this week, smart entrepreneurs rethinking transportation. with an unusual car-sharing start-up and a netflixlike model at the airport. call it planes, trains and automobiles. with our reporter of technician and dow jones laura colondi this week on "press here." good morning, everyone, i'm scott mcgrew. a term for you you may not have heard, the access economy. consuming less but getting more through sharing. "time" magazine says it's one of the ten trends that could change the world.

>> reporter: now, librarians will tell you they've been involved in the access economy for centuries. anyone in town can read a certain book without everyone in town having to buy a book. that concept, though, has spread. >> you can get in the driver's seat. >> reporter: car sharing, for instance. here a couple of stanford students jump into a lexus they found in the school parking lot through an iphone app. it's a program called wheeld. currently up and running at four campuses, it's received millions of dollars in funding from a similar program used in big cities called zip car. jeff miller is ceo of wheelz, a graduate of northwestern, stanford and harvard and is a former chicken farmer in uzbekistan. true story. laura colodni of the dow jones and moira of tech nation. obviously, we want to talk about car rentals, but the chicken farming, former chicken farmer in uzbekistan.

>> i was working for a microfinance organization that did chicken farming. so spent -- >> you're a money man of the uzbek chicken farmers. >> as soon as we're done talking about car sharing, we can talk about breeders, flock birds and all the excitement of poultry farming in central asia. >> let's talk about cars. you have four locations on college campuses. let's start with why college campuses? >> college campuses is a community that already exists. so when you're thinking about the access economy, one of the most essential elements of it is trust. so one of the advantages of going into a college and university environment is there's already a sense of affinity and trust that exists between both sides of your marketplace, the people that own cars and those who need access to it. so when you go to a college campus, you've already got one of the most essential ingredients already baked in. >> and in california because california holds special rules, right? >> yeah. so there's laws that have already been passed in california, oregon and washington that protect for this

type of commerce, that say when there's a peer-to-peer car-sharing transaction and owner renting their car to another driver, they're protected by the law and that it's the responsibility of the company, wheelz in this case, to provide insurance for that transaction. >> and laura, you have some concerns over that. >> well, i was wondering how much that limits your growth and what you're doing to confront that regulatory reality. >> yes, it's actually not clear whether or not you need to have legislation in place. it certainly is nice if it's there, but, you know, there are car-sharing companies operating outside of those three states. it just makes it a little bit more clear and eliminates some of the gray area. but as, i think, anybody knows, a lot of businesses begin where there's gray area. and then the regulatory environment often follows. >> you do know that the judgment portion of the male brain doesn't fill in till 22 years of age, right? i'm just asking. >> no, it's a good question. one thing that's very different about car sharing, especially if

you build the product peer to peer, is that you have social trust built into the product. so it's not the same relationship that our customers would have if they were to go rent a car from hertz. they know the person. they know their classmates. it's another individual. and you see who your mutual friends are. this ties it back to chicken farming. social collateral is one of the most powerful mechanisms in place to drive good behavior. microfinance has the best repayment rates in all borrowing and lending out there. and you don't put any collateral down. it's your social reputation that's on the line, and that's very much in play in peer to peer. >> to make an analogy, i don't smoke, but i might smoke in bob's car. >> no, and you may have biology class in bob's car. bob knows who you are and he can come find you. >> bob -- hertz doesn't get angry at me when i wreck their car. they maybe make me fill out forms. bob probably will. there is that.

>> i mean, bob would if there wasn't a backup mechanism to take care of bob. that's where our company has a million-dollar insurance policy that steps in if and when bob's car gets damaged. it's our responsibility to protect bob. >> you wrote in a blog post about a fatality that happened in a car-sharing situation. and you wrote, we will deal with this. this is going to happen to us. at some point, a passenger, a driver, someone else is going to be killed. >> just to be clear, that was not a wheelz passenger. >> right. you were looking ahead and saying to your own employees, we're going to deal with this. >> if we are successful as a company, which we will be -- >> right. you get enough cars out there. >> there's enough cars out there driving millions and millions of miles, fatalities happen. it's a reality that we need to be prepared for today because that is the nature of our business. hertz has had many fatalities. zip car has had a few. >> sure. >> it's to the reality of the business we're in. >> go ahead. >> how do you become the go-to service on college campuses when

you are up against things like hertz's connect program or even peers in the space, get around relay rides come to mind, even, goop.net. there's so many. >> you provide the best service and the best technology solution. you know, it's so easy for our members to access cars. they take out their phone. they look at which car is closest by. and they reserve it. they don't have to interact with the drivers, walk across campus and get the keys from bob. it's all built into the technology solution that we've built. and so it's so easy to use that it's just a better solution. >> walk people through this. the technology, the keys are already in the key. >> the keys to the ignition are. we have developed a device called the drive box. it's a piece of hardware that gets installed in the car owner's car as an after-market solution. this allows the person who wants to rented it to find the car. it's got a gps locator. find the car, find out where it's closest to you. it also taps into the locking mechanisms. so when you want to rent my car, you don't have to find my keys.

