Jim Gibbs, the co-founder and CEO of Meter Feeder, has been making a living writing computer software since he was 6. Still, the road to becoming the boss of his own company, though rewarding, hasn’t been easy.
In 2015, Gibbs and co-founder Daniel Lopretto started Meter Feeder after winning a “hackathon.” That led to a prestigious three-month boot camp in Silicon Valley in 2016 where they were mentored by Y Combinator, the angel startup accelerator that was instrumental in the early success of Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox and Doordash.
“It’s super easy to pay for parking these days; you pull up to a curb, pull your phone out and tap a button,” Gibbs, 46, said during a Zoom interview last month. “But let’s imagine that you’re a delivery person and you have to deliver one package every three minutes. You’re not going to be looking for zone numbers and you’re not interested in putting quarters in meters.”
In 2022, FedEx, UPS, Amazon and other delivery companies were fined over $125 million in New York City alone, according to Gibbs, because drivers for those fleets double-parked or pulled into restricted areas and were ticketed.
According to Gibbs, the key to avoiding such unnecessary business costs is simple. Meter Feeder is integrated into the vehicles, so no more scrounging for coins or fumbling with phones.
“When delivery drivers turn their vehicles off, they automatically pay for parking,” Gibbs said. “When they turn their vehicles back on, they stop paying for parking.
“And they also search the municipal database for parking tickets. If we see that there are parking tickets, we send them to the fleet manager. On average, well, it’s a little higher now, fleet managers were saving 40% just from parking ticket [fines],” Gibbs said.
“So the city’s happy because they get the money on time. The fleet’s happy too. The only people who are upset are the collection agencies.”
Municipalities that depend on the fines to fill holes in annual budgets aren’t crazy about Meter Feeder either. Gibbs said that 13% of Pittsburgh’s annual budget is parking taxes, so there was bound to be a certain amount of foot-dragging when such disruptive technology arrived.
Gibbs said that a lot of companies simply aren’t aware of the extent of their parking ticket problem, so when he’s making the pitch to integrate Meter Feeder into their fleets he also offers to run an audit.
“There was this one fleet that gave us three vehicles and we found [among] those vehicles $6,000 worth of parking tickets,” Gibbs said. “Then I said, ‘This is how much money we would’ve saved you.’ They have a lot of vehicles, too, so if they just at random picked a couple and said, ‘Try these …’”
That unnamed company wasn’t a client as of last month, but Gibbs said Meter Feeder would be engaging in serious negotiations soon. Because it is such an easy concept to understand, it is often a no-brainer for a fleet director and a company.
Meter Feeder can find parking tickets in over 500 locations across the U.S.
“We have a nationwide base,” Gibbs said, adding that Pittsburgh is still the company’s headquarters.
“It actually took us a little while to get into Pittsburgh, but we’re here now. We’re delighted to be able to point at home and say, ‘Hey, you can find and pay parking tickets with the Meter Feeder [app].”
Meter Feeder has 15 employees. Gibbs and his partner have raised millions in seed funds, and the company has generated millions in revenue. Big investors are beginning to take notice.
The Crafton resident’s dreams of entering the tech world began in his native Long Island, New York, where he learned the value of persistence and believing in himself at an early age.
“I had that hustle,” Gibbs said of his working-class youth. “Whenever I needed money, me and my friends would play loud music and start [break dancing] on the sidewalk and people would give us money.”
Long Island wasn’t the Bronx or Manhattan in terms of its impact on hip-hop, but it was the home of one of the most innovative hip-hop trios in rap culture’s half-century history. “It was the land of De La Soul,” Gibbs said proudly, adding that embracing the positivity and spirit of that group and the subgenre it created made him a child of the Daisy Age of Hip-Hop.
Consequently, he embraced his love of computer technology and education and viewed them both as tickets to economic self-sufficiency. In New York, there was nothing contradictory about being a computer nerd and a hip-hop devotee in the Daisy Age.
“I came [to Pittsburgh] in the ’90s to go to Carnegie Mellon,” he said of the famed computer science program. “I did all of that stuff. I didn’t finish.”
His parents wanted to help as much as they could, but the cost of financing his dream was too overwhelming for what a painter and a secretary could pull together when the bills arrived at the end and beginning of each semester.
Ever the optimistic self-starter, Gibbs fell back on what had worked for him back in Long Island when he needed cash — break dancing. But street demonstrations of the “b-boy” skills he had learned a decade earlier in his hometown was a harder sell in Pittsburgh, where classic rock and big hair ruled.
No matter how many hand spins, “turtles” or flips Gibbs could do, he couldn’t make enough money to pay for textbooks. He also grabbed as many coding jobs between semesters as he could, but he could never get the more lucrative software development gigs less experienced classmates landed.
After years of sinking into debt, Gibbs ran out of options. Suddenly, he understood something that confused him when he first arrived in Pittsburgh and would see people sitting on corners with signs begging for money.
“Give this man a trumpet or something,” he used to think. It took a downturn in his own fortunes to realize that even when you work hard, your efforts can be met with indifference if the audience doesn’t value what you’re doing.
Unlike his Silicon Valley peers who quit college to create million- (and billion-) dollar tech companies with the aid of venture capital unavailable to him, Gibbs’ decision to drop out of CMU wasn’t a gesture to the establishment that he was a maverick; he simply ran out of cash. That wasn’t as sexy an origin story for an up-and-coming tech boss, especially one who had written software years before hitting puberty.
He finally snagged a well-paying medical software development job just before quitting CMU. Even with the sudden rise in his annual income, he never looked back. That job and others like it made it possible for Gibbs to build a middle-class life in Pittsburgh with a wife and five sons that would’ve been impossible in the Bay Area where he was encouraged by friends and advisers to decamp.
During those years, he did work for USA Today “when their website was a blank screen.” He helped American Eagle Outfitters translate their site into 13 languages enabling them to ship to 57 countries. He helped build medical software.
“The last thing me and my co-founder built before starting Meter Feeder, we helped build a local platform that used to handle 30% of all the mobile retail sales in the U.S. If you bought three things off your phone, you’ve probably used my software before.”
He can joke about his late blooming as a tech mogul now, but it seemed inexplicable when he was trying to get local investors interested in Meter Feeder.
“So, I am a Black man, a builder, a CMU computer science guy that went through Y Combinator. It sounds like I have a little bit of a narrative thing going on,” he said with a chuckle.
Why what he had to offer, including Meter Feeder, wasn’t initially recognized in Pittsburgh wasn’t something he dwelled on, though the reason seemed obvious to many others at the time.
“I’m a Black man in tech,” he said. “This is my 40th year writing software. I have a tendency of trying to appeal to one’s logic. … ”
Once you understand this key autobiographical fact about Jim Gibbs, his ability to stay positive in the face of professional and corporate challenges has an even more interesting context.
Things turned around once he realized — and believed — he would always be the hardest-working person in the room.
Tony Norman’s column is underwritten by The Pittsburgh Foundation as part of its efforts to support writers and commentators who cover communities of color.