Anthony Rodio ’87 is a fixer.
A successful serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience in the marketplace, Rodio built a career identifying consumer pain points and finding efficient solutions in executive positions at Redbeacon (which was acquired by Home Depot), Support.com, SideStep (acquired by Kayak), and StubHub (acquired by eBay). He also served in management and marketing positions at Procter and Gamble, Microsoft, and Amazon. Now, Rodio aims to revolutionize the car repair space with YourMechanic, a mobile car repair startup based in Mountain View, Calif.
“The average car in the United States is idle 95 percent of the time,” Rodio explained.
“In the next five to six years, fewer and fewer people are going to own their own car,” he said. “Similar to how many people stopped paying for a telephone landline, they don’t see a point in owning their own car. And they are right, it is less efficient to own than to borrow, rent, and use.”
This is good news for mechanics as shared cars will be driven significantly more than individually owned vehicles, requiring more regular maintenance.
“Our industry is projected to grow,” he said.
YourMechanic hopes to capitalize on this growth by offering mobile car repair and maintenance services direct to customers at their home or business.
In addition to YourMechanic, Rodio is also supporting his alma mater, giving back financially and sharing his knowledge.
At the University of Oregon, Rodio primarily studied finance and management. He said the tenured professors he experienced during his upper level courses cared deeply about education and he enjoyed a breadth of experience.
“Most schools do a good job of functionally preparing people,” he said. “Running a business or scaling a company is very rarely about functional expertise. Are you solving a pain point in the market? Learn how to identify a pain point and how to develop a product that solves that pain point in a better way than exists today.”
A great example of that evaluative approach is the University of Oregon’s New Venture Championship (NVC), where Rodio served as semifinals judge in 2018.
“I loved the experience,” he said. “It was a chance to go back to some of the framework at P & G that extended well to running startups in Silicon Valley. I used those same concepts in evaluating the students in front of me, and I’m pretty direct. I look forward to doing it again.”
That candid, constructive problem-solving approach has been the key to Rodio’s career success—from laundry detergent to toothpaste to car repair.
“If more people could see that they could create more value in the world,” he said. “When you create value, everyone benefits and you get rewarded for it.”
Rodio would like to help others create a better world, and one way to achieve that is through academic scholarship.
The Jackson Rodio Scholarship provides support to students at the Lundquist College of Business, particularly in the areas of entrepreneurship and finance.
“I love my Ducks, and am hoping to give back more in time,” he said. “My view of universities is there are smart people at every school. Oregon gave me the room to grow into myself and get some confidence about how to be in a different academic environment and to succeed at work, as well as a career.”
—AnneMarie Knepper-Sjoblom ’05