Moving

Israel, however, is hardly a long bet. In 2009, at the age of 25, he co-founded the parking company ParkMe with his friend Sam Friedman. ParkMe compiles information on garages, lots, and even some street parking options in 4,000 cities worldwide, and it licenses that information to navigation companies like Google and Waze. That, in turn, helps drivers find parking where they’re going, especially in urban cores, where a well-situated spot can be maddeningly elusive. It lets users reserve and pay for parking even before they leave their homes or offices.

Israel’s route to becoming a tech czar of parking wasn’t the most likely one. He didn’t study computer science or engineering, and he never learned to code. And he never went through so much as a childhood phase of being obsessed with cars, despite growing up in car-obsessed Los Angeles. At Puget Sound, he majored in business and economics, planning to become either an investment banker or a film producer.

He also wound up, somewhat by accident, living on the social-justice floor of University Hall (now Oppenheimer Hall), seeing at close range what it was like to invest in a vision of a better world. Israel chose his own approach to politics, running for president of the student body in his senior year. He won the election, and in his most lasting contribution to the campus, he worked with Vice President Ryan McAninch ’06 to create a mascot for the university—Grizz, a fuzzy bear in a maroon-and-white-checkered lumberjack shirt and a little maroon beanie. Though Puget Sound teams had long been called the Loggers, the school lacked a recognizable character to dance on the sidelines at sporting events and stir up school spirit. “For 10 years, different presidents had wanted to create mascots,” he recalls, “and nobody had been able to do it. We just said we were going to get it done.”

After graduation, Israel moved back home to LA and enrolled in film school at the American Film Institute to study producing. He had made only one film at Puget Sound, a short horror movie called The Stacks, about a haunting campus library. “It was awful,” he recalls. His co-filmmaker, classmate Travis Kell ’06, remains a close friend, and the two most recently worked together to co-found Metropolis.

What he started to see, through that work, was a parking industry ill-equipped to deal with major changes to transportation that are on their way. Parking, he says, is “a relatively old-school industry that’s been unchanged, and historically hasn’t embraced tech for probably the last 80 years.” Yet transportation is in the midst of major shifts, from Amazon’s drone-powered deliveries to Uber’s vision of a driverless taxi fleet. Israel founded Metropolis to answer a question he didn’t see anybody else asking: “Who’s going to connect the archaic infrastructure of today with all these future modes of transportation?”

Now he’s getting going on the pitch. “How do you future-proof parking?” he asks, energized. “Where are all these autonomous vehicles going to go? Are they just going to drive around endlessly? I would argue not. They have to park somewhere; they have to be serviced; they have to be cleaned. There will need to be large-scale mobility hubs, both inside and outside the urban core. Somebody will have to control and facilitate that infrastructure, both from a digital perspective, as well as the underlying real estate.”

The details of precisely how Metropolis will tackle these questions will remain under wraps until the company leaves stealth mode early 2020. But the general principles that will drive it—and park it—are already hiding in plain sight. “Parking is a major component of the urban experience,” Israel says. “Yet we don’t talk about it. It’s dirty, underbelly, so unsexy. But it also is so not ready for the future.”