{"id":115736,"date":"2020-06-02T21:43:06","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T21:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/news\/?id=afevex77"},"modified":"2020-06-02T21:43:06","modified_gmt":"2020-06-02T21:43:06","slug":"meet-the-developer-andre-haddad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/06\/02\/meet-the-developer-andre-haddad\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the developer: Andre Haddad"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n

Once a refugee, Haddad now runs the high-end car-rental app Turo.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Thirty years ago, Turo<\/em> CEO Andre Haddad was in a parking garage beneath his family\u2019s apartment building in Beirut, listening for the bombs.<\/p>\n

It was 1989, the last of the 15-year Lebanese civil war, and the two dozen families living in Haddad\u2019s eight-story building often spent their nights huddled in the relative safety of the underground garage. Although just big enough for six cars at most, it had become a shelter, strewn with mattresses and lamps and personal items brought down from the apartments above.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou build up kind of a war wisdom over time: You don\u2019t want to be on the top floors of your building,\u201d Haddad says. \u201cAnd a lot of the shooting would happen at night, so you\u2019d try to sleep in the garage, hearing the shelling and building shaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

His family lived like this for more than a year, until the night the shells found their apartment.<\/p>\n

Haddad is recounting his story in downtown San Francisco at the offices of his car-sharing app Turo<\/em>, which that lets people rent out their (often very fancy) cars by the day. Want to drive a Lamborghini? Or take a BMW convertible from Vegas to the Bay Area? All doable. Today, Turo<\/em> has more than 14 million members and 450,000 registered vehicles. Haddad\u2019s road to get here crossed many borders, but it started that night in the garage.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

*Turo* makes it possible to rent the kind of cars that you\u2019d normally associate with spy movies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

After the bomb hit, things moved fast. Haddad\u2019s family decided to to leave Lebanon and stay with relatives in Cyprus, but Haddad took a different path. Prior to the blast he\u2019d been chatting with a cousin in Paris, one who\u2019d asked him a question he\u2019d never considered. \u201cHe said, \u2018It\u2019s your senior year of high school, what are your plans? What do you want to do?\u2019\u201d Haddad said. \u201cI thought, wow, nobody\u2019s asked me those questions. When you\u2019re in those conditions, there\u2019s not much of a vision for the future. It\u2019s a mechanism of self-defense.\u201d <\/p>\n

The day after the shell landed on his balcony, Haddad called that cousin, and before long he had a ticket to Paris and a plan to get into business school. Seventeen years old and on his own, Haddad also found his way into the French music scene and became a DJ \u2014 he claims to have seen Daft Punk before the helmets \u2014 but there was a problem: His music had all been obliterated in the blast.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Haddad, a former DJ in Paris, keeps a well-stocked music collection.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI was looking for ways to rebuild my collection,\u201d he says, \u201cand I discovered eBay.\u201d<\/p>\n

The selection was incredible, but the more he bought, the more he wanted to sell \u2014 and the shipping charges were piling up fast. To address both problems \u2014and using his speedily developing business instincts \u2014 he founded iBazar<\/em>, which launched as a way to swap music and became one of Europe\u2019s largest online marketplaces. iBazar<\/em> grew large enough that it was eventually purchased by eBay<\/em> for more than $100 million. Just like that, everything had changed.<\/p>\n

Haddad spent the next decade in tech jobs, occupying positions with eBay<\/em> and serving as CEO of Shopping.com<\/em>. In 2011, ground down by the workload, he was planning on taking a sabbatical when a friend approached him about a car-sharing idea called Turo<\/em>. \u201cI got to really appreciate the creativity, the scrappiness, the hunger,\u201d he says. Plus, he was well familiar with the notion of using the internet to connect real people. \u201cTuro was built on trust, which made me feel very comfortable with it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s an incredible highlight to see the power of humanity.<\/p>\n

Andre Haddad<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today, Turo<\/em> has more than 14 million members. \u201cThere are users who are barely 18, and some in their 80s,\u201d he says. The app offers everything from standard sedans to exotic high-end imports, often for less than the price of a traditional rental. <\/p>\n

In addition, after some initial hesitation, Haddad has become more vocal about immigration issues. \u201cAt first, I didn\u2019t want any public involvement with this kind of noble cause to be misinterpreted as personal publicity \u2014 or even worse, corporate publicity,\u201d he says. Plus, he adds, it hadn\u2019t been easy to turn the page.<\/p>\n

Today, he\u2019s becoming more and more outspoken, both out loud and in writing. He\u2019s spent years on the board of Immigration Equality, an organization designed to bring equality to LGBTQ+ immigrants. And he\u2019s signed amicus briefs and open letters aimed at protecting immigrants. \u201cIt\u2019s the right thing to do,\u201d he says. \u201cIt helps the economic development of the United States. But the fact is, people are here because they chose to come here. It\u2019s a very, very hard thing to do. If you\u2019re willing to do that, it means there\u2019s some exceptional traits of character.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published on the App Store.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once a refugee, Haddad now runs the high-end car-rental app Turo. Thirty years ago, Turo CEO Andre Haddad was in a parking garage beneath his family\u2019s apartment building in Beirut, listening for the bombs. It was 1989, the last of the 15-year Lebanese civil war, and the two dozen families living in Haddad\u2019s eight-story building […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apple-developer-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}