Joanna McFarland, co-founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive, an on-demand ride service for kids, was steering the firm to its best year ever thanks to a nationwide bus driver shortage, Covid struck, and children stopped going anywhere. With afterschool programs closed indefinitely, McFarland had to lay off most of her staff. A clutch pivot would save the business. McFarland looks back on a momentous year.
At a birthday party, all the moms were commiserating over impossible transportation issues. I was feeling guilty that I couldn’t get my son to karate at 3 p.m., and I joked that we should hire one of the moms to drive kids around. The person who is now one of my co-founders said, “Seriously, how do we do this?”
We designed our product around one question: “What would it take for us to put our kids in a car
