategy from costly broadcast campaigns to highly targeted and cost-effective digital.
That is when it dawned on me that I was better at branding than at acting, and when I realized I should change my career path permanently. In early 2014, I was poached by “Strut,” a Google Ventures company, where I became the Head of Content and worked closely with the CTO to categorize 7,000 fashion brands and transform 45% of downloads into daily users (compared to the industry average of 14%). It was there that I learned much more about the world of tech and what it takes to create an app.
A year later, I happened to meet my Pavemint Co-Founders, Randall Jamail, and Karen Romine, and suddenly my dreams of changing the world through tech began to take shape. Pavemint’s concept was simple: a peer-to-peer app that would connect people in LA looking for parking with people who had private spaces to share. While it was still only an idea when I heard about it, I knew it was a great one. I loved that the goal behind the app was to help make people’s lives easier while reducing the 30% of city traffic and 4.2 million tons of CO2 dumped into the air in LA every year because of parking. Almost immediately, I began working on Pavemint full time, helping to build our team up from three people to almost fifty employees over the next three years.
As a Co-Founder as well as the Executive Vice President and Chief Brand Officer of Pavemint, I’ve been given the incredible opportunity to wear many roles and touch many aspects of our app. Lacking a traditional tech background, this has been one of the most rewarding and, at times, frustrating, experiences of my life. It has been no easy task to create a two-sided marketplace, but I am proud of what we’ve accomplished during our beta and subsequent launch.
The Pavemint iOS launched in October of 2018 with over 4,000 spaces all over LA that could be booked in advance or on demand, such as near LAX, Hollywood, Venice Beach, West Hollywood, and near venues such as the Coliseum, the Forum, the Palladium, the Rose Bowl, Rooftop Cinema Club, UCB Sunset and more. We are currently expanding to additional locations and cities and just launched a web app which allows drivers to search for and reserve parking from any device with a mobile browser, including smartphones with Android operating systems, Windows tablets, and desktop and laptop computers.
I am still working hard to close the gender gap in tech by continuing to build a diverse team, as well as volunteering my time as a mentor to other women working in the tech industry. Currently, Pavemint is one of the few tech companies with an unheard of 50/50 male to female employee ratio.
In my limited spare time, I volunteer as a Brand Consultant for Can’t Do Nothing, a for-good organization that supports Syrian refugees, am on the advisory board for Civicas, an organization of female leaders with an aligned mission to invest resources which enhance civic life, and am on the Board of Directors for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, where I help to drive innovation and improve the quality of life in Hollywood!
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Getting to where I am today was definitely not a smooth road for me. I grew up in Pensacola Florida, in an ultra-conservative family. I was homeschooled, with soft skills such as cooking, cleaning, and homemaking the emphasis of my education. I grew up going to church for hours daily. At a young age, my life was already mapped out for me.
As to be expected, I got married at a young age, then moved with my husband to San Diego. Unfortunately, our marriage wasn’t the fairytale I imagined. As things began to go further south, I was terrified by what everyone I knew would think if I left. Eventually, as things got worse and worse, I decided to do the one thing that I had been taught not to do: I got a divorce and moved, alone, to LA, with no money of my own and no friends.
At that point in time, it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. There were nights that I slept in my car because I had nowhere else to go. But, pushing through the difficulties, I began a new chapter of my life, fully doing what I wanted for the first time. As soon as I had success in the field of acting, I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do.
This was a huge challenge, as, at the time, it felt like a failure. I had no idea how else I could make a positive impact on the world. When I first began to work at the marketing company, I nearly got fired because of my lack of grammar skills. Then, when I was poached and started working in tech, the first company I worked with failed fast, and this felt like another failure.
Surprisingly, every single failure turned out to be a blessing in disguise. If I hadn’t decided to leave my marriage and my acting career, I probably never would have landed in the world of tech and been able to find my dream career. There are STILL bumps in the road sometimes. It’s important to remember that sometimes things aren’t meant to be, and when they aren’t, something better will come along. Continue to strive for success and to treat each “failure” as a lesson.
Pavemint – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Pavemint is a peer-to-peer app that connects people looking for parking with business owners and residents who have spaces to share. Let’s say, for example, you have a driveway that sits empty during the day while you’re at work or a shoe repair shop with a lot that sits empty after hours; with Pavemint, you can unlock this underutilized inventory and make money from your parking whenever you’re not using it, helping to reduce traffic and CO2 emissions caused by drivers circling the block, and helping them arrive happier.
Hosts (those who have spare parking spaces) can download the free iOS parking app or log into the web dashboard and list their space(s) in minutes, with full control over availability, rates and a number of other customizable parameters. Guests (those looking for parking) can find and reserve parking as far as 12 months in advance or search for nearby parking on demand. The iOS app and web app make it easy to compare real-time prices, read reviews and get walk times to your final destination.
While it isn’t the first parking app to hit the market, Pavemint already has the largest peer-to-peer parking network in the U.S., with the majority of those spaces in “prime areas” of LA, where parking has been discovered to be most problematic. We launched last October with over 4,000 spaces on the app, available in areas such as West Hollywood, Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Mid-City, Atwater Village, Pasadena, Exposition Park, Inglewood, Venice, and LAX (and soon to be San Diego).
Recently, we also created a web app that allows users with Android phones, Windows tablets, and desktop and laptop computers to search for and reserve parking from any device with a mobile browser.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Honestly, launching Pavemint with over 4,000 spaces across LA was a pretty incredible moment. After years of hard work and dedication, it was amazing to see what our team pulled off. Another huge accomplishment was the creation of our web app, allowing users to book spaces on any device with a mobile browser, as well as from desktops and laptops.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.pavemint.com
- Phone: (310)-739-6322
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/pavemint
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/pavemint
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/pavemint
- Other: app.pavemint.com/search
Image Credit:
Teri B – (http://teribphotography.com)
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