you can make a reservation, walk up, hit unlock, and boom. the lock's open. you can get in. and like a zip car, the key to the ignition is left in the glove box. >> is that a violation of warranties for new cars that have a warranty or a lease? >> no, it's not. >> go ahead. there are rules that you are having to deal with that haven't been fully functioned. here i say go ahead and yet ask the question anyway. much like the insurance companies. >> so the question is does this obviate -- >> like with many technology companies, your technology and your ideas are moving faster than some, you know, the war warrancar warranty companies or insurance salesmen begin to really understand. >> there's a couple questions there. you had a specific question of how does this impact car warranties? there's a big history of after-market devices getting installed on cars. car alarms, car stereos. what we're doing is no different from that. there's nothing that takes place when you install a drive box that damages your car's warranty. your warranty is totally intact.

so that's that specific question. i think your question is more broadly, is our technology and innovation moving at a pace that's faster than some of the regulatory environments that are around it? absolutely. yeah, that's very normal. i mean, this technology often outpaces the regulatory environment. and in any disruptive industry that you come into, there's going to be large incumbents that are slower to move than the technology company. i mean, we're a small -- >> thus the opportunity. >> that's why innovation comes from start-up. >> now, my car is in the parking lot right now. what's in it for me? >> money, first and foremost. >> what are we talking about? >> hundreds of dollars a month. i'll tell you a story about one of our users. so we were approached right when we launched by an individual named megan conn. she was coming into her senior year at stanford. and because of federal cutbacks, she didn't have as rich of a student loan program. so she had a shortfall of a couple thousand dollars a year

she need to do make up. she approached us. halfway through the year, she had already made up that money. she's making money while it's sitting outside of her dorm. >> what is it, an hour? how does she get compensated? >> per hour or per day. the owner sets the price. it's up to you to determine the price you want to rent your car at, and the market will dictate what the market clearing price is. >> we only have time for one more question, and i get to take it. recently a venture capitalist not involved with you but involved with relay rides bought a used car with the pure intention of only renting it out as a money-making opportunity. what stops him from renting -- or from buying 20 cars and renting them out, or is that something that you're kind of expecting? >> i mean, i think it could very much go that direction. look at all the microentrepreneurs that came out and grew up on the ebay platform. we're creating a marketplace that can connect the buyers and sellers and make a convenient transaction between the two of them. i think there is a scenario in which that becomes normal. look at the economic gain that

you can achieve by renting your car out. it's very significant. it more than covers the cost of owning a car. i think there will be microentrepreneurs that engage in that behavior on our platform. >> jeff, former chicken farmer in uzbekistan and ceo of wheelz. up next, a new way to fly when "press here" continues.

the english entrepreneur richard branson told this joke once. what's the quickest way to become a millionaire? start off as a billionaire and then launch an airline. >> united 837. >> reporter: "the financial times" once calculated when you take all the airlines in the entire history of aviation, together they made negative $33 billion. >> much higher and faster than you've ever flown before.

>> reporter: airlines may be the worst way to try to make money. even when they're profitable as a few low-cost carriers are, the margins are razor thin. which makes eyrely's plan all the more mysterious. formerly an economist with the department of defense, eyerley thinks he can reimagine the airline business. small airplanes at underused airports, no more fares or tickets. sf instead, a netflixlike system between l.a. and the silicon basin. he speaks fluent russian and still holds a top-security clearance which is kind of cool. everyone has traveled on an airplane and said, i would do this so differently. here's what i would do. they'd be a lot nicer. they have a long list of things. we don't normally then launch

our own airlines. >> that's probably true. i'm grateful for that. i'm glad we get the chance to do it. >> let me also say, everyone thinks that. some people try it. very few people succeed. >> that's true. most people try it with what we think is onold and broken model. the ticket model itself made a lot of sense in the '30s and '40s, the age of the siller is-winged dc-3, and the only guy who ever left boise, celebrity chefs for the guys cooking in first class. it's not that way anymore. now flying isn't the privilege that it once was. we don't fly in awe of flight. now we fly because we've got to get somewhere else. >> and it works how? $1,000 gets me four tickets a month to use when i wish? >> i don't think the ticket model works. >> your ticket model, i'm sure, your netflix, it's a terrible analogy, the netflix one, but it's all we've got. >> ours is an all-you-can-fly model. we give you four boarding passes you can use anytime.

