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Parko – Parking Made Easy. Together.

You’re driving around the same block for 20 minutes, searching for a parking spot. Now how amazing would it be if you had an app, which could tell you where you could find available parking spots? Well, welcome to the world of Parko. It’s an app that helps people to locate a parking spot based on Big Data analysis. Its founder defined it as a crowd sourcing for parking – meaning using the information taken from the parking habits of many drivers, as a way to predict the chances of finding a parking spot in a specific street.

Tomer came to Israel about 6 years ago, after growing up in South Africa. While taking a course in Entrepreneurship in the Tel Aviv University, he had to suggest an idea for the students to conduct a market research on. He thought that an app to solve the city’s parking problems might be a good idea. So he suggested this idea and as a result, his classmates conducted a deep research about this as a project. The results made him understand there is a real problem here, when an average search for parking is 24 minutes. After this class was over, he started building his company, Parko.

One thing he told us about pitching to investors, was that it’s an art – and just like any art form, you get better at it the more you do it. He believes that if you really want to get better at this, it’s really important to do it over and over again, while staying open to feedback from others.

He learned that investors don’t focus on your product – they care about the pain. You must focus on this pain and make the investors understand you found a problem which solving will bring a real value and hence – a good return on the investment.

His source of inspiration has always been his father. In his 50’s, he decided to quit his job and built a successful business, publishing books about AIDS and other important issues for children. To him, this demonstrates the fact that you can learn anything you want, if you just put your mind to it.

He quoted his father, an extreme optimist who believes that “a pessimist always see the problems in every opportunity and an optimist always sees the opportunity in every problem”.

The founders of Parko: Itai David (left) and Tomer Neuner (right)