Colin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Placemate, leading the company’s operations, marketing, and business development strategy. He also oversees the company’s growth while leading the Placemate team to continually improve their operations.
A people-first approach has weaved Colin’s career path, encompassing a range of experiences from non-profits to startups to global corporations. He launched his career in the West African country of Guinea with the International Monetary Fund, focusing on reducing poverty, hunger, disease, and lack of adequate shelter. After moving back to the states, Colin joined Starbucks at their Seattle headquarters, guiding the marketing of their corporate social responsibility initiatives. He has also held leadership positions at startups managing marketing efforts, team recruitment, partnership management, and building scalable profitably and growth strategies.
Prior to Placemate, Colin spent 5 years in the technology sector, helping to pioneer the emerging “sharing economy” business model. In 2013 Colin joined Lyft as the 40th employee, spending 3 years driving growth on both sides of the marketplace and expanding into 65 markets (200+ cities) and over 1M rides/week. Armed with invaluable experience in this new category, Colin was recruited to Airbnb, where he received a bird’s eye view of changing consumer behavior, innovative technology, and public policy involved in the sharing economy.
Now as the CEO of Placemate, Colin has been able to seamlessly combine his altruistic philosophy with his first-hand sharing economy experience. Founded in late 2018 in Truckee, Colin launched Placemate as a local housing marketplace for vacation towns driven to find an innovative solution to the extreme lack of housing for locals. Just two years later, Colin led the efforts to create the homeowner incentive program, Lease to Locals, to further bolster housing access for locals. Since then, Colin has worked to expand the business and implement the Lease to Locals program in Colorado, and Idaho, with more future markets in the works.