you fly just like you watch a dvd, send it back, get another one, then you get that flight to book again. that keeps any one member from boxing out seats from anybody else. that's your only limit on it. then it's as often as you can book, you fly. >> and i should make it as an aside to the viewer, you are not flying yet. >> no, not yet. >> you are the vaporware of airlines, but it is a model and you have funding. >> we're closing tomorrow. >> congratulations. okay, fantastic. and at some point you are going to begin flying from very small airports which makes total sense to me because landing fees are none, right? >> what's great is we're sitting on the single most overbuilt structure. there are 29 overburdened airports, 480 airports with tsa and 19,820 places to land a plane. half of them offered at less than 10% capacity. literally anywhere you look at the obama's high-speed rail map, anywhere that they work, we work. and the infrastructure's already in place. we just have to put planes in

service. >> you mean where they don't exist. you don't work on the east coast. where there aren't trains. >> we may work very well on the east coast. probably from our earlier expansion, we would like to be on the east coast. one of the interesting comparisons we get into with high-speed rail, in the u.s., it averages 67 miles an hour now. average rail in the u.s., like 1886 was 104. so what we think of as high-speed rail, we were faster shoving coal into a steamer. as a nation. so there's -- innovation's sort of gone the wrong way with rail. we just aren't very effective at it in the united states. >> who are the pilots? >> pilots is an interesting question. there's two groups. we have the very senior guys coming to us with depth of experience and then your younger first officers. we fit in this interesting niche for airlines. and you go to the harvard of flight schools, you'll graduate with 200 hours. you need 2,000 that get on with some sort of regional airline.

there's nothing that bridges that gap. film students, 9 off of 10 do something else for a living. >> okay. >> one point. >> it sounds like it is going to be interns. >> what's interesting is planes you fly on now are flown by interns who are paying to fly to sit to get their hours up. hours are worth more than cash to early pilots. on the other seat, we have our captains who our director of training flew warren buffett for four years. flew air force one. we have a lot of military pilots who love us. they've been gone for ten years. and so we're the only airline in the world where they sleep in their own bed at night. so these guys get to finally see their families. so they are coming to us by the droves asking to come work for us. and we're incredibly proud to be able to provide jobs. >> freelance contract with you? >> no, they'll be our employees. >> and you're saying the senior captain has qualifications,

you're getting, let's say, the first officer from embry riddle. are you paying them at all? >> oh, yeah. what's interesting is -- >> but there's this huge amount, as a frustrated pilot myself, there's a huge amount of flight kids coming out of those schools that need any opportunity they can get. >> they end up shrimping out of the caribbean, fly skydivers. my brother who is a pilot flies, you know, he was managing dallas-ft. worth operations for frontier. he worked for tsa, anything he could do to stay in an airport because he didn't want to be that guy who dropped out. the reality is most of the guys who graduate do something else now. >> some people look at plotis, they look at the little puddle jumper, it's a perfectly great airplane, are going to experience the executives who have been on smaller airplanes. they're a little less hesitant about flying out of palo alto on a small airplane. >> yeah, we get the questions sometimes about people who are

afraid of little planes. the answer is they're not our target market. >> i guess that's what i was asking. the reality is -- >> if you don't understand that that's an incredibly safe aircraft, we don't want you in the first place. >> we're a single-engine aircraft. you're four times more likely to be killed in a twin. >> what about your net jets. >> so net jets, it's 9.8 million to get in, $54,000 a month and then $5,000 an hour to fly. so at $1,000, you can fly. their model is very different because it's a partial ownership and they're flying you -- it's on demand. i want to go from here to tokyo, book your plane and go. we're different. we're going to be an airline in the sense of fixed schedule, but we're doing it on a commuter ship. this only works if you're going to distances that we fly, destinations that we're already serving. >> we've only got a couple seconds left. and i want to say to the viewer

that we tape on thursdays. we air in san francisco market on sundays and then in other cities. so what has is about to happen has already happened which puts us in an awkward time zone of you have funding and you're going to announce tomorrow or a couple of days ago, depending on when you're watching the television show, in the few seconds we have left, explain to me what you can ahead of time. >> so it was led by partners in los angeles. nea stepped up here in palo alto and we've got another partner put together. we have angels -- two brothers who started a business who are five years apart who, you know, and we're in the position of being able to leverage their experience and building a business as brothers. we have some amazing team of folks who are excited about what we're doing. selling the idea of all-you-can-fly travel to venture capitalists who spend a lot of times on planes checking out portfolio companies.

>> we look forward to flying with you. "press here" will be back in just a minute.

welcome back to "press here." i'm joined by laura colodni of dow jones and moira of tech nation. your name came up recently. every viewer knows by now that scott thompson was forced to step down at yahoo!. everybody knows why. because he had said he had a computer science degree that he did not have. you played a little tiny role in that in that you had done an interview with him in which he said -- >> he had a computer science degree. >> so there he is on audiotape or whatever you radio people use. saying this, and that was a key factor. where were you when you suddenly figured out, you know what? i've got the evidence in this that's going to play a major part in this man's future? >> it sounds funny, but i was in washington, d.c., with a broken foot kind of going through the news on the internet.

and here it was -- the first question came up. because there had been a challenge. hey, he doesn't have this degree. he only has accounting. in the back of my head, i said, i've interviewed him. i could have sworn i told him about that. but broken foot, on the road, i'll check it when i get back because i was coming back over the weekend. meantime, kara swisher of "wall street journal," she listens to the interview, "you said it right in there, accounting and computer science. paypal." >> something to that effect, never corrects you. >> never corrects me. but when i got home and saw that right away. i've known kara for many years as a colleague. i said, i have even more. i have the raw interview. i have my original notes. and i'm telling you, i swear, you know, this is what happened because everyone who has one of those degrees, i've got a computer science degree. >> right. >> it's a techie area like yahoo! paypal, google, the original boys, we all had

computer science degrees. we always talk about it even before we get on the air. >> you let them know you have one because it changes the scope of the interview. >> two things. first of all, i also had the raw of the interview so you can hear the whole windup. that was absolutely clear, which they did not have. that's not what we air on npr. secondly, if you actually know anything about computer science and computers, you can see that i had laced through this interview all references to what you would know -- >> were you a computer science major. >> and it was so right. and let's not forget one thing. we know that he went from president of paypal over to president of yahoo!. what he really started out at paypal that he was interviewing for was chief technology officer. he had sent the bogus -- >> he had an accounting degree. he's going to be cto. >> so he sends off to the recruiters oh, i also have a computer science degree. >> right. >> of course, dead ringer for cto.

>> right. >> what would he want with a chief technology officer? technology. >> right. there is a rare point in which a reporter, when you become the news, which is not really happened to me. has it happened to you, become the news? okay. i'm going to have to ask you about that. it's a funny feeling. you don't know exactly how to behave. >> well, you suddenly realize your next act, as a journalist, whoa, wait a minute. i'm not a journalist in this story. i'm a witness to this story. and we know now that the yahoo! board sat down, listened to the interview. they read the transcriptions in the interview. they saw everything that was put out there, my original text notes, all the cut sheets, the raw stuff. they sat down and looked at that and is, like, i can't become a part of this as a journalist at this point because then i start to bias what i've done. >> sure. >> i just stoot there and quid

this is what i did. i have lots of media coming at me now. give us an interview. for what? i put this information out. i have no opinion on whether he should step down. and if you have an original question that hasn't been asked and answered, i'm happy to entertain it. but other than that -- >> the one excuse he gave that he was just being polite to not correct you. i actually found fairly credible because it's happened to me because you get people in this environment where, you know, it's uncomfortable. et cetera. you didn't mean to but you say something that's not quite accurate. i've had them not correct me, but a computer science degree seems to be something -- >> well, i go to a slightly different level. number one, if you listen to the whole raw, which is out there, early on, as of the tapes just rolling, i say, oh, stonehill college. that's jesuit college? no, no, no. i went oh, yes. >> so he does correct you about one part of the conversation. >> because i went to a jesuit

college. he's correcting and going along. and he knows, he's been told hey, you know, this is edited. let us know. it was all very, you know, very casual. he had weeks to change it. he really had days to change it before we went to air. it's not credible. you can listen to it. and it's just not credible. especially because he didn't answer the question as if he only had an accounting degree. and it's like well, i'm just going to ignore that one part of it. oh, both of these -- both? he says. >> yes. those degrees. >> and be an engineer, which you could aspire to as a computer science major, but certainly not as an accountant. it bears, you know, it just strains credulity. >> does ross have a computer science degree? >> carol barth called the

university of washington. >> i don't think he's coming in as a tech person. >> yes. >> they say yahoo! because he's actually going to come in and say hey. >> i don't know what degree you need to save yahoo!. ladies, we are out of time. laura and moira. we'll be back.

tinchts that's that's our show. we're preempted next week so nbc sports can bring you the final in the french open. we'll see you the following week. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.